Arboreal Deity Cerebration

The parable of the mustard seed is the briefest of parables, but when explicated grows into a sprawling post, so that Raccoons of the world can find slack in it...

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that birds of the air come and nest in its branches.

A footnote in my Study Bible says that the mustard seed symbolizes the disciples who "began as just a few men, but soon 'encompassed the whole earth'" -- almost like Jesus knew this would eventually happen or something.

The seed also symbolizes "faith entering a person's soul, which causes an inward growth of virtue," such that he becomes increasingly godlike (AKA theosis).

And on the opposite page, I see that there is a whole section on parables, which are "stories in word-pictures, revealing spiritual truth." In Hebrew and Aramaic, the word is also related to allegory, proverb, and riddle.

With apologies to our godless friends, parables can function a bit like koans, which, according to the google machine, are paradoxical anecdotes or riddles used in Zen to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.

In like fashion, parables "give us glimpses of Him whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways." The point is to vault us out of our habitual manner of thinking.

Which is why they require a bit of "work" on our end: the meaning "is not evident to all who hear them. The listener must have spiritual ears to hear, and even then not all have the same degree of understanding."

Parables are layered, as it were; or rather, we are layered, and therefore understand the parable according to our own depth.

The Study Bible cooncurs: the parables demonstrate that "people are responsible for their own lack of receptivity: having grown dull and insensitive," they are unwilling or unable to hear or accept the message.

Importantly, insight into them "does not come simply through an intellectual understanding"; rather, they are, as it were, relatively unsaturated containers into which a kind of higher understanding -- AKA faith -- may pour itself.

Rutler adverts to the intricacy -- and mystery -- of any seed. Jesus's "earthly contemporaries would have been confounded by the system that encodes in the first inkling of a life all that the organism will become.... A seed is alive, even if it looks like little more than lint," just as "the first cell of human life is alive" even if we call it a "blastocyst."

For Rutler, the seed represents the Church, "nascent and fragile" yet destined to reach over mountains, across oceans, and even through cultures, baptizing and transforming what is worthy and leaving the rest behind.

This despite the fact that "The little seedling did not seem to have much promise, and it seemed to die when it sprouted into a cross."

It seems that the seed is simultaneously incarnation, cross, and church, i.e., Body of Christ. Or, the sprawling Body of Christ is the mature plant that has grown from its tiny seedling.

Dávila has an arboreal aphorism that relates somewhat to the above: We cannot find shelter in the Gospel alone, as we also cannot take refuge in the seed of an oak tree, but rather next to the twisted trunk and under the disorder of the branches.

Which is why to fell sacred groves is to erase divine footprints.

Having said that, Souls that Christianity does not prune never mature.

Those three aphorisms add up to the idea that the seed is planted in time, which is why it is entirely bound up with history, which is to say tradition. History is the twisted trunk and tradition the unruly branches. Some Protestants would cut down the tree of tradition to try to get back to the seed, but that is to erase footprints the divine has left in history.

Nevertheless, prudent pruning is always advised. A couple of years ago a massive tree in my side yard split in two, because a huge branch had grown too large and too remote from the central trunk.

There's a parable in there somewhere....

Tares & Snares: Give Me Liberty or Give Me Stuff

Once upin a timeless...

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away, cloaked in his darkness.

So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came to him and said, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?'

'An enemy has done this,' he replied. The servants asked him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?' 'No,' he answered, 'lest in gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the reapers: Gather the weeds first and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat into my barn.

Once again Jesus furnishes his own exegesis -- or at least decodes the symbols -- equating the field with the world, the farmer with himself, the sower of weeds with the evil one, the good seed with "the sons of heaven," the lousy seed with "sons of the evil one," the harvest with the end of time, and the reapers with his angels.

Exactly what is a tare, anyway? Sources inform me that it is a naughty weed that not only resembles wheat when young, but is indistinguishable from it. You won't be able to tell the difference until harvest time, when both have matured.

Plus their roots may become entangled below ground, so you won't be able to pull the tare without risking the wheat. Nor do you want to confuse the one with the other and eat the tare, for it apparently causes dizziness and nausea. It's bad food.

The moral of the story? This world is Messed. Up. Until the end of time.

Note how grace falls from heaven in the form of the good seed. But it is as if, on the way down, there are cross currents from another source, which contaminate what God has poured out.

Interestingly, the bad seed is specifically a counterfeit version of the good. It is as if God throws down sound money, but before it hits the ground the Evil One tosses out millions in counterfeit bills. He must have studied the genuine bills closely in order to produce the phony ones.

The parable, according to Rutler, calls us "to exercise patience with the human will as it exercises its God-given freedom," for freedom itself is neither good nor bad. Rather, it depends entirely upon what one does with it. Or, to be perfectly accurate, it depends upon the vector of the freedom, i.e., where it is aimed.

As it so happens, this is one of the biggest differences between left and right. There is a chapter devoted to this in The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree. Let's check it out and see if it has anything to say about wheat and tare.

Ah, yes. Our real freedom is a natural right that does not (could not) come from the state. But modern liberalism creates and confers new freedoms that it inevitably (necessarily) sows with tares of coercion and control. In author words,

"[O]ur" -- which is to say, the left's -- "most recent ideal of freedom is a rather paradoxical one. We want a radical combination of personal rights and freedoms, but also a broad range of goods and services provided to all by the state."

One of these is not like the other!

