You Can Learn A Lot From a Political Sociopath

About the authoritarian liberal bullshit machine (which is as close to perpetulant emotion as we'll ever get): Green writes that "when language becomes dislocated from truth, some power or set of powers other than truth is at work."

And among other things, it is always a narcissistic power -- or must partake of pathological narcissism -- since it sets the self over and above the truth it is designed to serve. It renders one superior to truth, something that is actually impossible in principle, since there can be nothing higher than truth. Therefore it is an absurdity.

It turns out that Milton was on the case four centuries ago, observing that when language "becomes irregular and depraved," it is followed by the "ruin and degradation" of the people, who become "listless, supine, and ripe for servitude." Low-information, servile, dependent -- when the left talks about its "ground game," these are the medullards it needs to rouse from the couch in order to support their masters on election day. Then they can go back go sleep.

But we can of course go back even further, since Christianity revolves around this question of Word and embodied truth. Words ultimately matter because the Word is en-mattered.

Two forms of corruption may enter language, one in the space between words and reality, another in the space between speaker and listener.

Note that modernism put the kibosh on the first, while postmodernism eradicates the second. In other words, Kant says we cannot know the world, only our own ideas about it, while Derrida and the rest of the postmodern rabble say we can't even do that -- rather, only issue words about words about words, in the absurcular conspiring fraud known as tenure.

Green references our good friend Josef Pieper, who says that "sophisticated language, disconnected from the roots of truth.... invariably turns into an instrument of power."

I've mentioned before that working with severely mentally ill patients can offer insight into the workings of the relatively sane, because they have the same mechanisms we do, only hypertrophied and distorted, e.g., splitting and projection. No doubt Pieper gained insight into the everyday pathologies of language by observing the Nazis up close.

If one is not guided by truth, then to what is one oriented? This question implies a telos to thought, but here again modernity has cut us off from this path. To insist that such a path exists is to exile oneself from the powerworld of the left.

Recall the two spaces, between person and world, and person and person. If there isn't truth between person and person, then what? Whoever "is guided by something other than the truth," writes Pieper, "no longer considers the other as partner, as equal. In fact, he no longer respects the other as a human person."

Which brings us right back to Jonathan Gruber and ObamaCare: he acknowledges that the Obama administration lies to us because we are stupid. But it's really the other way around: they first contemptuously deprive us of our personhood ("bitter clingers," and all the rest), then exert power over us, being that the lie is in the service of the greater end of power. "Such speech," adds Pieper, is "in contradiction to the nature of language," since it "intends not to communicate but to manipulate."

Remember, in our nation, ultimate power resides in the citizenry. Therefore, every time the state lies to us, it is for the purpose of transferring some of that power to itself.

Or in other words, the Obama administration cannot speak the truth, for it would empower the citizenry over and against the state. Gruber is absolutely correct that ObamaCare could never have passed under such circumstances of transparency and allegiance to truth (and reality).

And of course, the left destroys the human person at its very conception -- both literally and figuratively. The rest, you might say, is commentary. Which is to say, words about words, no longer grounded in the reality of the logos-infused person.

Politics also takes place in a space -- the space between citizens and state. Yes, there is power in this space, but the powers are enumerated, limited, and, most importantly, derived from the consent of the governed.

What if this space is filled with lies instead of truth? Then there is a total inversion, as the state then functions to exert its power to enforce a false and deviant version of reality. Instead of illumination and liberation, language is deployed for the purposes of "manipulation and domination."

The bottom line, since I'm short on time:

[T]he abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed, finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow... so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of the public abuse of language. --Josef Pieper

The credo of the left: come for the lies, stay for the power.

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood, and I Chose Authoritarian Liberal Bullshit Forever

Liberal compassion lends itself to bullshit by subordinating the putative concern with efficacy to the dominant but unannounced imperative of moral validation and exhibitionism. --William Voegeli

Probably the most serious domestic problem we face is the existence of this pervasive liberal bullshit, which is really just Christian bullshit in disguise; or a hollowed out Christianity that leaves only empty gestures of "peace on earth and good will toward all mankind." If this had been a Buddhist, or Muslim, or pagan country, no doubt the bullshit would have a different flavor.

Liberals and conservatives generally have similar notions of what it means to "be a good person," and these notions are rooted in our Judeo-Christian heritage. There is no politician, for example, who advertises a disinterest in, or lack of compassion for, "the poor."

This may have nothing to do with the actual poor, but rather, with upholding the Christian image: liberal bullshitters "are more concerned with conveying their ideals, of which idealized understandings of their true selves are a central component, than with making statements that correspond scrupulously to empirical or causal reality."

Thus, the typical liberal program "might actually work to some degree, but any such efficacy is inadvertent and tangential to the central purpose: demonstrating the depths of the prescriber’s concern for the problem and those who suffer from it, concerns impelling the determination to 'do something' about it."

One of Obama's problems is that he confuses the politician's tactical but empty gestures of compassion with coercive prescriptions that are supposed to actually be effective in the real world. In other words, he seems to believe everything he learned in college, whether it is about central planning, or "white privilege," or America's destructive role in the world. He is cynical about everything but his own bullshit.

There are only three ways to gain real knowledge: authority, reason, and experience. Experience and reason -- or sad history and sober common sense -- prove the inefficacy of liberalism, so it must ultimately root its appeal in authority (which is enforced via shame-inducing social mechanisms such as political correctness).

Yesterday I watched a bit of Hardball while exercising, and there was an outlandishly arrogant roundtable segment devoted to ridiculing conservatives over global warming. All four individuals are utterly convinced that a thing called "science" is in unanimous agreement about the issue, when this is not only demonstrably false, but slowly moving in the other direction, as more and more informed people reject the theory.

The Christian too believes in authority, but not to the exclusion of reason and experience. Rather, the opposite: just as we do not believe in a God who created a deceptive world, we do not believe in authoritative climate models that have not only failed to predict the future, but can't even retrodict the past.

As mentioned yesterday, science cannot function outside a wider context; it cannot be its own context without generating intellectual absurdities and human cruelties. In other words, it cannot be only human without becoming subhuman.

No, we don't mean this in a polemical way. For example, a strict Darwinian by definition reduces the human to the animal, and the animal to something less. That is, his first principle is not "life," let alone "person," but rather, copying error + environmental selection.

Green agrees that "science can live and prosper and develop only when it is related to a larger understanding of reality -- that is, only within a certain vision of the nature of things." But modernity essentially is a science "severed from its origin" and divorced from its foundation in a more comprehensive and integrated worldview.

Or, one could say that the separation occurred with modernity, the divorce with postmodernity. This means that the accumulated wealth of community property had to be divided and assigned to each side. Science was granted custody of truth, while the humanities were given beauty, and compassion handed off to the "social sciences."

But unfortunately, the latter two cannot flourish in a single-parent household, for beauty without truth redounds to hedonism, deception, or banality, while benevolence without truth leads to the idiot compassion of liberal bullshit.

"When you remove beauty from the human equation, it is going to come back in some other form, even as anti-beauty. A good deal of modern art can be understood in this light. In modernity, beauty has been seen as an appearance -- ornamentation, sugar coating. Secularists and believers alike have either rejected beauty altogether or argued that beauty should make the pills of truth and goodness go down easier" (Wolfe).

And what is truth violently wrenched from its sister transcendentals? I don't know. Maybe like an endless Hardball roundtable, or authoritarian liberal bullshit forever.

A Christian understanding of the intellectual life must take into account -- contrary to the typical modern understanding -- the inherently moral nature of knowledge, the way knowledge is linked to the heart and will of the knower... --Bradley Green

Principle Wonks and Policy Wankers

One irritating term that needs to be retired is "policy wonk." Have you noticed that everyone who is described as one just happens to be a liberal idiot?

I think this is because it is analogous to being a tree wonk and thereby systematically missing the forest. What we need is more righteous principle wonks. Ronald Reagan is an obvious example of a principle wonk: freedom, low taxes, strong defense, limited government, etc.

Obama is often described as a policy wonk, but, like Reagan, he is and always has been a principle wonk. It's just that his brand of ideological wonkery champions false and deviant principles: income redistribution, expansion of the state, weakness abroad, racial grievance, feminist penis envy, climate change, illegal immigration, etc.

I'm guessing that so-called wonks on both sides start with principles (either explicit or implicit) and then find the data they need to support them. Which is unnecessary if you simply begin with the correct principles, and let reality take care of the rest.

For example, we don't need a study to prove whether, say, equality before the law is a good idea. Even if someone were to come up with data showing it to be a harmful idea (for example, because it provokes envy of people who accomplish more with their freedom and equality), we still wouldn't reject it.

But for several decades now, the wonkers of the left have been busy eroding the very principles that uphold our civilization, under the guise of "policy." They then elevate policies to principles, which renders them incapable of thought (because they are excluded from the ground of reality).

To cite an obvious example, marriage is perhaps the most important pre-political principle of civilization. Until just a couple of decades ago, no one considered it to be in the realm of political policy. Even if someone showed us data suggesting that it isn't harmful to deprive a child of a mother and father, we would reject the whole idea on principle, because it is self-evidently loony (not to mention in defiance of biological reality).

The minimum wage is another example. If one understands the principle of supply and demand, then it is impossible to be fooled into believing that an increase in the cost of labor will have no effect on its demand.

