I Renounce Satan and All of His Youthful Deathworks

Agreed, progressives are cosmically stupid, but I have it on good authority that the Devil makes people stupid and then exploits the stupidity. 

Your point is well taken, Petey. It reminds me of why the young and immature are such an important voting blochead of the left, because these youthful idiots are so silly and so easily indoctrinated. It goes back to the Romantics: 

The idea of the innate innocence of the hypothetical state of nature presses toward a cult of childhood and youth.... the Western world of today generally credits youth with wisdom and sees old age as corrupt, myopic, or behind the times.... 

[W]e have in recent years been treated to children and teenagers lecturing the older generation on everything from healthcare to the environment to matters such as Brexit and Donald Trump (Trueman). 

This is backfiring on Dems at the moment, because of all age groups the 18-29 crowd is most supportive of the Islamo-Nazis, and now they are forced to pander to the little monsters they have created. The indoctrination has been too effective, or at least inconvenient. 

The philosophical opinions of a youth can only be interesting to his mother.

And to Big Mother, AKA the bureaucratic State-Media-Academic Industrial Complex.

It is the same with the global warming hoax, defunding the police, LGBTQWERTY rights, and protecting us from the horrors of free speech. The more mature, the less support for these ideological pathologies. 

Put another way, it will be difficult for leftist tyranny to prevail until over 50% of the population is emotionally immature, or "stably unstable," so to speak. 

Which the left is of course working on, but it's a constant struggle against teleology -- in other words, maturity has a way of happening on its own unless it is prevented. 

For example, things like marriage and children tend to provoke maturity, so it is little wonder that one of the defining features of the left is the war on the traditional family.

Youth:

The young person is proud of his youth, as if it were not a privilege that he shared with the most idiotic.

The independence of which every youth boasts is no more than submission to the new prevailing fashion.

To praise youth is to forget our former idiocy.

Memo to Brandon, Schumer, and Bernie:

It is useless for the old man to adopt the opinions of the young in order to make others doubt his old age. 

It is also important for the left to make people unhappy in order to promote the illusion that there is a political solution to their unhappiness. Here again, the Devil's fingerprints are evident. 

But you know all of this. The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self reviews this generational triumph of developmental arrest, but is there anything new to add? 

Trueman doesn't get into the diabolical angle, since he presumably wants to be taken seriously. We, on the other hand, are under no such constraint. We want to make people guffah-HA! with laughty insights.

I distrust any idea that does not seem obsolete or grotesque to my contemporaries.

Each day it becomes easier to know what we ought to despise: what modern man admires and journalism praises.

Modern man thinks the devil has disappeared, when he only became more subtle. 

Indeed,

Many think that the devil has died, but he merely walks around today disguised as man. 

The closest Trueman comes to speaking of the devil is in a review of the concept of "deathworks," defined as an assault on the sacred order of things, for example, "an attack on established cultural art forms in a manner designed to undo the deeper moral structure of society." 

Deathworks make the old values look ridiculous. They represent not so much arguments against the old order as subversions of it.

Always delivered with that familiar sneer perfected over at MSNBC. It tries to makes the normal look "utterly repulsive" or "disgusting and vile." God himself

is literally cast into the sewer, the lowest of the low. The sacramental is made into the excremental.

This highlights the sacred bullshit of the left, in which "Religion is not rendered untrue. It is made distasteful and disgusting." 

If Nietzsche's madman unchains the earth from the sun, then we might say that deathworks are instrumental in this exercise, communicating the message of the death of God via aesthetic forms that come to shape the popular imagination... 

But disgust cuts both ways, in that

Our spontaneous revulsions are often more lucid than our reasoned convictions.

And nothing is more revolting -- in both senses of the word -- than the regressively childish deathworks of the left. 

Progressive Sheep and How They Get That Way

The greatest political puerility is to attribute to certain social structures the vices inherent in the human condition. --Dávila

Why is the left so hysterical? Why has the sober think tank of academia become a bottomless feel tank? Why is the news an estrogen carnival? Why is every institution from the military to the law to science riddled with mind parasites? Why the metastatic spread of soul-killing philodoxies and misosophies?  

