Change my mind:
The disease afflicting the modern world is in the first place a disease of the mind; it began in the mind, it has now attacked the roots of the mind (Jacques Maritain).
So, it is an autoimmune disorder, i.e., the mind attacking its own substance, or, in a word, college.
There are many ways to conceptualize the disease, and numerous historical epochs where we could situate its outbreak, but it really comes down to Genesis 3 All Over Again, i.e. to the rupture of human intelligence from the source of intelligence. The modern divorce of mind from being -- filed by Descartes and granted by Kant -- is just the most influential version.
Thus the mind is no longer docile -- AKA open -- to reality:
Indocile to the object, to God, to being, the mind becomes also and to the same extent indocile to all human authority, a rebel against all tradition and spiritual continuity.
Vertical closure is followed by horizontal closure, and the result is idiocy in its original meaning, a "private person" cut off from rational discourse. The inevitable consequence on the vertical plane is
that by losing its docility to human teaching and its docility also to the object, the mind in our time has proceeded in the direction of an absolutely brutal hardening and a progressive weakening of reason...
On the horizontal plane, the consequence is
that the most profound and at the same time most human bonds of social life must have simultaneously become by an unavoidable consequence gradually loosened and undone.
I call that a pretty good guess for 1931.
I like what he says about the simultaneous hardening and weakening of reason, which again has to do with a self-enclosed rationality detached from its proper object. It is at once a hardened fortress against transcendent realities, but then dissolves "every object of speculation in a great fluid jelly called Becoming or Evolution." Modern thought is indeed pillar of gelatin.
Now, "If the mind is not saved, nothing will be saved," and "nothing below the level of the mind can remedy this disease."
Can reason save us? No, not if it is not conscious of its intrinsic limits: it cannot "look for its standard in itself and in the face of the mysteries below," rather, must be ordered to the free-flowing transcendent mystery above.
Play us out, Nicolás:
Philosophy has as its object above all to prevent the follies of the day from blocking the windows and walling up the doors.
The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.
When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.
Humility is the epistemological condition of specific perceptions.
The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.
The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.
Indocile to the object, to God, to being, the mind becomes also and to the same extent indocile to all human authority, a rebel against all tradition and spiritual continuity.
ReplyDeleteTellingly, many of the minds mindlessly protesting today literally don't know why they are protesting. They're just doing it because all the other girls are doing it, and it's more fun than finals.
Maleducation is literally brain damage.
I am impaired up the wazoo today. However, I am game to comment because I just don't give up.
ReplyDeleteFrom the post "Now, "If the mind is not saved, nothing will be saved," and "nothing below the level of the mind can remedy this disease."
I would broadly agree with that statement, but also note that levels above the mind or interior to the mind seem to have been overlooked.
I add that the mind makes a great servant but a terrible master. The true guidance system for the human being is not the mind, it is the soul, which is located in the chest area and is associated with the heart and with sublime emotions such as love, tenderness, and the holy joy which suddenly wets the eyes and causes the heart to soar.
So you see the mind is a tool, and an important one. Intuition is loosely attached to the mind and is a major receiver of the Holy Spirit.
It takes the mind, soul, and even the physical body working as a team to achieve the yoking (yoga, union, fusion, and all variants) which completes the full, and the sane spiritual human being.
So, in summary, don't forget that the mind is great but it is not the King of metaphysical proceedings.
Humbly and verily physically wounded, I was hit, not enough to need hospital I don't think but we shall see, yours in Christ, Trench.
Today is the Coptic Good Friday, and proceedings on Golgotha are metaphysically underway even as we speak. The thief on the right is about to utter his saving statement, and steal a home run into heaven sans baptism. How I want to do the same, how I want it!! Lord Jesus please remember me when you enter into your kingdom!!! I want to sit with you at the right hand of God!!!
Amen brothers and sisters.