Man's Perfect Incompleteness

About that hole in the center of man: again, it is unlike anything else found in all of nature. No one expects a pig to be a better pig. A pig is just a pig. It can't fall short of its piggyness, any more than a community organizer can surpass being a community organizer. It is as if there is no space in the pig -- or the dreaded C.O. -- to be anything other than what it is.

Thus, the human space is associated first and foremost with freedom and possibility: if necessity is a two-dimensional line, then freedom is a three-dimensional space (four if we add the time component).

You could say that the pig is already "perfect," because he never fails to be one. But man is never perfect: rather, perfectible. And unless I am mistaken, perfectibility is oddly superior to perfection.

Here again, this has to do with the psycho-pneumatic space we inhabit: because it is empty, it is able to be filled (but never completely). In short, if you never have a question, then you'll never have an answer. But if you have The Answer (in the static, secular sense of the term), then you have no questions and therefore no creative space or love shack.

Balthasar writes of how "man sees himself as the sum and perfect image of the cosmos"; in him there is "a kind of concentration, which makes man the synthesis of the world and raises him above it."

And yet, as with Adam, we are always aware of incompleteness, hence the complementary creation of Eve, thank you very much. Of note, Eve is a part of Adam, and yet, someone obviously separate and distinct.

This is a mythic way of expressing our irreducible intersubjectivity, whereby we are simultaneously one and two. However, the oneness must be prior, otherwise there would be no way for two to return to one. Twoness is an existential fact, oneness an "ontological memory," so to speak. It may be also bound up with memories of paradise, for all I know.

In any event, twoness is always in search of oneness, or of higher unity, integration, totality, etc. It's the arc of our lives. The part wants to know it is more than just a meaningless fragment, but rather, part of a higher unity. God's modus operandi -- and vivendi -- is always "unity in diversity" (Pursell).

So, thanks to our perfect incompleteness, "man finds his completion and his happiness only in communion with another human being" (Balthasar). But at the same time, this "gap in man's nature affects also his relationship to God." That is, our very incompleteness -- which can never complete itself -- points beyond itself toward its own possible fulfillment in relation to God.

For Balthasar, there are really only three ways to pull this off, and two of them may be reduced to one. Therefore, we're really talking about the Human way and the Christian way. This former way "consists in a soaring movement of the heart, which leaves the whole world of contradictory earthly existence beneath it in order to seek a home in the region of a superterrestrial divine power."

Underneath this is the simple premise that "all multiplicity is opposed to unity and has in some mysterious way fallen away from it; only unity can be true being." That being the case, the world is a kind of opaque barrier instead of luminous ladder; the difference between God and world is identical to the difference between true and false, or appearance and reality, or forsakenness and salvation.

As such, this "way of salvation demands an inner renunciation of worldly differences," of "seeing through them all to their identical divine ground."

Now, that idea is not completely wrong; rather, like all cosmic heresies, it is a partial truth inflated to the whole of things. Obviously the world is not God, so in that sense it is not the Truth. And yet, it is everywhere filled with truth and beauty, with intelligibility and harmony, and that's no accident. One might say that it is not Truth but not non-Truth either.

In the heresy under discussion, there is still a residue of love, but it is subtly different from the Christian version, for it involves "fidelity to the thou, not in its difference, but in its ultimate identity with the loving self." In other words, it is not like one loving the other and thereby discovering a higher unity-in-difference, but an obliteration of the twoness -- which results in a profound devaluation of our end of the bargain. We're just God playing hide-and-seek with himself.

Likewise, "compassion" still exists, but in the form of feeling sorry for those poor saps still imprisoned in individuality.

But I like my individuality, and I don't need anyone feeling sorry for it. Thanks but no thanks. I would prefer to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world than to pretend they're not really happening to someone who doesn't actually exist.

"This negation," writes Balthasar, "is directed against the very nature of man," in that it preserves its own version of truth -- its wholeness -- at the expense of "abandoning [man's] whole worldly reality." And where's the bloody sport in achieving wholeness by "draw[ing] out conclusions which ultimately cancel out man"? I can shoot myself and do that.

Lost Time is Not Found Again. Unless...

Well, the happiness seminar turned out to be even more unhappy than I had imagined. I brought along some Theological Anthropology to keep me amused, but I should have chosen something lighter and less Germanic, because it was too hard to concentrate amidst the babble. Plus I arrived late, so I couldn't even claim a chair in the back row. And the reception was poor inside the building, so no covert talk radio. The horror! A first world problem of the most painful kind.

The presenter was a 350 pound psychologist/stand-up comedian with a voice and delivery eerily similar to Jay Leno. He said everything as if he were Leno being funny, except not a single thing was remotely witty, so it was just irritating. And the wisdom he imparted was on the level of the Sphinx, e.g., "in order to be happy you must avoid what makes you unhappy."

Hey, remember when man supposedly ventured to the moon and planted his flag there? It's a little like God visiting earth and planting his flag here, isn't it? Except it happens everyday; or every Today, rather.

As Balthasar describes it, "'Today' is the present of vertical salvation time," "suspended in and over the horizontal 'now.'" I've never heard it expressed quite that way, in the sense that there are these two sides to every moment, so to speak. Horizontal time necessarily passes away and "cannot be anchored" in anything: it's that slippery thing that is always slipping through our fingers.

But God's visit to earth -- "an event of divine freedom breaking in" -- means there is a kind of vertical anchor and rope. If God is always breaking in and pulling out, it seems that we may reverse the direction of time by "cleaving in love to God," i.e., "to the one being ascending." So we got that going for us.

Just flipping pages here. God not only enters profane time "with all its inner futility," but descends "to the bottom of the abyss of time." Only through this "total passage" through to the bitter end can there be a "reversal of the whole."

In this orthoparadoxical way, "the point of greatest antithesis -- between sinful time run to its end and spotless eternity -- becomes the place of the most intimate loving union between Father and Son." Like us, God plants his flag on a dead rock.

So, now it is as if time isn't just perpetual dissipation and loss. Rather, it has a kind of curvature that bends back toward eternity. Our earthly pilgrimage -- or bewilderness adventure -- is still a "journey in a foreign land," but at least the road back home is no longer blocked.

In the absence of this vertical road back home, then man is not only hopelessly fragmented, but pointlessly so (the two are related, but not identical).

What I mean is that man, being man, is born with "delusions of wholeness." Why? Other animals are already whole, with no awareness of being incomplete or in need of some missing piece of the puzzle. But at the center of man is a big (?!). Now, either there is a reason for that, or no reason at all. And if the latter, what makes us think we can do anything about it? It's just an ontological itch that can't be epistemologically scratched.

Existentialists are surely correct about one thing: in the absence of God, man is indeed a big fat nothing, with no possible meaning or significance other than what we make up. We need to be honest about that, and not recoil from the absolute nihilism of secular atheism.

But the religious view takes that same nothingness and transforms it from meaningless accident to ontological necessity: in the end, we are essentially nothing because we are creatures, not Creator. But that nothing turns out to be everything, because it is not just an abyss but a space and a gap over which there is a bridge.

Now, this bridge is not an "object," but rather, a relationship -- or at least the offer of one. It is that same vertical lifeline alluded to above which completes the temporal circuit. There is the possibility of wholeness amidst temporal fragmentation, such that Today becomes a gift instead of a burden. Unlike yesterday.

Wise Men From the Yeast

It happens every other October: I wait until the last minute to complete my (dis)continuing education units. Therefore, I'll be at an all-day seminar tomorrow, which means the world suffers another 24 hour setback in the progress of cosmic evolution. In other words, no posting.

I'm very discriminating about the seminars I attend. I always make sure they are the absolute cheapest, regardless of topic, being that it is my custom to bring earplugs and a book and hunker down in the back of the room. Similar to when I was in college.

Tomorrow's seminar is called The Habits of Happy People, so if I hear any helpful tips, perhaps I'll LIVE TWEET them. Yes, INSTANT HAPPINESS, while you wait.

I guess I'm a little curious to find out whether the speaker will discuss the classic views on happiness, or whether it will be nothing but postmodern pneumababble. We shall see. But I don't see how a human can possibly be happy in the absence of religion, unless he's very stupid or very high.

And not just any religion, because most religions are rather bleak, e.g., Islam and Buddhism. A world unleavened by the Christian message is a pretty dark and depressing place, especially for atheists.

I recently had this experience in reading a book on the history of war that ranges from the pre-hominids to the post-human monsters of the left, e.g., Hitler, Mao, Stalin, et al. The book is called War and Civilization, and indeed, you could almost say that "war" and "human being" are synonymous: where one is, so too is the other. It is a depressingly naturalistic view of man, completely devoid of spiritual uplift.