Here we go. 

To reset, we've been discussing the book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but since extremes meet, it actually describes the return of the barbarous self, the same one on which Judeo-Christianity exerted its rescue operation. Nevertheless, it borrows many of its most cherished assumptions from the very metaphysic it denies, e.g., human rights and the dignity of the individual. 

In fact, it pretends to eliminate all metaphysics, hence "the antireligious and antimetaphysical thinking that dominates our contemporary world." But thinking is precisely what one cannot do in the absence of a realist metaphysic that accounts for the conformity of the intellect to reality.   

Among other things, "The death of metaphysics" explains why "moral discourse today is so fruitless because it lacks any commonly accepted basis on which moral differences can be discussed and assessed." It's why we talk past each other. 

This is a hierarchical cosmos, so what we say is literally over their heads, while what they say is under ours. Again, transcendence accounts for immanence, while pure immanence is by definition enclosed in itself -- or at least pretends to be. 

"Take away the notion of human nature, and all that is left is free-floating, subjective sentiment." I feel that I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. Or, I feel that the baby isn't a person, therefore it isn't one. Here are "The seeds of today's moral anarchy, where personal emotional preferences are constantly confused with moral absolutes." 

For example, I am traumatized by microaggressions, therefore free speech must be curbed by the state. A reminder of Schuon's Law that "man has the right to be legitimately traumatized only by monstrosities; he who is traumatized by less is himself a monster." Every. Time.

Nevertheless, here we are: 

If society/culture is merely a construct, and if nature possesses no intrinsic meaning or purpose, then what meaning there is must be created by human beings themselves (Trueman).

But that's not meaning in any meaningful sense, rather, just your opinion, man. Meaning is precisely what takes place -- and can only take place -- in the dynamic space between immanence and transcendence. 

Someone here is sick, and literally, for mental illness always involves a failure of the mind to conform to reality. In many ways, contemporary discourse involves the question of Where is the sickness? In other words, someone is sick, it's just a matter of determining who it is. 

You will have noticed that the left pathologizes disagreement, such that our beliefs are always a literal consequence of phobia -- homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, gynophobia (the desire to Control Women's Bodies), etc. And "For both Nietzsche and Marx" in particular, "sacred order was a sign of psychological sickness." 

The Marxist does not think it possible to condemn except by distorting what he condemns.

But if you have to distort something in order to condemn it, it must mean that you want the distortion to be true, e.g., a Bloodbath, Russian Collusion, Very Fine People, Muslim Ban, Insurrection, Threat to Our Democracy, etc.

Civilization appears to have been invented by an extinct species. 

Wait a minute!

There are still a few of us left, AKA the Raccoon remnant.

It comes down to whether progressives are evil or just cosmically stupid:

The more stupid the motives we assign to an action, the less we are in danger of being wrong.

Moreover,  

Leftists are not the representatives of the poor, but the delegates of poor ideas.

Interestingly, polling suggests that poor and working class Democrats are beginning to discover this, which, if true, would bring about an extinction-level catastrophe for the left. Thus, they will have to crank up the pathologizing of conservatives from the usual 11 to 12 or more.

Progressivism may not necessarily be maliciously willful, just careless:

In the coherence of certain systems, a vision is articulated; other systems result from the mere inertia of an idea.

If you've read the previous 4,000 posts and 5.6 million words, you will agree that a certain cosmically coherent vision has been articulated, and thensome. But progressivism? It's just the usual entropy and gravity at work, 32 feet per second per second:

Having said that, there is a distinction between the grazing multitude of passive, low-information sheep and the lying elites who herd and shear them. One of their organizing lies involves the

view of history in which traditional heroes of the story are actually the villains and in which even the narrating of history becomes part of a wider discourse of power that keeps the marginalized on the margins (Trueman).

These tenured mythofolkers "provide the philosophical rationale for an anticulture."

Conversely,

Conservatism should not be a political party but the normal attitude of every decent man,

and

To be a conservative is to understand that that man is a problem without a human solution.

