Aphorisms for a Rainy Day

I am periodically prone to ambushes from the adversary -- or something -- that let me know I've wasted my life and that all this spirituality business is a rationalization. A dodge. So I know very well how to be a skeptic.

Deep faith is only that of the skeptic who prays.

Moreover,

There is some collusion between skepticism and faith: both undermine human presumptuousness. 

Back when I first dabbled in philosophy, I was drawn to existentialism. In hindsight, I was probably just depressed, because if depression had an ideology it would be the meaninglessness of existentialism.  

Dávila has many aphorisms that go to this darker side of life, for example, how could he say this if he didn't know this?

He who does not search for God at the bottom of his soul finds nothing there but mud.

Or this:  

When providence gives us the destiny we desire, we soon discover that to accept it requires a desolating resignation.

Indeed, 

Who is more than the miserable site of an epiphany?

But Señor, I find your little epiphanies to be quite helpful. Don't be so hard on yourself. 

Self-satisfaction is pathetic proof of lowliness. 

Okay, but--

Men are less mediocre when they do not think themselves obligated not to be.

Maybe you just woke up on the wrong side of the bed? 

Man is nothing but the spectator of his impotence.

A little perspective perhaps? Look on the bright side, and all that?

Any satisfaction is a form of forgetfulness.

That's not very promising. Have you made no progress? 

There is no spiritual victory that is not necessary to win anew each day.

That's at least a form of victory, no? 

Every life is an unsuccessful experiment.

That's a bit categorical. 

He who wishes to avoid grotesque collapses should look for nothing in space or time that will fulfill him.

Nothing? Are you sure you're not an existentialist in disguise? 

The briefest commotion of the soul makes us feel that our existence is like a grave that is being filled.

You sound like Kafka in his arthropod phase.

Man does not have the power to do anything important. Only to hope that what he does will have an important result.

Now, on the other hand,

God sometimes prunes our branches like an impatient gardener.

And 

Faith in God does not solve problems, but makes them ridiculous.

So cheer up:

Defeats are never definitive when they are accepted in good humor.

Secondhand Inspiration

Inspiration. What is it and where does it go? I can only write when I'm feeling inspired to do so, but what does this even mean? And when I'm not inspired, I resort to secondhand inspiration. There are certain thinkers such as Dávila whom I can rely upon to jolt the vertical battery. 

But this doesn't answer the question: what is inspiration? Obviously it has something to do with "spirit" -- spiration -- and with its somehow affecting the psyche that is open to it -- or sometimes even closed, as with Paul on the road to Damascus.

Let's consult another favorite source of inspiration, Schuon:

inspiration simply means that the Spirit guides man in accordance with the divine intention and on the basis of the capacities of the human receptacle. 

Were this not so, there would be no theological elaboration, nor any divergences within orthodoxy, and the first Church Father would have written a theological treatise that would have been unique, exhaustive, and definitive; there would never have been either a Thomas Aquinas or a Gregory Palamas.

So there is a co-mingling of Spirit (↓) and a human receptacle (¶). Thus, as implied by Schuon, there is both "universality" and "particularity," since no two receptacles are identical.

Elsewhere he writes that    

Inspiration, like revelation, is a divine dictate, with the difference that in the second case the Spirit dictates a law-giving and obligatory Message of overriding force, whereas in the first case the Message, whatever be its value, has no dogmatic import, and has an illustrative role within the framework of the fundamental Message.

So, revelation per se is a very special kind of (↓), whereas our kind has no dogmatic import but is for purposes of illustration only. A Raccoon is under no obligation to be one.   

Back to Dávila, does he have any inspirational things to say about inspiration? Well, art is inspiring, because

Strictly speaking, the work of art does not have a meaning but a power.

A mysterious spiritual power that radiates from the object into us. For again,

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace. 

It is not religion, but nor is it exactly not religion, for

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

Moreover,

When God absents himself, shutting us up in the world, art is the last shutter that closes.

But what about inspiration?

Man can keep the page clean, but only God can write on it.

Mere talent isn't enough, for

Simple talent is to literature what good intentions are to conduct. 

I'm pretty sure I have more inspiration than talent, but I suppose this is preferable to the opposite, i.e., having talent but no inspiration. 

Here's a nice one:

God's inspiration of the Bible is not ventriloquism. The voice of God passes through the sacred text as a wind storm through the leaves of the forest trees.

