When Fantasies Crumble, the Effect is Real (7.03.11)

Beneath all the hysteria on both sides, it's difficult to say exactly what is going on and where it will lead. It would appear that Obama has now crossed the threshold from the "cracking" to the "collapse" stage, which no one should celebrate, any more than one should celebrate when a neurotic but still functioning person undergoes a psychological breakdown. Yes, the breakdown is necessary to reintegrate at a higher level, but even the most seasoned psychotherapist would find it difficult to have more than one or two such cases in his practice.

First of all, we don't have any idea how Obama, whose privileged life as a leftist mascot has shielded him from any accurate feedback about himself, will react to the impingement of reality. With anger? Depression? Vindictiveness? There is simply no way of predicting how such an emotionally immature person will react under stress, and this should be cause for concern to us all. Suffice it to say that he will not be able to handle it with the grace and dignity that President Bush did for eight years.

And equally importantly, the President is not just the leader, but the fantasy leader, and when people feel their organizing fantasies slip away, they experience a tidal wave of irrational anxiety -- the very anxiety that had been "contained" by the strong fantasy leader. Again, despite his economically destructive and self-defeating policies, one must nevertheless give FDR credit for remaining a strong fantasy leader who kept the nation from crumbling into psychotic anxiety. Suffice it to say, Obama is not this kind of man.

In 1994, President Clinton had the good sense to bring in a "group therapist," Dick Morris, who was able to help him make sense of reality and to adjust his policies accordingly. But Obama may be too proud and too brittle -- not to mention, too ideological -- to make this adjustment. But if he fails to do so, it will only ensure further crumbling, and at some point the collective anxiety will turn to rage. Again, the rage may feel empowering to those who harbor it, but few people make good decisions when angry.

In order to understand the depth of Obama's fall, one must reexamine the absurd heights to which he was elevated. Remember, when a man falls, he only falls back to the ground. But if he was absurdly elevated through primitive fantasy, this tends to create a "snap-back" phenomenon, through which the person crashes through the ground. For example, let's say that the person is up in the rarified world of +12 fantasy (which one might think of as a "positive mind parasite"). When he crumbles, he will snap down into -12 anti-fantasy.

This is because the narcissist specifically develops his narcissistic defenses to shield himself from the unconscious belief that he is worthless. This is why the narcissist's defenses are so brittle, and why they so easily cast people under their ever-ready bus. With even a hint that you are not propping them up with idealization, under the bus you go.

Anyway, this post from last year looks at the idealization of Obama, which I said at the time was a measure of his (and the nation's) distance from reality. Will the ground hold, or will Obama crash through it?


*****

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence, and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair.... The tens of thousands of new voters Obama brought to the polls tonight came because he wrapped them in that experience, because he let them touch politics as it could be, rather than merely as it is. --Ezra Klein

A black man with a white mother became a savior to us. A black man with a white mother could turn out to be one who can lift America from her fall.... This young man is the hope of the entire world that America will change and be made better.... If you look at Barack Obama's audiences and look at the effect of his words, those people are being transformed. --Calypso Louis

Continuing with our analysis of the Devil Card, our Unknown Friend (UF) writes that the excesses of the left are always "owing to an intoxication of the will and imagination which engenders demons."

For example, if Marx and Engels had merely behaved as good Jews or Christians and "simply defended the interests of the industrial workers without having let themselves be carried away by their intoxicated imagination," then their ideas wouldn't have been so apocalyptically destructive. After all, every spiritually normal person wants to help the deserving poor and needy, but it is axiomatic that helping the human animal while killing the human soul renders any spiritual benefit inoperative for both parties.

Further, as Schuon commented, "Progressivism is the wish to eliminate effects without wishing to eliminate their causes..." To paraphrase him, the leftist wishes to make himself as useful as possible to a collectivity which renders the individual as useless as possible in the process. But,

"one must never lose sight of the fact that there exists no higher usefulness than that which envisages the final ends of man. By its divorce from traditional truth... society forfeits its own justification, doubtless not in a perfunctorily animal sense, but in the human sense. This human quality implies that the collectivity, as such, cannot be the aim and purpose of the individual but that, on the contrary, it is the individual who, in his 'solitary stand' before the Absolute and in the exercise of his supreme function, is the aim of purpose of collectivity. Man, whether he be conceived in the plural or the singular, or whether his function be direct or indirect, stands like 'a fragment of absoluteness' and is made for the Absolute.... In any case, one can define the social in terms of truth, but one cannot define truth in terms of the social."

Moreover, the left always couches their supposed empathy for the downtrodden in fantastically broad and sweeping generalizations of historical "and even cosmic significance, such as the statement that God does not exist, that all religion is is only the 'opium of the people,' [and] that all ideology is only a superstructure on the basis of material interests." UF wrote that in the early '60s, but it is no different today, with the intoxication that fuels and pervades the Obama campaign:

"What we hear from Obama is the eternal mantra of the socialists; America is broken, millions have no health care, families cannot afford necessities, the rich are evil, we are selfish, we are unhappy, unfulfilled, without hope, desperate, poverty stricken, morally desolate, corrupt and racist. This nihilism is the lifeblood of all the democrat candidates.... When Michelle Obama claims she is only newly proud of her country, she does not exaggerate. In her world as in Obama's, they believe we are a mess, a land filled with the ignorant and unenlightened, filled with despair" (Fairchok).

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes, not divine, but demonic. --Pope Benedict XVI

As UF writes, it is always a "matter of excess -- a going beyond the limits of competence and sober and honest knowledge," which the left never doubts, "having been carried away by the intoxicating impulse of radicalism, i.e., by a fever of the will and imagination to change everything utterly at a single stroke."

It is this fever dream of sweeping existential change that animates the left no less than the Islamists, since both deny the possibility of real spiritual change, which is an individual matter; in contrast, man's existential situation cannot be altered, only transcended.

As Lee Harris has written, a fantasy ideology such as Islamism is obviously not a rational response to the world arrived at in a logical, sober manner. Rather, it is a transformative belief, meaning that its primary purpose is to psychologically transform the person who believes the fantasy. And believing the fantasy is an end in itself -- it has no purpose other than to make the fantasy seem like reality -- like it might actually be true. Therefore, the real reason for 9-11 wasn't actually to bring down western civilization. Rather, it was for the Islamists to deepen their trance.

Likewise, anyone with a basic familiarity with economics knows that leftist ideas don't just fail, but backfire. They cause all sorts of unintended consequences that the leftist never connects to the original policy -- e.g., how the welfare state eroded the structure of the black family, how racial quotas inevitably harm blacks, how rent control causes housing shortages, how subsidizing higher education simply drives up the cost, how socialized medicine leads to rationing, and how the government forcing banks to make bad loans to unqualified people is at the epicenter of today's economic problems.

Now, UF explains that the virtue of temperence protects us from the intoxicating counter-inspiration of radical fantasies -- including religious fantasies, which are not actually religious but manmade. As such, it is foolish to blame God or religion for things that emanate from the lower vertical in man.

UF makes the subtle point that one cannot engender a positive collective mind parasite. This is related to the principle that the mind parasite is an effect of "congealed" or "coagulated" psychic energy. As a result, it always "enfolds," whereas the good radiates. The former is an inward, contracting movement, whereas the latter is an expansive, radiant movement. This may sound overly abstract, but we are all familiar with the ontologically closed world of the left, whether it is their elite university campuses or the myop-ed page of the New York Times. If you approach these things with your activated cʘʘnvision, you can literally experience them as a sort of dense, black hole of "inverse radiation."

Now, why did people respond to, say, Ronald Reagan? For the opposite reason -- the radiant positive energy of which he was a mere vehicle. This only became more apparent when placed side by side with Jimmy Carter's withered and constipated presence.

I suppose the novel thing about Obama is that he is selling the same constipation, but with a kind of cheap and meretricious radiation that one must be intoxicated to appreciate. Indeed, as Fairchok writes,

"That is his appeal; he is [ironically] an actor, a performer, a cinematic presence that stirs simple emotions, emotions that have little grounding in truth. His speeches are the inane lyrics to a popular song that endures only because it has a great beat. One must not think too deeply on what Obama says, for it turns to smoke and disappears in the light of day. Ezra Klein is correct, Obama's speeches do not inform, they pander, they propagandize, they harmonize with the mythology of despair and the chimera of entitlement. As his hagiographies proclaim, he represents a new Camelot, but one that does not hold America quite so precious, a Camelot of globalists, moral relativists and communitarians."

Now, how to drive out a demon? Easy. As UF explains, "Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e. on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent.... A demon rendered impotent is a deflated balloon." And the most recent Rasmussen survey indicates that this balloony tune is on a flaccid trip from omnipotence to impotence in record time.

As the farcical Marx taught us, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce. But what comes after that? We're still dealing with the tragedy of the New Deal and the farce of the Great Society. No doubt Obama is a farce to be reckoned with, but I see two possibilities. If we divide history into Petey's descending stages of Gods, Kings, Men, Weasels, Beasts, and Chaos, I think FDR would be the king, LBJ the man. Clinton was the weasel. This would suggest that we are about to enter a beastly chaos, from which the only solution would be the return to a new age of gods, or, more properly, God. God or chaos. Vertical Man or horizontal beast. Sounds about right.