The Coming Collapse of the Cosmos

No, not the merely physical cosmos, which might also end in a collapse -- the Big Suck -- but the real cosmos --- the one that includes the Great Between where the cosmos makes itself known. 

This is another kind of violent implosion: of transcendence being sucked into the immanent frame discussed in yesterday's post. Indeed, it's that great sucking sound that pervades our culture. Let those with ears hear!

Gosh. We could probably boil down yesterday's post to Voegelin's definition of the Cosmos, which is

the whole of ordered reality including animate and inanimate nature and the gods. Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into the immanent "world" and the transcendent "divine ground" (Webb).

When he refers to the "gods," he means earlier and more primitive ways of symbolizing the divine ground, which -- like O -- is 

the supreme, undefinable, transcendent reality which may be considered either as the source or origin of both the world and the metaxy [i.e., the human space between immanence and transcendence] or as "the Beyond" that forms existence by drawing it into participation (ibid.). 

Now, it is interesting that the Cosmos should include this ambiguous Between, but without it the Cosmos could not be known. I suspect it has some similarity to Eliot's mysterious Third who walks always beside us. If ultimate reality is substance-in-relation, then relation is irreducible, and there's your Between.

At any rate, it is where all the action is. Think about it. Or rather, try to think it away. Can't actually be done. Unless you're done with thinking, for thinking is always "about," and about is a relation. 

Of course, you might think that thinking is only about more thinking, but surely you Kant be that stupid. You need to get outside more often. Outside your head. Beyond tenure.

It will surprise no one if I say that Democrats are the party of the immanent frame, which is founded upon the rejection of transcendence. It is an inherently pathological move, hence all the pathology, which is both a cause and consequence of their disordered souls.

Nowhere does Trueman mention Voegelin in The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but he prophesied all of this decades ago. However, his ideas and terms are so uncommercial that it's no surprise that he never crossed over to the pop charts -- for example, Amathia, which really only means  

voluntary ignorance motivated by aversion to truth.... its symptom is an unwillingness to be drawn into consideration of the transcendental. 

A better and snappier term would be transphobia, but that has been taken by our immanent transphobes, who are phobic of transcendence, precisely. This phobia extends to history, hence all the frantic rewriting: "It has a vested interest in the actual erasure of history," so that "Forgetfulness is now the curricular form of our higher education."

*Ironically*, it mean that the person with a degree in history has a degree in forgetfulness. Moreover, he has filled the forgotten space with (immanent) ideology. No wonder these folks are unemployable, except by the Borg. But there are not enough jobs in the Borg for all the ignorantia produced by the Borg. 

This is true barbarism, and it is manifested in things as apparently diverse as art, architecture, technology, consumerism, and the sophisticated ideologies promoted in university seminars (Trueman).

Not to mention the secular seminaries of elementary and high school. It's why Democrats are still standing in the schoolhouse door, only now preventing escape. "Home" schooling is redundant. It's just schooling.

Trueman next reviews all of the Usual Suspects responsible for our plight, including Rousseau, the romantics, Nietzsche, Hegel, Marx, Darwin (in the metaphysical sense), Freud (same), Reich, Marcuse, Adorno, de Beauvoir, Sartre, Gramsci, et al. 

Reviewing these transphobes again would be like pulling teeth, but I'm already getting one pulled this afternoon, so I'll spare me. 

Besides, there's a deeper principle that unifies this rabble, and they are just instances of it. Trueman even says that any starting point is going to be somewhat arbitrary, as we can always go back further:

To the question Where should the starting point be? there is really only one answer -- and that itself is a question: How far back do you wish to go?

Me? I wish to go all the back to Genesis 3 and to the permanent possibility of reenacting the metaphysical error therein. This error has two sides, the denial of transcendence and (therefore) of human nature. Eve & Adam were the first transphobes.

For example, Rousseau's Confessions is obviously modeled after Augustine's, only the two come to opposite conclusions: for the latter

the moral flaw is ultimately intrinsic to him.... Circumstances merely provide an opportunity for a particular action to reveal the immorality of his innate inner disposition. 

 But for Rousseau,

his natural humanity is fundamentally sound, and the sinful act comes from social pressures and conditioning.... he is basically good at birth and then perverted by external forces.