Likewise socialized medicine: it does not work because it cannot work. Why? Among other reasons, because it destroys the information necessary to rationally calculate prices and thereby allocate scarce resources. No amount of government benevolence can replace the information it destroys through socialism, because, for all practical purposes, the amount is infinite (and certainly unknowable by any human being or group of human beings).

An economy is an infinitely complex, self-organizing, information processing organism. The ham-handed, truth-destroying, visibly grubby hand of the state sees to it that prices cannot reflect costs, which creates further distortions from which the state then proposes to rescue us. Same deal with the college bubble. Subsidization by the state increases demand, which increases cost, which calls for more subsidization.

In The Gospel and the Mind, the author demonstrates how the abandonment of Christian principles leads directly to intellectual insanity. This no doubt sounds polemical, but the insanity is here, and it has a rational explanation. It didn't "just happen." Rather, it happened because certain principles were abandoned and others adopted.

Beginning at the beginning, we must ask ourselves if the human mind is capable of knowing truth. If it isn't, then there can be no rational principles at all -- or no rational reason to put our faith in them.

To put it another way, we must inquire into whether it is possible for our minds to be "saved." As Green writes, if we are redeemed by Christ, then this must include the whole man, including the intellect. I would go further and say that, since the intellect is what truly defines man and sets him apart from the animals, then salvation bloody well better include it!

What is the alternative -- that Christ redeems our bodies but not our minds? No, that is the way of the left: the so-called "sexual revolution," for example, liberated the body (as if it can be isolated from the person). How did that work out? Any time a leftist uses the word "liberation," it's time to reach for your revolver, because your intellect is being liberated from your soul, in preparation for your power being liberated from your person and your money from your wallet.

The state not only has a vital interest in our being unable to think things through, but in denying access to the very principles that make this thinking-through possible. Or just say public education. If you don't believe me, then believe the refreshingly candid Jonathan Gruber. An honest liberal could never do all these wonderful things for to us.

A public, secularized education deprives us of the overall vision whereby knowledge finds its proper place. Absent this hierarchical vision, knowledge can just as easily become demonic, or even just sterile, and certainly dis-organizing.

As Green writes, the Christian vision of God, man, and cosmos "provides the necessary substructure, or precondition, for meaningful and enduring intellectus (understanding)." This doesn't necessarily mean our principles are correct, but it does mean that they are explicit and consistent.

These principles touch on ontology (the nature of being), on anthropology (the nature of man), and on epistemology (the nature of knowledge). Is a liberal politician ever explicit about his principles? If he is, then he cannot be consistent -- and certainly not electable -- which is why he doesn't go there.

"Without certain key theological realities and commitments," writes Green, "the cultivation of an enduring intellectual and cultural life becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible." Of note, this does not imply that the left is beholden to no "theological realities and commitments." Rather, we just have to find out what they are, because these strange gods will explain the falseness -- and resultant dysfunction -- of everything else about them.

To be continued...

You Shall Not Turn Theft Into Compassion

So, we're out in the bewilderness with the unholy trinity of tempter, temptee, and temptation. It's a true mirror image of reality, because, as in the Trinity, nothing here is forced. Just as God only "offers" his love, so too does the Tempter only offer the temptation. He always respects our free will, otherwise, where's the sport? So in this sense, Satan is not as destructive to our dignity as is the state.

The first temptation is, of course, to turn stones into bread. There is an excellent analysis of this in Meditations on the Tarot, which I'm sure we have discussed in the past. Let's see if I can track it down...

Well, there is this:

"'Lead us not into temptation' has obvious resonance with Jesus' forty days in the desert, just after his baptism. If baptism is the 'purification,' then temptation is the test of purity.

"And as we have discussed before, the adversary never forces the issue; he does not operate through coercion, like some mid-level government functionary, but through temptation.

"Temptation is the test of purity, and purity is the victory over temptation. The purifying 'fire' that occurs in the space between these two poles is our phoenishing school, allowing us to make ashes of our former selves.

"Temptation is etymologically related to stretch, so that it implies a kind of centrifugal pulling of ourselves outward, from the center to the periphery, from coon-centration ("coon central") to dissipation. The world itself is a giant test, an opportunity to challenge our ability to resist its seductions."

Then there is this:

"Appropriately, the temptations all ultimately flow from the violation of the first Commandment, in which God is pushed aside 'as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying' (Benedict).

"With this primordial (vertical) act, man inverts the cosmos and places himself at the top.... Doing so redounds to countless errors of every kind, e.g., cognitive, spiritual, philosophical, political, scientific, moral, etc.

"This cosmic inversion cannot fail to result in epic falls, for no house can be built upon sand. In replacing God with man, we necessarily replace truth with opinion, virtue with convention, and wisdom with tenure."

Now, the promise to turn stones to bread is the central promise of the left. It even has a technical name: the Keynesian Multiplier, whereby one can simultaneously feed the masses by stealing from them; it may be visualized as a vast circle of human beings, each with his hand in the next guy's pocket. Or perhaps using a bucket to remove water from one end of the pool and pour it into the other end.

As we expressed this infallible truth back then,

"One popular way to try to turn stones to bread is through the apparatus of the welfare state. In its case, it attempts to transform money obtained through coercion into compassion. But the state has only enumerated powers, not innumerable feelings." Or in other words, it mainly has a feeling for power. To paraphrase someone, when a liberal politician asks us for power to do good, it's usually wise to subtract those last three words.

Bottom lyin': The liberal fuses magical faith and raw power with an irony so thick that his own mind cannot penetrate it, so the self-deception -- the auto-pullwoolery -- is complete, and the totalitarian temptation is able clothe itself in mercy. (See, for example, Jonathan Gruber's candid acknowledgement that it was necessary for the state to lie to its stupid citizens in order gain the power to control their healthcare.)

Yes, for the statist, taxes are his eucharist and entitlements his benediction. His appeal to "progress" is likewise an empty gesture in a world deprived of hierarchy. For how does the materialist measure progress except in the form of more and bigger stones?

Which generations to come will carry on their backs, trundling around in fiscal circles. Americans will still be paying for Obama's stone soup long after we're all gone.

Obama's temptation in the political desert went like this: "if you are truly the One, then transform this stolen pork into prosperity!" Might as well try to turn the bacon back into the pig.

(Sign yoinked from American Digest)

Any materialist has failed the first test of spirituality -- or "temptation in the wilderness" -- which is to not attempt to turn stones into bread, or quantity into quality. For in so doing, the materialist inevitably reduces bread to stones, or life to death, spirit to matter. We are left with only stones, so there is "nothing left to eat," speaking metaphysically. And with nothing to eat, there is no way to grow into spiritual manhood. --That Would Be Me Again

Miracles Under the Reign of Quantity

It seems that Jesus' first temptation is food, being that he fasts for forty days and nights while undergoing the other Big Three. This number, according to Benedict, is not arbitrary, but has symbolic resonance with Israel's forty years of wandering in the bewilderness and Moses' forty days on Mount Sinai, and perhaps even Abraham's forty days on the way to Mount Horeb, where the sacrifice of Isaac was to take place.

It can admittedly be difficult for we moderns, who live under the Reign of Quantity -- not to mention Obama's IRS -- to appreciate a more playful approach to numbers. Think of all the numbers that convey a qualitative meaning; in fact, now that I think about it, numbers one through nine all have highly symbolic resonance, and now that I think about it a little bit more, quantities must stand for concrete qualities or else they are just airy and abstract platonic nothings. Math is just a highly symbolic language, but it's still a language.

The early Fathers, according to Benedict, "regarded forty as a cosmic number, as the numerical sign for this world. The four 'corners' encompass the whole world, and ten is the number of the commandments." Multiply them and we have "a symbolic statement about the history of the world as a whole," which "Jesus takes into himself and bears all the way through to the end."

Even before the specific temptations comes the trash talking if you are the Son of God... This is like Bill Maher-level trolling: if your God is so great, why doesn't he prove it to me? It also previews the later mockery of "If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross!"

Well? Is there any truth to the charge? On the one hand, one might well ask: is this any way for a God to appear in history? No, it is not. It is probably accurate to say that no human being would have anticipated or even fantasized about it occurring in such a seemingly feeble manner.

However, this obviously cuts two ways, because it emphasizes that no human being would have concocted such a counter-intuitive script. Why? What would be the point? It seems to be the very opposite of what anyone would have wanted or thought they needed.

This "demand for proof is a constantly recurring theme in the history of Jesus' life; again and again he is reproached for having failed to prove himself sufficiently," and clearing up any and all ambiguity about his identity and mission -- in short, for having failed the Bill Maher test.

The other day, the Happy Acres Guy made a passing comment to the effect that (I'm paraphrasing) a "miracle" is not a cause, but a consequence, of faith. Seen with the eyes of faith, all sorts of things suddenly appear as miraculous. Conversely, seen through the eyes of a corrosive cynicism, nothing is miraculous. Everything just is what it is, and couldn't be otherwise. For such a person, a miracle is a priori impossible, so even if one were to occur, it would be explained away.

Indeed we know this is true, because contrary to the sacred dogma of the Reign of Quantity, existence is a non-stop miracle. Once one starts believing this, then the knowledge follows -- you know, give me faith that I may believe. It's just we are so conditioned by the modern world to not think in this way. But imagine the ancient mind, which had no such difficulty.