So, as a kind of antidote (I hope), I just ordered a book called History in His Hands, which covers the same ground, but from the divine-human angle. I saw the author on The Journey Home on EWTN, which is without a doubt my favorite television program. I must have seen about 25 episodes, and nearly all are quite compelling (speaking of the search for happiness).

To the extent that Christianity fails to transmit joy above all else, then somebody goofed. Chesterton was very good on this point. In his The Everlasting Man, he speaks of the "unfathomable sadness" and pessimism of the pagan world, adding that "I doubt if there was ever in all the marvelous manhood of antiquity a man who was as happy as St. Francis was happy."

When we speak of the "leavening" of Christianity, that's what we're talking about: it occurs not just in the individual but in the culture and in history at large. It is the reason why America has always been the most optimistic nation -- and why it was of such world-historical consequence that we elected this bilious bonehead in 2008. Could the contrast with Reagan be more extreme?

Every doctrine has a method: in the case of Platonism, the method is up, out, and gone: "an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone" (Chesterton). It is what any atheist or materialist in his right mind would do -- that is, if he carries his depressing premises through to their suicidal conclusion: if the world is absurd, why participate?

Balthasar says much the same thing -- and not at all disrespectfully. For Plotinus, for example, the world itself is a fall from the One, so no salvation is to be found in it.

This is the polar opposite of the Judeo-Christian stream, in which the creation is fundamentally good, the very sensorium of our salvation. I would say that this is because time is "renewed" by grace instead of being just a meaningless circle or a less-than-meaningless descent into entropy. Grace is what renders time negentropic. We are not so much dropped into time as suspended there by a nonlocal thread that proceeds from the top.

We are... I've always liked how Harry Nilsson put it. He may not have been anyone's idea of a Christian, and yet, he was leavened just the same:

“Late last night, in search of light, I watched a ball of fire streak across the midnight sky. I watched it glow, then grow, then shrink, then sink into the silhouette of morning. As I watched it die, I said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a lot in common with that light.’ That’s right. I’m alive with the fire of my life, which streaks across my span of time and is seen by those who lift their eyes in search of light to help them though the long, dark night.”

Or in Song of the Stars, by Dead Can Dance,

We are the stars which sing / we sing with our light... Our light is a voice / We make a road for the spirit to pass over

And every light has a source.

Cosmic Podiatry

I think it's appropriate to pause a moment and reflect on ten nine years of the One Cosmos blog, what with a seemingly endless trail -- or blockade, depending on your point of view -- of posts extending back to October 2005:

Okay, that's enough. No need to get maudlin. Back on your heads!

Hey, that image looks familiar! Must be from that series of posts we did on the Divine Comedy a few years back. Being that the goal of this blog has always been to write things with no expiration date -- or no possible relevance, depending on your point of view -- might as well repost it today, because I'm short on time:

We're finally up to the canto we've all been waiting for, in which Deepak Chopra gets his just desserts. For this is the valley of rapacious brutes who debauch themselves for gold -- who distort spiritual reality by treating it as a profane thing to be bought and sold.

Folks here are buried head first up to the knee with their feet exposed, the soles of which are on fire. Strange image. I wonder what Dante had in mind?

Upton writes that the souls here "are buried in an inverted position because they have inverted the spiritual hierarchy."

As we know, the principial world (the world of metacosmic principles) is like an inverted tree, with its nonlocal roots above and its convenient local branches down here below.

Therefore, the inverted position of these vulgar simoniacs (one who practices simony) is simply an image of what they inverted -- and perverted -- in life. Thus, their feet, which symbolize the terrestrial world, are at the top, while their heads, which symbolize the celestial, are at the bottom. This reveals their true values and motives, which cannot be hidden from God.

This brings to mind what may be my favorite letter of Meditations on the Tarot, The Hermit. The hermit is a properly right side-up man, and for this reason will appear upside-down to the worldly. This blog is proudly upside-down, and always will be. We're here, we're queer, and we're not going away.

Such a man does not deny the world but sees it -- and its contents -- in its proper perspective and order. He does not place what is both priceless and of urgent importance above what is ephemeral and insignificant. Which is why The common man lives among phantasms; only the recluse [i.e., hermit] moves among realities (Aphorisms of Don Colacho). Now, there was an invert!

Furthermore, the hermit is the cosmic locus of the synthesis of heaven and earth, i.e., their union, not polarization. He represents the harmony of intellect, emotion, and will; or mind, heart, and strength.

But again, such a man will appear upside-down to the hypnotized mob and tenured rabble, for Modern society works feverishly to put vulgarity within everyone’s reach (DC), and largely succeeds now that so many of us attend college, those somnambulant secular seminaries of factsimian sophistry.

For the properly spiritually oriented man, his soul is on fire and God is the water. But in this vale of hell, the soles are on fire and there's no water to be found. Dante also notices that the fire flickers back and forth between the heel and toes. Upton suggests that this is another inverted image, this one of the purifying spiritual fire, since in Hell it moves horizontally rather than vertically.

In a foot note, Upton reminds us of the spiritual hucksters who charge good money to teach idiots how to walk barefoot on hot coals. I always suspected that Tony Robbins was a preview of hell.

The valley of the hotfoot is also a parody "of the baptismal font," in that these sinners "are horribly baptized by the fire of the Holy Spirit they sought to buy and sell" (Upton).

But the Divine Fire is not a plaything. To imagine that one can control it sufficiently to truck and barter in its activation is about as wise as selling nuclear secrets to Islamists. In the long run you end up with the Agni but no ecstasy.

In the next valley it gets even hotter, for it is the vale of the spiritual pundits, the magicians and diviners who "impiously sought to pierce the veil of the future" (Upton). These people cause much more mischief than you might imagine, for they are spiritual prometheans whose reach exceeds their grasp -- or whose mental being surpasses what they have properly assimilated and actualized spiritually. They are engaged in the dangerous practice of driving in front of their headlights; in other words, they are operating in the dark, with mere knowledge (k) in front of being (n).

Therefore, in this valley of hell they are perpetually facing backward. Once again it is an inverted image of how they functioned in life; in being turned backward, they remind us "of a 'vanguard' cadre in politics or an 'avant-garde' movement in the arts, which, after a few years, turns out to be totally reactionary; their attempt to conquer the future binds them to the past" (Upton).

Speaking of timely.

Is there anyone more nauseatingly predictable and reactionary than the political "progressive" or artistic "transgressive"? Even the word "progressive" implies an ability to see into the future. But when their future arrives, it is always an atavistic hell. Obama does not look forward but backward, to Jimmy Carter, LBJ, FDR, and the whole failed history of illiberal collectivism and statist coercion. Likewise the public employee unions for whom it is always 1900, or liberal blacks for whom it is always 18th century South Carolina, or feminists for whom all reality is one big Daddy Issue.

And of course, such people are not only looking backward but down, toward the lowest rung of the cosmos. No one pretends that the unions are fighting for any ideal except for their own material gain. But in the words of Don Colacho, there is no faster way to corrupt an individual than to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses. Such an assoul is upside-down, inside-out, and assbackward.

Hey, it's a Tony Robbins seminar, and it will only cost your soles!

Who Was that Unmasked Man?!

Since we're on the subject of time, here is a timely aphorism of Don Colacho: Time should be feared less because it kills than because it unmasks.

Think of how this dreadful truism applies to Dear Leader, Mr. Bequeath Ebola, who, of course, promised "change." Now, change is obviously the essence of time, but a progressive is someone who believes time has a kind of automatic direction, and yet, no telos, no fixed orientation.

Therefore, the kind of change that is championed by progressives is almost guaranteed to result in a grotesque unmasking of the unredeemed man, i.e., the beast that man becomes in the absence of conformity to what transcends him. After all, deterioration is change. One might say that change in the absence of God is just slow-motion death. Or maybe you don't read the news.

So, Obama has been unmasked over the past six years, as have his decroded "people." And I suppose the fact that some 40% still support him proves that they still see the old mask firmly in place. I actually know people who are like this.

The other day, one of them spoke to me of the stunning success of ObamaCare. Not only is he enclosed in the left's alternate reality, but his only knowledge of conservative ideas is filtered through its hateful ignorantsia, so he is programmed to reject reality a priori -- the same way you might react if someone said to you, "Yes, but Hitler wrote that..."

Progressives believe it is possible to determine truth via calendar, hence the belief that they must be on the right side of history. But history has no "side" unless it is in reference to what surpasses history, AKA God. Otherwise history is just history: it has an opaque front and cloudy back, but no periphery.

There is of course a positive unmasking, and this is what we call "metanoia," or conversion, or repentance.

Conversely, you could say that Adam was the first human to put on the mask, for which reason God -- no doubt ironically -- asks "Where are you?" Adam responds that he heard God's voice, became frightened, and "hid myself," i.e., put on the mask to fool God. Good luck with that.