Depraved on account'a being deprived, or something. Nevertheless, this principle is "so basic to much of modern liberal thought that it verges on the platitudinous." Which is why I would rather not review it, and would prefer to have my tooth pulled the old-fashioned way later today.

Likewise, for Nietzsche, "the basic error human beings have made is to give themselves a nature," whereas for us this is the basic truth -- a nature that includes the possibility of making Nietzsche's perennial error. 

Same with Sartre, for whom existence is prior to essence, which is precisely upside-down and inside-out. 

Or Marx, who also denies any essential human nature, but historicizes it in terms of the "social and economic structures of society." Your consciousness is a consequence of your class, or in the parlance of the times, race, gender, and victimhood.

Darwin? "By dispatching the idea of teleology from nature, [he] inevitably dispatched it from human beings too." It's a long fall from man to apeman, but here we are, a planet of the (mere) apes in denial of their transcendent nature.

Cosmophobia and the Third World War

Why are American Christians suddenly Christian Nationalists? What happened? The essential content of Christianity hasn't changed, nor the Declaration or Constitution, so what did change? The container, i.e., what Charles Taylor calls  

the immanent frame. Prior ages were characterized by a transcendent frame, a belief that the world stood under the authority of a reality that transcended its mere material existence (Trueman).

Such an immanent reality is a kind of self-referential, ontological tautology in which "this world is all there is, and so moral discourse cannot find its justification or root its authority in anything that lies beyond it." Because there is and can be nothing beyond it. 

Among other inconveniences, no civilization has ever maintained itself without reference to a transcendent order. A purely immanent civilizational order "is unprecedented in human history," and it looks like we won't be the first to make a success of it. 

Nevertheless, that's the plan, which, in order to succeed, must eliminate those of us who believe and live in the transcendent frame. 

Thus, what looks like a mere political dispute is really an ontological one, going to the very nature of reality. 

Nor is this one of those disagreements susceptible to compromise, at least from their side of the divide. This is because a transcendent frame allows for immanence, but the immanent frame denies -- cannot tolerate -- transcendence, precisely. 

In case you were wondering about the source of their rigid and shrill intolerance.

The denial and banishment of transcendence is "one of catastrophic cultural significance" resulting in "distinct and damaging cultural pathologies." 

Of course, in order for there to be pathology, there must be a transcendent or teleological norm. Which is again convenient for the soul-sick among us, since it renders their pathology normal. No one is better or worse than anyone else, except those of us who believe otherwise. Hence, we are the worst. 

This is also one of the sources of their hysteria, since they know they are being judged. Which is why you are not permitted to merely tolerate their pathology but must celebrate it: Bake the cake, deplorable!   

It is impossible to consistently maintain a strict immanent frame. Rather, any attempt to do so will always smuggle in the very transcendence it denies. Thus, it will always be inconsistent, contradictory, hypocritical, and ultimately absurd.   

Gödel.

Yes, if only they only understood that reality always transcends ideology, they might see the error of their ways. But they are responding to an alluring and powerful pull -- the pull of the demonic.  

Was that wrong? Was that uncalled for? I don't think so, for what is the diabolical but the flight from transcendence? Indeed, this is one of the classic definitions of fascism, i.e., the violent resistance to transcendence. Even if it isn't caused by the devil, it results -- you will have noticed -- in endless devilry.

The Devil, according to Schuon, is "the humanized personification -- humanized on contact with man -- of the subversive aspect of the centrifugal existential power." 

Being that man qua man is the being suspended between immanence and transcendence, this subversive movement proceeds downward into an intrinsically pneumopathological immamental illness.

Spiritual warfare:

This is the reason why society now often feels like a cultural battle zone: it consists of groups of people who simply think about the moral structure of the world in utterly incompatible ways (Trueman).

Trueman uses the terms "second world" and "third world" to describe the transcendent and immanent frames, respectively. Thus,

there is no common ground on which the denizens of third worlds can engage in meaningful dialogue with those of the first [pagan / mythic] or second.... 

More than that, third worlds are characterized by total opposition to any kind of sacred order and to those verticals in authority (religious institutions and authorities) that typically mediate that sacred order.