On Bumbling and Humbling Oneself to the Top

I'd like to wrap up with The Theological Origins of Modernity before moving on to another topic or perhaps taking another short break, whichever is easier.

But I just gnosissed -- just this second, actually -- an interesting little connection between the Renaissance humanists we've been discussing (people such as Petrarch, Ficino, and Erasmus), Christian hermeticism of the Unknown Friend variety, and Kabbalah. It also makes me wonder if someone such as Meister Eckhart wasn't dipping his toe (theory of everything) into the latter two streams.

I say this because I'm eyeballing a passage that discusses the Christian humanist Marsilio Ficino, who attempted to use Neoplatonic thought as a way to reconcile and synthesize "Christian piety and Roman morality." Of course, this whole idea will be offensive to those readers who imagine that tradition followed the scriptures rather than vice versa, but Gillespie correctly points out that the earliest Christian fathers drew "heavily on Platonic and Neoplatonic thought," and Ficino "was convinced that Christianity and Platonism had a common origin in the more ancient thought of Hermes Trismegistus and Zoroaster."

Now, this shouldn't pose a problem for a broadminded Christian such as, oh, say, St. Augustine, who knew that Christianity had always existed (indeed, how could it not?), but that it had simply gone by different names prior to the earthly appearance of Christ. The way I would look at it -- and again, it should go without saying that no one is under any pressure to agree with me -- that great historical events cast a backward shadow, so that in hindsight we can see all sorts of hints, augurs, omens and clues, like dark sparks cast back into the stream of time.

Here again, this shouldn't be controversial, for among the first things the early Christians did was pore over the Old Testsament, only to discover that it had been crawling with evidence that no one had fully pieced together. Indeed, what were the prophets doing if not examining the present for signs of possible futures? I don't think they were "seeing the future," since, as Scrooge found out, the future is variable, depending upon what happens in the present.

Nevertheless, it is clearly possible to see the outlines and contours of certain world-historical patterns, especially something as "large" as Jesus, who was both the "center" of history and its most supersized event. Again, he is like a vertical depth charge that causes temporal waves to travel both forward and back.

According to Gillespie, the Corpus Hermetica contributed "in important ways to the formation of early Christian thought," and "had a profound impact on many of the early church fathers, including Victorinus, Athanasius, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen"; and I would definitely toss Denys the Areopagite into that mix.

Ficino other Christian humanists thought that this more ancient form of Christianity "could serve as an alternative to scholasticism," but I think you can see that it also avoids Luther's excesses. For Ficino did not expand the nominalist God at the expense of man, but "gave the human soul a privileged place in the universal hierarchy, as the bond of the universe and the link between the intelligible and corporeal worlds. Cultivating the soul in this view allows humans to 'become all things.'"

This is getting very close to unalloyed Coonspeak. But this is a perilous balance, because we are surrounded by heresies, hostile forces, and mind parasites on all sides. So proceed cautiously!

Note also that while Ficino "accepted the ontological individualism posited by nominalism, he saw individual beings filled with and united by sparks of divine love. Motivated by love, they are naturally attracted to the good and thus to God." This follows from the premise that God himself is only "unified in love," which resolves the one and the many -- or unity and trinity -- within the divine being. Love is the "interior reality" of God.

Here again, Ficino expresses the very Coonish (n)Otion that, while humans possess free will, it is "constrained from above," so to speak, by the Great Attractor. There is a transitional space between us and our transhistorical archetype, which is where freedom takes place, both for good and for ill. Thus, if "humans naturally are attracted to the good, then humans can freely exercise their wills in a manner that is harmonious with divine will," but without God's will entirely effacing our own (or our will denying God's omnipotence). Complementarity, baby.

A student of Ficino, Giovanni Pico de la Mirandola, extended his master's arguments, and "was convinced that truth was universal and that all philosophies and religions had a part in it." I would express it as follows: not only is any truth impossible in the absence of God, but all truth proves the existence of God, whether from science or religion. Even if Christianity is the most adequate or full revelation of God's being, this does not mean that God's being is not revealed elsewhere. And God's being is clearly the substance of truth (but not only truth).

Pico was also fully aware of the fact that philosophy and science can only take one "so far in penetrating the truth of the divine," and that it was necessary for one to take a leap into the unKnown at its well-lit frontiers -- or where the bright encampment borders the dark frontier, precisely.

Finally, is critical to remember that man is not in his privileged cosmic position because of "his own intrinsic excellence or power but his status as the imago dei." Thus, as Toots always said, the higher one ascends, the more humble one should feel, until one is finally a big nobody. Humility is always the mark of the master. Otherwise, one is misappropriating what belongs only to God. Thus it follows that Jesus suffered the ultimate humiliation.

At least until this.

The difference, of course, is that one can surrender to humility or find out the hard way. It's your choice.

Why Liberals Are So Strong On Defense

Don't look at me like that. They are strong on defense. Against reality. They're relentless. They never stop assaulting it. Denial, projection, splitting, contempt -- their arsenal is formidable.

Continuing with yesterday's post, I'm sure that some of this sounds pedantic, but it really isn't. Klein's ideas are actually quite useful and immediately applicable -- in my opinion, because they are truly universal, as universal as, say, anabolism and catabolism -- or the breakdown and buildup of bodily tissue. You can't have one without the other, nor can you have new knowledge without breaking down what you already know.

In order to be found you must be lost, so the bewilderness adventure is every bit as important as your well-lit little encampment in the clearing. But if you lose your sense of the infinite (vertical) frontier, you might as well cash in your humanness right now, because your adventure is over. We are always (or should be) fruitfully engaged with the infinite and the eternal, for which religion is here to remind us.

In contrast to the paranoid-schizoid (heretofore PS) position (discussed yesterday), in the depressive position (D), the infant gradually integrates experience into a coherent, central self which is able to distinguish fantasy from reality, interior from exterior, self from not-self. You might think that this is an unproblematic achievement, but you would be quite wrong. We all carry remnants of the paranoid-schizoid position, some much more so than others. Again, the problem is not so much the PS itself, but its separation from D. It is actually a dialectic, which is why Bion symbolized it as PS<-->D, which you might think of as dispersal and integration.

In my book I refer to the enduring, unmetabolized or "crystalized" PS remnants as “mind parasites." Not only do they operate outside awareness, but they have a logic all their own.

As an example of how PS<-->D can work on a macro scale, in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung wrote that after his break from Freud in 1913, "a period of inner uncertainty began for me. It would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had not yet found my own footing." Interestingly, this coincided with the onset of the war, which was experienced as a sort of psychotic breakdown of the world's order. Jung could not distinguish between his internal experience and the world situation:

"The pressure I had felt in me seemed to be moving outward, as though there were something in the air. The atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had been. It was as if the sense of oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. This feeling grew more and more intense."

Hmm, this is getting interesting. What happened next? "In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all of the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps.... I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated."

Soon he was plunged into an "incessant stream of fantasies" that made it difficult for him to function. "Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them. There is a chance that I might have succeeded in splitting them off; but in that case I would have inexorably fallen into a neurosis and and so been ultimately destroyed by them anyhow."

More on Jung's psychotic break in a later post. For our purposes, the point is that he did not defend himself against the unconscious, but fully plunged into it in an ultimately creative and healing way. (Although there are those who plausibly argue that Jung was actually unsuccessful in his psychic reintegration and that he remained crazy, which I won't get into here.)

Now, a "borderline" individual engages in severe splitting between good and bad, and has difficulty distinguishing between "inside" and "outside." As such, if you disappoint or frustrate them, they can suddenly perceive you as all bad (which they have projected into you), completely forgetting your many positive traits and the many happy experiences they have had with you. It is as if these experiences never happened, and the “good you” no longer exists, because it has been banished to some black hole of the unconscious (this process should not be confused with garden-variety PMS).

Likewise, a narcissistic individual only has use for others so long as they serve as a mirror for their primitive, paranoid-schizoid grandiosity. As soon as you fail to idealize them, they will react with anger or contempt in order to maintain their illusion of greatness. They will flush you from their life like a bad object. In order to protect themselves from the experience of shame, the narcissist preempts it with contempt. (You will have noticed that Obama's contempt is out of control, which is a testimony to his narcissistic "britlleness" and unconscious insecurity. It is only a matter of time before he has no one left to toss under the psychic bus.)

More generally, the manic defenses are those psychic defenses that prevent movement from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position, and include contempt, triumph, control, and idealization. Basically, you can think of these defenses as coming into play when reality threatens to impinge upon fantasy. In fact, these defenses ultimately consist of attacks on a reality the individual has already dimly perceived but does not wish to consciously entertain.