To paraphrase Schuon -- and this is a real orthoparadox -- man is the only creature who is free to defy or contradict his own nature. In California, Governor Brown recently signed a law mandating that children who are confused about their sex are "free" (!) to choose either locker/bathroom. Yes, the left is beyond parody, beyond Orwell, beyond my powers of insultainment.

Even so, time eventually unmasks, no matter how much plastic surgery. Alternatively, we can stop the pretentious charade and just unmask ourselves before time does the job for us.

One of the reasons why the left must legislate so much insanity is to prevent the unmasking that would occur in the absence of force. For example, in the absence of state-mandated racial discrimination, time would unmask some uncomfortable truths about race and IQ.

Now interestingly, unmasking ourselves is an exercise in freedom, whereas time's unmasking is under the force of necessity -- the latter is against our omnipotent wishes.

But the self-unmasking -- i.e., reverse auto-pullwoolery -- takes place "outside time," or it is a kind of exit from profane time. Balthasar writes that the "timelessness which the beloved object [God] bestows on the person who chooses it" is at the same time an expansion of the freedom of the person who so chooses.

Wha?

Yeah, you could say this is the eternal "day of creation," or fiat lux. Balthasar speaks of "the ever-increasing mutual penetration of these two elements, which were 'created in the beginning' as 'heaven and earth.'"

A Raccoon believes -- well, this Raccoon, anyway -- that Christ appears as the creativity-freedom principle in history. He is simultaneously God unmasked and man unmasked -- "naked" but not ashamed, glorified but humble.

"Here the mystery of the time-transcending origin appears as the total Christ.... The world and its falling away were created for the sake of this origin and this goal," which "surpasses and at the same time justifies time" (ibid.).

Thus, this final unmasking is the "vertical resolution of the whole structure of time, and hence of history..." The irritating abyss of time -- which is a measure of our distance from God -- is bridged by the divine creativity-in-love which, from our side, invites us to free ourselves of the disguises we wear to try to elude the decrosion of time -- the very same time that ruins everybody's lives and eats all our steak.

A Day in the Life of God: Three Chords Good!

Another problem I have with divine omniscience as usually understood is that it is as if the three modes of time -- past, present, and future -- are reduced to the past only.

Think about it: if events are determined, then it is very much as if everything has already happened. What then, is the point of time? Present and future become oddly superfluous -- inexplicable, really. There can be no "point" to anything, because there is nothing toward which to point.

Einstein agreed that the existence of the now is just a mirage: he "completely rejected the separation we experience as the moment of now. He believed there is no true division between past and future, there is rather a single existence."

Upon the death of a dear friend, Einstein wrote the family and assured them that his death "was of no consequence, 'for us physicists believe the separation between past, present, and future is only an illusion, although a convincing one.'"

Well, that's comforting. Why bother with priests and psychologists when one can consult with a psychophysicist or physicotherapist? But as we all know, when it comes to common sense, Albert was no Einstein.

This illustrates the larger fallacy of trying to explain away the concrete human world for some abstract and experience-distance one. This is what all ideologies do, and unfortunately, it is possible for religion to yield to the ideological temptation.

Indeed, this is one reason why I would say Christianity is a cure for religion, for the simple reason that it is impossible -- or should be, anyway -- to reduce a person to an ideology. If you place person at the top, then any abstraction must be in the service of concrete personhood, not vice versa.

(And we might parenthetically add that Jews are covered here by the I AM; by way of contrast, Allah is the YOU DO OR ELSE!, while Buddhism is the YOU AREN'T AND NEITHER AM I. The New Age god is ANYTHING GOES because I AM S/H/IT.)

Now, none of this means that I am right. It only means that people who disagree with me are fools or knaves.

I am not a literal Whiteheadian, but rather, just plunder what I need from him. And one of his central points is that time matters, not just in an abstract sense, but quite concretely, in the manner in which we experience it. For him, our experience of time is something of an analogue of the very structure of the cosmos, for the cosmos is a process of coming into being (whatever that is) and fading into the past (whatever that is) -- just like our experience of time.

In the book for which the blog was named ten years ago this month, I sheepishly suggested that our otherwise inexplicable love of music has to do with the fact that the very structure of music mirrors the process of reality; it discloses the truth of things. In fact, one of the rejected titles for the book was The Cosmic Suite.

If time is an illusion, it is as if we could comprehend, say, a symphony, by taking all its notes -- which are extended in time -- and compressing them into one big noise, not unlike the final chord of A Day in the Life. Fans of Beatles lore will recall that it was produced by hammering an E chord simultaneously on four keyboards. Except that, with no time, there wouldn't even be the forty second decay that follows.

Now, just because existence is a melody, that doesn't mean the composer has completely fixed the notes, nor that we take no part in its composition. In fact, I would suggest that while the chords are indeed fixed, the existence of freedom allows us a degree of leeway as to how we choose to proceed through the "chordal space" (one might say that time is the space between the cosmic chords).

Indeed, we are so free that we can, if we so desire, ignore the chords altogether, as Ornette Coleman purports to do in his harmolodic approach.

Now, I happen to appreciate Coleman, but only because his music is a kind of "comment" on ordinary music. If his were the only kind of music, then I don't think I'd enjoy music very much. I suppose it's like, say, a horror film or thrill ride, which no one would want to experience constantly. It is frankly why I check out MSNBC once in awhile: for the momentary discordant horror.

About those cosmic chords: what are they? And how do we hear them? Well, you could say they are "archetypes," but that has too much of a Jungian connotation. How about just human nature? Which I suppose leads us back to the book we're discussing, A Theological Anthropology. Man always develops through time, right? Remember adolescence? Childhood? Infancy? What was that all about? For starters, it was an unending process of change. But what -- or who -- was changing? And "toward" whom?

I suppose that's like hearing a melody and trying to figure out what it is that is changing, when it is the nature of a melody to change. This suggests that we are not notes, but rather, unique melodies. Or, each of us takes a unique path through the chordal space of time. We are each a mirror of the Song Supreme.

You could even say that God himself is one endless song with three chords: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And as one chap expressed it, Three Chords Good.

Out of time! This tune will resume tomorrow...

The Cosmic Redemption Center

"Pride prevents intelligence become rationalism from rising to its source" (Schuon). Rather, in denying its source -- which is both deeper and higher -- it replaces Spirit with matter, thus accomplishing the Inversion of inversions, or Mother of All Demons: "proud reason" denies "its own nature," but this hardly prevents it from thinking -- if you call that thought!

The end result is that "torrents of intelligence are wasted for the sake of conjuring away the essential and brilliantly proving the absurd" (ibid.).

It seems that this is what the Obama administration has been reduced to (minus the brilliance) on every front: cobbling together a world that exists only in speech, while insisting that our eyes and bank accounts deceive us.

I know. Breaking news from 2008!

The dogged attempt to conform to the ideological fantasy world of the left is what got us into this multidimensional mess to begin with. I wouldn't even call these dopes ideologues; emotiologues is more like it. The left doesn't actually have an intelligentsia, only a bitter resentia or sappy sentimentia.

The Good News is preceded by the Bad News -- which is precisely what makes it good. In other words, if you haven't first been apprised of the bad news, then the good news will make no sense. It will have no context.

What is liberalism but a systematic attempt to deny people their right to hear the bad news, and to thereby get their affairs in order and handle their isness?

Regarding the bad news, the mature person will say to the physician: give it to me straight, doc! Don't sugarcoat it.

Okay. The bad news is that you have fallen and you can't get up -- at least not on your own, and not all the way.

The good news? There is help, as nonlocal operators are always standing by, ready to assist you.

Me? I don't believe in "guardian angels." Rather, I just rely on mine for all he's worth.

About this fall: it seems -- as alluded to in paragraph one above -- that it is very much wrapped up in this thing called "pride." Indeed, it has always been known that pride cometh before a clusterfark, and that an arrogant attitude precedes a fall landslide.

Now, to even say "fall" is to imply verticality. In the absence of the vertical there is no place to fall, nor any place to ascend to, except in one's own eyes (customarily projected into others in order to mirror and confirm one's pride). What is the lust for fame but a misguided search for confirmation of one's wrongness (i.e., that wrong is right)? Even I am sometimes subject to this temptation, because how could 26 Raccoons be wrong about me?

The contemporary world -- its dominant mentality -- is a tangle of inversions that proceed from the first. This, in my opinion, is what it means to be born into sin. A man cannot exist without a world, even an inverted one. We all have to conform ourselves in some form or fashion to this corrupt place, unless we are given the gift of total detachment, like a Saint Francis. But few people have that particular calling.

Pride --> Fall. Fall --> Stubborn arrogance. Absence of humility --> Gradual loss of ability to recognize, revere, and bow down before what surpasses oneself. ObamaWorld.

Now, there is something about falling that results in "brokenness," as in fragmentation and loss of wholeness. Who claims to be whole? Show me this man, and I will show you an unredeemed assoul!