Thus the "complete breakdown of communication." And here we are, trying to talk sense into people who can speak only nonsense. This is not even an argument, for in "clashes with a representative of a third world there is no real argument taking place":

There is no common authority on which they might agree to the terms of debate in order to determine exactly what it is they are debating.

Not even the authority of reality, since that's just an oppressive social construct invented by white Christians to control the third worlders. 

Cosmophobia.

Yes, Petey, that's what it amounts to: a neurotic rejection of, and flight from, the total order of reality. 

Can't we just agree to disagree? No, because what is the compromise position between reality and its alternatives, or what is and what we wish it were? A little bit of delusion? A smattering of insanity? A moderately demented president?

This is nothing less than a struggle between culture and anti-culture, the latter "called such because of its iconoclastic, purely destructive attitude toward all that... second worlds hold dear."

The progressive travels around among literary works as the Puritan did among cathedrals: with hammer in hand.  

And not just literary works but artistic works in general, not to mention legal texts such as the Constitution.  

in the third world, crudity becomes the norm because the general interdict against such is seen as a tyrannical hangover from an outdated way of viewing the world.

Nor is history immune to the destruction:

The falsification of the past is how the left has sought to elaborate the future. 

A reminder that

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god. 

Again, what is the compromise position between God and the anti-God? They cannot tolerate us, because doing so reveals them as the intolerant cosmophobes they are.

Existentialism, Essentialism, and the Crisis of Stupidity

My takeaway from yesterday's post is that our civilizational crisis of stupidity comes down to a flight from essentialism and a downward drift into existentialism. It is because of this cosmic sophistry -- centuries in the making -- that a person is able to say he is somehow trapped in the wrong body. 

Recall these three extracts from The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self describing the knowable Cosmos we once knew, which 

--regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it,

and in which

--the authority of the created order was obvious and unavoidable. The world was what it was, and the individual needed to conform to it,

versus one that 

--sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

What was so wrong with the previous world, a world in which men were men and women were glad of it? 

In a word, essentialism, which "is the view that objects have a set of attributes that are necessary to their identity." If I Am is a consequence of What Is, then obviously we cannot choose our gender. Rather, it is just one of the many things assigned by reality.  

Therefore, reality has got to go. In this view, there are far more important things than mere reality, beginning with fantasy. Which is how we got to this fantastical place, where 

it is increasingly easy to imagine that reality is something we can manipulate according to our own wills and desires, and not something that we necessarily need to conform ourselves to or passively accept (Trueman).  

Liberation! From reality:  

Today what is called "intellectual liberation" is a change of prisons.

And

Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison. 

The perfect totalitarian gulag of the Woke, in which "identity becomes as potentially unlimited as the human imagination." Nevertheless, the biggest conceivable prison is still a prison.

Hell masquerading as heaven, AKA the utopia of the left.

Hell is a place where man finds all his projects realized.

It is also any place from which God is absent. 

As we've said before, leftism is the institutionalization of man's fall, in which we "take the place of God as self-creators" and presume to be "the inventors, not the discoverers, of meaning" (ibid.).

But freedom!

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

If these people are so liberated, why are they so unhappy, constantly jumping, growling, and barking like a dementia patient that found Hunter's crack?  

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain.  

Oh. That explains a lot: the invisible collar and chain is reality, and they bark and growl at us because we remind them of it. 

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence. 

You know, the mostly peaceful™ kind. 

Here's a good one:

Marxism turns the intelligence that it touches to stone.

Why? Because it denies the very essences that render the world intelligible to the intellect. You'd be mad too if "So-called 'external' or 'objective' truths" are "simply constructs designed by the powerful to intimidate and harm the weak" (ibid.). 

Or at least constantly frustrated because of the deplorables who reject your fantasy of how the world ought to be. Truly truly, they despise us, but only because they have first despised the world, AKA reality.

All "traditional institutions must be transformed to conform to the psychological self, not vice versa," and that's a heavy task. After all, they've completed their grim march through the institutions, and yet, the growling is only louder. One suspects that the growling isn't a means but an end: that I am angry, therefore I am.