(Again, notice how much contempt the liberal media and politicians have for the people who voted for Scott Brown; it's really quite breathtaking, but it certainly gives the lie to the kooky idea that liberals are "for the little guy." In reality, they are for the little guy so long as he is a contemptuous loser who can't get through life without his liberal overlords. Otherwise, the little guy is a contemptible racist redneck Bible-thumpin', cousin-humpin,' rifle-pumpin', tea-dumpin', country bumpkin.)

At the same time, the manic defenses prevent recognition all of the implications of the unconsciously perceived reality, which is obviously a huge impediment to fruitful and generative thought. It explains why the left does not profit from experience, and why they continue proposing irrational and utopian ideas and policies that have already failed and will surely fail again. But only by arresting thought in this way can they keep their Audaciously manic Hopes alive. (Thomas Sowell calls this the inability to "think beyond stage one," which in practical terms comes down to failing to appreciate the Law of Unintended Consequences.)

In the past we have discussed deMause's concept of the “group fantasy.” In my view, the anti-theology of secular leftism is very much rooted in the paranoid-schizoid position, whereas the classical liberalism embodied in the conservative intellectual movement is much more reflective of the depressive position. Here, I hope it should go without saying that I am not primarily referring to individuals, as there are obviously many immature conservatives and mature liberals. Rather, I am specifically discussing the group dynamic.

If I am correct, then we will see in conservatism a much more sober and realistic assessment of mankind. As I have mentioned before, I am of the view that conservatism is as much an inclination, temperament, or “cast of mind” as it is any set doctrine. In fact, the doctrines follow from the temperament -- or, you might say, the depressive position -- rather than vice versa. This would explain why normal people generally become more conservative as they mature and grow wiser, whereas leftism mostly appeals to the young or to the permanently immature of academia and Hollywood.

Awhile back, I wrote a post which summarized the main tenets of conservatism and liberalism. Let’s review them and see how they line up in terms of the paranoid-schizoid vs. depressive positions. I think they basically speak for themselves.

Russell Kirk summarized the six canons of conservative thought as

1. Belief in a transcendent order; and that most political problems are moral problems resulting from bad values. (To cite an obvious example, if dysfunctional minority groups adopted the values of successful minority groups, such as Asian American values, they would be just as successful.)

2. Appreciation of the ineffable mystery of existence, and with it, opposition to the tedious uniformity, egalitarianism, and utilitarian aims of of most radical systems.

3. An understanding that liberty and equality are contradictory aims; a belief that there are distinctions between men and that classes will emerge naturally and spontaneously in a free society. “If natural distinctions are effaced among men, oligarchs fill the vacuum.”

4. A belief that property and freedom are intimately linked. “Economic leveling... is not economic progress.”

5. Distrust of radical schemes by liberal intellectuals “who would reconstruct society upon abstract designs” that simply mask the intellectual’s lust for power.

6. Recognition that change and reform are not synonymous, and that “prudent change is the means of social preservation.” (Again, note the balance between PS and D; conservatives are all for change, just not indiscriminate destruction of the existing order in exchange for a fanciful utopia.)

In contrast, contemporary left-liberalism has entirely different assumptions and attacks the existing social order on the following grounds:

1. “The perfectibility of man”; the belief that education, environment or legislation “can produce men like gods; they deny that humanity has a natural proclivity towards violence and sin.”

2. Contempt for tradition. “Formal religion is rejected and various ideologies are presented as substitutes.”

3. Political leveling: “Order and privilege are condemned,” accompanied by “an eagerness for centralization and consolidation.”

4. Economic leveling: “The ancient rights of property... are suspect to almost all radicals.”

The first six postulates are true or revolve around truth; the second four are false or rooted in falsehood. But worse than that, the latter are manic defenses against the sobering reality of the former. To put it another way, to believe in the latter four is to remain a child forever in the pneumacosmic scheme of things.

There Is No Such Thing as a Liberal

Rather, there is only a boundaryless, mixed-up fusion of Baby Democrat and Mommy State. But we'll get to that in a moment.

Right now, I just want to say -- and let me be perfectly clear about this -- that I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when the oceans began to rise and our freezing planet began to warm up again… That this was the moment when we dodged a bullet with a ballot and prevented a tyrannical federal government from permanently extending its grasping tentacles into the most intimate reaches of our bodies. We love Uncle Sam, but he doesn't have a license to practice medicine, and he has no right to examine our prostate. Only the IRS can do that.

My friends, this is the moment when we said NO! to the dork farces who insist that you can fill the economic swimming pool by taking water from the deep end and pouring it into the shallow end. This was the moment -- yes, the delicious moment -- when we came together as a nation and made Tingles Matthews cry on national TV. And folks, it doesn't get any better than that.

Actually, I can't relate to all the hoopla surrounding last night's election. First of all, a conservative doesn't locate his salvation in politics. But even then, it's literally a matter of avoiding a catastrophe as opposed to imagining that suddenly the world has been transformed. True, the sense of relief is real, but relief is very different from joy. It's much more temperate and sober, like finding out that that spot on the CT scan is just a fatty cyst, not an inoperable tumor.

Plus, we realize that the same atavistic and entropic powers and principalities who are the wind beneath Obama's bag are still here, and that these powers will always have the upper hand in this world. They never rest, they never take the day off, and they never quit. They do not know slack. They politicize everything and everyone, because that is their religion. Theirs is a manichaean world, minus the nuance.

And just as a practical matter, the Department of Irony (which presides over history) forecasts that this could actually benefit the Democrats, since it will prevent them from enacting their most kooky and destructive legislation, so that they may actually be in a stronger position next November. We never forget the orthoparadox that more tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.

No time for an all new post, but this one from a few years back seems relevant:

I’m trying to imagine what it must feel like for Horizontal Man to win -- or even hope to win -- an election. I know that for me and other verticaloids of my acquaintance, there is no great joy upon winning an election, usually just relief that we have managed to temporarily pull the cultural plane out of its death spiral.

But for Horizontal Man, politics is his religion, which is the whole problem with his politics. The Obama phenemonon is the quintessential example of this. He is almost wholly the product of vertical wishes and dreams inappropriately (because unconsciously) displaced onto the horizontal plane. Obama most certainly realizes this, which is why he is running one of the most cynical and manipulative campaigns in living memory.

One way or another, vertical man is born again “from above.” Therefore, he draws his energies from the vertical center and radiates them to the horizontal periphery. But since Horizontal Man is trapped in the bewilderness of his contingent being (i.e., maya), he unconsciously projects the above into the future, and thereby constructs a faux spiritual life that attempts to draw on the psychic energies of his self-created (and self-enclosing) illusion.

In other words, horizontal man (if he isn't just an honest nihilist or self-consistent hedonist) practices the religion of progressivism, in which belief in a transcendent order is immamentized and "nourishes" the vacuum where his soul ought to be.

In so doing, the leftist receives a kind of existential consolation which may be compared to a form of counterfeit grace, in particular, when he imagines that he is in proximity to his imaginary heaven and therefore closer to being “saved” from the existential situation that afflicts all humans. Obviously, the Obamaniacs are feeling very "close" to this heaven, which ratchets up their creepy fervor. (The depth of spiritual hopelessness and primitive hatred defended against by this false hope is frightening to consider; cf. here.)

You can clearly recognize this mechanism of hoped-for horizontal salvation in action. For if reality were actually as awful as what the fantasists of the left have been saying for the past seven years, we would not see this manic exaltation among their rank and foul. Rather, we would see great sobriety and moral seriousness, as they brood on the monumental work of undoing the theo-fascist takeover of America, of saving the biosphere from immanent demise from the Bush-caused planetary inferno, of repairing our "permanently damaged" standing in the world. After all, if all it takes to undo these problems is to elect a smiling cipher, then the problems couldn't have been that serious to begin with.

The great psychoanalyst Melanie Klein divided childhood psychological development into two main stages, which she termed the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions. (I will try to avoid pedantry at risk of over-simplification.)

For Klein, the primary goal of development was to move from the former to the latter, although in reality, the relationship between the two is more dialectical than linear, similar to the relationship that exists between the conscious and unconscious minds, or between what might be called mental metabolism (building up) and catabolism (breaking down).

In other words, we no longer think of an unconscious mind per se, but a dialectical relationship between the conscious and unconscious. This dialectic can be fruitful and generative, or stultifying and self-defeating, but you can no more rid yourself of unconscious processes than you could speak without the implicit deep structure of grammar, or understand religious symbolism without the archetypal clueprint implanted into us by God.

Human beings are subject to the nuisance of intrusive thoughts long before they are capable of thinking them. The problem for development is to build a robust psychic structure in which one may think thoughts instead of merely being thought by, or subject to, them.

Naturally, our earliest psychological reality is almost wholly fantastic, and it is actually the primary job of the parent to prolong this fantasy until the baby becomes capable of discovering and bearing reality. In the absence of unconscious buffers, reality truly would be unbearable -- something like looking straight into the sun, or trying to live on the surface of mars, or being trapped in a SigAlert with only Air America on the radio.