Conveniently, I am reading a book by Balthasar called A Theological Anthropology, which has also been published as Man in History, but in the original German as The Whole in the Fragment. One might say "the health in the brokenness," or "the one in the many," or "the God in the man," or "the voice in my head."

In chapter one, Balthasar speaks of encountering God in the upper vertical; since he is "already there," this is something like a memory, even though it is a new experience.

And to "think," (quoting Augustine) is "to take things that the memory already contained, but scattered and unarranged, and, by thinking, bring them together."

In this regard, it seems that love and unity go together like... pride and fragmentation: for by engaging in disciplined verticalisthenics, "we are collected and bound up into unity within oneself, whereas we had been scattered abroad in multiplicity" (Augustine). Just as the Fall brings fragmentation in its wake, the assent reveals wholeness, or begins to heal the fragmentation (health and wholeness being cognates):

"To descend into time means to 'wander away,' to 'fall away,' to... sink into the abyss which the creature would be by himself, without God's creative and grace-bestowing act..." (Balthasar). "Turned away from unchanging truth," man "drifts in folly and wretchedness" (Augustine).

You might say that the ascending person and descending light meet in a spiroidal, "ever-increasing mutual penetration" (Balthasar).

Critically, this occurs in matter, in the body, and in history, not in some timeless, unchanging platonic realm above, a la Plotinus or Buddhism. In order to undo the great cosmic inversion, we must both turn around and look up, so that God, so to speak, may be down and in with us. Emmanuel.

In this way time is no longer the corrosive and entropic enemy of the Gnostics, but rather, the medium of creativity -- including the creative response to God, which indeed "redeems the time."

So yes, that is correct: the Raccoon lodge is not unlike the sacred "redemption center" where we bring our old containers to be recycled and remade into new ones.

Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. --2 Cor 4:16

With God All Things Are... Necessary?

A small error slipped past our editor in yesterday's post: I said I was plagiarizing with Schuon's Logic and Transcendence, when I meant From the Divine to the Human. Otherwise, the post is imbued with the usual infallibility, and carries the nihil bobstat and dodgy Imprimatur of Toots. Both books, by the way, are among Schuon's best.

As we've suggested before, it seems that what most troubles people about a process theology is that it seems to limit God's omnipotence and omniscience. Well, maybe. It depends upon how one defines those terms. There are, however, compensations.

For example, if everything is necessary, then nothing is possible. In other words, everything has to happen just as it does, so deal with it.

I was thinking about this over the weekend. What are we to make of the crack that with God all things are possible? If one were a Muslim or Christian predestineer, one would have to say "with God all things are necessary," and that it is our task to simply resign ourselves to these things and to endure them.

But to say that all things are possible with God is to say something with metaphysical implications, for it is to say that "possibility" exists in God.

But this is precisely what classical theologians do not say: rather, God for them is by definition radically complete and lacking in nothing, so how could he contain possibility? As the ArisThomists say, God is pure act, with no potency: "God is changeless because change means passage from potency to act..."

I don't know about that. Maybe it's temperamental: just as apparent limitations on God's omnipotence make a certain kind of person uncomfortable, this notion of utter changelessness gives me the willies.

But it's not just a feeling and a preference; rather, a logical absurdity; there are also the many passages in scripture that describe God as changing -- not in his essence or his primordial nature, of course, but in what Hartshorne would call his "consequent nature."

The picture just entered my thoughtspace of the planets orbiting the sun, held in place by the force of gravity. However, the gravity works both ways: just as the sun "pulls" the earth, the earth pulls the sun, albeit in a comparatively fractional way. Likewise, when you jump up in the air, your body pulls at the earth, just as the earth pulls back.

So, perhaps creation "changes" God in that way: infinitesimally, but still more than zero.

Schuon bats around some of these ideas in a chapter called The Problem of Possibility. Again, if everything is necessary then nothing is possible, so your problem is solved (because problems aren't possible, only necessary).

I suppose this has a certain appeal for a certain type of person. Again, Islam means surrender, i.e., to the radical necessity of Allah's inscrutable whimsy. There's even a certain element of this in Christianity, i.e., "Thy will be done," but it is in the form of a request and a petition, not just a resignation to cosmic inevitability, or a one-sided surrender to Fate.

After all, some things are truly inevitable, which is precisely how we can know that some things are not inevitable, i.e., that they are possible. It is good and healthy to reconcile ourselves to the inevitable, but I don't see how that could be true of the possible, because the latter invites our active participation. In my view, this explains the superiority of the Christian west over the Muslim middle east, because again, recognition of divine possibility -- and our participation in it -- changes everything.

We can still say that God is necessary being, except that this necessary being contains infinite possibility. I would even analogize this to father and mother, the former connoting the unchanging absolute, the latter connoting the divine mercy, and mercy is only possible because of a passionate connection.

In other words, to feel mercy is to be moved, and to be moved is to be changed. But change is precisely what God cannot do if the orthodox view is correct.

Even for God to "know" us requires a change on his part, for what is knowledge but conformity of the subject to the object (or in this case, another subject)? The classical view is that God already knows everything, so there can be no real relationship of knowing us. Rather, it's just God knowing himself, but even then that's an abuse of the term, because knowledge is change.

Here is how Schuon describes the innards of the Godhead, which I find quite compatible with a modified process theology:

"God is both absolute Necessity and infinite Possibility; in the first respect, He transcends everything that is merely possible, whereas, in the second respect, He is, not a given possibility," but rather, "Possibility as such." In other words, in an orthoparadoxical sense, God's necessity includes possibility (which is nearly synonymous with freedom).

After all, if God chooses to create this world instead of that one, that is the actualization of a possibility. Would it be of absolutely no consequence to God if he had created the other world? Then why bother? It flattens everything and turns God into the ultimate nihilist.

Another way Schuon handles this question is to essentially posit "two sides," so to speak, of God. I have always analogized this to our own consciousness, which is always necessarily two-sided as well, i.e., conscious vs. un- and supra-conscious.

In God, this would take the form of Being and of Beyond-Being. Beyond-Being would in turn correspond to God's unchanging essence, whereas Being would correspond to our Creator-God, the personal God, the God to whom we can truly relate and who can truly relate to us (like the sun and planet alluded to above).

Schuon: "We would say consequently that Being is Possibility purely and simply; possibility necessary in itself, but contingent in its increasingly relative contents..."

Again, possibility as such is necessary, but not this or that possibility, hence the reason for prayer. For if there is no possibility of change in God -- if he is complete necessity -- then prayer can only be an exercise in futility.

Or consider the Trinity itself: is it just an unchanging circle, like God chasing his own tail? Or is it an eternally deepening spiral of love?

In conclusion, I would suggest that possibility is the phase space of divine infinitude.

****

Also, the classical God would be a bit like Obama, with no need to attend his intelligence briefings because of his omniscience.

Liberalism and the Duty to be Cosmically Stupid

Interesting case of what we might call applied nominalism:

"By listing and sometimes inventing names for small Islamist splinter groups," Obama can pretend to have "rolled back" terrorism by what amounts to a linguistic strategy, i.e., by "rendering it a disparate series of ragtag jayvees.” This is like defeating organized crime by suggesting that each criminal is a unique person.

For it is written: Rather than an ideological strategy, the Left is a lexicographical tactic. --Aphorisms of Don Colacho

Nominalism is the metaphysical view that denies the existence of universals, which soon enough leads to a denial of the ability to think. But a nominalist is never consistent. In Obama's case, for example, he can support his crude generalization that America is a racist country by pointing to Ferguson. Note that he doesn't do with Ferguson what he does with global jihad: reduce it to a unique case.

Nor does Obama revert to nominalism vis-a-vis any of the victim groups that make up the core of his electoral coalition: women, homosexuals, illegals, public employee unions, etc. We can crudely generalize all day long about them, so long as it is in the form of pandering and not meaningful judgments.

"There is a purpose behind this dizzying proliferation of names assigned to what, in reality, is a global network with multiple tentacles and occasional internecine rivalries... Obama has not quelled our enemies; he has miniaturized them. The jihad and the sharia supremacism that fuels it form the glue that unites the parts into a whole -- a worldwide, ideologically connected movement rooted in Islamic scripture that can project power on the scale of a nation-state and that seeks to conquer the West. The president does not want us to see the threat this way."

But the line in that piece that caught my eye is that Obama doesn’t know what’s important because he doesn’t know what’s true. Truth is always important -- even seemingly trivial truths, since they support and lead up to the Big Truths. Thus, the real problem is that Obama elevates falsehood to importance -- or builds a Tower of Babel on a foundation of gelatin.

For example, it is important that police are engaging in genocide against black men, or that women earn seventy cents on the dollar, or that homosexuality and heterosexuality are identical, or that the planet is warming. None of these things are true, so it is the duty of intelligence to reject them.