The progressive becomes angry at nothing as much as the stubbornness of the one who refuses to sacrifice the certain to the new. 

Or essences to opinions, intellect to ego, reality to fantasy, justice to social justice, liberal order to progressive anarcho-tyranny, etc.

Reality is Not What it Used to Be

Where do we go from there? -- in reference to the previous post, which took the telovator to the top floor and concluded that

In everything that is true -- that exists -- there "has to be at least a vestige of the Son's correspondence to the Father."

This explains why we are at once swimming in an ocean of truth and drowning in a sea of lies. 

At any rate, supposing we have pierced the veil of the toppermost -- or it us, rather -- there's nowhere to go but back down into the world. 

Indeed, we are always between immanence and transcendence, bearing in mind that Betweenness as such is a primordial category -- that something is always and forever going on Between the Father and Son, AKA conformity to the True. This between -- what Voegelin calls the metaxy -- represents

human existence as "between" lower and upper poles; man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation of being" (Webb).

This latter -- participation of being -- "Refers to sharing the qualities of the supreme exemplar," or "a condition between higher and lower degrees of reality." In the Judeo-Christian tradition it is reflected in the principle of our theomorphism, and can be symbolized as follows:

O

(⇅)

Ø

That's us in the middle. To dwell at the bottom equates to empiricism, to flee to the top idealism. But neither approach on its own is justifiable. It reminds us of a book called The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization, which describes the seesaw argument that has been going on for over two millennia. 

The two men disagreed on the fundamental purpose of the philosophy. For Plato, the image of the cave summed up man’s destined path, emerging from the darkness of material existence to the light of a higher and more spiritual truth [↑]. Aristotle thought otherwise. Instead of rising above mundane reality, he insisted, the philosopher’s job is to explain how the real world works, and how we can find our place in it [↓]. 

But an integral view of the cosmos requires both, since they are not dualistic but complementary. Perhaps I should reread it, but at the moment I'm reading a book called The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution.

And here we are. But how did we get here? That is the question the book attempts to answer. The short answer is through really, really bad philosophy, involving a great deal of amnesia, in particular, a systematic forgetting of what man knows about man. But I'm only up to p. 64.

At any rate, the book does bring us back down from the beautiful clouds of metaphysics to the cloudy muck of history.

So, how did we get here -- to a place that sees and raises Descartes, and says I think I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. What must the world be like in order for such a nonsensical statement to make sense? It actually requires centuries of work. Termites can't destroy a house in a day. 

Long story short,

Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that's why all this has has happened.... Yet any proposed Christian solution to the crisis of modernity will fail if it does not address the core issues of the Great Forgetting (Trueman).

Long story shorter,

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.

Each day modern man knows the world better and knows man less.

If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

"Human" is the adjective used to excuse any infamy.

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

Man speaks of the relativity of truth because he calls his innumerable errors truths.

Nor is there a "Christian solution" per se, since ours is a chronic but treatable condition.

We only know how to solve problems that do not matter.

Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.

Little problems like death, loss, evil, human nature, and the nature of reality. 

Trueman actually begins with the problem of I am a woman trapped in a man's body, a sentence which "carries with it a world of metaphysical assumptions."

Now, every mentally ill person has a problem. As does every healthy person. What is life but problems?

The problem of the fellow somehow unhappiting the wrong body

cannot be understood until it is set in the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood.

Get your anthropology wrong and everything else follows. Am I wrong?

No, but Nietzsche, Marx, and other fiending fathers of postmodernity are: they argue

that the history of society is a history of power and oppression and that even notions such as human nature are constructs designed to reinforce and perpetuate this subjugation.

In other words, forgetting human nature isn't a bug, it's a featured mind parasite. It's like saying There's no such thing as a woman, and I am one. But if everything is an oppressive social construct, so too is the construct of transgenderism. Indeed, often enough to only escape from this oppressive construct is suicide.

The product of power and oppression is the Sacred Victim, who are collectively "the real heroes of the narrative." You get more of what you reward, hence all the victim-heroes. At the same time the real heroes, from Washington to Churchill, are the oppressors.