"[T]his historically novel combination of enemy opposites" may be characterized as "libertarian [liberTAREan ho ho] socialism, under which citizens have all the personal, bodily, and especially sexual freedoms imaginable, while their former political, economic, social, and expressive freedoms are increasingly either eliminated altogether or heavily regulated by the state, its courts, and tribunals."

Ripped from the headlines, as it were.

So the state always sows tares into its bogus promises of wheat. It's another way of saying that the government that does anything for you can do anything to you.

Look at the promises of ObamaCare, or Social Security, or Medicare, whatever. There are tares enough in state subsidized college, but just wait until it's free! We are still recovering from the economic catastrophe caused by the state sowing its tares into the mortgage industry.

And here is an especially distressing story: California is sowing tares of statism into all its textbooks (as if they aren't far enough left as it is). This is to ensure that children grow up to be worthless tares fit only for hell. Which they will proceed to reproduce on earth, like good little statists.

As to the demons who sow the tares into the textbooks of innocent children? Necks & millstones, says the sower of good seed.

There is horizontal freedom and there is vertical freedom, and unless the former is informed by the latter, it reduces to nothing more than... nothing, really, because it is utterly meaningless.

In fact, to separate the vertical from the horizontal is perhaps the most efficient way to turn God's joyous wheat of freedom into tares of ontological dread and existential mischief.

Back to Rutler. He says that the parable opposes the idea of man's total depravity, "for the bad seed comes after the good seed in Christ's telling. In the beginning, the field was good, and the first seed was good. Nature is not originally evil..."

Note also that the evil one waits until good men are sleeping before he does his nefarious business, i.e., sowing the bad seed. He doesn't do it in broad daylight, being that sunlight is always the best disinfuckedup.

"The enemy obscures lucidity with euphemisms and cloaks with pride the consciences of bright minds." You might day that he focuses an intense beam of darkness so as to turn their mindfields insight-out.

Libruls are tarists, no doubt about it.

Seed & Soil, Word & Womb

I'm reading an interesting book -- Hints of Heaven -- that analyzes each of Jesus' parables. "Analyzes" is probably the wrong word; there's some of that, but it's more of a meditation on their meaning. I will try to add to Rutler's exegeses if I can, but there are no guarantees, the spirit blowing where it will and all.

Now, if this is God speaking, these parables should be of concern to us all -- not just the content but the form as well, for why should a co-creator of the cosmos specifically choose this idiosyncratic manner of expression? There must be something about the parabolic form itself that is conducive to transmitting what he wants us to know, and in the way he wants us to know it.

But in any event, as foretold in Psalms, I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world. That's a bold statement!

Let's get some preluminaries out of the way -- like, exactly what is a parable? It is "a similitude employing a brief narrative in order to teach a spiritual lesson" (Rutler). All told there are 24 of them in the synoptic gospels, but for whatever reason, none in John. They are "hints of heaven," or "delicate and veiled indications of our true homeland." Thus they are what we annoyingly call reveilation, revealing and veiling at the same time.

Jesus even gives us one reason why he communicates in parables: because some people hear without understanding and see without perceiving. Thus, it seems that the parable requires a bit of mental work on our end in order to make the penny drop. It reminds me of psychotherapy, the trick of which is to guide the patient to a realization, as opposed to just providing the answer.

The first parable is The Sower and the Seed. It goes a little like this (I just grabbed the first translation that came up; it's not necessarily the same one Rutler uses):

A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path and was trodden under foot, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil and grew, and yielded hundredfold.

In this case, Jesus even explains the parable to the slow-on-the-uptake disciples:

The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop...

This parable, according to Rutler, is about our receptivity to grace; it is "more about the soils than the Sower." The seed is the Word, but herebelow the Word falls into more or less fertile soil. Jesus names four kinds of soil with differing degrees of receptiveness and therefore fertility.

Rutler identifies the first -- the seed which falls by the wayside -- with "the path of the proud, who consider the seed, the word of God, out of place or irrelevant."

This, it seems to me, speaks of the quintessential infertile egghead who prefers his own barren path to the fruitful fields of God -- like an ugly asphalt street running through an orchard. Think of academia. Because it has to do with "knowledge," some divine seeds inevitably fall there. But what happens to them? They are carelessly trampled underfoot, and if noticed at all, will be regarded as weeds instead of the very nourishment that sustains truth.

The rocky ground goes to those people who, deep down, are as shallow as can be. "This soil is superficiality, the seductive cosmetic of obtuseness." It is "the senselessness of those who channel-surf through life, addicted to shallow entertainment and insubstantial celebrities..." They are distracted by distraction and addicted to addiction. As Homer Simpson says of himself, "I've discovered my one weakness -- it's that I'm weak!

What about the thorny ground? "The seed that falls here is choked by illusions." It is a mixture of good and bad -- including good and bad religion. (I could say more, but I'm out of time; but think of all the chopra-esque religious parasites, or parasites on religion!)

Finally there is the good soil, which "makes a hybrid of heaven and earth." Pneumaticonically speaking, it is (↓↑), "the indescribable conversation between man and God"; it is the seed that "takes root in the earth [↓] and flourishes, growing upward [↑] toward paradise." I suppose the Archetype of archetypes here would be Word & Womb.

But more generally, it is a "blast of objective grace" plunged into "the soil of human subjectivity." Whatever else the mind is, it is womb and soil for the ends of birth and harvest.

Absolutism, True and False

When asked about his philosophy, Schuon would say that he was an absolutist -- which, in our relativist and totolerantarian world, is intolerable.

But everyone is an absolutist, either explicitly or implicitly, overtly or secretly (especially to oneself). Look at how the left wing tech giants vow to rid the internet of "hate speech" before the sun sets tomorrow. They absolutely won't tolerate it!