Now admittedly, it is entirely possible that they overshot too far in the opposite direction, regarding as miraculous things that have banal scientific explanations. But this doesn't undermine the principle that miracles not only can occur, but must occur, given the fabric of reality.

Fabric of reality? You mean physics? There you go again, trying to reduce quality to quantity! You really must stop doing that. Abstractions are fine, but don't start with them, rather, start with the real world.

I would also say that the miraculous is at the edge of articulation. The typical infertile egghead conflates the linguistically mappable world with the world itself, and therefore excludes himself from the miraculous. Much of Christian dogma is designed, so to speak, to prevent this constriction from occurring, because it can in no way be "contained" by the mind or by language. The "unexpectedness" of Jesus is just one example of this.

As usual, Schuon has some very helpful things to say on this subject. The miraculous, he writes, is "an interference of the marvelous in the sensory realm." And I say, if this weren't happening all the time, the world would be a rather boring place indeed. Even the fact that it is not boring is evidence of the miraculous. In other words, from where does all this novelty, creativity, and upside surprise come?

How did life appear out of matter? Consciousness from biology? Truth and beauty from monkeys? "This phenomenon has in itself nothing mysterious or problematical about it: the so-called natural laws of a lower degree of Existence can always be suspended through the intervention of a higher degree, whence the perfectly logical term 'supernatural'" (Schuon). "Scientists," he adds, "confuse the miraculous with the irrational and the arbitrary."

In other words, what is natural on one level might be supernatural on another. Looked at this way, from the standpoint of mere physics, biology is supernatural. It is trans-physics, just as the human person is trans-biology.

Thus, each "degree also has its laws, which means that the miracle is 'natural' on the universal scale, while being 'supernatural' on the earthly scale." Assuming there is a scale above the human, then from its perspective, the miraculous vertical ingressions herebelow are quite "natural," as natural as when an artist decides to create something beautiful. Which is to say, supernatural.

In Eric Metaxes' new book on the subject, he points out that the Greek word for what we translate as "miracle" is sign. Thus, in the words of Schuon, "The purpose of the miraculous phenomenon is the same as that of the Revelation which it accompanies or as a result of which, or in the shadow of which, it is produced: to elicit or to confirm faith."

The First and Last Temptation of Barack

I'll be spending Thanksgiving with the liberal relatives. As always, I would prefer not to discuss politics, but I can't help imagining what I'll say if this or that question comes up. Every year around this time, we see articles written by liberals on how to talk to your racist, Fox-watching, science-denying uncle. Maybe I'll write one for conservatives, if only to get rid of the voices in my head. But not today.

Unless the question of why one should believe in God comes up (which it has in the past). There are purely utilitarian reasons for choosing to believe in God, just as there are purely utilitarian reasons for getting married, even though there are better reasons. Likewise, behaving morally is a good way to avoid getting in trouble with the law, but it is preferable to actually love virtue and self-mastery.

Speaking of which, after baptism comes temptation: if Jesus incarnates the descent of the absolute, then the temptation in the desert involves a further "descent into the perils besetting mankind" (Benedict). In order for this thing (meaning the whole project) to be efficacious, he "has to enter into the drama of human existence, for that belongs to the core of his mission."

You could say that there is no man without a narrative. Therefore, in order to "become" man, one must not only enter the flesh -- incarnate -- but the story, the essential drama -- for which I can't think of a word at the moment... historify? Enmyth? Bechronicle? Whatever the word, "he has to penetrate it completely, down to its uttermost depths" so as "to bear it on his shoulders and to bring it home," full circle.

The descent is not a one-time-only deal, "but accompanies him along his entire journey. He must recapitulate the whole of history from its beginning..., in order to transform it." A constant part of life is temptation, therefore he must expose himself "to the risks and perils of human existence."

Cut to a barren desert, which is a nice contrast to the leafy paradise of Eden, where things went off the rails in vertical space. Man made (and makes) himself ill among plenty, and now we shall see if he can be made whole amidst danger, deprivation, and temptation.

First of all, what is a temptation? Is it outside or inside? Animals don't experience temptation, because it presumes free will: I am tempted to do that, but I choose to do this.

But every temptation holds out a promise, whether explicit or implicit: choose this and _______ (fill in the blank). Often if we simply fill in the blank, the temptation loses its allure. I've been working with my son on this for years in order to demonstrate to him how a desire fulfilled is just replaced by another, in an endless, compulsive cycle. (There are, of course, worthwhile desires, but one must be able to discern the difference.)

If we visualize the mind as a complex phase space, then temptations are like fixed point attractors, i.e., basins toward which desire is drawn. To the extent that we repeatedly engage in the compulsion, then it is as if our subjective phase space is characterized by these semi-permanent and relatively autonomous valleys. Through repetition, these can eventually become as wide as the Grand Canyon, as in alcoholism and drug addiction.

How to rid ourselves of these malevolent attractors? I would say that this space is always dynamic and fluid, like an ocean. Spiritual peace is none other than a kind of "flattening" of the ocean, which immediately brings to mind Matthew 14, with Jesus calmly walking on the storm-tossed lake. Well, the world -- last time I checked, anyway -- is one big storm-tossed lake, is it not?

In any event, if Jesus is going to go to all the trouble of being tempted in the desert, these particular temptations had better have rather wide application. They will need to stand for and subsume any number of lesser ones (there can be attractors within attractors, as in a fractal).

At the very heart of spiritual temptation must be a bad choice: we could even depict this in a completely abstract way: if O is the Great Attractor, then Ø represents the alternative. We could even say that this is the perpetual serpentine Gnostic promise: don't choose O! That's just a lie told to children to keep them in line and limit their freedom. Choose Ø!

Looks like Benedict is on the same page: "At the heart of all temptations... is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives." Thus the refusal "to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion."

Not to get all insultaining, but that is quite literally how one becomes a liberal. I do not mean this in a polemical or insulting way. Indeed, the fact that most liberals do not believe in God (or are confused about God) -- that they reject O -- is a source of pride, not shame. Does Bill Maher look ashamed of being an atheist? The rebellious rejection of O is very much a part of their identity.

Furthermore, as Benedict writes, "moral posturing is part and parcel of temptation." It always goes hand in hand with pride, for which reason it is difficult to find a truly humble liberal. They are all about presuming "to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and throw ourselves into" the hard work of making the state even bigger and more intrusive than it already is. And of course, these overeducated yahoos always claim "to speak for true realism" (as if Truth isn't the realest of the real).

So, this is the same eternal drama into which Jesus inserts himself. And indeed, he is faced with the eternal temptation of the left, which is to reduce the world to "what is right there in front of us -- power and bread." Although circuses are also important to the left, hence MSNBC, or unreality TV in general.

I would say that this divide between O and Ø is the eternal crossroads, and that a human being can only pretend to make it go away. Man is a moral being, and that's that. Language itself is a moral medium, being that its purpose is to communicate truth.

Therefore, every time you open your mouth, you're making the world more heavenly or more hellish, which explains the aroma that emanates from MSNBC or from Dear Leader himself. Did you see his press conference? One suspects that O turned away from O well before he could have been consciously aware of the craniorectal insertion. His ideology -- and ideolatry -- goes all the way to the bone. Or large intestine, rather.

Heaven Scent

I guess I have time this morning to get back to the Jesus project, now on to his ministry -- which seems like too banal a description. A ministry is obviously the activity of a minister, "a person whose job involves leading church services, performing religious ceremonies (such as marriages), and providing spiritual or religious guidance to other people." Okay, but...

For starters, who made him a minister? By what authority? We can see where he gives that authority; in Acts 26:16 he says "I have appeared to you for this purpose, to make you a minister and a witness both of the things which you have seen and of things which I will yet reveal to you."

Benedict writes that this is a question that confronts any reader of the Gospels: that is, where did he get this stuff? "The reaction of his hearers was clear: This teaching does not come from any school. It is radically different from what can be learned in schools."

And yet, it is taught with great authority. Which doesn't automatically mean it's true. But it does raise a second question: how is it that he is so eerily -- one might say charismatically -- confident about what he professes?

How does one ever attain certainty on any matter? Schuon writes that it is not a question of mere logic, since logic can only deduce proof from premises that must be furnished by another source. He says that certainty is actually "an aspect of knowledge," somewhat like an attribute of the truth it confirms:

"It is situated beyond the domain of the sentiments but on the individual plane it nonetheless possesses a perfume which allows us to look on it as a sentiment. One can likewise speak of a sentiment of doubt; doubt is nothing else but the void left by absent certainty..."

Of course, we can always be certain of error and doubt the truth, or Obama would have no explanation. How then to discern the difference?

I would say that if you read and understood what Schuon said above, then you are well on the way to understanding where real certainty comes from. Conversely, if you have no earthly idea of what he's talking about, then -- among other problems -- you will be insensitive to the perfume that attends Jesus' ministry (or better, Jesus himself).

Jesus is truth and presence, or the presence of truth. "Thus," writes Schuon, "Christ is essentially a manifestation of Divine Presence, but he is thereby also Truth."

One might also say that he is the manifestation of the metacosmic Center at the cosmic periphery. Importantly, this is both a spatial and temporal center, or the axis of history. Jesus is both "the Word which manifests itself in the Universe as the divine Spirit," and "the Real Presence affirming itself at the center of the soul..." Or in other words, the metacosmic and microcosmic personal centers.