This is why you cannot “spoil” an infant. Rather, you must indulge them until they are resilient enough to tolerate the painful and disappointing discovery of reality. Ironically, this can only be achieved if they have a firm foundation of entitlement and generative fantasy -- for example, the fantasy that one’s painful hunger causes a generous and bountiful breast to magically appear out of nowhere.

The baby must imagine that this loving breast is his own creation before he makes the disappointing discovery that it actually belongs to mother (let alone a third interloper!), otherwise reality will have to be rejected or even attacked in some form or fashion. We must be provided with, and then gradually disillusioned of, our infantile omnipotence, on pain of trying to hold on to it or resurrect it for the rest of our lives.

The paranoid-schizoid position predominates during the first year of life. Naturally there is no clear sense of psychological boundaries at this time, which is why the psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott made the famously wise crack that “there is no such thing as an infant.” Rather, there is primarily a harmonious (or inharmonious), mixed-up fusion of mother and baby. The baby’s sense of individual selfhood will only gradually emerge from this primordial matrix.

Klein called this the “paranoid-schizoid position” because it is the source of our most primitive psychological defenses -- e.g., denial, splitting, and projection. These defenses are normative for a baby, but only become problematic to the extent that we fail to evolve into the depressive position.

At this early age, we shouldn’t even think of them as defenses, but more as primitive modes of "thinking," i.e., of organizing our otherwise chaotic mental experience, almost like primitive neurological "categories" or preconceptions. (And research by Allen Schore indicates that these are very much neuro-biological signposts that order our world.)

For example, splitting early experience into a “good” and “bad” breast is analogous to God’s separation of the primordial waters. It is an attempt to achieve safety by placing a distance between what are in reality different aspects of oneself. Projection obviously works the same way, in that it allows the person to evacuate the "bad" or to place the good outside the self for "safekeeping."

End of part one.

The Descent of Man: Human, Post-Human, and Subhuman

At the time it first appeared, humanism seemed "a strange construction of... incommensurable parts" (Gillespie). Especially in hindsight it appears incompatible with Christianity, but only because of what it later became, long after it had shorn itself of its Christian roots.

From our transhistorical vantage point, it seems "an anti-Christian revival of pagan antiquity, a turn from what Nietzsche called slave morality to the master morality of the Greeks and Romans" (Gillespie). Remember, although ancient Greeks and Romans stressed virtue and honor, they also had no problem with infanticide, slavery, brutal torture, and horrible treatment of women.

And by the 20th century, this (per)version of humanism had prevailed. Christian humanism devolved to secular humanism, and here we sit today with the postmodern, post-literate, post-intellectual and post-noetic barbarians not only inside the gates, but in control of virtually all the disseminators of "culture" -- the news media, the arts, primary education, academia, professional organizations, and even perhaps most religions, e.g. the National Council of Churches, or reform Judaism (AKA, the Democrat Party with holidays thrown in).

Clearly, humanism answers a human need. But is it a legitimate need? Or, can it be made legitimate? The good news is that humanism "made the Renaissance and the modern world possible" (Gillespie). But one must immediately qualify that statement by noting that it also made the Renaissance and the modern world possible.

Is it really just a matter of all things human cutting both ways, of every blessing coming with a curse, and vice versa? Or, is there perhaps a proper way to be human? This is an idea that has always intrigued me, from my earliest days in graduate school. That is, when you train to be a clinical psychologist, you are training to be a "healer of souls." That being the case, there must be an explicit or implicit model of how a soul is supposed to function and what it is designed to "accomplish."

As I wrote in my book, only with the emergence of life do we have this new cosmic category called "pathology," because only when things need to go right, can something go wrong.

But the same holds true for the human subject. If it is not designed to do anything -- if it is just an absurd cosmic accident -- then it can have no intrinsic purpose and therefore no pathology. At best, "psychotherapy" would be purely analgesic, just a matter of reducing pain (or increasing pleasure) -- even when the pain is providing critical feedback about a life wrongly lived. But that is precisely the problem: you cannot say that a person is living his life "wrongly" if there is no ultimate purpose to life.

Recently our resident troll articulated the humanist position with his characteristic coarseness, that this is indeed a chaotic and meaningless cosmos except for the "meaning" that human beings invent and impose upon it. The whole problem with this approach is that this is not "meaning" properly so called, any more than a paranoid delusion is meaningful. Rather, it is pretending that the meaningless is meaningful, precisely. Frankly, I have much more respect for the secular humanist who is intellectually consistent, and who lives life as a true nihilist and anarchist.

But no human can consistently live this way, because it is not human to do so. Nor is it even "animalistic," for animals are anything but nihilistic. Rather, they well understand the purpose of their lives, and are never at a loss for "what to do." To paraphrase Schuon, animal instinct is their "collective intellect," whereas for man, the intellect properly so called is his instinct. We are born to know, and not only that; rather, we are born to know truth, otherwise our knowledge is ultimately of "nothing."

Nor is there any intrinsic limit to what a human may know. That is, he may know, and know absolutely. Or, you could say that he knows that the Absolute exists, if only because he can absolutely deny it, as do the neo-retro-atheists.

The question is, what is man that man should be mindful of him? You will have noticed that the more secular humanism "succeeds" in its project, the more it fails, because it converts potential humans into infra-humans exiled from their own spiritual archetype, their own salvation. Rampant narcissism, the cult of celebrity, neo-pagan body mutilation, the exaltation of the instincts, the most base impulses and sentiments masquerading as art -- if that is what humans are, who needs them?

But again, this is only a crude caricature of humanism cut off from the very impulses that brought it into being. The answer is surely not to suppress the human, as they do in the Islamic world, or in Communist China or Korea, or on leftist campuses, with their politically correct thought police, oppressive speech codes, and coercive totolerantarianism. Note the irony that they too have their implicit idea of what it is to be a proper human, but that it is imposed from on high, when one of the inviolable features of a true humanism would be the freedom to discover this on one's own.

Again, Petrarch tried to steer a middle course, on the one hand rejecting "Aristotelianism on essentially nominalist grounds," but also rejecting "the nominalist contention that God's omnipotence made all human freedom impossible." To a large extent, the new humanists found their inspiration in some of the earliest Christians, who were not only more intimate with ancient, pre-Christian wisdom, but also free of the institutional corruption that had gradually developed during the middle ages.

What makes a human a human? We cannot merely be rational beings, for if that is the case, then the ideal man is more of a machine than a human. In that model, the least human would be the most human, an obvious absurdity (which is why naive positivists and materialists such as Charles the Queeg are so creepy to us).

Rather, Petrarch regarded humans as primarily willing beings, which immediately goes to the question of freedom. Although reason can never account for man's freedom, if his freedom operates outside reason, then it is no longer free. Rather, it is merely "absence of constraint," which is neither here nor there. In this regard, the existentialists are absolutely correct that freedom without truth is nothingness, so that to embrace the nothingness makes one more human. An absurdity, yes, but existentialism does not pretend to be otherwise, which is to say, other than wise.

Way out of time. To be continued....

Complements Beget You Everywhere

Let's take a little side trip on the road to modernity, and find out what Schuon had to say about the spat between Catholicism and Protestantism. Yes, he was a Sufi, but he had an extraordinarily deep and subtle understanding of, and appreciation for, Christianity. While he naturally had some blind spots, he still easily surpasses most religious thinkers in getting to the essence of the subject.

Bear in mind that I'm freely tossing my own ideas and interpretations into the mix, so Schuon is not responsible for my (mis)use of him. Also, please remember that one of the main reasons I write is to discover what I think, so what follows may surprise me as much as it does you. So before you disagree, at least give me a chance to understand what I mean. I'm sure some of this will offend, but I'm not trying to be offensive, so cut a brotha'-under-the-pelt a little slack.

Now, being that he was a traditionalist, you'd think that Schuon would automatically reject Luther as heterodox and even heretical. However, he recognizes that there are two great principles that govern religious phenomena, one of them more vertical, so to speak, the other more horizontal. The former is what he calls the "celestial mandate," the latter "apostilic succession."

Clearly, the celestial mandate must ultimately take priority over the apostilic succession, because without it, there would be nothing to apostle-ize. There would be no news, but a lot of vacuous people to propagate it -- just like cable TV.

Ironically, in a certain sense, the celestial mandate cuts both ways, since it is the source of tradition, and yet, it "blows where it will," and can never actually be contained by tradition. You might say that the role of tradition is to do the utmost to be a worthy vehicle of the celestial mandate. It's a very delicate balance -- a complementarity, you might say -- to maintain tradition while simultaneously remaining open to what amounts to the "extra-canonical intervention of Grace"; or, to balance growth and conservation, just as in politics.

I'm not sure if this is self-evident or unnecessarily convoluted, but it's clear to me so far. And I think right away you see a kind of trialectical tension that human beings simply cannot eliminate, which is why it is true (up to a point) that there must always be the outward or exoteric "church of Peter" and the inward and esoteric "church of John." Furthermore, these are in no way "opposites," but fully complementary. You cannot have one without the other, any more than you can have form without substance, or a body without a skeleton to support it.