Some absolutists are frankly intolerable -- Islamists, social justice warriors, Black Lives Matter, campus crybullies, etc. So, how do we determine the difference between a healthy and functional absolutism vs. a fascistic and dysfunctional one? How do we know that my Absolute is worthy of reverence and respect, while yours deserves to be kicked in the balls?

In the previous post I mentioned Gairdner's excellent Book of Absolutes, which I don't believe I've ever playgiarized with at length. He notes that "for more than a century, the citizens of the Western world have been uncritically subjected in the media, the public square, and the classroom to the disturbing idea that there is no permanent truth in human life or in the material world and that the meaning of something can therefore be found only relative to something else."

Thus, "for most of us" -- and this would include me during my academic years of peak indoctrination -- "this has become the only indisputable truth of modern times..."

"We are told that time and space are relative" -- which is of course true; which is to say they are relative to one another and to the absolute speed of light -- but also that "Cultures are relative. Moral values are relative. Laws are relative. Even biological distinctions such as gender are said to be relative (or 'constructed') at will."

Here we see how mental and spiritual toxins that once polluted only the mountain peaks of academia have flowed down into the valleys and oozed up into the plains of politics, media, lower education, and popular culture.

Thus, for the first time in history we have a president who actually believes this shit. And I think that even Hillary Clinton is surprised that more than half of her base also fervently believes this lunacy -- not as a cynical strategy to gain power (which a Clinton always understands), but in terms of non-negotiable, absolute ideals. Hence the success of the Sanders campaign.

Let's get one thing out of the way: yes, everything is relative, the question being relative to what? For the proper Absolutist, everything is relative to the Absolute, AKA God. Indeed, we don't even believe it is possible to have the word "relative" without reference to the Absolute, for they mutually define one another.

But for the absolute relativist, everything is relative to everything else. This can make no logical sense, for it means that one is truly trapped in language, and cannot make any meta-statements from outside the system, i.e., from the perspective of the Absolute.

So in reality, everything is either ordered to the Absolute in a hierarchical way, or else we are reduced to a kind of absolute disorder about which we can make no true statements at all. Which is why to be a genuine Absolutist is to be a Truthist as well.

One reason why multiculturalism is such an abomination is that culture itself presupposes certain absolutes upon which everyone agrees. Widespread agreement on these absolutes is precisely what creates the conditions for a high-trust society.

In Gairdner's more recent The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree, he writes of how, when he was younger, "it was common at a dinner party with family and friends to find ourselves drawn into discussion and debate over the political and moral topics of the day."

Two observations, which I too well remember: first, no one was fearful of expressing their views, as this was prior to the oppressive regime of political correctness. Second, "I cannot remember any violent personal attacks, tears, or outrage over someone else's point of view, however wacky it may have seemed..."

But nowadays I can't even imagine volunteering my views in public unless I pick up clues from my interlocutor that I am in a Safe Space (I live in one of the most hermetically sealed liberal bubbles in the country). There is no doubt whatsoever that the Trump phenomenon is rooted in this experience -- which is why it doesn't matter what he says, so long as it disturbs liberal idiots.

And when I say "idiot," that's not an insult, rather, literal, for "the ancient Greeks actually used the word idiotes... to describe anyone who insisted on seeing the world in a purely personal and private way."

"Certainly, no young person in the past would have expected to impress a teacher by arguing that all truths are relative," for to do so is a confession of absolute ignorance and/or stupidity. If everything is relative, then truly, everyone deserves an A -- or F, which literally amounts to the same thing.

Hitler was an Absolutist. As was Stalin. And Mao. And the Islamists. How then is our Absolutism different from theirs?

Simple: our Absolutism means openness to the Absolute. In other words, it is a vertically open system in which we are always relative to the Absolute. What we call "general" or "natural" grace is the downward flow of energies from this nonlocal source (to be distinguished from the special grace of Christianity).

But the false Absolutism of the left always involves the superimposition of a manmode, faux absolute on the world, thus foreclosing the open vertical flow. Then, in a perverse caricature of reality, a kind of counterfeit grace flows "freely" from the state. Thus, thanks to Obama, more Americans are dependent upon this unbought material grace than ever before in our history.

At the same time, there is a relentless attack on the competing form of vertical grace, i,e., religion. The left must attack Christianity, because if Christianity is true, then leftism is both false and demonic.

Leaps of Faith Above and Below

I'm reading a book called The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree, by William Gairdner. I bought it because I really enjoyed his previous Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defense of Universals.

In fact, I had pulled the latter down from the shelf because I thought it might have something useful to say about King Barry's embarrassing sexual neurosis, which he wishes to force upon the rest of us via federal power. How weird is that?! Talk about violating the separation between crotch and state.

Obviously, one thing -- perhaps the one thing -- that divides liberals and conservatives is the existence and status of absolutes: we believe they exist and place constraints around our existence, while liberals insist -- absolutely! -- they don't.

In a logical world this would end the debate, with liberals hanging their heads in shame over their rudimentary but catastrophic error in reasoning. Fat chance! When your logic is this defective, it cannot be remedied by mere logic.

It's like mental AIDS: when your immune system is that compromised, you cannot expect it to save you from the consequences of a compromised immune system.

Analogously, reason functions very much like a cognitive immune system. It cannot actually bring us to truth as such -- for that always requires a leap -- but it can certainly kill a lot of bad and dysfunctional ideas along the way.