I am reminded of how neurologists say it is possible to diagnose incipient senility: don't panic, but if you hold a jar of peanut butter a few centimeters from your nose, and can't smell it, then you may be developing Alzheimer's. I suppose something similar must occur to the spiritual olfactory system to cause spiritual dementias such as atheism.

As to the ultimate source of his certainty, Benedict writes that "Jesus' teaching is not the product of human learning," but "originates from immediate contact with the Father" -- whatever that means.

What it means is that it is grounded in the ultimate principle, except that this principle is not an abstraction, but rather, a concrete person. Thus, it is grounded in relationship and in dialogue, which are prior to any specific content.

For Jesus, it appears that "prayer" is the name for this dialogue. "Again and again the Gospels note that Jesus 'withdrew to the mountain' to spend nights in prayer 'alone' with his Father." To con-verse is to flow-with, so we are talking about a mysterious spiral of communion.

Now, it seems to me that the (or a) deeper meaning of baptism is a radical reorientation to the metacosmic center: "it is meant to be the concrete enactment of a conversion that gives the whole of life a new direction forever" (ibid.). It is to simultaneously turn toward, to be in, and to be drawn toward, this Center, so it embodies both the already and the not yet: real change and real hope.

You are now on the vertical path, which consists of many roads all leading to the same place. Unlike profane philosophy, which consists of many roads leading from nothing to nowhere, here all roads lead from anywhere to everything (or from anyone to the One and back again, in a round trip of ascent and descent).

But one still has to give up the Nothing (which resembles the "false plenitude" alluded to above), or in other words, die to death, so "immersion into the waters is a symbol of death." Water always has two symbolic meanings; on the one hand, it can be "the annihilating, destructive power of the ocean flood," "a permanent threat to the cosmos, to the earth..." At the same time, "the flowing waters of the river are above all a symbol of life" (ibid.).

So, while you can't fight fire with fire, I suppose one can vanquish water with Water, so this post ends not with a bang but with a groaner.

Have You Lost Your Christian Mind?!

I may have to set the Jesus thingy aside for the moment, since I haven't had the temporal slack to thoroughly plunderize Ratzinger, and I don't want to grow it alone. I suppose I could, but that would take even more time -- i.e., time for reflection, contemplation, and trialogue.

Also, I have a hard time planning ahead anyway. Not only does the spirit blow where it will, but this particular spirit can only blow where it will. You call it undisciplined, I call it spontaneity. Or multi-undisciplinary.

At the moment, I'm preoccupied with this nice-looking book (which I just started) called The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life. It goes to many of the ideas we bandy about here, albeit in a less polemical, sharp-elbowed, and over-the-top manner. He's a professor, not a blogger.

The overall thesis of the book is alarming enough, even if stated in a dispassionate way. Stated in a bobastic way, it would be something like: failing to be Christian makes one intellectually insane. Or in other words, if the purpose of Christianity is salvation, this certainly includes a rescue operation of our capacity to think.

As always, Jews are a special case, therefore much of this may not apply to them; then again, you will have no doubt noticed how common it is for the irreligious (or even Reform) Jew to become intellectually -- and politically -- insane, so perhaps it will; we shall see. We are particularly interested to know if there is some identifiable point that the mind goes off the rails.

Genesis, of course, speaks to this, but in a rather general way: that is, we are all faced with the primordial choice of recognizing God or of being God. Even so, choosing the former is no guarantee of sanity; it's just that choosing the latter is a guarantee of intellectual un- or insanity.

For that matter, it is not as if self-identifying Christians don't lose their marbles. Hardly! We don't want to fall into the No True Scotsman fallacy. Therefore, we will have to inquire into why this is the case: how does the cure seem to become the illness -- as in, say, that homosexual-hating pastor, or Obama's demented mentor?

The No True Scotsman fallacy, by the way, occurs when confronted with a counter-example to a universal claim. Thus, if I affirm that Christianity allows one to think properly, you may reasonably ask: "What about Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton?" To which I indignantly draw myself to my full height and respond, "no true Christian would think as they do." (Similarly, our anonymous troll's favorite fallacy is the "no true progressive" dodge.)

Perhaps we will weave in a bit of the infancy narratives after all, specifically, the star that alerted and guided those Wise Men to Jesus. As Benedict writes, they not only "represent the journeying of humanity toward Christ," but "initiate a procession that continues throughout history."

Furthermore, they symbolize "the inner aspiration of the human spirit, the dynamism of religious and human reason toward him." Also, this makes the implicit connection between cosmos and Christ: there is now something fully in the cosmos that is fully beyond the cosmos: the Creative Reason is here with us, and creativity never stops surpassing itself.

That idea of an intellectual north star: everyone's got one, whether implicit or explicit. One cannot not have a metaphysic and still presume to think. The North Star is the First Principle.

It is possible to attack this question from either end: in other words, assuming one is capable of thinking, one may drill down to the principle that makes this possible.

To cite one obvious example, let's say I am thinking about natural selection. To the extent that I am truly thinking -- or thinking truly -- natural selection cannot possibly be the principle that is responsible for my ability to think about it. That's what you call an epistemological non-starter, because there is simply no way to get from natural selection to truth. This also explains why the metaphysical Darwinian is not only an unserious thinker, but cannot possibly be serious. It is the type of thing we can confidently reject out of hand as a false path.

However, atheism has its benefits, or it wouldn't exist. For example, it exalts the human mind (without the proper complement of humility). Such a mind cannot really know truth, but it can know a kind of pretend truth. It is similar to pretend wealth. Let's say I loan you a great sum of money. You will live large while the money lasts, but all the while you are accruing interest.

Likewise for one who enjoys the flood of cheap Darwinian cash. Eventually -- again, if you drill all the way down -- you will find that your principal is exhausted, and your mind is writing checks that the spirit can't cash. It's all just funny money, and you've been living in an ideological bubble, with one person of tenure living off the worthless checks of another until the whole thing collapses.

Kind of like what happened yesterday.

To be continued...

Hope and Change, AKA Resentment and Coercion

Well, to be honest, I haven't had time to get much further in the Jesus trilogy, so this post will consist of beating one idea to death. But it's a terribly destructive idea that deserves to die, and not just at the ballot box.

Both Balthasar and Chesterton make much of the very idea of God-as-child. The former speaks of "the eternal mystery of the childhood of Christ" flowing "into the eternal childhood which is given to men: hope."

For if you think about it, hope is indeed the essence of childhood. Why? A number of reasons, but I was thinking of how children are always changing and growing. They are like little arrows that always point toward their own telos -- which is to say, perfection, or completion, or maturity. I would suggest that America is infused with this idea -- or rather, that the very idea of America is infused with Christian hope in the sense we have just stated.

What I mean is that there is no reason for hope in a static society: things are as they are and will be as they will be because they have always been this way (and this way is decreed by the gods, so it is not for us to change it).

Against the American ideal is the European import of Marxism, which both sees and creates static classes. Sowell touches on this in his indispensable Intellectuals and Race: just as the caste system tethers individuals to their societal place, thus depriving them of hope, multiculturalism seals people into so many boxes of petrified failure. The difference is that the leftist exchanges hope for envy, thus the crude appeals to race, class, sexual preference, etc. In other words, the leftist croctrine of diversity

"tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one's life chances should be the same -- and that it is society's fault if these chances are not the same." So instead of hope for betterment, the left promotes resentment of the better off, accompanied by a demand for "social justice," which is simply envy with a truncheon.

So, one man's hope is another man's hell. Which, of course, is playing out all over the country today. If only the people who were deluded into voting for Obama in 2008 could exercise a little self-awareness, and appreciate that we are now living in the reality that in 2008 was only a "hope." This is it. This is what happens when Christian -- or at least American -- hope is displaced by Marxist resentment.

Did we see the future in 2008? No, only the present. Obama supporters blinded themselves to the present in order to indulge a fanciful hope that is both anti-American and un-Christian. It makes their world go around -- in a downward spiral.

As Sowell states, "the caste system preaches resignation to one's fate," while "multiculturalism preaches resentment of one's fate." Unlike these, Americanism kicks fate in the nuts and says get outta' my way!

Imagine placing children into unchanging castes; or imagine that we didn't move through school grades, but rather, were assigned one grade for life. The idea is preposterous, but not as preposterous as the left's "war on women" or its crude appeals to racial hatred, fear, and stupidity.

Jesus, of course, makes a point of counseling us to be as children, but surely he doesn't mean this in any pejorative sense -- i.e., to be as naive, credulous, and easily led as a Democrat.

Again, what characterizes the child? Well, for starters, a child is what man uniquely is, in the sense that -- alone among the animals -- he specializes in immaturity because his neoteny never ceases.

To say neoteny is to say neo-nate, which simply means "new birth." Thus, to say that man must be "born again" implies that one must not conflate, say, biological and spiritual birth, in that the former happens just once.

Now a child, just because he is constantly learning and therefore "permanently immature," is not thereby a little nothing. Rather, he is the very symbol of our own eros shot into the heart of the divine center. We are all as children growing toward our proper end.

The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once wrote an article on the psychodynamics of shoplifting, suggesting that it wasn't so much motivated by want or by greed, but by hope. That is, in the instant the shoplifter is engaged in his theft, he is temporarily buoyed by the hope that the painful emptiness at the core of his being will be filled. But it never is, so he must repeat the process in a compulsive manner.

