Workin' for the Cosmos

Just flipping through a book by Maritain on St. Thomas called The Angelic Doctor, and found many timelessly timely passages, for example,

The unity of a culture is determined in the first place and above all by a certain common philosophical structure, a certain metaphysical and moral attitude, a certain scale of values, in a word, a certain common conception of the universe, of man and human life, of which social, linguistic and juridical structures are, so to speak, the embodiment. 

Ultimately, the disunity we are seeing on our streets and college campuses is a result of inhabiting different and irreconcilable universes. Nor is there a "two universe solution," since there is by definition only one. Problem is,

The drama of Western culture consists in the fact that its stock of common metaphysics has been reduced to an utterly inadequate minimum...

That was written in 1931. We have since sunk beneath the minimum. And yet, there is always further to sink. But for Maritain, our task is to think "of the world and the present moment in light of eternal truths," which was one of the guiding purposes of the blog back in 2005 -- to interpret the "news" in light of the "eternals," or the transient under the aspect of the permanent. 

The good news is,

The greater grow the powers of illusion, the more lovers of truth will feel drawn towards the vast light of that wisdom... 

Thomism

does not want to destroy but to purify modern speculation and to integrate all the truth that has been discovered since the time of St. Thomas. It is an essentially synthetic and assimilative philosophy...

Same here, because a man needs a hobby. As for Thomas, he pretty much had one hobby and "a single ambition: to discern and to demonstrate primary Truth." "He had only one thing to do and he did it well."  

Maritain asks, "What are the conditions on which this lost unity can be recovered, not as it once was, for time is irreversible, but reconstituted once more in new forms?" Problem is, we live in an age of crude materialism, and matter is the very principle of separation. Nor can man

find his unity in himself; he finds it outside himself, above himself. It was his determination to be self-sufficient which ruined him. He will find himself again only by becoming attached to his first principle and to the order transcending it. Pure subjectivity, like pure materiality, disperses.

Which checks out. Oddly, contemporary culture is simultaneously materialist and subjectivist, which is a true triumph of stupidity, since matter is incapable of subjectivity and subjectivity is immaterial. Oh well.

There is no greater delusion than to seek in immanentism the reconciliation of man with himself.  

It's a vertical zombie culture, that's what it is. What is a vertical zombie? I don't know, but this is close enough: 

that pitiful product which goes by the name of modern man, a being cut off from all his ontological roots and transcendental objects, who, because he sought to find his centre in himself, has become... merely a wolf howling in despair towards eternity.... 

Their cosmically pathological ideas  

are dead: though they may still encumber us for a long time, like cadaverous products, they are finished.  

In a flatland cosmos, in which transcendence has been immanentized, the zombie wolves are reduced to howling at race, class, gender, and Jews.

Western civilization "can now save itself only by working for the whole universe." Which is an interesting way of putting it: "Whom do you work for, Bob?" "Nobody in particular, just the cosmos." It says as much at the top of the blog:

THE COSMOS IS OUR SCHOOL, THE INTELLECT OUR FACULTY, TRUTH THE FIRST PRINCIPAL

In case it's not obvious, "principal" has a double meaning, since the first principle is the meta-cosmic Person.