To be only capable of reason would be analogous to suffering from an autoimmune disease whereby the immune system ends up attacking healthy tissue along with the unhealthy. Mere rationalism is always circular and therefore tautologous.

What I find is that liberals are oblivious to this constraint, thinking that their faux absolutes are supported by logic, when they actually result from a leap of faith. Thus, they are the mirror image of religious folk, except their leap is unconscious and not reflected upon. (One definition of theology is conscious reflection upon revealed absolutes.)

Adam's fall repeats itself in the fallen personality. What this essentially means is that man is situated along a vertical axis, such that the fall is not just in the past but very much in our future. But so too is the possibility of ascent. Both the ascent and descent will require leaps of faith.

That is, man cannot go beyond the limits of agnostic rationalism; he is as it were enclosed in a circle, and cannot know what lies beyond this absurcularity without that leap of faith. This goes to Augustine's gag about believing so as to know (credo ut intelligam). Guffaw ha!

You can (implicitly) know a lot without (explicit) understanding, but you can't understand without implicit knowledge.

Which is precisely what the world's greatest logician, Gödel, proved with his ironyclad theorems: not that we can't know the absolutes that lie outside the circle of logic, but that we routinely know them in a translogical way. Frankly, we can't even think without the support of these implicit absolutes. They support everything we do, brainwise.

Thank God for atheists, because these negative agents of humanity perform a vital catabolic function of tearing down bad ideas -- like the logical immune system alluded to above. Being that they are catabolic, they release energy for the purposes of metabolism (i.e., the breaking-down is for the purpose of building-up).

But unalloyed catabolism equates to diabolism, because again, it reduces to an attack on healthy and unhealthy tissue alike. This is how garden-variety village atheism transitions to outright cosmic assoulery.

There are many "sexual absolutes" that are hardwired into man. These are things we don't have to think about or defend -- or at least didn't have to think about and defend until the left began attacking and undermining them.

Many of these absolutes were never thought about consciously, but rather, were settled by thousands of years of natural (and later, cultural) selection. So much for the left believing in Darwinism! For what is Bathroom Barry's peculiar attitude toward sexuality but a war on biology (and above)?

To be continued...

Love and Progress

You can't help noticing that music is very important to people and that most songs are about Luuuvvvv. But what is love about?

"Fundamentally," writes Schuon, "every love is a search for the Essence or the lost Paradise." Thus, it's sort of a category error to believe that this or that man or woman will somehow restore paradise for you. I mean, they might for a week, or a month, or six months, but beyond that, you're pushing your luck. Nostalgia can only sustain you for so long.

So, idealized, romantic love "bears witness to to this nostalgia for a far-off Paradise." Not that there's anything wrong with it, but we need to be prepared for what comes next, which is a kind of psychic inversion, through which... well, Schuon expresses it better than I can:

"To be at peace with God is to seek and find our happiness in Him; the creature that he has joined to us [in marriage] may and must help us to reach this with greater facility or with less difficulty," which again goes to precisely why and how marriage is a sacrament, i.e., a special channel of grace. It is an "outwardness with a view to inwardness," or a "form with a view to essence." It's why even atheists get married, although they have forgotten why. Or in other words, they do so for the unconscious nostalgia, not for the supraconscious hope.

The only other person I know of who speaks of marriage in this curious manner is the "esoteric orthodox" writer Boris Mouravieff. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but I remember it being pretty fruity. Let's see if we can find any useful nuggets!

Mouravieff cites a gag from some esoteric tome called The Golden Book that goes like this: To live means to love; / He who loves not, hardly lives. / He leads a mournful existence / Whose only meaning lies in the hope of loving.

And the same sentiment "had already been pronounced by St Paul nearly two thousand years ago. He said: the aim of life is to attain Love" (e.g. I Corinthians 14:1). "Better still," writes Mouravieff, "Love is the Aim of life on the whole cosmic scale, right down to the most primitive organisms."

"Love, like the personality, is also a Divine talent which is loaned to man..." And "anyone who does not develop his talent loses it." Regarding this divine loan, "The result is that one cannot command love any more than one can forbid love."

But "Even if the couple is composed of truly polar beings, if the lovers do not adhere to the supreme conditions demanded by Love, once their credit is exhausted, Love disappears" and "one finds oneself left with the broken pieces."

To me, this means that the polar relation must be infused with an energy from outside and above, or end up exhausting itself through sheer entropy. For which reason a long and happy marriage is a true miracle -- i.e., it is renewed and revivified by the miracle of grace. Or in the cryptic words of Petey, No body crosses the phoenix line lest it be repossessed and amortized.

Here is another crack from The Golden Book referred to above: Every man is born bearing within him the image of his polar being. / As he grows, this image grows within him... / Man is not conscious of it. Yet it is his Alter Ego... / In quest of her he must eternally go... / For in their union, the limit between the I and the Thou is obliterated... / And silence will then be the depository of the fullness of their Love.

A few more observations, these from volume 3: "The main danger for women, and above all young girls, lies in the frequently observed attitude of copying men, for then woman loses all the specific assets that give her her charm, so that she betrays her mission without any reason or benefit."

Re the Gender Wars, "let us try to imagine a child who... is born with a left arm ending in a right hand.... Can we think, even for a moment, that this malformation will not have an effect on the whole life of this unfortunate child? It is the same for young girls who cultivate a masculine spirit in a feminine body: by deforming themselves psychically, they also lose their charm [and how!], so that they fall into a third, psycho-pathological sex: the neuter sex."