That being the case, it is obvious -- to me anyway -- that there is no reason why the apostilic succession cannot make a space for the intrinsically wild and untamed celestial energies. Is there any doubt that people who break away from tradition are -- whether legitimately or not -- seeking a more intense, personal, and genuine encounter with the celestial mandate, a direct descent from above? I mean Shakers, Quakers, Fakirs, Seekers, Suckers, Slackers, Pentacostal crackers -- in a way, they're all just trying to bypass the horizontal form and go straight to the source, misguided though they often are.

The problem, however, is to combine this free-wheeling approach with legitimate authority, order with spontaneity, classical with jazz. To emphasize only the vertical to the exclusion of the horizontal is asking for trouble, man being what he is. Yes, tradition can devolve into the mundane "bureaucratization of the sacred," but the total lawlessness of the frontier is not the answer (at least for the vast majority).

But again, for Schuon, the impulses behind the Reformation were (small l) "legitimate," since, at the time, they drew "from a spiritual archetype that was, if not entirely ignored by Rome, at least certainly 'stifled.'" Thus, not dissimilar to how Buddhism broke off from Hinduism in order to return to its first principles, Luther operates outside strict apostilic succession in order to go straight back to the celestial mandate.

Do you see the point? To say that every man becomes his own priest is to say that each man is given his own private celestial mandate (which again, man being what he is, can be a recipe for disaster).

But soon enough, the Reformation begins to "congeal" into its own horizontal traditions, so that additional schisms become inevitable. One of them, for example, is that only faith saves; or that God's absolute omnipotence precludes man's free will; or that moral effort counts for nothing. Thus, people who believe in free will or the efficacy of works must split off and form their own sect.

But please note: none of these schisms is strictly necessary, if one preserves the fullness of the original complementarity which cannot be resolved anyway. As Schuon puts it, Protestantism ends up opposing "Roman excesses with new excesses."

Indeed, even to insist that "only faith matters" is going to generate an inevitable split within itself. For, what kind of faith? A sincere faith? A half-hearted or lukewarm 51% faith? A faith that proves itself with works? A thoroughly rotten person whose faith is nevertheless rock solid? A faith that has no problem with abortion or anti-Semitism?

For Schuon, there is no real faith in the absence of gratitude and sincerity, which reflect one another in the following manner: "Sincerity forms part of faith, thus it is only sincere faith -- proved precisely by moral effort and works -- that is faith as such in the eyes of God. In other words, sincerity necessarily manifests itself through our desire to please Heaven which, having saved us from evil, obviously expects us to practice good; and this consequentiality can be termed 'gratitude.'"

Now, as we have been discussing, there is rather wide latitude in one's understanding of man's fallenness and what we can do about it from our end. Both Augustine and Luther took rather extreme positions, which, for Schuon, end up being a caricature of what the teaching is trying to transmit to us. In other words, it's supposed to be a kind of useful wisdom, not just a condemnation. It's like the difference between a fatal diagnosis for which you can do nothing, vs. being told by your physician that if you don't address your condition, it will surely be fatal.

Either the fall is contingent or necessary; if the latter, then you might say that we are indeed rotten to (or from) the core, and that the rottenness is essential to our nature. But if it is contingent, then there is something we can do about it. It does not necessarily "penetrate and corrupt all [of man's] initiatives."

Again, our attitude toward this question bifurcates in two directions. In the Catholic approach, which Schuon calls more "dynamic," "if a man does not make efforts to transcend himself, he follows his passions and becomes lost; if he does not go towards his salvation, he drifts away from it, for who does not advance, retreats; whence the obligation of sacrifice, asceticism, and meritorious works."

The Evangelical approach is more "static," but that doesn't mean it is not efficacious. In this path, one's salvation is predetermined, "which in fact is reassuring," and is "addressed firstly to men given to trust in God, but trusting neither in their capacity to save themselves, nor in priestly complications," but also to some purely contemplative types "who love simplicity and peace."

With regard to the latter, Schuon observes that while Luther closed one door to grace, he opened another, in the sense that he considerably simplified and centralized worship, and "opened the door to a particular spiritual climate which also possesses a mystical virtuality." Clearly, Luther is not interested in "dotting every theological i" -- "which is the Roman tendency -- but at believing in the literal wording of Scripture." If much of it makes no sense, hey, no big. Plenty of things -- probably the vast majority -- are true without us understanding how or why.

Nevertheless, the Raccoon tends to be an extremely curious creature who cannot stop asking why.

Revelations, Revolutions, and Reconciliations

Just a dashed-off post to offload some excess ideation that is taking up space in my melon....

As I mentioned the other day, if a religion doesn't meet man where he is, it's not going to be particularly effective. In other words, if I have to pretend I'm someone else in order to fit into a particular religious view of the world, then something is wrong.

Now, this is not to say that when there is a conflict between the way I would like for things to be vs. the way revelation says they are, that I should reject the latter. I'm talking about much more fundamental issues. In particular, I'm thinking of two things: personal identity and modernity, both of which I am rather attached to. I don't want to go back to neolithic, or ancient, or premodern times.

Hell, I don't even want to go back to the 20th century. Or to 2009. I like it here. Unlike the traditionalists, I don't think that any period of history is intrinsically privileged over any other, because they're all insane. For one thing, man is man, both everywhere and everywhen. If you find yourself idealizing some previous period of history, it's likely that you're just projecting paradise -- which is interior, archetypal, and vertical -- somewhere else. But at the very least, wherever you go, you have to go there too, which exiles you from paradise all over again.

For example, as much as I revere the Founders, it's amazing how quickly the wheels came off their revolutionary idealism after the war for independence was won and it came time to actually put their ideals into practice. In reading Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, it's been quite instructive for me to learn more about the ruptures and divisions, the personal hatreds and paranoia, that erupted after 1783.

It seems that passions were temporarily dampened with the adoption of the Constitution in 1787, but so intense were the conflicts thereafter, that it is something of a miracle that such a man as George Washington existed at that time, because he, and only he, had sufficient stature to serve as the living source of unity in the country.

Rather fascinatingly, as sophisticated as these men were, it wasn't just abstract respect for the rule of law or reverence for the Constitution that got them through, but the concrete love of a man who was the living embodiment of the ideals they cherished -- honor, virtue, courage, selflessness, and disinterested wisdom.

I think you can see the same forces at play in figures as diverse as Lincoln, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Reagan, all of whom became much more than their ideas. I hate to make such an odious comparison, but it really is the inverse of the "Führerprinzip." Obviously, something so powerful can have a dark side, so the same principle that explains how a person can become an embodiment of the good explains how they can become an embodiment of evil. Indeed, demagogues and cult leaders from Jim Jones to Obama cynically rely upon this collective human longing for a living messiah.

Not sure how I ended up here. I had wanted to continue with our discussion of the medieval Raccoon Petrarch, who attempted to forge a Christian humanism that steered a middle course between the Catholic establishment and the Protestant revolutionaries. But again, once the battle started, positions immediately polarized and hardened, to such an extent that the middle was eliminated. You were either on one side or the other. For the Raccoon, it was something like a choice between Crips, Bloods, or Dead.

For just as in the case of the Founders, their abstract ideals were not sufficient to shield them from their all-too-human tendencies. I mean, so intense were the hatreds and rivalries of some of the Founders, that Alexander Hamilton tried to bait President Adams into a duel! The President! No, he didn't want to assassinate him outright. That would be dishonorable in the extreme, hardly befitting a gentleman. Rather, he wanted to kill him in a fair fight.

Just so, all the Christian love in the world was unable to prevent the bloody religious wars of the 16th and 17th centuries. Or, to put it another way, if we stipulate that both sides were equally fervent in their love of God, then something wasn't right.

In the little transhistorical space that briefly opened up before things turned ugly, Petrarch had the idea that "individual human beings and their goals matter, that they have an inherent dignity and worth. This assertion was revolutionary and stood in stark opposition to the regnant doctrine of original sin and the Fall, which denied that individuals had either an intrinsic value or a capacity for self-perfection" (Gillespie).

Fortunately, these ideals eventually triumphed in some places -- most notably, in the American Revolution -- but it was still a struggle to demonstrate in practice how democracy, individualism, and self-interest were concretely linked to religious ideals.

For one of the central conflicts that opened up immediately after Washington's inauguration was the question of whether human beings really are qualified to rule themselves in the absence of a more "evolved," learned, and dispassionate aristocracy. The bitter hatred between Jefferson, who was the most passionate (to the point of irrational utopianism) advocate for the former, and the Federalist Hamilton, who stood for the latter, could hardly have been more intense and personal (it makes me think that Hamilton knew about Jefferson's baby mama situation).

But here again, you see the same archetypal pattern that split the Christian world, which really came down to hierarchy vs. radical democracy, verticality vs. horizontality, One vs. many, Father vs. Son. However, the Raccoon takes neither side in this false dispute, since he realizes that this is an irreducible complementarity, and that to insist that only one side of a complementarity is true, is to internalize the Cosmic Divorce.

On Why the Secret Had to Protect Itself

I don't blame any Raccoon for going underground in the 16th century, where we've remained ever since. Nor do I blame anyone at the time for turning away from religion and wanting no part of it.