More generally, as Boethius wrote, if the mere satisfaction of desire were the cause of happiness, "there is no reason why beasts should not be thought blessed, whose whole intention is bent to supply their corporal wants." By extrapolation, a life of pursuing false hope converts man to an animal.

In any compulsion, there is an existential component of hope; but this is not real hope. Rather, it is merely a defense against hopelessness. Nothing is more deflating than an illusory desire satisfied, because its satisfaction co-arises with hopelessness. In fact, we could say that any compulsion -- and few people are completely free of them -- is simply hopelessness deferred.

For this reason, gratitude is the best revenge -- even a preemptive strike -- against the wily one: "Gratitude is a virtue that allows us, not only to be content with little things -- this is holy childhood -- but also to appreciate or respect little things or big things because they come from God, beginning with the beauty and the gifts of nature; one must be sensitive to the innocence and mystery of the divine works" (Schuon).

But leftist ideology rests upon an ontology which inverts the order of the cosmos, elevating existence over and above essence. In so doing, it essentially sanctifies a perversion, as it instantiates at its very foundation false hope. That is, we all know ahead of time that the fanciful schemes and discredited economic ideas of the left can never "deliver the goods" -- not the material goods and certainly not the spiritual ones.

Jesus, Mary & Joysoph

Barely any time this morning, as can be discerned by that wince-inducing title.

As Lincoln might have said about the Incarnation: let us resolve that this species, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.

It is as if the entire cosmos and whole history of man are focused to a point, conferring "a decisive re-orientation toward a new manner of human existence" (Benedict).

This new beginning "opens up" new possibilities for man, possibilities that had previously been foreclosed. Now we not only have a horizontal genealogy, but also, so to speak, a vertical "pneumalogy" -- a direct line of common descent from the Father.

However, since this is a new birth of freedom, the link is not compulsory but voluntary. No one is forced into anything. The adoption papers have been drawn, but we still have to sign the dotted line.

On Friday night I watched what is supposed to be the Best Zombie Movie of All Time, I Walked With a Zombie. In it, one of the characters says something to the effect that their life is so miserable -- these are descendants of slaves who still toil on sugar plantations -- that they weep when a baby is born and "make merry" at funerals.

I suppose one could say the same of being born a peasant at the margins of the brutal Roman regime in 3 or 4 BC. There is indeed a great deal of pessimism in ancient thought, and it is difficult to see why there wouldn't be.

Chesterton touches on this in The Everlasting Man -- that even if one was not a slave, the vast majority of people were "insignificant or even invisible." Unlike today, the state didn't even bother pretending to be your friend. He speaks, for example, of the pyramids, which were erected

"under those everlasting skies for ever by the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants and dying like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands."

The pyramids are supposed to be an enduring monument to man's greatness, but we forget that they point in two directions, or rather, like any Tower of Babel, they try to transform what is a meaningless existence into a meaningful one in a self-nullifying way -- like trying to prove the eternal greatness of Nazi Germany via a monument built by Jewish slave labor.

In this context, the annunciation of Jesus' conception is quite odd. As Benedict writes, the angel does not greet Mary with the usual Shalom or a colloquial Whassup?, but rather, with a word that translates to Rejoice!

For Benedict, this "marks the true beginning of the New Testament." You might say that the Gospel -- good news -- begins here, in a surprisingly literal manner. This joy is a "particular gift of the Holy Spirit.... a chord is sounded with the angel's salutation which then resounds through the life of the Church." Thus, "Rejoice, full of grace!" implicitly connects these two -- joy and grace -- which are "joined at the same root."

Remember, we can always say NO! to the offer of joy and grace. We are all entitled to spiritual birth control, which is none other than free will, or the power to render ourselves infertile and prevent a divine conception (and birth and growth). There is terrestrial abortion and there is celestial abortion, but the two are not unrelated.

Speaking of fertility, Benedict has a brief passage on Joseph. Not a great deal is said about him, but then again, to describe him as a "just man" says a great deal.

For Benedict it implies "one who maintains living contact with the word of God.... He is like a tree, planted beside the flowing waters, constantly bringing forth fruit." These vertical waters, "from which he draws nourishment, naturally refer to the living word of God, into which he sinks the roots of his being."

Furthermore, this is not something "imposed" from without or from on high, but something recognized and loved for what it is: it is that same Joy alluded to above:

"The image of the man with roots in the living waters of God's word, whose life is spent in dialogue with God and who therefore brings forth constant fruit -- this image becomes concrete in the event recounted here [his attitude toward Mary's surprising pregnancy], as well as in everything we are subsequently told about Joseph of Nazareth."

A New Birth of Freedom

No, I'm not referring to Election Day. Or maybe I am.

The "Infancy Narratives" are obviously rather scant, but from another perspective, it's rather remarkable that they exist at all. Why?

Because they place God in a rather unflattering, or at least undignified, light, especially considering a historical context in which casual infanticide was still widespread. "Historical documents of the time," writes Pursell, "say next to nothing about the women, children, and men living in destitution," which was the majority.

Even so, the existence of Rome brought about a kind of useable Cosmos, or functioning world order. To jump ahead a bit, if one wants to propagate -- much less incarnate -- a universal message, it won't do to download it into, say, an isolated group of hunter-gatherers, for the message will have no way to get out. Not only is there no writing or common language, there are no roads, no institutions, no way to get the Word out to others.

But the existence of Rome permitted a kind of convergence of Roman know-how, Greek know-what, and Hebrew be-who: technology, philosophy, and religion. So, there is a kind of nested context for the appearance of Jesus: a single family, within the womb of Judaism, situated in the wider context of Rome. As Benedict writes,

"For the first time, 'all the world,' the ecumene in its entirety, is to be enrolled [referring to the census that was taking place at the time of Jesus' birth]. For the first time there is a government and an empire that spans the globe....

"Only now, when there is a commonality of law and property on a wide scale, and when a universal language has made it possible for a cultural community to trade in ideas and goods, only now" can the universal message "enter the world." This goes to what is meant by "the fullness of time." The time must be ripe.

The first thing that will strike the shriveled sensibility of the politically correct will be something like "Universal? Spans the globe? What about China, or Persia, or the Aztec empire?" Well, maybe they weren't universal enough. Just sayin'. Even today, China may eventually conquer us, but they will never evangelize us. Nor will it be the first time that Christianity evangelized its own barbarian conquerers. Funny how God works that way.

Funny? Funny how?

"It is a colossal joke, actually, a characteristic of God's sense of humor.... The idea that God could have let himself be born as a defenseless baby occurred to virtually nobody" (Pursell). For that matter -- again, very much against the grain of the times -- Jesus "reserved his most dire warnings for those who harmed children and led them astray. He told everyone to live and love simply, as do children."

But although Jesus appears within the context of universal power -- or the most powerful civilization that had ever existed -- he is nevertheless born completely outside that worldly power. This is a true inversion (or "transvaluation") of values, another topic to which we will no doubt return.

But why would God incarnate completely outside what the world recognizes as power? I can think of several reasons; for example, to avoid confusing divine power with what the world recognizes as power. At the time, there was literally nothing as powerful as Rome; and to this day, there is literally nothing more powerless than an infant. That's what you call an infinite contrast. (Then again, think of the peculiar power of the infant to draw us into an intimate circle of love; truly, the infant is the hinge of psychohistorical evolution.)

Where does the Word dwell? Or, where does the word choose as a dwelling place? It seems that he has a marked preference for low and humble places -- that he resists the proud and mighty (or vice versa, rather). I would add that evolution always occurs at the edge of things, not the center.

In the animal kingdom, for example, it is said that speciation occurs as a result of a genetically similar population being isolated in a new niche. Benedict writes that Luke "wants to show that humanity starts afresh in Jesus." Thus, he represents a kind of speciation at the margin of empire, isolated in his niche by virtue of culture, religion, and class.

This implies that the cosmic speciation could not have occurred at the center of things -- which sheds new light on the difficulty faced by the rich man endeavoring to enter the kingdom of heaven, and conversely, the notion that the meek shall inherit the earth (among other passages).

So, Jesus is off in the bewilderness, not unlike the Jews wandering in the desert -- "desert" evoking the literal margin of civilization.

Of note, Jesus' purpose, one might say, is to participate in man, so that man might participate in God. But what does it mean to "participate in man?" I would suggest that there are many ways to participate in man, and yet, miss the point entirely.

For example, if one incarnates in, say, a Chinese emperor with 2,000 concubines, is that really going to give one a feel for what it means to be human? Will that provide a well-rounded, typical human experience? And will others be able to relate to the experience?

I would say that unless one directly participates in pain, helplessness, loss, powerlessness, betrayal, death, etc., one has not experienced the full human monty, but rather, eluded it.

Now, despite what we have said about human powerlessness, the whole point of the Incarnation involves, to paraphrase Schuon, absoluteness entering into relativity, and there can be no power that surpasses the Absolute. How is this power recognized, if it has nothing to do with what the world recognizes as power?

For Schuon, it manifests Truth and Presence, or one might say the presence of divine truth and truth of divine presence (Emmanuel, "God-with-us"). How else to explain the peculiar power of the martyrs? Or even the inexplicable persistence of this powerless divine power, 2000 years on?

This powerless power is on such a different plane from worldly power, that the latter can often appear almost demonic by comparison, especially lately. And yet, the divine power has a way of resurrecting, and more generally, reasserting itself in unexpected times and places. Like maybe next Tuesday, for example.