And if this dreadful trend "is not stopped in time, this tendency to copy the other sex -- which can be found in men as well as women -- excludes both from any possibility of esoteric evolution."

What I would say is that sexual polarity is the (or a) basis of the (re)generative ingression of vertical energies through which we ultimately transcend this polarity. Or in other words, progressivism inevitably puts the kibosh on cosmo-pneumatic vertical progress.

On all planes, the objective sign of Love's participation is the creative spirit which animates the subjects for whom it has become an aim. Conversely, if we think we are in Love but do not notice an increase in creativity on any plane, either in ourselves or our partner, we can be sure that the relationship is based on anything but Love. --Mouravieff

Ascending and Descending Along the Male-Female Axis

Continuing with our theme, Schuon has an essay called The Problem of Sexuality, which I will simultaneously read and comment upon in order to ensure maximum incoherence and superficiality. He begins with the observation that "It would be impossible for the spiritual life in itself to exclude a domain as fundamental, humanly speaking, as sexuality; sex is an aspect of man."

Every culture regards sexuality as important, which is why they all regulate it in some form or fashion. Indeed, we can see what the left's sexual deregulation over the past 50 years has wrought: abortion, divorce, perversion, sexual conflict and confusion, and unhappy women in particular (probably because the deregulation is more congenial to the male's primitive nature than to the female's; indeed, most of the regulations were there to protect women and children from the predation and selfishness of men).

People like to blame Augustine for the West's ambivalent attitude toward sexuality, but it seems to me that Augustine simply latched on to and accentuated an ambivalence that is already there. But as Schuon says, "nothing that is human is bestial by its nature," although "it is necessary that our attitudes should be integrally human, in accordance with the norm imposed upon us by our deiformity." So, man can surely become bestial, but the bestiality is accidental and not essential.

Which raises an interesting question: is our fall accidental or essential? In other words, does it deform only the surface, or reach all the way to the core? For Schuon it is ultimately the former, even if all men are nevertheless fallen: "the human body, male or female, is a theophany, and remains so in spite of the fall." And "by loving one another, the spouses legitimately love a divine manifestation, each one according to a different aspect and a different respect."

In fact, the first thing that occurred to me upon familiarizing myself with Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, is that he was essentially explicating a kind of Christian tantric yoga, the point of which is to perceive the other as a divine manifestation. At the very least, marriage, being a sacrament, is a formal relationship that invites the ingression of vertical energies -- all the way into the body and down to its most intimate physical expression. In this regard, it is completely orthodox to view divine and sexual love as having the identical source and telos: "Fundamentally, every love is a search for the Essence or the lost Paradise."

It seems that Eve is the archtypal expression of an ambivalent attitude toward female sexuality, and why not? Eve is a message, as it were, to both men and women, albeit in different ways. For man is weak when it comes to being seduced, and woman is weak (although it masquerades as power) when it comes to seducing.

Dennis Prager often points out that from an early age, men are taught to deal with their innate weaknesses and faults, which revolve around violence and sexual predation. But it is politically incorrect to discuss the intrinsic weaknesses of women. If we could talk about them, we would certainly highlight how the gender gap in voting inevitably results in the election of feminized liberals and the growth of the swaddling state -- of the proliferation of wimps and bullies, often in the same person. Thus, so many of our societal problems are a direct consequence of unchecked and untutored female instinct.

It is as if man and woman must compensate for the reciprocal weaknesses of the other. Or, to put it conversely, there is a kind of "reciprocal superiority" on the spiritual plane, each assuming a "divine function" for the other.

Man stabilizes woman, woman vivifies man; furthermore, and quite obviously, man contains woman within himself, and vice versa.... Man, in his lunar and receptive aspect, 'withers away' without the woman-sun what infuses into the virile genius what it needs in order to blossom; inversely, man-sun confers on woman the light that permits her to realize her identity by prolonging the function of the sun. --Schuon

God and Gender

Let's continue with last Friday's post on the cosmic implications of human sexuality. I suppose we have to start with the cosmic implications of humanness as such, and then go from there. Again, human beings are in the image of the Creator, such that there are traces of our origin even in our physical form.

How so? Let's answer that in the form of an aphorism or two:

The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face (Dávila).

For that matter, the feminine body is far too perfect and spiritually too eloquent to be nothing more than a transitory accident (Schuon). Can I get a witness?

Thus, Christianity does not deny the splendor of the world, but rather invites us to search for its origin, to climb towards its pure snow (Dávila).

The journey is more aesthetic than epistemological; or, to be perfectly accurate, it is epistemology via aesthetics, or knowledge through beauty:

Approaching religion through art is not the caprice of an aesthete: aesthetic experience spontaneously tends to expand into a presentiment of religious experience (ibid.).

For which reason, When religion and aesthetics are divorced from each other, it is not known which is corrupted sooner (ibid.).

So, the human form is an aesthetic object, which in turn draws us toward its nonlocal spiritual source.

Recall Schuon's gag about the human station being both the summit of and exit from terrestrial conditions. The former goes to immanence, while the latter goes to transcendence; equally, the former goes to man's splendor, while the latter goes to his humility: man is a kind of everything/nothing, depending upon how we look, i.e., with two eyes or three.

Now, God is either beyond gender or the synthesis of both. Thus there is an aspect of man that is beyond gender, but in this regard, the left commits what Wilber calls a pre/trans fallacy, in that God is beyond gender, not before it. Insofar as man is concerned, he may transcend gender, but only after he is one. This is why the left is committing a systemic cruelty to children in trying to deny them, or confuse them about, this primordial identity.