Therefore, if you are a liberal, it is your solemn duty to be systematically stupid.

That's all I wanted to say about that. Just a little warm-up act. What I really want to talk about is the divine and cosmic orders, or the deep structure, you might say, of the vertical and horizontal worlds. Alert and patient readers will recall that about a year ago I thought I had discovered a way to reconcile tradition with the process theology of Charles Harsthorne. We're about to find out if that was true or just an unimportant boast.

It all begins with chapter four of Schuon's Logic and Transcendence, awkwardly titled "The Interplay of the Hypostases." A hypostasis, if you don't know, is "something that stands under and supports." It is the "foundation," or "underlying or essential part of anything as distinguished from attributes" -- the "substance, essence, or essential principle."

There is also a specifically Christian connotation, of course, in the nature of the Trinity. I believe the Spirit of the Trinity will come back to haunt us later in the post, especially with regard to its "substance," the reason being that this substance must actually be a process and a relation -- or relation-in-process -- so it's a little misleading to call it a substance at all, since the latter implies a kind of stasis.

So right away we see that the first part of this post was not wholly irrelevant, because we are right back to the question of universals -- indeed, the ultimate universals whereby we may understand the nature of reality. Conversely, without these universals we are lost in the universe. Literally, since "universe" is the ultimate universal short of God (and I would say because of God).

In other words, we all implicitly assume the existence of a universe, even though no one has ever seen it, nor will anyone ever be able to logically prove its existence. In order for there to be a universe, there must be a single underlying order to the whole of existence, something that binds all of reality into a comm-unity. Unless you are a nominalist, in which case we are tossed into a world that is ultimately absurd.

Schuon's writing is usually characterized by simplicity and clarity, but this is one of his more challenging essays. He even says as much at the end of the chapter, that "We are here at the limit of what can be expressed," so "it is no one's fault if within every enunciation of this kind there remain unanswerable questions, at least with respect to a given need for logical explanation on the plane of dialectics." What he hopes to provide are "points of reference that permit us to open ourselves to the ineffable to the extent possible" -- or to deploy words right to the edge of the vast What Cannot Be Said (unless by God himself).

Even so, one can still say a lot more than most people suspect but simply file away under the heading of "mystery." Nevertheless, at the end of the deity, we have to concede that "ultimate comprehension" orthoparadoxically "coincides with the inexpressible" -- or that we know (in our hearts) much more than we can say. Conversely, it is often the case that the less one knows the more one can say, therefore Obama.

Schuon begins with the Absolute, but Absoluteness has certain immediate corollaries, most importantly, infinitude. Borrowing a geometrical analogy, if the Absolute is the point, then the Infinite is the circle surrounding it -- or better, an infinite series of rays emanating out from the center.

Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but later in the essay he compares the point to Father, the Circle to Son, and the radii to Holy Spirit. You could say that this represents the ultimate cartography of spirit, and that it repeats itself across dimension and scale.

You could also say that the point is the One, while the radii redound to the Many. You could also say that the latter are the precipitate of God's radiant goodness, which we experience herebelow in the form of universal-transcendentals such as beauty, truth, and virtue, to the whole host of possible perfections. Or, to quote Schuon, it "gives rise to an operative Infinitude and to a manifested Good," or to "a hypostatic hierarchy 'in a descending direction,'" which, "in the final analysis, is creative" (emphasis mine).

The only potential stumbling block for the Christian is that this geometrical-dynamic might imply that this is some kind of impersonal emanation as opposed to the free activity of a creator-person. Not to worry. Freedom and creativity and love are smack dab in the middle of this thing, not accidental but essential to its inexhaustible dynamism.

About those things that cannot be understood, or that exist outside man's comprehension: one of the biggies is evil, in that we can understand in theory why it has to be here -- i.e., that we are not God and this is not paradise -- but when confronted with the individual act of evil -- say, decapitating a coworker -- we come up against a wall of incomprehension. Why? Perhaps because evil operates outside God, and therefore within a realm of cosmic absurdity. You could say that "there is nothing to understand," which is what makes it evil, precisely. Which is why it is more effective to fight evil with a hammer and mop than with tenure.

However, you will have noticed that one of the foundational insanities of liberalism is that evil does have some simple explanation: that it is somehow our fault. The left said this during the Cold War, just as they say it of the war on global jihad. They say it of domestic criminals (so long as they are members of a certified victim group), just as they say it of most any evil that can befall a person through his own irresponsibility or bad values. Liberalism is a Rush to Non-Judgment, as in it's not your fault! But one of the things nominalism eventually eliminated was our freedom (and therefore responsibility), because freedom is either transcendental or nonexistent.

So, that's about it for today. To be continued...

A Window on the World, a Mirror of Reality, a Ladder to God

Apropos of yesterday's post on the mental slavery of feminism, it seems that folks these days are in need of liberation from liberation -- from faux liberation, or from various forms of slavery masquerading as liberation.

Remember "sexual liberation"? How about freedom through drugs? How did homosexual liberation work out -- at least before the state covered their asses by spending a disproportionate amount of our money on developing a treatment?

There is no "freedom from" without a "freedom to"; the former is the province of politics -- i.e., negative liberty -- while the latter is the province of ethics. Without the freedom to do what is right, one has only the liberty to do what is wrong. In other words, human behavior is intrinsically teleological -- or, the very existence of the virtues reveals the shadow of the cosmic telos herebelow.

"The noble man," writes Schuon, "is one who masters himself and loves to master himself," while "the base man is one who does not master himself and shrinks in horror from mastering himself." Thus, modern liberalism is like a factory for producing ignoble men and base women. To ask such human beastlings to be dignified is like asking Al Sharpton to vacate the sewer.

Furthermore, "The noble man feels the need to admire, to venerate, to worship; the vile man on the contrary tends to belittle, even to mock, which is the way the devil sees things" (ibid). The cheap, mocking humor of a Bill Maher or Jon Stewart is of this nature. They don't even want to understand what they mock, because it would diminish their unearned superiority. Intellectual narcissism only survives in a sharply constricted world, or in a sea of their own stupidity.

Even a hundred years ago, Chesterton had enough insight into the modern world to see that real "liberality" (i.e., of spirit) has "nothing to do with liberalism; in fact, it cannot even now coexist with liberalism."

Nor, for that matter, can someone interested in human beings in their integral totality coexist with what are called "humanists," who take one aspect of man and absurdly expand it to the whole. Synedochebags.

Speaking of cosmic orthodoxy, one of the primordial distinctions we must make is between man and God. To say "man" is to evoke God, as relative to absolute. Man the relative potentially spans the vertical axis "where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes spirit." It is very much like those paintings of the head-chakra opening out to eternity, or of luminous halos that signify the same.

For, just as the five senses are windows on the world, the intellect is like a two-way mirror that reflects both matter and spirit, or world and God (and world because God). The intelligence actually liberates us in six directions, up and down, in and out, forward and back (or divine and human, interior and exterior, past and future). Moreover, each of these conditions the others, so as one expands, so too do the others. Isn't it obvious that the wider the intellect, the more one perceives of the world?

Likewise the truism that the unexamined life is not worth living; one might say that the unexamined life can't be lived, at least humanly speaking, for such an examination is required in order to colonize the interior world. Otherwise we become subject to it, i.e., to mechanical patterns and mind parasites of various kinds.

About man's vertical bi-directionality, the irony is that a Christian, according to Chesterton, is "a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses." The world reveals itself to the intellect for the very reason that both are revelations.

But the unaided intellect could only go so far up until a man became "a miraculous medium between heaven and earth."

This is indeed why the cosmic ladder goes all the way to the top, because it first went all the way to the bottom. Or just say humility and plenitude, kenosis and theosis.

Gosh! No time today, and less time Monday...

Why are Feminists Such Pussies?

We are batting around this idea of a Cosmic Orthodoxy. If there were a Cosmic Orthodoxy -- a correct way to think and to act -- life sure would be less complicated, wouldn't it? We could just get on with it, instead of having to take time out of our day to battle the follies of liberalism and other cosmic heresies -- although I suppose it must be conceded that the heretics among us do unwittingly serve one purpose, in that they provide us with dense objects against which to burnish our sacred pliers with the blowtorch of love.

I suppose the rock bottom principle underlying the possibility of a Cosmic Orthodoxy would be one, i.e., one human nature and one truth which discloses itself in both material and immaterial reality.

In our quantitative age we seem to have no trouble agreeing that this is the case on the lower planes -- e.g., physics and chemistry -- because few people argue for a multicultural approach to these disciplines (although, to be sure, there are a few in every cloud).

Then again, these same people would disagree that these planes are "lower," since they reject verticality a priori. Thus, to the extent that reality exists, they would insist that it is physical, or electrochemical, or genetic, or what have you -- anything, so long as it isn't human, let alone divine (however, as we shall see, those latter two categories always manage to slip in through the backdoor).

