Memo to the Universe from a Post-Disenchanted Inhabitant

We left off yesterday's post with a couple of aphorisms:

The nominalist lives among facts. The realist lives among gods.

“Intuition” is the perception of the invisible, just as “perception” is the intuition of the visible.

That last one touches on the left-brain/right brain differences discussed in the post, while the first is reminiscent of Richard Weaver's coon classic Ideas Have Consequences, the ideas in question being realism and nominalism. For Weaver modernity is characterized by the eclipse of the former by the latter. 

In short, nominalists ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak. If your world is drained of magic, blame a nominalist. 

Nominalism has a positive and a negative content: on the one hand it affirms that only particular things exist, and that any purported abstractions from them are just names. But in so doing, it denies universals, essences, transcendence, and even the intelligibility of the world -- or the adequation of intellect to reality. 

I'm feeling lazy. Let Prof. Wiki explain:

In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. 

Most nominalists have held that only physical particulars in space and time are real, and that universals exist only subsequent to particular things. 

Nominalism is primarily a position on the problem of universals. It is opposed to realist philosophies which assert that universals do exist over and above particulars...

And now you know why the nominalist lives among facts while the realist lives among gods. These are no no doubt the same gods as those in the title of All Things Are Full of Gods -- not to mention the structure of the book, which is a dialogue between four gods. 

But there's only one God.

True, but a hierarchical cosmos is chock full of "living presences" and intelligent structures. Dávila is as Catholic as they come, but has more aphorisms about gods and mysterious presences than I could count. I'll just select some at random:

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

God does not die but, unfortunately for man, the lesser gods, like modesty, honor, dignity, and decency, have perished.

After experiencing what an age practically without religion consists of, Christianity is learning to write the history of paganism with respect and sympathy.

The gods punish by depriving things of their meaning.

When man refuses the discipline the gods give him, demons discipline him.

The historian of religions must learn that gods do not resemble forces of nature but that forces of nature resemble gods.

Now, nominalism collapses the space between immanence and transcendence -- the "home of the gods," so to speak -- and thereby eliminates the very phenomena for which religion provides the keys to symbolize and think about them. Which is why the Aphorist says

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores...

Thus,

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

Now, if we're talking about the re-enchantment of the cosmos, these two are quite important:

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

Let's get back to the final chapter of All Things Are Full of Gods. Recall that in the nominalist vision, words do not imply essences or universals, rather, they're just names for things. The universe isn't really communicating to us. 

But for human beings, "their nature dictates that they can never be at home in a world that doesn't speak." Even in our "disenchanted age" we are drawn to 

stories that infuse inanimate objects with consciousness and personality, and in any other kind of tale that tells [us] there's a subjective depth in all things.... The proper habitat of a living soul is an enchanted world... (emphasis mine).

The proper habitat of a living soul is a living cosmos? Well, "in the absence of those numinous or genial presences human beings feel abandoned, and very much alone." Cue the Aphorist:

The most dispiriting solitude is not lacking neighbors, but being abandoned by God.

Moreover, 

God is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything. 

 Memo to the universe: you're not all that. Nevertheless,

[A]fter four centuries of mechanistic dogma, the inability to view the natural order as a realm of invisible sympathies and vital spiritual intelligences is very much the essence of the late modern human condition. 

The history of modern disenchantment is the history of humankind's long, ever-deepening self-exile. So, naturally, no longer believing that the world hears or speaks to them, they find themselves looking elsewhere for those presences....

We can't go back to the enchanted world, but is there a way forward to a post-disenchanted world? Because the contemporary perspective

seems not only a folly -- a ridiculous way of seeing a world that's manifestly filled with mind and life and communion -- but a disastrous condition, which can have only ever more dreadful consequences if not corrected by some saner view.  

Gosh. Not to boast, but with 5,000 posts, I feel like I'm doing my bit.