More generally,

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things. 

And

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

Ain't it the truth. A world without (↓) -- to be literally enclosed in horizontality -- would be unendurable. Even if it's secondhand (↓).

Meditations on Some Meditations

Next month will be 19 years of blogging, albeit with periodic withdrawals due to the rhythm of inspiration, which blows and stops blowing when and where it will.

Even the most lucid writer spends a lot of time doing what he does not know how he knows how to do.

And that certainly includes me. I have no idea why the tap turns on or off, but I know when it's off, because that's when I have to write instead vice versa:

Philosophers are not hunters of truths -- truths are the hunters of philosophers.  

And I'm not being hunted -- or haunted -- at the moment. Why try to force the issue? 

The journalist chooses his subjects; the writer is chosen by his subjects.

Besides,  

When everyone wants to be something, it is only decent to be nothing.

Moreover, 

The first step of wisdom is to admit with good humor that there is no reason why our ideas should interest anyone.

But what am I supposed to do with myself if I can't propagate my uninteresting idea to those who aren't interested?

Man needs a busy life. No one is more unfortunate than the idler who was not born predestined to be one. 

Oof. Did I retire too soon? Am I not a true Christian Dudist? 

An idle life without boredom, stupidities, or cruelty is as admirable as it is rare.

On the other hand,

The price that intelligence charges to those it chooses is resignation to daily triviality.

Writing about what isn't trivial is my defense against the triviality of existence. Come to think of it,

Observing life is too interesting for one to waste time in living it.

 Is this true? Or just the rationalization for a narrow and uneventful life? 

Those who groan about the narrowness of the place in which they live wish to believe that events, neighbors and landscapes would give them the sensibility and intelligence that nature denied them.

So, proletarian pastimes and bourgeois adventures are vulgar substitutes for sensibility and intelligence?

The religious life begins when we discover that God is not a postulate of ethics, but the only adventure in which it is worth the trouble to risk ourselves.

A ha. So it's a matter of undergoing a vertical adventure for which horizontal adventures are a kind of pale substitute?

Soul is what gives birth to all the things that last.

I'll buy that. Also its converse, in that the things that last -- that are timeless -- are proof of the soul. 

By the way, 

The unbeliever imagines that religion pretends to give solutions, while the believer knows that it only promises to multiply enigmas.

What could be easier than atheism? I prefer the challenge of reconciling religion and science, or the vertical and horizontal. 

Impartiality is less attractive than the partiality that views itself with irony.

Partly because

Ideas betray us if we do not betray them beforehand. We must only be faithful to the complexity of things.

 At the same time, there is an objective reality. For example.

The greatest discovery we can make in ethics is that in ethics one cannot make discoveries.

As they say, a law that isn't grounded in the nature of things is no law at all.

Now, here is something to ponder:

The proofs of faith are internal to faith, as those of the sciences are internal to science.  

No existing interpretations are universally valid. A religious interpretation is grotesque in a secular context, just as a secular interpretation is grotesque in a religious context. 

It's easy enough to prove the necessity of God -- or someone like him -- with a little metaphysical diddling. But in order to make it fruitful, one must undertake a religious practice. It's like the difference between knowing all about musical theory vs. picking up an instrument and learning how to play.

It seems a practice is to religion what method is to science. In neither case should these be confused with their content, or one ends in idolatry on the one hand or scientism on the other. In short, it is a mistake to absolutize anything but the Absolute.

The other day we spoke of how Romanticism was a kind of attempt to resuscitate the corpse of verticality from within the new tyranny of horizontality: 

The great writers from Romanticism onward are prisoners frantically shaking the bars of the jail into which they turned the world without God.

But the doors are locked from the inside? In any event, 

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, man becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries.

It's a right-brain thing:

Proofs for the existence of God are the ideology of the feeling of His presence in the soul.

 Not that this proof answers every question. To the contrary,

To give a religious answer to the enigma of the world is a less sure sign of religiosity than to confront it with a religious question.

In any event,

We have reached such an extreme of ineptitude that we only believe to be real what would persist if the arts were abolished.

When the most real is at the summit of the vertical hierarchy. About which -- as Thomas says -- "This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God." Thus, 

It is not our knowledge that sometimes makes us feel superior, but the quality of our ignorance compared to others’ knowledge.