Now, to even perceive the simplest object is to participate in transcendent oneness, otherwise perception would consist in perceiving only an atemporal formless blob with no outlines or divisions -- not even the self-evident distinction between the senses and the intellect.

True, our unaided senses would essentially reveal the murky contours of a blob, but the mind never actually stops there. Even infants learn almost right away that they live in a sea of objects, not just a sea. In other words, they are liberated into and then out of the senses -- and thus ushered into the world of transcendence -- as a birthright (unless something goes catastrophically wrong, as in severe autism or early tenure).

But for a human being, "unaided senses" is very much like the fanciful notion of an "unrelated person." In truth -- and this would be another element of cosmic orthodoxy -- humans are irreducibly intersubjective, meaning that they are members of one another from the ground up. For me, this is a reflection of Trinity (the ultimate metacosmic principle) in man, the microcosmos.

But this intersubjectivity also applies to the nonhuman world. In other words, we are thoroughly entangled with the world, which is precisely why we can truly know it. If this weren't the case, then we would indeed be trapped in Kant's phenomenal world, i.e., in the forms of our sensibility.

Chesterton provides a vivid analogy, writing that it would be as if all knowledge were nothing more than pictures we paint on the inside of our windows, and then mistake for the landscape outside the house.

Yes, Kantianism really is that stupid -- and infertile, since it is impossible for the intellect to mate with reality. Rather, it can only mate with its own images, which is to say, engage in cognitive onanism and call it truth.

This is very much like devoting one's sexual energy to pornography and calling it love. But self-love is an oxymoron. Love is other-directed, beginning in God. Thus, it is important to be lovable, so as to be worthy of the love received. Self-love bypasses this trinitarian circuit. The narcissist's soulmate is himself. Nice to know Obama has found his.

One of our cosmic principles is, of course, that the ultimate reality is not substance but person; or, one might say that the ultimate substance is a dynamic threeness, not any kind of isolated monad. The moment you think about this, it is soph-evident.

To cite one obvious and all-pervading example, there is the knower; there is the known; and there is knowledge. Like the Trinity, these are distinct but not radically divided from one another, or we couldn't really know anything. Rather, we would again be confirmed old bachelors consoling ourselves with mental masturbation, like Kant.

Thus, as Chesterton said -- but I will shout for emphasis -- "SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS WAS ONE OF THE GREAT LIBERATORS OF THE HUMAN INTELLECT"! How? Well, for starters, he liberates us into reality. I was reminded of this yesterday in viewing this short video on feminism. Think of the cosmic irony: the most self-styled "liberated" women in history are voluntarily enslaved to a masturbatory ideology!

Now, the Raccoon believes that if you are going to submit to an ideology, then make it a fun one, not a grim, resentful, joyless, and embittered one, right?

If Kant is right and perception is reality -- or the only reality we can know -- then at least perceive something pleasant, dammit! Besides, as alluded to above, your prime directive is to be lovable, not to imagine that you will finally love yourself if only men stop controlling your pathetic life. There is a reason feminists are unloveable and therefore filled with so much anger and resentment.

They are also weak-willed pussies. I mean, why the reliance on patriarchal government to somehow rid the world of patriarchy? Putting a woman in the White House will be every bit as effective in promoting female happiness as Obama has been in making blacks so deliriously happy. It will only highlight the fact that the state can't cure your misery.

source: Happy and not embittered Acres

Cosmic Heresies and their Alternative

In the Aristotle/Thomist tradition, the function of the intellect is to essentially identify form in substance -- to "pull" universals out of particulars, or knowledge from the senses; it is what allows us to see any dawg and immediately know he is a member of the category "Clinton."

It seems to me that Chesterton is trying to do something similar in his book on Thomas Aquinas, only on a much higher level: that is, pull the essence of Thomas himself from his sprawling corpus, which most of us would have neither the time nor brains to assimilate. Etienne Gilson remarked that he had spent his life studying and writing about St. Thomas, and now a journalist comes along and "writes a better book about him than I have!"

This idea of a simple essence -- or essential simplicity -- appeals to me, for reasons alluded to in yesterday's post: I have this sense that things can't be as complicated as scholars make them out to be, and that deep down there must be a simple explanation for It All -- or at least a simple approach to it, and that so many arguments between scholars are at the margins of reality, not at the center. (And I mean scholars within tradition; those outside tradition are each arguing from their own manmade centers, so there is no hope for them.)

Yesterday I read that Charles Hartshorne once planned on writing a book to be called The Universal Orthodoxy. I'm kind of glad he never got around to it, because I am definitely going to steal that title if I ever write another book. Frankly, I've been looking everywhere for that title, so I am relieved to have finally found it. Cosmic Orthodoxy would work just as well.

Now, in order to write it, I will have to do for me what Chesterton did for Aquinas: extract the essence without making me look like a simpleton. But the idea of a Universal Orthodoxy would follow from the principle that there is a Universal Man, or that man exists.

Remember, a nominalist doesn't believe in the existence of universals, so there is no category of man, only individual human beings. Thus, once you take a single step down that path, there is no possibility of universality, of a metacosmic key to unlock the damn world enigma. And in rejecting Thomas, the world stepped right on to that path.

With one exception: mathematics. Mathematics is clearly universal, although there are no doubt feminists and professors of black studies who would insist that math is gendered or that the white man's numbers are privileged. But we give those people Ph.D.s to humor them and make them go away, not because we take them seriously. Everyone else knows that math is math, and that there's not a damn thing we can do about it (notwithstanding liberals who abuse math and statistics to prove anything; the fact that they bother to misuse math is a kind of backhanded respect for its authority).

Math is all well and good, but no one has ever -- or will ever -- be able to use it to create a cosmos. In other words, let's say that physicists eventually find a way to resolve the four fundamental forces into one simple equation. Remember, the equation is abstracted from reality. You cannot reverse imagineer the thing, and magically produce reality from the equation.

It seems to me that this is something those atheistic devotees of science always forget: that science is about reality, not reality itself. Reality Itself always transcends science, obviously. It is an Inexhaustible Mystery, which we mean quite literally.

For what is a mystery? Rizzi speaks for us in defining it as "an area of reality so intelligible that we can never understand it all." So to say "reality is a mystery" is not some kind of evasion or mystagoguery, but an objective principle, indeed, one of the First Unavoidable Principles of Cosmic Orthodoxy.

In this sense, reality -- or being -- is not a puzzle to be solved but a mystery to be enjoyed. True, there can be annoying mysteries, like, for example, "Why do we tolerate the IRS?," but that's not a true mystery, because there is a rational explanation, no matter how irrational.

But real mystery flows from the inexhaustible intelligibility of being. Notice that the essence of scientism is to imagine it possible to contain this mystery in science, which usually comes down to math -- the notion that quality can be reduced to quantity, semantics to syntax, subject to object. Thus, these dweebs must feel that reality is some kind of annoying mystery, like the IRS.

For, you see, nominalism -- which is a cosmic heresy -- is nevertheless, like all heresies, a partial truth. This is most relevant in the study of human beings. The fact that we can say "human being" means that man may be reduced to a universal category.

However, the fact that each soul is unique means that every man escapes -- transcends -- category. Or in other words, that each man is an inexhaustible mystery, analogous in this way to the God who birthed him and to the Being that nourishes him.

Which is also why leftism is a cosmic heresy -- well, there are actually a number of reasons why, but in this case because its first principle is to sacrifice the individual for the group, and thus hack away at man's very reason for being; for if man isn't a significant other, he is an absurd and insignificant unit of the state.

Not much time this morning... to be continued...

A Manichee in the White House

People correctly intuit that truth must be simple, which is why they so often seem to organize themselves around a simple -- but incorrect -- truth.

But "incorrect truth" is an oxymoron, so it is equivalent to ordering oneself to error, i.e., failing to discriminate between appearance and reality. And if you don't do that, you can't even get to first base, let alone back home, which is only the whole point of the game of life.

Islam is famous, for example for simplifying religion to the point of gross distortion. True, "there is no God but God," but such a formulation goes way too far in excluding the non-God, i.e., the good old Many, and if we reduce the Many to the One, then there is pretty much no point to existence -- at least our existence. God may have some weird point, but it is utterly unknowable to us, not even by analogy.

Chesterton wants us to retain three simple but extremely fruitful principles from Aquinas, and let the philosophers argue over the details.

For what is a philosopher, anyway? Among other things, he is someone who is not only "trained to put up with philosophers," but "patient with clever people when they indulge in folly." But a Raccoon does not suffer academia gladly, so he doesn't look back, and lets the dead bury the tenured.

These Three Things are 1) the goodness of creation, 2) moderate realism, AKA the vindication of common sense, and 3) "the primacy of the doctrine of being." To appreciate these Three is... well, it is to be sane. It is also to be human. And ultimately it is to turn the world right-side-up -- that is, if you have inherited the inverted world of the left and are in need of reorientation.