For example, "In 1572, seventy thousand French Huguenots were slaughtered in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre," after which Pope Gregory XIII was "delighted to receive the head of the slain Huguenot leader Coligny in a box..." (Gillespie).

But "lest anyone imagine that the barbarity was one-sided," when Cromwell invaded an Irish town in 1649, his army killed virtually every last person. "They burned alive all those who had taken refuge in the St. Mary's Cathedral, butchered the women hiding in the vaults beneath it, used Irish children as human shields, hunted down and killed every priest, and sold thirty surviving defenders into slavery" (ibid.).

And that's just a very small sampling of the savagery. Of course, it's all too easy to simply blame religion for the atrocities, since no one at the time was irreligious, and religion was thoroughly entangled with culture, language, ethnicity, customs, power and politics. Furthermore, whenever someone engages in genocide, I think it's fair to say that it is never for the stated reason. Rather, there are unconscious motivations of which the actor knows nothing.

To put it another way, nothing as deeply irrational as genocide could occur as a result of purely rational motivations that one can take at face value. For example, the Nazis didn't merely wish to kill Jews, but wanted to degrade, humiliate, and thoroughly dehumanize them, so that the whole bloody project was imbued with an obvious component of sadism. But no Nazis, to my knowledge, publicly announced that "we're doing this because we secretly get a thrill out of degrading people and watching them suffer." Nor did those who engaged in the religious wars.

Nor do leftists, for that matter, imagine that their conscious desire to "help" people is covertly motivated by a contemptuous desire for power over them. Very few people wake up in the morning with the conscious idea of doing bad and harming people. Which is one of the reasons it is naive in the extreme for leftists to constantly announce their belief that conservatives actually do wish to consciously harm people.

You will have noticed that they never take us at our word that we really do think that high taxes are bad for the economy, that collectivism and statism are inconsistent with American values, or that racial quotas are bad for blacks. I would actually have more respect for leftists if they first said, "look, I know you're a good person, that racism is repugnant to you, and that you don't mean to harm blacks. But your opposition to racial quotas is so irrational, that it must be concealing some unconscious conflict about race." Because consciously, I am a passionate negrophile of the first rank -- and not just the light skinned ones with a Harry Reid dialect.

Anyway, back to those Raccoons who were forced underground during the religious wars, just when it was starting to look like there might be a little opening for them to come out of the closet and be accepted by society.

A Raccoon is a big believer in free will, without which truth, virtue and beauty cannot exist. If we are not free to discover truth, then we are like machines. Again, as we have mentioned in the past, it is really quite simple: truth is what man must know; virtue is what he must do; and beauty is what he must love and create. Of course, it doesn't end there. For just as truth is the virtue of the intellect, virtue is beauty of soul. And beauty is the splendor of truth. Etc.

But again, for Luther, all of this ancient retro-futuristic Raccoon wisdom goes out the window, since the nominalistic God "was responsible for everything. Thus, neither he nor anyone else could either gain or lose salvation, because faith alone saved and faith came only through grace. Luther's soteriology or doctrine of salvation thus rested on the omnipotence of divine will and the powerlessness of human will." Luther maintained that there was no such thing as contingency, which for him was a kind of maya, or illusion. In reality, God is in control of everything, again, just as in Islam.

Now, I don't think this is an "illegitimate" spiritual approach, at least for a certain type of aspirant. It's just that there are very different types of people, and one approach is not going to be attractive or effective for another. One cannot deny that this more totalitarian approach is compatible with some temperaments, and that it gives them comfort to believe that they have no control over reality and that God is fully responsible for everything that happens.

But I cannot emphasize enough that this is not a universal teaching, but a peripheral one. It is a upaya, or "skillful means," and if it works for you, far be it from me to talk you out of it (which is why I compared it to Zen). It's just that I have no idea why you are interested in this blog, because I certainly haven't the slightest interest in your metaphysic (no offense -- I just don't).

And just why you would argue with me is a bit of a mystery anyway, since if God controls everything, I don't have the free will to accept or reject your argument anyway, nor you mine (and I'm not arguing anyway, just sharing a vision).

Again, we firmly believe in man's dignity and therefore his free will; and we reject the belief that God is directly responsible for what we see as the evil in the world. Evil is not just an illusion, or "a part of God's plan." We are here to fight evil.

More to the point, I could never respect a God who is less moral than I. Again, no offense. It's just the way Raccoons are built. Look, I realize that Raccoon theology will never be popular. If I thought otherwise, I'd write more books instead of just speaking to the scattered brotherhood of the invisible lodge.

Let's get back to those 14th and 15th century Raccoons, such as Petrarch, who tried to forge a middle way to resolve what eventually became the religious wars. According to Gillespie, "he offered a a new vision of how to live to a Christian world caught in the tremendous spiritual crisis brought about by the nominalist revolution and the cataclysmic events of the fourteenth century...."

One thing that makes Petrarch a Raccoon is his concern for the indivdual and the world, which makes his a primarily descending path. For we do not wish to escape the world into God, but to divinize the world through God's energies refracted through his pneumacosmic junior partner, man. No, we do not believe in worldly perfection, but we do believe that things can be improved, and that much of the outcome is in our hands. We matter. Indeed, matter matters.

Remember, the idea of the true "individual" only emerged in the late middle ages. As such, it was a new existential/ontological "problem." And with the emergence of the individual also came the "discovery" of the world as something more than just a divine symbol that could be understood through analogy.

In short, the individual and modern science co-arise, and with them, democracy, human rights, free markets, and other blessings of modernity. But of course, to the strict traditionalist (e.g., Schuon or Guenon), these are not blessings but curses. (To be perfectly accurate, in my view they are both, depending on the vertical station of the soul involved with them.)

Petrarch's ontology begins with a new appreciation of the unique individual. And he "was able to make this vision concrete and attractive by displaying to the public his own inner life as well as those of an astonishing array of ancient personalities...."

This has two main effects. First, "this inward journey led to the unexplored territory of a self filled with passions and desires that were no longer something mundane and unspiritual that had to be extirpated or constrained but that were instead a reflection of each person's individuality and that consequently deserved to be expressed, cultivated, and enjoyed."

The Raccoon would say that man now had an interest in exploring and colonizing his own psychic space, instead of simply repressing it, blindly acting it out, or living one's life as a collective "type." Now, can this go too far into narcissism, eccentricity, and glorification of the self, cut off from its spiritual archetype? Of course! But we'll get to that later. Remember, at this point in history, the whole project was still tied to Christianity, not divorced from it.

Secondly, Petrarch disclosed a "relevant past filled with courageous and high-minded individuals" who were worthy of emulation. And these two strands were connected, for by learning from these great personages of the past, "one could begin to understand how to give shape to one's own individuality," but not for its own sake. Rather, it was a way of combining piety, nobility, and individuality. And at the very least, you should be grateful that this was precisely the attitude of America's founders, even if you believe they were theologically misguided.

This is certainly how it has worked for me. Man is built for reverence, but of course, it all depends upon who and what one reveres, for the reverence creates a kind of sympathetic bond through which there is a real and genuinely transformative psychic contact, for both good or ill. But we're running out of time, so we'll continue tomorrow, slack willing.

(All quoted material from The Theological Origins of Modernity )

Beasts to the Left of Me, Monsters to the Right

Just another reminder, everyone will have a chance to be offended as we go along, so there's no need to jump to any conclusions. Let me also say that Gillespie takes a rather neutral and scholarly approach. He's not the least bit polemical. Rather, he just lays out the facts, objectionable to some though they may be.

And it should also go without saying that I ask and expect no one to agree with me on these matters. Nor am I bothered by those who disagree with me (although I am puzzled why some of them would be in any way interested in this blog).

To conclude his take on Luther, Gillespie reiterates that although his thought "originates out of the deep spiritual problems that arise from his encounter with nominalism," his solutions create as many difficulties as they resolve, so that his "position is beset by deep and intractable problems." His only fallback position is "faith," but in my view, a faith divorced from intellect leaves the field wide open for the neo-barbaric, anti-religious intellect that followed.

Man's intellectual needs are legitimate, and he has a cosmic right to answers that satisfy these needs. We are constituted of spirit, psyche, and body -- or passion, will, and intellect -- and any of these that are not "contained" by one's religion will tend to run wild outside it. It doesn't matter if it is an inadequate theology of the body or of the intellect; leave one out, and you're asking for trouble. Just as the person can fall into sexual perversion, a mind that is not infused with the Light can clearly fall into intellectual perversion. I myself was once an intellectual pervert and textual deviate, so I know.

Obviously, nowhere does Jesus say anything about faith in scripture. I mean, for starters, he didn't write any. There was no new testament, only the used. Furthermore, in any case, scripture "has to be interpreted, and that means valuing some passages and books above others. How in such circumstances do we know we are choosing correctly? How do we know what we take to be divine inspiration behind our reading is not in fact the subliminal urgings of our passions and desires?" (Gillespie).