Out of time... to be continued...

No Vacancy!

Well, yesterday wasn't a total loss. The subject of the seminar was the role of chronic inflammation in every imaginable illness, from heart disease to cancer to diabetes to depression and Alzheimer's. All the biggies -- including aging -- are more or less inflammatory autoimmune responses gone wild. The solution?

Don't get stressed (which triggers the inflammatory response), get lots of stage 4 sleep (which is when your brain manufactures the happy chemicals), and consume a lot of ginger, fish oil and other healthy fats, turmeric, green tea, cocoa, alpha lipoic acid, probiotics, and other medicines of immortality. Also walk 10,000 steps a day and do yoga -- or at least avoid sitting for lengthy periods. And definitely cut back on the carbs.

Back to our subject, which is the life of Jesus, starting with the Infancy Narratives. This is not the sort of subject I could ever tackle on my own, so I will be relying upon vertical inspiration to occasionally hijack the bus as we drive along. If that fails to occur, you'll be the second to know, because it will be just you and I without a third: static and not dynamic.

In these matters, two is company while three's a cloud: "The sacred cloud -- the shekinah -- is the visible sign of God's presence" (Benedict). This is the very same cloud that "overshadows" Mary, a subject to which we will return.

But to the extent that we exclude this mysterious Third, you might say there is No Vacancy, which is precisely the first problem faced by the baby Jesus: the world has no space for him. Luke informs us that there was "no room for them in the inn," for which reason Mary is reduced to giving birth in a manger, of all things, which is "a trough or open box in a stable designed to hold feed or fodder for livestock." It seems that his very first experience in this world involved pearls before swine and other beasts.

Benedict relates this to John's description of how "his own people received him not." You could say that the manger incident is just a preview of more unfortunate things to come, and more generally, that the light shines in a kind of invincibly ignorant darkness. Ultimately, the author of the world is strangely unrecognized by his own world: the creation rejects its own creator for something or someone better. But isn't this just Eden all over again?

"Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man has nowhere to lay his head." Here again this is very odd, and has no resemblance to those Myths of Old to which middlebrow skeptics try to relate it.

For example, Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors were said to be offspring of divinities, but as Benedict points out, this was for transparently political reasons. i.e., "giving theological legitimacy to the cult of the ruler." This is born of the same atavistic impulse that once elevated Obama to a "lightbringer" or "evolutionary agent of change." Such pious legends cannot survive contact with reality.

Forgive me if I jump around, spirit blowing where it will and all that. But I keep coming back to the radical idea of the author of creation becoming a character in his own play. In so doing, he is definitely not -- in my opinion -- reading from a script that has already been written. Rather -- and this is the whole point -- he is submitting to his own creation.

Predestineers will of course disagree with me, and that is fine. But I was quite arrested by a passing comment on page 36, to the effect that "God seeks to enter the world anew. He knocks at Mary's door. He needs human freedom" (emphasis mine). Yes, God needs human freedom in order to pull this off. What a strange and radical -- and liberating -- idea! For it is as if the two freedoms must meet in freedom in order to co-create something radically unprecedented.

"The only way he can redeem man, who was created free, is by means of a free 'yes' to his will." And here is the sentence that really caught my eye; although some will disagree, it follows logically: "In creating freedom, he made himself in a certain sense dependent upon man. His power is tied to the unenforceable 'yes' of a human being."

Will Mary give her consent? Is there or is there not a vacant womb? Either this is a kind of "risk" on God's part (it certainly is from our perspective), or Mary's decision and later role lose all merit. God is taking a big gamble (I guess he plays dice after all) -- like a guy who asks his girlfriend to marry him in front of 50,000 people at Yankee Stadium. Sure, they always say yes, but still, you never know until you ask.

But Mary responds, Let it be to me according to your word, which represents "the moment of free, humble yet magnanimous obedience in which the loftiest choice of human freedom is made." It assures that the narrative to come is truly woven of human and divine freedom. "It makes," writes Balthasar, "the foreign land into a home in both directions: heaven on earth and, therefore, earth in heaven." In its absence, one could say that the world remains a foreign land with no proper space for us: life consists of alienation inside a cramped prison.

This reflects "the secret of the supernatural fruitfulness of the soul: that it is aroused entirely by the seed of God, and yet cannot do without the assent of the natural powers of the mind." This "willing cooperation" is "the sine qua non of its growth" (Balthasar) -- meaning that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition, the latter belonging to the God in whom all things are said to be possible.

Sounding very much like Eckhart, Balthasar goes on to say that "Whoever takes God's word into his soul becomes its mother and can, through grace, help bring it forth. But he can do this only because he is at the same time drawn into the eternal birth of the Son in the Father, in which, through grace, he becomes the brother or sister of the Word."

Thus, we are all coauthoring our own infancy narrative. Assuming we have a vacancy.

This mystery of the Incarnation has two aspects: the Word, on the one hand, and its human receptacle, on the other: Christ and Virgin Mother. To be able to realize in itself this mystery, the soul must be like the Virgin... --Schuon

Who Do People Say That I Am? And Where Do They Think I'm From?

A reader has challenged me to conduct a complete exegesis of the Gospels, or more particularly, of Jesus. Of course, Jesus cannot be reduced to what is contained in the Gospels, but more importantly, I am no theologian, just a guy and his blog.

Therefore, I hatched the idea of rereading Pope Benedict's wonderful triptych starting with The Infancy Narratives, to Baptism through Transfiguration, and onto Holy Week and Resurrection.

In doing this I would like to preserve a kind of stereoscopic sensibility, in that I want to start from ground zero, or utter cluelessness, without too many assumptions about Who This Guy Is, even while bearing in mind that he is -- irrespective of whether or not one is a believer -- the most consequential person who has ever lived.

Now, "consequential," in the sense I am using it, means "laden with causation," so to speak. Again, irrespective of one's perspective, it is just an empirical fact that Jesus continues to cause an incalculable number of things to happen -- this post, for example. Obviously, I wouldn't be writing it if he hadn't existed (and this is leaving aside the question of whether Jesus is actively causing things in the vertical sense).

Take a contemporaneous historical figure, say, Tiberius, who was emperor of Rome during Jesus' ministry. Clearly, Tiberius was far more consequential at the time, as he had the power to make most anything happen, whereas Jesus had only the power of an anonymous peasant, which would have been a scintilla more than zero. His criminal's death on the cross would only seem to emphasize the point. Ultimately we would say that man himself had the power of life and death over God -- or at least so it would seem.

Fast forward 2000 years, and we see that Tiberius is essentially inconsequential -- whatever causes he initiated have eventually dissipated -- whereas Jesus' consequentiality only grows over the centuries, like some kind of mustard seed or something.

Again I want to remind the reader that I am attempting to begin this analysis from a standpoint of ignorance which may at times resemble blasphemy. But based upon what we have thus far said, it seems to me that even the most intellectually uncurious and even tenured person would find this rather puzzling: how does the most consequential man on earth become so inconsequential (hey, ask Obama!), whereas how does a common criminal -- whom contemporary psychiatry would frankly regard as delusional -- become the most consequential? (Enough about Obama!) You have to admit that this is odd, odder still if a lunatic is the most consequential man in history.

But let's not prejudge the case: it's not as if other lunatics, or knaves, or criminally insane, have not turned out to be quite consequential. I know, for example, of a religious founder who took pleasure in marrying underage girls and decapitating those who resisted his message of peace. And it is arguable that the second most consequential man in all of history has been none other than Karl Marx. He too continues to reach from the grave and cause any number of things to occur, for example, Obama (and everything Obama causes in return).

Where to begin, with theology, or metaphysics, or history? In a way, this goes directly to the infancy narratives, for what are they actually? Are they really just banal "history" as understood by the modern mind? Or are they theology presented in the form of historical narrative? Or are they, like Genesis, more like lessons in metaphysics and ontology, in this case revealed via biography (or word in flesh)?

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but we do have to begin somewhere. For the Jewish mind, one operating assumption was that man is already in the image of God. Boiled down to an abstract principle, it means that man and God are complementary, even if God necessarily takes priority: man illuminates God because God has first illuminated man.

So, one of our assumptions is that there is both horizontal and vertical causation. Frankly, if there were only the former, then man could never know it. Rather, to know of the horizontal is to be in the vertical; and to be in the vertical is to live in this mysterious space between matter and God; or relative and absolute, if you nonbelievers prefer.

Now, even the most thoroughly secular person is still trying to "ascend" (in the vertical). How? Well, science, for example, is, in its very essence, the reduction of multiplicity to unity. Note, however, that there is a kind of unity in both (vertical) directions. We can descend all the way down into a dark monistic materialism; or, we can ascend into an differentiated but integrated synthesis, which is the luminous way of genuine science (or at least philosophy of science).

But the Christian story -- or the infancy narratives -- begins at the other end of the vertical, with "a man on a mission," so to speak. In other words, this is a hypothetical descent from the most-high to the most-low (in human form).

Thus, on the one hand people knew exactly where Jesus was "from": he's that guy from Nazareth. But at the same time, the Gospels record consternation about how this guy from Nazareth could presume to know all that. When Jesus asks, "Who do people say that I am?," he's also posing the question, Where do you think I am from?, and even Why do you think I am here?, or What is my vertical message?