And most of us can't help assimilating some of this inverted world, because it is the world we are expected to live in. Or in other words, it's Barack's world, we just pay taxes in it (and we are merely using Obama as a symbol for the much wider and deeper pneumapathology he represents).

Dennis Prager touched on this during his program yesterday. He mentioned the absurdity of a nut like Paul Krugman accusing conservatives of "living in a bubble." If only! It is quite literally impossible for a conservative to get through the day without being drenched in liberalism. Obviously it is everywhere, in the news media, in the educational establishment, in entertainment. You would have to live like the Amish to somehow avoid it.

However, a New York liberal such as Paul Krugman can easily lead an intellectually friction-free existence, encountering no serious opposition. One suspects that this is at the heart of his and Obama's incessant deployment of the Straw Man. It is the closest thing to disagreement in their perfectly insulated bubbles.

With respect to the goodness of creation, Thomas was especially eager to shoot down Manichaeism, which continues, like a virus, to mutate into ghastly new forms.

At its root, Manichaeism is always dualistic and, one might say, excessively Platonic. It denies the intrinsic goodness of creation, and therefore of embodiment and humanness. If its doctrine is dualism, then its method is "ascent," i.e., fleeing up and outta here, a la Plotinus, over the wall of flesh and into the pure land of transcendental idea.

One sees an example of modern day Manichaeism in the climate fantasists who regard man as a cancer on the planet, or in the neo-Marxian class warriors who conflate wealth and darkness (except when they don't), or in black Muslims who think a big-headed scientist named Yacub created whites to be a "race of devils." But enough about Eric Holder.

"The exact problem" with these idiots is the identification of "purity with sterility, in contrast to Thomas Aquinas who always identified purity with fruitfulness" (from the introduction). What he means is that the Manichee withdraws into kind of transcendental world of perfect ideas -- which is precisely what ideologues such as Obama do.

As the old joke about economists goes, "sure it works in reality, but will it work in theory?" One could say the same of the climate fanatics: "sure, the planet isn't warming. But that's only in the real world. The question is, does it agree with our models?" Or, one could say it of metaphysical Darwinists: "true, there is an infinite gap between animal and man. But how does that square with these bones we dug up?"

Now, Manichaeism shouldn't even be thought of as any ideology per se, because beneath that it is simply a universal temptation, or one might say intrinsic cosmic heresy. It is an error just waiting to happen, every time and to everyone. We are always free to go down -- or up, rather -- that path, but it will guarantee that we end up infertile eggheads.

The modern scam, for example, is predicated on people such as Descartes, who famously divided mind from matter, or Kant, who went one step further and divided mind from reality. How can this not guarantee infertility or monstrous pneumacognitive birth defects somewhere down the line?

Monstrous? Yes, of course. Look at Hitler, dividing Jew from Aryan, or Stalin, dividing bourgeois from proletariat, or Obama, who has managed to create more division than any president in our history because of his fundamentally divisive ideology. Before all else he is a Manichee, as evidenced, for example, by his membership in that heretical gnostic Christian sect, e.g.,

"It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another hemisphere… That’s the world! On which hope sits!"

Such is the audacious hope of the political Manichee. Has this hope bore fruit? If so, what kind? You first. Looks rotten to me.

A Liberal is a Man Who Can Prove Everything and Nothing

While perusing this piece this morning at Ace of Spades, a thought occurred to me: I don't have time for a post.

Then another thought: it is more than a little interesting that the logic of the left is so flexible -- a less charitable person would say nonexistent -- that it can prove anything. With one exception: the existence of God.

How weird is that? Even if we concede that the existence of God is absurd, this should pose no barrier whatsoever to the left. Rather, the very existence of the left is rooted in logical absurdities, in comparison to which God is the one and only thing of which we may be absolutely certain.

Now, as usual, this will sound polemical and bobastic, but it is not. Just think of the uses to which "leftist logic" is put, and to the many impossibilities it is able to prove: that there is no fundamental difference between men and women; or that children aren't entitled to a mother and father; or that earth is warming due to carbon even though carbon has increased by 25% over the past 17 years while the temperature has remained stable; or that charging more for energy will result in less demand, while charging more for labor will have no effect on demand; or that genes explain everything except racial differences; or that free will doesn't exist; or that homosexuality is natural and normal; or that our minds do not disclose reality... one could go on and on.

But the whole modern project is rooted in a profound and primordial illogicality, an outright rejection of reality. Once you accept this initial illogicality, then it is like the faith with which All Things Are Possible. Once you leave logic behind, then you can indeed use it to prove anything.

Chesterton makes this same point in his book on Aquinas, that "Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to reality; to what, if left to themselves, common men would call common sense."

Rather, each philosophy starts "with a paradox; a peculiar point of view demanding the sacrifice of what they [the common man] would call a sane point of view." One finds this initial absurdity in everyone from Descartes and Kant on down to the tenured rabble of today.

It's easy: just start by believing one little thing "that no normal man would believe," and the magic never ends. Chesterton cites several typical examples, e.g., that law is above natural right, or that things are only ideas, or that everything is relative. True, one cannot strictly prove, say, that solipsism isn't the case, but that doesn't mean that solipsism is the case. You also can't prove your eyes see the real world, but that doesn't prove you're blind.

Thomas too asks us to make just one little leap of faith, but this leap ushers us into the real world, for the simple reason that it asks us to believe that our senses disclose the real world. Yes, you can, under a multitude of guises, reject that leap of faith, but to do so is to commit spiritual suicide and cognitive cluelesside.

I wasn't kidding about having no time. To be continued tomorrow...

The Dreary Pursuit of Pleasure and the Joyful Pursuit of Truth

I've been reading Volume 2 of Chesterton's collected works, which includes The Everlasting Man and his biographies of Saints Francis and Thomas.

Chesterton, along with C.S. Lewis, is of course one of the more enduringly popular Christian apologists. Back in 2007 we devoted a long-forgotten series of posts to his Orthodoxy (1908), which was actually written prior to his being received into the Church. The Everlasting Man (1925) is a post-conversion meditation on some of the same themes.

I find that Chesterton's style of writing takes some getting used to. He is definitely not the most organized thinker, let alone systematic, nor is he concise.

The word "sprawling" comes to mind. Undisciplined. At times we see a kind of back-and-forth between insipid intellectual laziness and inspired poetic energy that sends sparks flying from the page. It almost reads as if it were dictated during a manic episode and then not edited.

A typical paragraph fills a whole page, and he throws in all sorts of then-contemporary references that make no sense to us now, often as targets of good-natured opprobrium. He easily veers into irrelevant tangents, nor can he resist the most formulaic wordplay and cringe-making puns. Furthermore, being that he is essentially a journalist, he has no particular qualifications to bloviate on matters that are best left to highly trained philosophers, theologians, scientists, and metaphysicians.

In short, this man is a Raccoon!

I immediately thought of him this morning when reading this awful story about some goofy kids in Iran being whipped and imprisoned for being goofy kids and having fun. Can you imagine?

No, you cannot. Why? Because you have been Christianized in a civilization that has been slowly leavened by Christian joy for the past two millennia. Indeed, the joylessness of the mullahs resembles nothing so much as the dreadful joylessness of the spiritual gulag of leftism. Neither permits real joy. Where the left differs from Islam is that it not only permits but encourages the joyless pursuit of pleasure, i.e., the daily grind of the hedonic treadmill.

Also, the left won't whip you (yet) for being politically incorrect, just ruin your reputation and career: "Authorities arrested the group for contravening Iran’s strict vulgarity laws, which prohibit public displays of dancing.... The Islamic Republic condemned the video as a 'vulgar clip which hurt public chastity,'" and "the whole group was told they would receive 91 lashes each."

I checked out the video, and it is interesting how their dancing is so charmingly awkward and stiff -- as if they have just been incarnated and are getting used to having bodies. It reminds me of a story I read about 15 years ago, about special classes in Japan where they teach people how to smile.

Now, the music to which they are dancing is African American, and such music could only have arisen in America. The song is quite overtly retro, and sounds like an unreleased Curtis Mayfield tune from the early '70s (Prof. Wiki agrees), back when black music was still joyously liberating instead of angry, repulsive, and animalistic.

The reason why their music was joyous was because it was again leavened with Christian joy. After all, a hundred years ago blacks had much more reason to be miserable than they do today, and yet, that is when gospel music emerged and thrived. You'd think they would have been be as morose as the mullahs, but gospel is the very sound of joy, and virtually all the classic soul singers of the 1960s and '70s were trained in the church (not to mention all of the early fathers of rock, e.g., Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny Cash; rock only starts becoming palpably dark in the late 1960s, after being hijacked as the primary means of expression for the cultural left).