I would suggest that one way to know is to consult what 1500 years of grace-infused spiritual genius has produced -- i.e., to find out what the greatest spiritual thinkers have thought and said. And although some very conservative types might compare the following to our own Supreme Court interpreting the American constitution through "international standards," I don't see anything objectionable in taking this approach to religious metaphysics -- not to indiscriminately mix revelations from below, since God detests that. Rather, to simply appreciate that there is widespread coonsensus on many of the fundamentals.

Or, one can simply realize with Augustine that there exists a religion that co-arises with man, and which currently goes by the name "Christianity." Obviously Christ's existence is prior to his physical form, for he tells us ("before Abraham was I AM). To put it another way, the great novelty in Christianity is the Incarnation (and Resurrection), not the Christ. The Light is surely real, and it didn't just come into the world in 4 B.C., or whenever it was. It's always here, and men either see it or they don't.

Gillespie goes on to say that "a great deal of Luther's thought turns on the notion of grace," but that "Jesus never uses the word charis in this sense in the Bible. It becomes central only in Paul and later in Augustine." Nor is there "any mention of predestination in the synoptic Gospels."

The central problem with Luther, as I see it, is that in response to the crisis of nominalism, he overemphasizes God at the expense of man. And much of this hinges on his interpretation of the Fall. In fact, if I remember correctly, this is also an issue that divides Orthodoxy from Catholicism, since the former doesn't see the Fall in quite the catastrophic terms the West sees it. Gillespie notes that in the Latin west, there was "nearly unanimous opinion that Adam's fall had cost man dearly," and that "from this perspective, man had no intrinsic worth or dignity." Quite frankly, you are a hopeless loser, with no power whatsoever to save yourself.

I must admit that this approach has never appealed to me, and is one of the things that turned me away from the versions of Christianity I encountered earlier in my life. The idea that Socrates is in hell because he didn't know Jesus is no more appealing to me than the idea that God is punishing Haiti because two hundred years ago it supposedly made a "pact with the devil." (Besides, if that were true, one would expect to see earthly rewards paid for with the coin of eternity.)

I may be over-generalizing here, but it seems to me that Eastern Christianity hardly forgets that we are fallen, but that it also remembers that we are imago dei -- in the image of God -- and that this surely counts for something!

For me, it means that our covenant with the Creator is truly a Divine-human partnership. Sure, we're the junior partner, and always will be. But just as your relationship with your child changes as he matures, I don't think God wishes to treat everyone equally as permanently helpless infants. Indeed, Paul implicitly touches on this in the metaphor of spiritual milk. vs. meat.

Now, as I've mentioned in a couple of the previous posts, I don't think the split between Catholicism and Protestantism was strictly necessary, although, historical conditions being what they were, it was pretty much inevitable. But was there another way out of the impasse? I think there was, and Gillespie touches on this in chapter two of the book, Petrarch and the Invention of Individuality. From my perspective, the issues raised here are absolutely critical, because if you get your theology wrong, your anthropology will be a wreck, and if you get your anthropology wrong, your theology will be a mess.

At the very time that the nominalist insurgency was taking place, there emerged what Gillespie calls a Christian humanism -- not, mind you, a Christian humanism. The point is that this was a humanism that took seriously the idea that man may be wounded, but that he isn't dead. In spite of it all, he is still the imago dei; and as they say in the East, there can be a more or less wide gulf between image and likeness, and our purpose here on earth is to close that gap.

What the Raccoon calls "spiritual growth" takes place precisely in this space between image and likeness. Again, for the sake of clarity, Luther would absolutely and unequivocally reject the idea of "spiritual growth," much less that a man could do anything about it from his end. Indeed, he would condemn this as heretical, blasphemous, arrogant, and all the rest. Rather, you are either saved or you are not saved, and there's nothing you can do about it anyway but submit, identical to the Islamic approach.

Gillespie has a pithy formulation with which I agree; that is, "one cannot abandon God without turning man into a beast." But at the same time, "one cannot abandon man without falling into theological fanaticism." Look at the Islamists, who clearly err on the side of (their) god, with catastrophic consequences. To them, man is nothing, which is why they can engage in genocide with no compunction. But they are only doing what Christians did to each other in the 16th and 17th centuries.

For if man is nothing and God is everything, there is no reason why I shouldn't blow up airplanes or shoot abortionists. I'm not saying that this conclusion is inevitable, but one can appreciate where the devaluation of man leads -- just as one can appreciate where the devaluation of God leads. Atheists are not necessarily bad people, but an atheistic culture that has lost contact with its spiritual source will eventually descend into evil. And a culture that reduces man to a worthless sinner will also tend in that direction. (Please also note the similarity with leftist doctrines that are so contemptuous of the individual, who can only be saved by the anointed elites who run the god-state.)

So one thing that really caught my attention in the book was Gillespie's discussion of the handful of sensible and balanced Raccoons who were scurrying around back in the 14th century. These men attempted to forge a theology that valued the growing awareness of the individual without in any way jettisoning traditional theology. Petrarch, for example, sought "an amalgamation of Christian practice and ancient moral virtue."

This only makes sense, because it takes into consideration the very real emergence of a new phenomenon that was taking place at the time: the individual. In one sense, you can squelch the problem by condemning, repressing, and devaluing it; on the other hand, if one fails to channel this new reality within tradition, it then becomes detached from God, and transforms into the promethean glorification of the will. With Luther, every man becomes his own priest; but this is only a small step from every man becoming his own god.

Thus, Petrarch thought that the solution to this problem required "a richer understanding of what it meant to be human that drew not merely on Scripture but on the moral models of antiquity": Athens + Jerusalem, you might say. He further sought "to revivify the love of honor and beauty as preeminent human motives."

Speaking of which, there is no question that America's founders were animated by just this type of Christianity, one that very much focuses on the ancient virtues of honor, wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, and disinterested knowledge. I also happen to be reading the outstanding Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815, and when you read about the majestic honor and dignity of, say, George Washington, it seriously makes you want to weep for your country. The men who formed America were Christian humanists par excellence.

Frankly, many of them were affiliated members of the the Scattered Brotherhood of the Vertical Diaspora, but that's a topic for another post.

That's enough for today. To be continued...

Medieval Space Cadets and Modern Time Travelers

As mentioned previously, existence in the premodern world was a wholly vertical affair. As Gillespie describes it, "The inhabitants of that world did not await a bright and shining tomorrow but the end of days. They did not look forward to the future or backward to the past, but upward to heaven and downward to hell" (emphasis mine).

Again, it was as if they lived in space, not time; or at least a very different mode of time -- one that didn't "progress," and which contained its own more encompassing order. Denying this order would be like denying the seasons, or trying to make spring follow summer.

Thus, man lived more in vertical space than in horizontal time. And this space was hierarchically ordered from top to bottom. There was no such thing as "empty space." Among other things, it was filled with angels, gnomes, sprites, fairies, and various forces -- the "evil eye" of a neighbor troll, for example. But one of the accomplishments of scholasticism was to order this space in an intelligible manner. Analogously, if you think of the way that moderns organize time in such an obsessive manner, this is what premodern people did with space.

For example, here are a couple of pictures of the cosmos, circa 1300, one from before color TV, the other one after:



So space was not the empty abstraction that it later became with classical (Newtonian) physics. Interestingly, with the Freudian and Einsteinian revolutions, neither psychic nor physical space can any longer be thought of as "empty," but the ontological revolution has been slow to trickle down to the scientistic masses.

We still live in a primitive world of scientistic superstition, in which the mind is thought of as a bag with stuff in it, and the cosmos a machine consisting of particles and laws -- particles that are wholly external to one another, and invariant laws that are held to be universally valid while magically operating without transcending that which they operate on. Metaphysical incoherence rules the day, and systematic incoherence is always crazy making.

Metaphysically speaking, space and time are necessary reflections of the Absolute. Both time and space have their infinite and absolute modes. For space, the absolute is the point, or axis, while for time it is the now. In the premodern world, both space and time were bound, made to measure for man's psyche.

But for modern man, who buys his ill-fitting spacetime suit off the rack, they are "infinite." Thus, Pascal's crack about being alarmed by "the eternal silence of these infinite spaces," and feeling "engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me." This signals an obvious change in man's orientation to the cosmos, from absolute to infinite -- or to infinite space unconstrained by any (relatively) absolute structure.

So modern man becomes dis-oriented; or, he becomes reoriented to matter only. The axis of the cosmos is now upside down, and man is inverted with it. But this all goes back to the nominalist revolution that swept aside the intelligible and hierarchically ordered space of the medieval world.

As Gillespie explains, "to think of oneself as modern is to define one's being in terms of time," which is an extraordinary thing. "In previous ages and other places, people have defined themselves in terms of their land or place, their race or ethnic group, their traditions or their gods, but not explicitly in terms of time." Premodern peoples temporally orient themselves around a primordial event of some kind -- this became their temporal axis -- but it is again quasi-absolute, not infinite.