Then again,  

Each one clings to the snobbery that he can.

Faces of Nihilism

We've been writing of how the essence of modernity turns out to be nihilism. As Hart makes clear, the assumptions are nihilistic. It's just a matter of following them through to their "ineluctable nihilistic terminus." 

If you harbor those assumptions without reaching the terminus, then you are leading a life of bad faith, duplicity, and intellectual dishonesty. Most likely you're drawing on an implicit reservoir of Judeo-Christianity to provide what meaning subsists in such a sophicating worldview. 

Now, I'm a simple man:

Either God or chance; all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

But chance produces nothing and explains nothing. I read the book a few months ago, so I'll let an amazon reviewer refresh my memory:

Chance is merely the probability of something happening. If we flip a coin, the chances of it landing on heads is fifty percent. But chance doesn’t cause it to land on heads. Chance isn’t an entity and has no power to cause anything to happen.

The problem is that many scientists are claiming the universe came by chance. If chance has no power, how could it create a universe?  

If I flip a coin 100 times, there's a chance it will come up heads each time. But what are the chances that such an unlikely outcome is a result of chance? 

chance has no power to do anything. It is cosmically, totally, consummately impotent.... It has no power because it has no being.

So, there's no chance that chance is a sufficient explanation of being, mind, life, or anything else, for it's really just another word for ignorance -- "ignorance of real causes." 

Yes, but isn't God too just another name for our ignorance?

No, I think God is the very principle, ground, and possibility of intellect, intelligibility, meaning, and truth.

God is not an inane compensation for lost reality, but the horizon surrounding the summits of conquered reality.

That would be the transcendent horizon of total intelligibility toward which we are ordered. Conversely, 

If God does not exist we should not conclude that everything is permissible, but that nothing matters. 

"Nothing matters" is the very content of nihilism. 

Come to think of it, also of clinical depression, and I'm sure there is considerable overlap between the two. Why are there more affective disorders than ever? Perhaps for the same reason there is more nihilism than ever. The condition is grave but not serious though, because

If it is not of God that we are speaking, it is not sensible to speak of anything seriously. 

If life is meaningless, then so too is your depression. Indeed, your depression is a murmurandom from below informing you of this absence of meaning.

The preluminary ramblings above were inspired by a review of an intellectual biography of Roger Scruton, calling him "the anti-nihilist par excellence." Which, if you recall the previous 25 posts on All Things Are Full of Gods, was one of the themes that emerged. i.e., the possibility of a post-disenchantment alternative to modern nihilism. 

For again, it's easy enough to debunk reductive and scientistic materialism, but with what exactly do we replace it? It can't be another ideology, because that would be just another iteration of the problem. A couple of aphorisms come to mind:

Reality cannot be represented in a philosophical system.

That's true. Gödel would be the first to endorse that proposition. He also said that it was "to be expected that sooner or later my proof will be made useful for religion, since that is doubtless also justified in a certain sense." 

But before jumping to any conclusions, the second aphorism reminds us that  

An adequate theology would be unintelligible to us.

Well, great. Philosophy can't map reality, and a theology that could would be beyond our comprehension. No wonder people flee into nihilism. 

But I can't have been the first to say that nothingness is just the shadow of God. At any rate, 

God is the transcendental condition of the absurdity of the universe.

In this regard "absurdity" is much like chance, i.e., a privation of something more substantive and intelligible.

Back to Scruton, he

found intimations of transcendence, of the “sacred,” as he called it, manifested in those places and moments where time mysteriously intersects with eternity. 

I call that a bingo, i.e., the nonlocal vertical realm that is always at a right angle to horizontality and immanence. Nor can such encounters be reduced to a system per se; indeed,

Everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools. 

Scruton's philosophy was "a repudiation of repudiation," which reminds me of another aphorism:

Man's moment of greatest lucidity is that in which he doubts his doubt.

Scruton eventually came to doubt his own doubt and be skeptical of his skepticism. He

“served a full apprenticeship in atheism,” but... having pondered his loss of faith against the backdrop of advancing secularism, steadily regained it.

 Same. Similar to what Hart says,

The inexorable “laws of nature” articulated by modern science cannot explain away the “I” that “is the defining feature of the human being.” Various forms of scientism and reductive materialism (including vulgarized neuroscience or “neurobabble” as Scruton sometimes contemptuously called it) try to “de-personalize or deface the world” as the revolutionary mindset of Communism did with murderous intent.