As Schuon says, "the liberating Way may be either 'virile' or 'feminine,' although it is not possible to have a strict line of demarcation between the two modes" -- partly because each is always in a dynamic rapport with its projected complement. In Jungian terms, for the male, the animus relates to the projected anima, while for the female it is the other way around. We are all searching for the archetypal other who completes us on this plane.

Schuon points out that our deiformity must be a feminine attribute, in that we are the passive partner vis-a-vis God, who is active. Here, Mary represents the archetype of archetypes, i.e., of human receptivity to the Divine energy.

For which reason female has an ambiguous relationship to male. I don't want to trigger anyone, but Schuon suggests that "there are two ways of situating the sexes, either in a horizontal or in a vertical sense." According to the horizontal, "man is on the right and woman on the left," whereas considered vertically, "man is above and woman below" (as reflected in the God-Mary relation).

Anyone who uses this as a pretext for domination or oppression has thoroughly misunderstood the cosmic lesson. I would suggest that, to the extent that women are oppressed -- most conspicuously, in the Islamic world -- it is because of a pathological perversion of the vertical relationship, or an infection of that relationship by horizontal mind parasites.

Which I think Genesis 3 goes to. Consider the verticality of its metaphysic: Adam comes from God, and then Eve from Adam. The relationship is inverted when Eve listens to the serpent (a quintessential archetype of horizontality), who then pulls Adam away from God. This is not to blame woman per se, because Adam is still ultimately responsible for his ontological reverse metanoia, such that he turns from the above to the below. Eve only tempts, she does not compel.

And again, Mary represents the reversal of this reversal. Thus, the Eve/Mary axis is the same as the Nothing/Everything axis alluded to above. You might say that the serpent promises man everything and delivers nothing.

Like the left.

Cosmic Sex Education

The liberal fraud of sex education involves the bait and switch of telling children they are nothing more than biological beings -- thus excising sexuality from transcendence -- and then insisting that sexual identity is anything we want it to be, thus isolating it from biology altogether (so much for the left being "scientific").

The upshot is a denial of both transcendence (spirit) and immanence (biology), while introducing a counterfeit version of each. Counterfeit immanence redounds to infrahuman animality, while counterfeit transcendence is an omnipotent attitude toward one's own sexual nature -- as if one chooses it rather than vice versa.

But as Pieper writes, "The more necessary something is, the more the order of reason must be preserved in it." Thus, because "sexual power is so noble and necessary a good, it needs the preserving and defending order of reason." The virtue of chastity simply "realizes the order of reason in the province of sexuality." One wants to say that this virtue is precisely what renders sexuality human sexuality.

As such, unchastity "is in its essence the transgression and violation of the rational order in the province of sexuality," such that "in intemperance man sinks to the level of a beast" (although a specifically human beastling, not an innocent animal).

There is so much deliberate sexual confusion propagated by the left -- it is one of their prime directives -- that a review of our Cosmic Sexuality is in order. Perhaps the best place to start is an essay by Schuon called The Message of the Human Body, the sexual polarity -- or complementarity -- of which is not accidental but essential.

For to say that we are in the image of the Creator is to affirm that man -- including the body -- "manifests something absolute and for that very reason something unlimited and perfect."

This is not to reduce spirit to matter or form to substance, but only to say that the former are prolonged all the way into the latter, such that the body will reveal traces of its source. We are not Manichaeans. We do not deny the body, but rather, situate it in its proper context.

Time out for some aphorisms courtesy Nicolás Gómez Dávila:

'Sexual liberation' allows modern man to pretend to be ignorant of the multiple taboos of another kind that govern him.

The sensual is the presence of a value in the sensible.

Monotonous, like obscenity.

Sex does not solve even sexual problems.

It is impossible to convince the fool that that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals

Eroticism, sensuality, and love, when they do not converge in the same person, are nothing more, in isolation, than a disease, a vice, and foolishness.

Back to Schuon. Even our vertical posture is "a direct reference to absoluteness," such that man is "not only the summit of earthly creatures, but also, for this very reason, the exit from their condition." Thus, our verticality is not capped at the top, but rather, more like an open-ended arrow pointing to a perpetual transcendence.

Herebelow the Supreme Principle bifurcates into Absolute and Infinite: "the masculine body accentuates the first aspect, and the feminine body the second."

Let's pause here for a moment and consider what Schuon has just said. Perhaps you've never heard this expressed before. For me, it is a quintessential example of vertical recollection -- of anamnesis -- because as soon as you hear it, you say to yoursoph, "of course! How stupid of me not to have realized that." But it's why we have beauty contests for women and strength contests for men.

The converse would be perverse, i.e., strength contests for women (women are of course free to play sports, but it is not essential that they do so) and beauty pageants for men. We all know this in our bones, such that one must undergo years of liberal indoctrination to subvert these deep cosmic values. It doesn't mean we reduce a man to his strength or a woman to her beauty; again, these are simply archetypal prolongations from the source.

"Now, each of the bodies, the masculine and the feminine, manifests modes of perfection which their respective gender evokes by definition; all cosmic qualities are divided in fact into two complementary groups: the rigorous and the gentle, the active and the passive, the contractive and the expansive."

Aaaaaand we're outta time.

The Common Good and Other Illusions

Pieper has some good thoughts that go to our recent excursions into the parallels between man's original sin and his fatal conceit.

By way of background, note how the sufficient reason of our constitution is to safeguard our pursuit of happiness. This pursuit is an individual matter (or at least not governmental), and for good reason(s) -- one reason being that the government could not possibly define the common good except vis-a-vis its enumerated powers, e.g., law enforcement, justice (the legal kind), and military defense.

