Stalking the Miraculous

Dávila never explains or argues, rather, leaves it to the reader to simply understand or not understand. Like a joke, if you have to explain it, it’s no longer funny. 

Not getting the joke is frustrating, because we know there’s a laugh in there, but we can’t figure out how. It’s a disorienting feeling because it’s as if we’re caught between two meanings -- the obvious one, which, like poetry, obscures a deeper and non-obvious one. And 

Nothing seems easer to understand than what we have not understood.

A case in point is this non-obvious aphorism we mentioned a few weeks back:

Outside epistemology there is no salvation.

Hmm. It can’t just mean what it means. But let’s start with a dictionary definition anyway. Epistemology involves 

the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas, 

1) The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification, 

2) Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony, 

3) The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs, and 

4) Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments.

Okay, what can this have to do with salvation, whatever that is? This latter falls under the heading of another -ology, in this case, soteriology. This is another Big Subject, because what if you’re not even aware of wanting or needing to be saved? From what? By whom? And how? 

Starting with the Prior Testament, salvation has to do with God’s acts delivering the chosen people (but ultimately every one of us) from various calamities and nuisances, but with a special focus on exodus from slavery.  

In the Subsequent Testament the focus is on delivery from sin and death, or in a positive sense, healing and communion with God, not just in this life, but beyond. 

Also, one can’t help noticing that this salvation is very much from a someone who wants the opposite outcome, which is to say, our damnation or something. There’s a cosmic drama going on, and we’re caught in the middle of it. Modern sensibilities may be repelled by such an account, but there it is.

This is indeed a hard saying for modern sophisticates, but perhaps we can gain a TOEhold (Theory Of Everything) if we start at the other end. 

What I mean is, broadly speaking, we all want to escape. From what? Everything from boredom at one end to Death at the other. 

However, supposing we can run away from such things, what are we running to? This is the real question, isn’t it? Life -- at least in the modern west -- provides us with an infinite number of distractions from tedium, meaninglessness, routine, etc. 

However, at the same time, the problem with modernity and postmodernity is that they deny the to referenced above. We’re all free to run from, but there is no to. It doesn’t exist, for to say “God is dead” is to say there is no to.

Okay, but let's think about this: let’s say the authorities are chasing us. If we can hide somewhere to the west, this presupposes an east, not to mention north and south. 

Yes, but we’re talking about time, from which there is no escape. Oh? Let us count just some of the ways: there are people who live in the past, AKA nostalgiacs. 

And vulgar politics is dominated by people alienated by the present and living in a future that will never arrive, AKA progressive time travelers. There are also drugs with which to escape time, one of the best being reading (AKA tome-traveling): 

Reading is the unsurpassed drug because it allows us too escape not only the mediocrity of our lives but even more so the mediocrity of our souls.

As to drugs more generally,

Of the modern substitutes for religion, probably the least heinous is vice.

Ho! What would be the most heinous? No doubt whatsoever: ideology. Why?

The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates.

Okay. What does he hate: reality. The progressive is always running from this, but at the same time, he's already denied the existence of the to.

But in reality, 

We cannot escape the triviality of existence through the doors, but rather through the roofs.   

There's one now! Let's climb through and see what's on the other side.

All noble activity is a stalking of a miracle.