After all, Christianity (we're going to leave Judaism to the side, because it is a special case) is quite literally the original liberalism -- liberality of mind, of heart, and of body. This is precisely what set it apart in the ancient world: what in the name of Zeus are these people so damn happy about?

Now, this is not to say that the history of Christianity doesn't reveal the gradual encrustation and suppression of this primordial joy -- after all, we're talking about humans here -- but the joy always breaks through and returns, because that is what Christianity is, essentially. Good news, right? Few writers more effectively convey the sober silliness of this truth than Chesterton.

St. Thomas was, for example, "one of the great liberators of the human intellect." This cannot be emphasized enough, because virtually all the competing philosophies of modernity are enslaving, not liberating. Starting with Descartes and Kant on down, most modern philosophies condemn us to a prison of neurology, or linguistics, or economics, or race, or power, or the unconscious, or what have you. We descend from "the truth sets you free" to "there is no truth, and you're not free to discover it anyway."

Thomas says NO: that you are -- at least potentially -- liberated into the real world, which is both beautiful and intelligible, the very ladder with which we may reascend to the Creator. He brings the good intellectual news that "the senses [are] the windows of the soul and that the reason [has] a divine right to feed upon facts..." It is Thomas who teaches "that Reason can be trusted," whereas "it was the very life of Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy."

Thus we see a hidden and unappreciated link between this latter tradition and any other modern or postmodern philosophy which denies man the intrinsic right to know What the Hell is Basically Going On. Not the details per se, but just the possibility.

As we have rhetorically asked in the past, why on earth are the people who so denigrate humans called humanists? Thomas and his ilk are the ultimate humanists, in that they insist "on the immense importance of the human being in the theological scheme of things." And when we say "human being," we again mean in all dimensions, body, soul, and intellect. You might say that the body is entitled to joy for the same reason the intellect is entitled to truth and the soul to beauty. God did not create us to starve in a prison of matter or a desert of quantity.

Indeed, "a Christian means a man who believes that deity or sanctity has attached to matter or entered the world of the senses." Thus, the Christian Raccoon is literally the most materialistic of all, just as he is the most humanistic. If Christ is "the miraculous medium between heaven and earth," then matter is infused with the highest principle. Every good scientist knows this, and yet, places an arbitrary limit on his own mind, or sets up a roadblock at the outskirts of logic.

Chesterton's pal Belloc says much the same thing, that "delight in existence itself" is "the highest mark of sanity and and reality." The ephemeral is always bisected by the permanent, and our task is to recognize this perpetual crossroads and know that I AM. It's why we call it The Vertical Church of What's Happening Now.

Trapped by Clarity, Liberated by Person-ality

Once again insophicient time for a fully half-baked post. Since it is Mrs. G's birthday, I magnanimously volunteered to transport the Boy to school.

Certain ideas are only clear when formulated, but others are only clear when alluded to. --Aphorisms of Don Colacho

In The Science Before Science, Rizzi writes of how "The temptation to sacrifice reality for clarity has trapped many an otherwise strong and competent thinker."

In fact, it seems to trap most any thinker, so long as he is reduced to swimming in his own ideas. In the Christian tradition our natural reason is "healed," or, if you prefer, prolonged, by transnatural grace, which is really the only way for reason to exit its own tautology -- to escape the clutches of Gödel and to turn it from a closed circle to an open spiral.

We could also say that we are unknowculated against the Big Bad Idea in light of the fact that the first and last metacosmic fact is Person, not any abstract idea. Certainly no mere idea can save us, no matter how stupid.

Only loyalty to a person frees us from all self-complacency. --Don Colacho

As we have said before (paraphrasing someone), the answer can be the disease that kills curiosity; or, it can confer a kind of quickndirty knowledge that actually prevents -- or pretends at -- understanding.

Thus, Rizzi writes that "a clarity that appears too soon or is too broad and facile is likely to be a counterfeit achieved by ignoring the full depth and breadth of the reality under consideration."

Human beings are born with an epistemophilic instinct: a vertically orienting love of truth, or an innate desire to understand What the Hell is Going On. The other day I was surprised and belighted to run into the following quote by Chesterton at Happy Acres:

"The primary things in the universe, before all letters and all language, are a note of exclamation and a note of interrogation."

If I understand him rightly, he is talking about ! and ?. In the book I combined them into (?!), AKA the sacred WTF. Chesterton seems to pathologize the (?), linking it to serpentine skepticism and to our primordial calamity: "nor has there been any other battle since the beginning of the world."

But what if we regard them as complementary rather than oppositional? In that case they will work together like anabolism and catabolism, or analysis and synthesis, i.e., breaking down and putting back together; or, perhaps the joyous (!) of the right cerebral hemisphere complemented by the more detached (?) of the left.

One could also say that the science before science is a kind of pure (!), i.e., the overwhelming facticity and utterly surprising intelligibility of being: there is reality, always staring us in the face. Unless our senses are like totally lying to us, in which case you are confused or deranged or tenured (but I repeat myself).

This is of course where science begins, and must begin: with our experience of the objects of sensation. But then comes the (?) with which we investigate those objects of experience.

Now, either there is a rational foundation of our intellectual life, or there isn't. And regardless of what any postmodern (or post-Aquinas, really) philosopher pretends to believe, he still begins in the pre-rational world of (!), only departing from it in thought. "Thus," writes Rizzi, such pneumapaths "oscillate between unconscious acceptance and a conscious rejection."

This is the primordial incoherence at the heart of modern incoherence. "Such a rejection leaves the root of one's thinking ungrounded, hanging in the air, where it is free to blow in the wind of one's will" (ibid.).

Or, one could say that the Primordial Rejection of O is founded on a conversion of will to willfulness, or from freedom to compulsion. The divine gift of freedom is hijacked, so to speak, by motives having nothing to do with truth.

Therefore, as anyone who hasn't attended graduate school already knows, "to say that there is 'no such thing as truth' is to say words without meaning" (ibid.).

However, when we affirm the truth of Truth, we are by no means talking about anything the human mind could ever contain, thank God! You might say that if we could know it, it wouldn't be Truth. Rather, it always contains us.

You could say it is a kind of "higher dimensional" Truth, or, better, the eternal sponsor of all truth. I would go so far as to say that the intellect is woven from truth, or that truth is its substance. Therefore, the love of truth is really like soul calling out to soul and actually getting a response -- which always provokes that (!)

There are certain types of ignorance that enrich that enrich the mind and certain types of knowledge that impoverish it. --Aphorisms of Don Colacho

Obama or Bust

Didn't get far with this, and now I have to get some work done. Bad traffic taking the boy to school, which is why Obama needs to give amnesty to all those illegals, so our streets can become even more crowded and maybe people will give up driving and Save the Planet.

Is it unacceptable to wonder if the world might be much better off if Islam had never existed? As far as I know, we are in possession of no contradictory data since Churchill's crack about the dreadful curses with which Mohammedanism burdens its votaries. Vanderleun's snidebar reminds us of their

"improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement, the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men" (Churchill).

Just sayin'. The same could be said of Christianity, but only by someone as incredibly courageous, intellectual, historically informed, and unconsciously Christianized as, say, Bill Maher.

Christianized?

Yes. For example, Chesterton expresses it well when he speaks of how "Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other" -- specifically, that there is a deep relationship between infant and Cosmos, or between the impotent baby and the omnipotent Creator.

We often hear liberals claim how their latest power grab is All About the Children -- which it usually is, in a perverse and destructive way -- but they are nevertheless what Chesterton calls "psychological Christians" even when they aren't "theological ones." They are the form without the content, the intelligence without the wisdom, and especially the sentiment without the substance. I mean, consider our children's Soup Nazi, Michelle Obama.

I just knew that if I googled it, it would be there waiting for me -->

Now, think about Obama, who boasts that America is one of the largest Muslim countries in the world, but sends the bust of Churchill back to Mother England. How nutty is that?

So, we have a choice: Obama or bust. We'll take the bust back, please.

Rebecca Bynum writes of how, in the Christianized west, there are distinctions between God, religion, and the political order. Not so in Islam, where these three are permanently fused: "Islam has effectively replaced God. Since for Muslims the only allowable method of finding God's will is obedience to Islam, for all intents and purposes, Islam is God."

This is what troubles me about evangelical predestineers, because if their doctrine is true, it is literally the case that there is no distinction between God and creation, therefore man = God. In other words, if everything I do and think is a direct result of God's will, how am I distinct from God? I am no longer an individual, nor do I have any rights or duties, since I am just a divine cat's-paw.

Think again of how this differs from orthodox Christianity, in which the most helpless thing in the world -- the human infant -- is of ultimate value. In Islam it is the other way around, i.e., it preserves the downside-up reality that Christianity is here to invert: "Like a hive of bees, the group must be protected by the sacrifice of the individual. Islam is the queen for which all individuals sacrifice" (ibid.). Who needs it?