But to even call oneself "modern" is to not only define oneself over and above another period of time, but to have entered another kind of time altogether. And as we shall see, it is not a "human time," for there is nothing less humanistic then secular humanism, which tries to adapt man to non-human modes, thus abolishing man.

In any event, "To be modern is to be 'new,' to be an unprecedented event in the flow of time, a first beginning, something different than anything that has come before, a novel way of being in the world, not even a form of being but a form of becoming."

It is also to "understand oneself as self-originating, as free and creative in a radical sense, not merely determined by tradition or by fate or providence." It is "not merely to be in history or tradition but to make history" -- a power that was previously limited to gods and mythic heroes.

I think you can immediately see the (qualified) upside of this liberation from the absolute into the infinite, in that man himself becomes a "mode of the infinite" with virtually unlimited potential. This is a critical point, for the nominalist revolution, in smashing that medieval cathedral of space, utterly transformed our relation to God. But this transformation ramified in two directions, one of them emphasizing the divine end and minimizing man's own significance. This was the extreme direction Luther took, culminating in predestination and the utter rejection of the idea that man's works could have any influence on his own salvation.

I would suggest that that is a profoundly unhumanistic stance, and I am sure Luther would agree with me. His response would be, "so what? Why do you care about these worthless sinners? Almost all of them are condemned to hell anyway, except for those pre-chosen by God for reasons we cannot fathom anyway."

The chapter on Luther was a real eye-opener for me, as he strikes me as unpleasant in the extreme (but of course, in his defense, he was responding to some rather unpleasant and thoroughly corrupt people). He was initially a nominalist, to such an extent that "he considered Ockham his master." This provoked his own profound spiritual crisis, as he concluded that the scholastics were incorrect, and that there was nothing one could do in this life to merit salvation. "He thus lived in terror of a wrathful God," and his later theology was largely a way to come to terms with this terror.

Luther resolved his existential terror in a zen sort of way. Since man cannot save himself, why worry? Rather "he can only be saved by faith alone," which "arises through grace and grace only through Scripture." Thus, his central insight "was that no works can satisfy such a God but also that no works are necessary," since all we have to do -- all we can do -- is believe in him.

Again, the human qua human is nearly entirely expunged from this formulation. Ancient ideas about cultivating virtue become arrogant attempts to appropriate God's powers. Cicero? Gone. Plato? Adios. Boethius? Get out. Again, only God can save you. Reason no longer matters, but only biblical exegesis. And "because there is no continuum that connects creator and creation, there can be no levels of ontological perfection." To put it another way there is no (↑) at all, only (↓), which most assuredly blows where it will.

Another key point for Luther is that (non-biblical) language no longer becomes a vehicle of truth, "for the truth comes about as a result of an inner experience of the divine that cannot be adequately captured in words." To pretend to understand God is only a form of "sinful pride." "[E]verything that occurs happens as a result of God's willing it to be so," which immediately implies that God is responsible for evil.

Luther had no logical way to deal with this objection, since he didn't believe in free will, so he basically evaded the issue by insisting that we shouldn't dwell on it, but rather concern ourselves only with what we can do about it, which again comes down to faith, and faith only. And even then, there's nothing to worry about, since faith "arises only through grace," again, because humans can do nothing to save themselves. God's omnipotence explains everything, but in so doing, explains nothing.

Evolving Beyond Darwin & Luther

Before I started this series, I was going to mention that it would probably only offend two groups, Catholics and Protestants -- the former because of how badly they blew it, the latter because of all the bad that was ushered in with the good they accomplished. But I see that Warren and Susannah have already called a preemptive truce, so that's a relief.

As we go along, readers might feel as if I'm being harder on one side than the other. But please suspend judgment until we're done, because I'm certain that everyone will have a chance to be equally offended. The ultimate purpose of this series will be to heal that painful split once and for all (obviously in theory -- I'm not that grandiose), but some disassembly will be required. However, there's no need to disassemble one another.

It's really rather fascinating, because it immediately brings up all of the original passions that provoked the schism to begin with. Except that 500 years of the civilizing process has made us much less prone to kill one another over doctrinal matters and metaphysical disputes.

Which, now that I think about it, is an interesting subject in itself, and one that I attempted to tackle in chapter 3 of my book. That is, either in conjunction with, or in opposition to it, there is an autonomous "civilizing process" that must be taken into consideration. In other words, people can obviously be quite passionately religious, but uncivilized to the point of monstrous savagery. The Islamists are only the latest example, but again, when you read about what Catholics and Protestants did to one another during the religious wars, you wonder how Western man ever evolved out of that barbarism (those who did, anyway).

I also happen to be reading Gilson's From Aristotle to Darwin & Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species and Evolution, which I'm unconsciously weaving and blending into this patchwork stew. For Gilson -- who was a Catholic philosopher -- brings to light the extreme irony that Protestantism and Darwinism are quite directly linked, for they are really just two competing versions of modernity -- a modernity which is already intellectually exhausted.

For as Cardinal Schönberg explains in the foreword to the book, Darwin's theory "adopts a purely nominalistic doctrine that views living things as nothing but accidental variations within a continuous fitness landscape and admits of no natural kinds." In other words, with the death of transcendental realism and the triumph of nominalism came an end to any notion of transcendent archetypes. Remember, the fulcrum of Luther's rebellion was over this very point. The rest is just commentary -- or the drawing out of the ineluctable consequences that follow.

I'm sure this isn't very clear to most readers, but don't worry, it will be before we're finished with this series of posts. But one of the most important consequences that follows the banishment of universals is the end of formal and final causation. If there are no transcendent archetypes -- which there cannot be under nominalism -- then there can be no formal and final causation, since they limit God's absolute omnipotence.

So this is just one of the -- in my mind -- bad things that was ushered in with the good of the nominalist revolution. The problem is that formal and final causation most assuredly exist, and that the world becomes literally unintelligible in their absence. Scientism only pretends to do without them.

But Luther had no interest whatsoever in whether or not the world was intelligible. Rather, his only concern was man's salvation, in part because he was convinced that he was living in the End Times, so that understanding the world was just a vain distraction. Furthermore, it was the height of prideful arrogance to imagine that humans could understand God's creation, again, because God is radically transcendent and omnipotent, and subject to no man's understanding (outside revelation), which amounts to a restriction on God's activity. Again, if God can do whatever he wants whenever he wants, who is the scientist to think that he can place limits on Him with his equations and instruments?

Note that of the four types of causation -- material, efficient, formal and final -- the first two are wholly immanent, or horizontal, while the second two are transcendent, or vertical. Here again you see that the nominalist revolution, by banishing formal and final causation, set the stage for the wholly immanent philosophy of ideological Darwinism, or just of materialism in general.

For materialism is one of the possible philosophical reactions to a senseless world devoid of formal or final causation. Literal creationism is another. The irony is again that Darwinism and creationism are not "opposites," but kissing cousins, just two possible responses to the modern rejection of the transcendentals that make the world intelligible.

Gilson brings out another fascinating irony -- and something that I've discussed in the past -- and that is that Darwinism is not only "anti-evolutionary," but that it renders evolution strictly impossible. The concept of evolution was around long prior to Darwin, and in fact, he didn't even mention the word in the first five editions of The Origin of Species. But Darwinians eventually hijacked and redefined the word, identical to how illiberal neo-Marxists hijacked and redefined "liberal."

The original meaning of the term "evolution" had to do with intelligible development -- for example, the manner in which the seed develops into the tree. Somehow the tree is "involved" in the seed, and the seed "evolves" into the tree. Thus, one could not speak of evolution without bringing in formal and final causation.

But this is the exact opposite of what Darwin believed. As Gilson explains, "Nothing is less like Darwin's doctrine than the idea that new species should be already present in their ancestors, from which they only have to evolve in the course of time." Therefore, Darwinian change does not disclose anything intelligible at all, for it is completely horizontal, just one meaningless change after another.

As Gilson correctly notes, "The human mind can grasp only that which is intelligible." Thus, "the meaning of absolutely directionless, meaningless, purposeless Darwinian change cannot really be grasped -- there is no meaning in such an alleged process, and thus no intelligibility." In the absence of an ordered framework -- which immediately implies transcendence and finality -- "pure chance or disorder is not something the mind can really know."

This is precisely what I mean when I say that man can explain much more about Darwinism than Darwinism can explain about man, for to even say the word "truth" is to have transcended the meaninglessness of Darwinian change (not evolution).

Again, as I have posted about before, actual evolution -- as opposed to meaningless change -- is only possible within a religious framework, but only then within a framework that restores formal and final causation, and undoes the nominalist revolution that ushered in modernity. This revolution -- and I'll get more deeply into this tomorrow -- virtually destroyed the religious intellect (emphasizing instead only faith), leaving the field open to the vulgar scientism that dominates culture today.

As Schönberg describes it, "the world is full of people who believe in God, but is almost bereft of people who believe in the full power of human reason." But Pope Benedict has called for an end to this "self-limitation of reason" and for a "rebirth of philosophy" that would vault man back to where he properly belongs, beyond the artificial constraints of a nominalistic scientism through which man has perfected crawling while forgetting how to fly.