Tell us something we don't know.

Okay, Trueman discusses the terms mimesis and poiesis, which "refer to two different ways of thinking about the world." The former is much like a realist philosophy in which truth is the conformity of intellect to being: it

regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it.

Such a commonsense view of the world is precisely what makes you an oppressive and power-mad White European Heteronormative Christian Nationalist tyrant. Conversely, poiesis   

sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.

Genesis 3 All Over Again? 

Sure sounds like it. Back in the real world,

the authority of the created order was obvious and unavoidable. The world was what it was, and the individual needed to conform to it.

Now, I'm all for questioning authority. But the authority of reality? And its author? That seems more than a bit soph-defeating. Nevertheless, "Today's world is not the objectively authoritative place" it used to be. Nowadays, 

Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot.

That's enough for today.

A Tweenage Correspondence Course in Reality

Or maybe three-ality.

Let's get back to basics: "truth is a relationship of correspondence between two quite different sorts of things," on the one hand, the intellect, on the other, intelligible reality. 

But note that in reality there are always three, since relationship itself is equally primordial. That's our claim, anyway. 

For example, try saying anything without a relationship between words and things or words and other words. Can't be done. 

For me, a Christian metaphysic vaults this mysterious third to the toppermost of the poppermost. Looked at this way, we aren't just related to reality, but relationship as such is a part of the reality to which we are conformed.

I know, tricksy. But denying it is also a kind of trick, only the bad kind that results in a host of metaphysical mischief.

Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you (Eliot) 

Who is it? You know poets. They never come right out and say it. Although in the footnotes there is a counter-claim by the idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley which sketches out in precise terms what we do not believe: that

my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and... every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.

If Professor Bad Example is correct, then there is no shared relationship, nor any "third" walking beside us. In fact, no real us at all, just two more or less contiguous but closed circles. 

But for us the Us is as equally real as the I and the Is , i.e., Intellect-Being-Relation. Are you with me? Or just an adjacent circle enclosed in absurcularity -- a nul de slack? 

Yada yada, truth is always a "three-way affair," is it not? Which is how we can at once know truth and share it with others. 

Having said that, many people are indeed closed circles, i.e., the existential closure alluded to in yesterday's post. In reality, a person qua person is a truth-bearing being, but how? By virtue of what principle?

I'll just quote Marshall and add my own comments as necessary:

if Jesus Christ is the truth, then truth is borne, not only chiefly by sentences or beliefs, but by a person.... in the end, truth is a person. 

That's the claim. Aphoristically speaking, that

The truth is objective but not impersonal.

Truth is a person.

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

A person is a be-tween. 

A betweenager? And a trialogue? Sounds about right, Petey. But let us dig a little deeper into this whole. 

Look! Down there: "a single concept of truth applicable to all true sentences and beliefs."

Wait -- it's alive! Don't act so surprised:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago.

"In the correspondence of person to person by which the Trinity makes us Christ's icons one may hear an echo of the ancient idea that truth is a correspondence of mind to reality."

Listen! For God is the guest of silence.

we cannot be bearers of Christ's image without sharing in his correspondence to the Father, and so bearing, like him if imperfectly, the imprint of the Father himself....

Granting to creatures a participated likeness in the incarnated Son's correspondence to the Father seems to be the final goal of the act by which the Trinity brings it about that we have true beliefs. 

In other words, conformity as such -- which is always a relation -- is grounded in the conformity of Son to Father?

If correspondence to the Father is itself identity-constituting and non-contingent for the Son, then "truth" belongs... to God's own identity, in the form of the Word's perfect correspondence to the Father whose total reality he expresses. The Son would then correspond to the Father -- would be "the truth of the Father."

The Truth of truth -- of even the possibility of truth? Sounds like it: this "identity-constituting relation to the Father would thus be basic to the truth of all possible true beliefs." Turns out that "Everything corresponds to the Father in some fashion, however remote." 

In everything that is true -- that exists -- there "has to be at least a vestige of the Son's correspondence to the Father."

Short & sweet.

All truth goes from flesh to flesh.

But

Write concisely in order to finish before you become boring.