For Benedict, the Gospels, each in their own way, "set out to answer these questions." In short: Who? Where? Why? and, How can we participate? Each of these is inextricably intertwined with the others, and I would say goes to the question of how Jesus can be so consequential and continue to cause things like this post to happen today.

Benedict points out that Matthew and Luke present two very different genealogies, one essentially extending from the origin to the now, the other from the now to the origin. As Abraham's life "points forward" to his multitude of progeny (both horizontal and vertical), Matthew wants to say that this stream reaches a kind of focused intensity in the person of Jesus -- or Mary, rather.

If the genealogical stream suggests horizontal continuity from Abraham to Mary, then the vertical ingression into Mary implies discontinuity: "Mary is a new beginning. Her child does not originate from any man, but is a new creation, conceived [vertically] through the Holy Spirit."

At this point -- if not sooner -- non-believers will have already manifested the Jesus Willies, meaning that something in them recoils from all this sappy Jesus talk. Again, I am attempting to avoid this, to the extent that it is possible. Rather, I am trying to open up a space for understanding, even if one ultimately rejects what one has understood.

You might say I am trying to provide some cognitive "hooks" for the modern mind, which will otherwise reject the whole thing out of head.

In this case, I am simply positing the idea that man self-evidently has access to the vertical; that this vertical is either hierarchical (conditioned from top to bottom) or an unintelligible absurdity; and if the former, then the possibility that the top of the hierarchy may manifest in the bottom. This latter would represent "Incarnation," but let's not get ahead of ourselves. At this point we are simply affirming the possibility. And if it is possible for dead matter to come to life, we should keep an open mind as to other possible secrets matter has in store for us.

So, the gospels imply that "Jesus belongs by law, 'legally,' to the house of David. And yet he comes from elsewhere, 'from above' -- from God himself." The point is that this man has a mysterious "dual origin"; he is both one of us and not like any of us: brother and stranger, friend and superior, Jesus and freak.

To be continued... assuming interest.

Adaptation to the Environment vs. Openness to Being

Not enough time for a new post. So I plunged down seven years into the arkive, and rejected about a dozen before settling on this one as salvageable. When I say "salvageable," I mean it has been both edited and added to. As usual when I revisit a post, I regarded it as if it were written by someone else, and took the liberty of correcting the author and fine-tuning his arguments...

As I've mentioned before, I'm not a bitter person, but I do still mildly resent the fact that it took me half my life to unlearn my left wing brain-washing and soul-dirtying and rearrive at where my philosophical endeavors should have started to begin with. I wasted so much time assimilating things that are not only wrong but harmful to the soul and incompatible with true happiness or fulfillment.

What in the world is the world? Or, to put it another way, what kind of world is the world of man, and is it the same as the world? Ever since Kant, the answer has been No: our world -- the world we perceive -- is just a form of our sensibility, a kind of projection of our neurology. Therefore, it is not the world. Rather, the world -- whatever that is -- is radically inaccessible to man. (Which begs the question of how we can even posit it, but whatever.)

This question is addressed in an enjoyable book I'm currently reading, For Love of Wisdom: Essays on the Nature of Philosophy, by Josef Pieper. One of the themes Pieper develops is the idea that all other animals merely live in a world, whereas human beings are privileged to (potentially, at least) live in the world.

For example, people assume that all animals with eyes, when they look at an object, see the same thing, when this is demonstrably untrue.

Pieper cites the example of a certain bird that preys on grasshoppers but is incapable of seeing the grasshopper if it isn't moving. Only in leaping does the grasshopper become distinct from the background -- which is why many insects (and higher animals) "play dead."

In their resting form, it is not so much that they are dead as literally invisible. It is as if they drop into a hole and no longer exist in the world of the predator. Even if the bird were starving, it could search and search, and yet, never find the unmoving grasshopper right under its beak.

What this means is that the animal cannot transcend its biological boundaries, even with an organ -- the eye -- seemingly equipped for the task.

Pieper quotes the biologist Uexküll, who draws a distinction between the animal's environment and the actual world. As he writes, "The environments of animals are comparable in no way to open nature, but rather to a cramped, ill-furnished apartment."

Animals are confined to the environment to which they are adapted, and from which they can never escape. Most of the world is simply not perceived or even capable of being perceived. In fact, the world did not come into view until human beings happened upon the scene.

But given Darwinian principles -- which, by the way, we can only know about because we have transcended them -- how did mankind escape its cramped environment and enter the wider world?

Or did we? Are we as trapped in a narrow cross-section of reality as our tenured apes? If so, then both science and religion are impossible. Like the bird looking for the immobile grasshopper, we could find neither "the world" nor "God," despite the most diligent searching. Indeed, we wouldn't even know of the existence of the reality for which to search. But if science is possible, then God is necessary. Or, to put it another way, since God exists, science is possible.

Pieper writes that the human spirit is not so much defined by the property of immateriality as it is "by the ability to enter into relations with Being as a totality," in a way that transcends our mere animal-environmental boundaries.

Now, as Schuon always emphasized, the intellect is not restricted to a particular environment. Rather, it is universal -- "relatively absolute" -- and therefore able to know the world. As Pieper writes, "it belongs to the very nature of a spiritual being to rise above the environment and so transcend adaptation and confinement," which in turn explains "the at once liberating and imperiling character with which the nature of spirit is immediately associated."

This is what I was driving at on p. 92 of the book: "Up to the threshold of the third singularity, biology was firmly in control of the hominids, and for most of evolution, mind (such as it was) existed to serve the needs of the primate body. Natural selection did not, and could not have, 'programmed' us to know reality, only to survive in a narrow 'reality tunnel' constructed within the dialectical space between the world and our evolved senses."

But then suddenly Darwin was cast aside and "mind crossed a boundary into a realm wholly its own, a multidimensional landscape unmappable by science and unexplainable by natural selection"; humans ventured out of biological necessity and "into a realm with a vastly greater degree of freedom, well beyond the confining prison walls of the senses."

Thus, natural selection is adequate to explain adaptation to an environment, but it cannot explain our discovery and comprehension of the world. Pieper quotes Aristotle, who wrote that "the soul is in a way all existing things."

What does he mean by this? What he means is that the soul is able to put itself in relation to the totality of Being. While other animals have only their little slice of Being, the human is able to encounter Being as a whole.

Thus -- running out of time here, but thus -- to be in Spirit is "to exist amid reality as a whole, in the face of the totality of Being." Spirit is not a world, but the world. Or, to be precise, "spirit" and "world" are reciprocal concepts, the one being impossible in the absence of the other. Science itself is a spiritual world, or it is no world at all, only an environment. Usually an academic environment.

Bottom line: there is no naturalistic way to get from the restricted intelligence of animals to the open intelligence of humans.

The Blinding Light and Omniscient Darkness of a World Made of Language

Back to words -- or messages, messengers, and recipients. Deconstructionists like to pretend that the world is made of language, but they don't really believe it, any more than the liberal believes in racial equality. Rather, they first redefine the plain meaning of the word and then pledge their allegiance to their little delusion.

But for the Vertical Church of the Orthoparadoxical Trinity, the world really IS made of language, bearing in mind its three modes alluded to above. The postmodernist collapses these three, so that language refers only to itself: words point only to other words, with the result that speaking becomes indistinguishable from the ceaseless cranio-rectal exploration of the tenured.

Speaking of which, this superb book on how Israel went from being adored to despised by the left has a chapter on the malignant leftist intellectual assclown Edward Said, that reminds us of how intellectually depraved he and they are. As far as I am aware, there is nothing analogous in contemporary conservatism to these fashionable intellectual darlings becoming Academic Superstars and shaping whole generations of morons. (Even a public intellectual such as Russell Kirk is simply preserving and handing along the Permanent Things.)

In the 1960s it was provocateurs such as Marcuse, Adorno, Sartre, Michael Harrington, et al. Nowadays it is Said, Chomsky, Zinn, Foucault, Derrida, Rawls, and the rest of that rabble. Such people are not even confused, rather, grandiose transmission belts of Confident Error to the McDullards of academia (both students and other professors).

The reason conservative thinkers are not generally subject to such systematic nonsense is that we are by definition much less influenced by these types of fashionable intellectual vaudevillians (there are always exceptions -- some so-called conservatives even voted for Obama). A hundred years from now no one will know these noams, but people will still be studying Aristotle, Aquinas, or Burke, for the simple reason that the former are always intellectual reactionaries who react to and recoil from truth. Truth is one, while its endless alternatives constitute the fashionable nonsense of the day.

As to the linguistic composition of reality, Balthasar writes that "By keeping himself open in his suspended center to movement toward the depths, [man's] language is constantly enriched from heaven and earth."

In other words, man is the recipient of a continuous stream of horizontal and vertical murmurandoms, but only if he opens himself to them in freedom. For example, vast swaths of the world -- mostly the Islamic world -- systematically close off the horizontal messages, while perhaps an equal number of cardiomyopic assouls in the west shut out the vertical.

Of note, once one forecloses the vertical, that is hardly the end of it. Like any other form of repression, there is always a return of the repressed, but in a disguised, projected, or transformed way. Which is why there is no one more superstitious than the secular leftist, just as there is no one more "concrete" than the Islamist who rejects reason and empiricism.