But to otherwise pretend to know what's good for us -- well, that is quintessentially Fatal Conceit territory. Besides, if you ask the state to define the common good, it will always and everywhere do so in a way that is good for the state.

It's just like the market. All of its millions of transactions occur because a person on one end wants the item or service more than the money it costs, while the person on the other end wants the money more than the item or service. In short, they have to agree, and this agreement yields a subjective sense of satisfaction.

Imagine some governmental entity presuming to understand those millions upon millions of experiences of satisfaction. Madness! If anyone is "satisfied" with ObamaCare, it is pure coincidence, because it specifically abolishes the nexus of satisfaction. You can be resigned to it, but not satisfied in the true sense.

It is as impossible to define the common good "as it is to define the 'essence' of the human person." In short, no one can do it but the person in question. Unless he is a child -- which is precisely why the left necessarily treats us as schoolchildren who are never permitted to graduate.

Here "we are able to identify once again an essential element of totalitarian regimes." That is, "the political powers claim the right to define in complete detail the specifics of the [common good]."

Remember the good old days when a liberal was just someone who wanted to reach into your shower and adjust the temperature? Now he's someone who wants to reach into your pants and adjust your biology.

"What is so ruinous here is the fact that the 'plan' becomes the exclusive standard that dictates not only the production of material goods but equally the pursuits of universities, the creations of artists, even the leisure activities of the individual -- so that anything not totally conforming to the standard is suppressed as... 'undesirable.'"

Amazingly, these liberal drones submit "voluntarily," or at least with no resistance, via the instinct to conform backed by the soft tyranny of political correctness.

It requires courage to stand up to the tyranny; in fact, "Courage is a testimony to the existence and power of evil in the world."

In short, "because justice and goodness do not automatically prevail on their own," courage is required to bring them about. "It is a liberal illusion to assume that you can consistently act justly without ever incurring risks" -- which reminds us of the old gag about liberals always dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good -- which is to say, courageous.

"To be courageous means: to oppose injustice in the face of overwhelming external power and to accept willingly any resulting disadvantage, be it only public ridicule or social isolation."

What is a bad man but a good man's teacher? And what is political correctness but the coward's inadvertant lesson in courage?

If a pornographic novel is advertised as 'risqué,' then in truth nothing at all is being risked. It would be much more risqué to declare publicly that chastity is part of what makes a person whole; this would be much more dangerous. --Josef Pieper

Garbage In, Liberalism Out

In my lifetime the left has been wrong on every major issue. That’s quite a record, and it leads one to wonder about the source of their preternatural consistency. What is it in them that causes such awful decision-making?

Whatever else it is, it involves an absence of the virtue of prudence. Prudence, writes, Pieper, is "highest in rank among the four cardinal virtues."

Recall the other three, justice, courage, and temperance. Why would they be subordinate to prudence? Because, for example, courage without prudence is just rashness or recklessness. Justice without it is -- well, anything from tyranny to social justice, which amount to the same thing in the end. And temperance without prudence reduces to a lukewarm relativism.

So prudence "is the mother of the other three virtues" and "precondition for all that is ethically good." But why, exactly?

Because prudence first and foremost implies contact with reality. Obviously, if we don't know what reality is, then we cannot make prudent decisions about it.

For example, if I fool myself into believing that socialism is actually possible, untold destruction follows from that single error.

As Hayek and von Mises teach us, the evils of socialism don't occur because it is possible but just poorly executed, but because it is strictly impossible. It pretends to know what no human being can possibly know, so its judgments are poisoned at the source.

Clearly, "to do what in reality is right and good presupposes some knowledge about reality; if you do not know how it is with things and how they stand, you are [practically, concretely] unable to choose what is ethically good." Not only do good intentions mean nothing in this context, but an intention detached from reality can't actually be good.

The sharp ideological differences in the country are a direct consequence of differing ideas about reality. Or, one side believes reality exists, while the other maintains it is both relative and a consequence of perception; which is to say they don't believe in reality at all. So really, the debate reduces to people who believe reality exists vs. people who don't.

Thus, from our side of the fence, this insane debate about school bathrooms is... I was going to say "surreal," but it's really subreal. There is no reality to it, and yet, we are forced to pretend there is. As such, to even concede that the other side has a point is to have validated a reality that does not and cannot exist (like "homosexual marriage").

Hey, I'm a psychologist. So back off, man. I try to heal delusions, not patronize or aggravate them. Otherwise the patient will end up healing me of my contact with reality.

"The precondition for every ethical decision is the perception and examination of reality." And "prudence is the art of making the right decision based on the corresponding reality..." So there are really always two steps: 1) contact with and receptiveness to reality, and 2) deciding rightly.

But reality is messy. Just because we have contact with it, it doesn't mean the correct decision will be obvious. We are not logic machines.

Rather, organisms that metabolize living truth: prudence is "the power of our minds which transforms knowledge of reality into realization of the good."

Little Big Mankind

Picking up where we set down yesterday, it is as if God -- better, the Godhead -- breaks his Coin of Infinity in two, such that he keeps the positive infinity for himsoph but gifts us with its negative image, which is actually an infinite capacity for him. After all, nothing short of the biggest vault will hold the largest coin.

Thus, God's infinity is "imprinted within us." It sets up a dynamism, because our infinity is on a perpetual search for the object that matches it. Nothing short of God satisfies the longing. This is because only two things are beyond all possible finites: God and man, in complementary ways.