Why confine oneself to a nihilistic system that can't account for the most interesting phenomenon in all of existence? Again, we are ordered to that transcendent horizon that can never be reduced to some immanent system:

scientific materialism cannot account for the erotic quest of the knower, of the person who searches for the truth about the nature of things and the nature of the soul. It obscures the self or the soul and thus the quest for self-knowledge.

 But what is science without self-knowledge, without a serious and sustained effort to grasp human interiority... 

Just nihilism by another name.

The Re-Mystification of the Cosmos

Our most urgent task is that of reconstructing the mystery of the world. --Dávila 

Our subject is re-enchantment, or rather, post-disenchantment, if such a stance is possible. To repeat:

Today we require a methodical introduction to that vision of the world outside of which religious vocabulary is meaningless. 

A post-disenchanted world would be one in which a "religious vocabulary" is full of genuine meaning -- one in which verticality and transcendence are as real as -- actually, more real than -- immanence and horizontality. If 

The history of philosophy is the language that lets you talk about what is interesting,

then theology and metaphysics are languages that furnish points of reference that allow us to talk about what is the most interesting. For again,

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

Problem is, for the secular thinker there can be no outer regions of a soul that doesn't exist, i.e., that is ruled out a priori. In Flatland no spheres are allowed, or rather, are reduced to circles. Which is why

Homogeneity drives out God.

Which is to say, reducing the world-hierarchy to a single level and uniform substance. Again, doing so prevents us from talking about what is most interesting, which is why

The modern tragedy is not the tragedy of reason vanquished, but of reason triumphant.

When in reality,

The world is a system of equations that stir winds of poetry.

And  

A voluptuous presence communicates its sensual splendor to everything.

Not to go all animist on you, but 

Feelings are attributes of the object, as are sensations.

Denial of which causes a kind of horizontality-induced asthma:

I do not breathe well in a world that sacred shadows do not cross.

You're always free to confine yourself to some manmode horizontal ideology, but  

He who adopts a system stops perceiving the truths that are within his reach.

These aphorisms are all nice sentiments, but we're looking -- urgently -- for a hardheaded paradigm of post-disenchantment, which I suspect is Hart's goal as well, and are we any closer to it now that we've reached the end of the book?

Throughout human history, most peoples have assumed that, when they gazed out upon the natural world, something looked back and met their gaze with its own, and that between them and that numinous other was a real -- if infinitely incomprehensible -- communion in a realm of spiritual experience (Hart).

That was then, this is now: it's called progress.

Yes, good and hard. It's also called nihilism:

modernity is to a great extent nihilism, in the simplest, most exact sense: a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what the human will can impose on things.

We've only got a few paragraphs left in the book. Is there a solution, or just more kvetching?  

Perhaps it can yet be undone. Perhaps an escape from the machine is possible.

Suggestions?

They [humans] might yet learn to know themselves in a new way as spiritual beings immersed in a world of spirit..., and remember that which lies deepest within themselves: living mind, the divine ground of consciousness and life, participating in an infinite act of thought and communication, dwelling in a universe full of gods and full of God.

So, you're telling me there's a chance?

I'm not very hopeful. 

Nor am I, at least on a wholesale basis. But each individual is a unique problem of, and potential path to, that infinite divine ground of consciousness and life. In which case,

The mystic is the only one who is seriously ambitious. 

The book ends with a little friendly advice from one god to another (to the skeptical reductionist):

Devote more time to the contemplation of living things and less to the fabrication of machines. It might change your perspective over time. If not, it would still be good for your... your soul.

Bearing in mind that

The soul is born only to the one who believes in it.

And that

Only the souls that are made fertile by a divine pollen bloom. 

Is that it?

What do you mean?

Seems like a bit of a letdown after 25 posts on a single book.

Eh, that's true of most books, which, in the words of the Aphorist, contain neither a single error nor a single insight (not to say Hart falls into this sterile category). I have a special section of books in my library that are more or less foundational, and to which I return time and again. The rest are... put it this way:

Most philosophies are obstacles to avoid en route but a few are mountain ranges that one is forced to cross.

 At the end of the deity,

Tradition, propaganda, chance, or recommendation chooses our readings. We choose only what we reread.