In other words, if one cannot penetrate and illuminate the horizontal world rationally, then it is as if one is left with a kind of dense concrete block of unintelligibility. This also explains why their visions of heaven are so concretely sensual, whereas the left wing political heaven is always an unattainable and destructive abstraction that they nevertheless cannot stop loving with mind, body, and heart.

As a matter of fact, this goes to one of the reasons for the left's reversal on Israel, because during its first twenty or thirty years, Israel was probably the most purely socialistic nation that has ever existed, right down to kibbutzniks who didn't own so much as their own pants, and whose children were raised collectively.

Of course this beautiful idea eventually fell apart in practice, so Israel became the most convincing proof ever that socialism cannot work even under the extraordinary conditions of being a voluntary system among ethnically, religiously, culturally, ideologically, and linguistically similar peoples. How then could it possibly succeed in a place like the US, where it can only be forced upon an ethnically, culturally, religiously, linguistically, and ideologically diverse population?

Obama does not know this. Why? Maybe because Edward Said is one the floundering fathers from whom he got his crazy dreams. I don't have time to get into the details, but suffice it to say that Said is as thoroughly rotten as they come. To assimilate his ideas is to become rotten, or to allow one's mind to rot from the inside out. Even to look up to such a person signifies a broken moral and intellectual compass. In other words, his perverse ideas simply do not resonate in the sane (even leaving aside Said's dishonesty, pomposity, and wretched scholarship).

Note that for a postmodern thinker such as Said, it is naive to think there is such a thing as unambiguous truth, for which reason his lies become understandable as the means for revolutionary change, which is the real point. A lie that furthers Palestinian barbarism is a good thing.

This view of reality could not be more opposed to ours (again, it is reactionary, i.e., a reaction to truth). Now, we agree that there is ambiguity surrounding language, not because of a deficiency of truth but because of an excess, an overflowing mystery through which meaning is conveyed through words even while always transcending them. "Language acquires its depth, its infinite significance, its poetic, prophetic, lawgiving power from knowledge of this mystery" (Balthasar). Thus, "When the mystery of the ground of being fades, then the expressive power of words fades also."

Furthermore, all speech that we call "great" is "rooted, without qualification and without exception, in the religious, in the reverent vision" of this perpetual differentiation of the primordial Word.

Now, theo-logy, as Balthasar reminds us, is at one end "the speech of God," but at the other "the speech of man in God." In other words, there is mystery at both ends, and yet, it is not a "barren" mystery, but rather, an endlessly fertile one. "If man is ultimately gifted with speech because he himself is a word of God," it means that man is simultaneously word, recipient, and speaker in return. This is the only possible source of our own potential "wholeness," which comes via participation in this eternal divine trialogue at the heart of things.

Eavesdropping on Nature's God

Continuing with yesterday's line of thought... well, first of all, here are some highlights from the second repost I promised:

Reader Magister commented that "Feminists seem to be perpetually at war with their own bodies." However, this resentment is projected into men and into babies, as if it's our fault that their bodies are so sexually alluring, or the baby's fault that women have such nice cozy wombs just perfect for perpetuating the species. It's almost as if the female body has a purpose or something.

However, feminists reject the sufficient reason of their bodies -- for readers living in Rio Linda or laboring under the delusions of gender theory, that means the reason why your body exists. I mean, everything has a reason, right? Can we at least agree on that? Or do feminists now regard logic as an abusive form of mansplaining?

No? I see. It's a form of rape. Besides, that's not funny!

Did you know that 90% of workplace deaths occur to men? So, why isn't everyone freaking out about MORTALITY INEQUALITY!

In my response to Magister's comment, I wrote that, "Speaking of cosmic rights, the baby certainly has a legitimate right to the mother's body, which is why, you know, breasts. (Which are to be distinguished from boobs, which is what breasts look like to a man.)

"More generally, as we've discussed in the past, not only are our minds intrinsically intersubjective, but so too are our bodies. Man and woman point beyond themselves and 'refer' to one another. So to say that we 'own' our bodies and that's that is a little simplistic, to say the least, and certainly not humanistic." (I don't want to imply that I am devaluing the gift of our individuality, only that it is a gift that must be given in return, ultimately for reasons of cosmic math, i.e., to assure that 1 + 1 = 3.)

The reasons humanism is not humanistic are that a) human beings could not have evolved from such a static situation, and b) no existing human being lives as an isolated body, cut off from the rest of mankind. Rather, a living body is an open system at every level, biologically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually. Or supposed to be, rather.

Now, in order for language, or information, or meaning, to exist, one thing must be capable of standing for another. This is an extremely simple and basic concept, so simple that you have to be the victim of a public education to not know it.

Of note, this feature is woven into the very fabric of existence, and was here long before human beings arrived on the cosmic scene. Consider DNA, for example, through which a gene, or combination of genes, stands for -- one might even say "symbolizes" -- this or that trait.

But even prior to that, we know that the world is always susceptible to intelligible abstraction, which is why, for example, we can talk about a "big bang." We can talk about a big bang because of background radiation that encodes information referring to that primordial event -- just as light striking your retina can tell you that a star existed a billion years ago, or however long it took the light to get here and now.

This means that at the moment of luminous impact, our present and the star's past -- or the star's past and future -- are thoroughly entangled in this moment of knowing. When the star gave out that light a billion years ago, little did it know that it would someday arrive at the back of the eye of a lifeform that didn't yet exist. But stars were bigger back then. It's the cosmos that's gotten smaller.

Now, perhaps the one Big Idea I have retained from Christopher Alexander is that Life Itself is latent or implicate everywhere in the cosmos, but becomes manifest or explicate under certain conditions.

This is an extremely handy idea for discerning the Living from the Dead at every level of the cosmos. But it is really helpful in sorting between the humans and the zombies, because the language of the latter is both dead and endeadening (see the leaden communiques of our anonymous troll, for example). There is something wrong with their whole encoding system. They radiate Death from every pore.

Now, to recognize the implicit Life in things is to realize that "The universe is made of person-stuff. I always thought it was made of machine-stuff, but now I see that it is not" (Christopher Alexander).

Yes, exactly. Person-stuff. Among other things, this means that human beings -- better, Persons -- are not late arrivals to the cosmic manifestivus, but its whole basis; or rather, its quintessential expression, only made explicate and local. For anything, the end reveals its purpose, right? Final cause is chronologically last but ontologically first.

This is why everything makes so much damn sense, but it also explains when and why things don't, because things are supposed to make sense. Absurdity is the exception, not the rule -- just as most things in the world -- unspoiled nature, that is -- are oddly beautiful. Why? What's with all this useless beauty? Indeed, what's with all this useless truth?

So, that is the end of the old post. On to the new. Recall what was said about cosmic messages: somehow, everything in nature is a message, or encoded information. I recall Chesterton making this point. He says something to the effect that if we're going to talk about messages, it makes a great deal of difference who the messenger is. Agreed, the world is a message. But from whom?

The message of Darwinism (or any other secular philosophy) is that there are no messages -- at least no human messages, nothing addressed to us. Yes, there are instructions for encoding proteins, but that's pretty much it: we might say there are messages but no messenger and no recipient.

So, how did humans decode the message? I guess you'd have to say that, like the NSA, we're just eavesdropping on conversations (or monologues) that are none of our business.

All of this goes to the fact that it is impossible to imagine a more inhuman philosophy than humanism, since it isolates the human being from this whole trimorphic network of messenger-message-recipient. In his From the Divine to the Human, Schuon has a typically illuminating essay called The Message of the Human Body.

Now, in the Raccoon view of things, everything is a revelation. Or in other words, there is revelation proper, AKA scripture, or the Incarnation, or direct mystical experience (or infused contemplation).

But obviously the creation itself is a revelation, as is the human person. By way of comparison, I can know with certainty that another person exists, for he is revealed to me. However -- and this is where revelation proper comes in -- I cannot truly understand "what he's like" unless he reveals it to me. So, the world is like that: it certainly reveals a Creator, even if it cannot necessarily convey intimate details of his subjective life -- what he's really like.

Back to the human body: what is its message? "Choom Gang '79?" No, no, not the tattoos. Just the body itself. Schuon suggests -- or reads, rather -- that the male body accentuates absoluteness, while the female body expresses the infinite; or I suppose one might say strength and nurturance.

"Even without knowing that femininity derives from an 'Eternal Feminine' of transcendent order," writes Schuon, "one is obliged to take note of the fact that woman, being situated like the male in the human state, is deiform because this state is deiform." Nor can there be any strict demarcation between the two, because we all descend from the "primoridal androgyne" that "survives in each of us."

This seems like common sense -- and certainly common experience: "the feminine body is far too perfect and spiritually too eloquent to be no more than a kind of transitory accident." Can I get an amen or two from a man or two? Dávila says something similar: The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face.

The child too carries a message, which all spiritually attuned parents recognize. (Again, for Jesus to emphasize this reality in the ancient world was almost unheard of.) The child reveals to us "what is simple, pure, innocent, primordial, and close to the Essence." His "beauty has all the charm of promise, of hope, and of blossoming," of "a paradise not yet lost" (Schuon).

You could say that the child has not yet drifted so far from the "divine intention"; they are much higher upstream, where the crystal waters flow. Thus the necessity of retaining the message of childhood in the wisdom and maturity of the adult, e.g., "the qualities of simplicity and freshness, of gratitude and trust, which he possessed in the springtime of his life."

There's more, but that's enough for today....