Note that this automatically renders man superior to any finite object. It is why no finite object can float our boat in any permanent way.

However, in the absence of God, our own infinitude will be experienced as a kind of persecutory defect. Instead of engendering a fruitful dynamism, it will sponsor a restless compulsion for sensations and experiences that leads nowhere in the end.

You could say that the immanent God is a kind of infinite abyss, while the transcendent God is an infinite horizon. And one can sail after him in either direction and wind up in the same harbor. As Clarke writes, "the inner spiritual ascent of the soul to the One and the outer metaphysical ascent through the cosmos reveal themselves as two sides of the same coin." They "mirror each other in different orders."

Clarke says that Augustine is typically regarded as the quintessential exemplar of the inner ascent of the soul, while Thomas is the seen as our tour guide extraordinaire for the metaphysical ascent through the cosmos.

However, looked at more deeply, Thomas' carefully constructed ladder can be repurposed as a "springboard for [the soul's] final metaphysical-mystical leap to the Infinite Fontal Source of the whole, hidden in mystery from our direct gaze but pointed to by every finite image..."

So we got that going for us.

We are always face-to-face with the Ultimate. No wonder we feel so small! And yet, no other being is aware of this confrontation. No wonder we feel so big!

You'll often hear scientistic types talk about how small man is compared to the infinite spaces of the vast starry heavens blah blah blah. Well. Lots of rocks are bigger than man, too. So what? Does it make the rock superior to man? Obviously, no matter how big the rock, it's still just a rock.

Well, the same principle applies to the cosmos. I really couldn't care less how big it is. I mean, I care, but not really. Just as an intellectual curiosity, but not as any kind of ultimate statement about anything. Man always has the infinitude discussed above, so he transcends every object, up to and including the cosmos.

Pieper writes that "whenever we speak of the ultimate, of the ultimate and last, we have already implicitly thought of a penultimate and first. And with that, something has already been said about the human being: namely that his everyday life is situated between these different states of realization, disposed toward his ultimate potential but not necessarily reaching it..."

Thus, "By the act of creating him, God sets the human being upon a path whose goal is that 'ultimate' which can be called 'virtue' in its true sense: the realization of the divine design incorporated in the creature."

When we get this principle through our thick skulls, we are in a position to understand Jesus' shockingly orthoparadoxical statement that No one is good but One, that is, God.

And no one but man is small or large enough to get the gag.

Hey Buddy, Do You Have Change for an Infinity?

This post started off one way, but ended up another. It was supposed to be a pretend interview with Josef Pieper, as in me asking questions and he supplying answers. But I got carried away with the first question, so the answer(s) are thoroughly intermangled with my own bobservations, so it's really a case of aggravated playgiarism.

Let's start with the difference between science and philosophy, and why the former can never take the place of the latter.

A: The specialized sciences abstract from the meaning of Being as a whole, and must be satisfied with that. Conversely, the object of philosophy is 'the holy and manifest mystery of Being.'

Now, science is only possible because truth emanates from Being; when we conform to Being, truth is the result. So the method of this or that science is correct only when it allows itself to be determined and molded by its object.

The problem with postmodernism is that not only does it not submit to the object, it doesn't believe it is possible to do so. This is precisely how we end up with the perverse educational adventures of Bathroom Barry, who refuses to consider the biological object in order to determine the truth of its sex. It is literally no different than refusing to open one's eyes and distinguish a wall from a door or window.

In short, to accept the given as it gives itself is the precondition for learning anything about any thing. The only alternative is to project one's own psychic content onto the object, i.e., to be trapped in Kantworld or worse. And yet, this is the world to which we are forced to adapt, in which "perception is reality."

Note the demonic switcheroo, in that the essence of political correctness is forced submission to a reality which is only perceived. It is a secondary reality superimposed upon the first, say, "women earn 60 cents to the dollar," or blacks are disproportionately imprisoned. The left is all about replacing first reality with second reality, and then forbidding curiosity about the former.

This is why the left's answers are always so dreadfully simplistic. Reality is never as simple as the left's policies, or, more to the point, the left manages reality via a crude simplification. For reality always gives more than can be grasped by man; it is an inexhaustible 'light that can never be drunk up.'

The other day we were talking about original sin and the fatal conceit. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek talks about why the left is always totalitarian at its core:

"The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends.... it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends."

Which is why philosophy -- in the sense described above -- is forbidden by the left. Hey, it's why the state murdered Socrates, right? 400 years later the state tried to murder God. You'd think humans would get the message. The state certainly hasn't forgotten:

"So long as dissent is not suppressed, there will always be some [subversive Socrates or revolutionary Jesus] who query the ideas ruling their contemporaries" and put them to the test. Our new climate of intellectual fascism isn't new at all. The spirit of Obama was there in ancient Greece, preparing the hemlock.

As philosophy is adequation to Being, theology is adequation to God. Being is one of the names of God, so theology is obviously higher up the ontological food chain than is philosophy.

One reason why the left can never engage in philosophy is that philosophy -- obviously -- operates at the threshold of theology, and the left doesn't permit God. Analogously, it would be like attempting to study human biology without human psychology. There is a flow of intelligibility from the unitary human subject-object, and it is we who direct the flow into this or that sub-discipline.

But man, who is the mirror of the totality, is precisely the terrestrial analogue of the 'holy manifest mystery' of being. If we are ordered to the totality, we must in some sense be the totality in an implicit way.

Clarke touches on this in his The Philosophical Approach to God. He posits a kind of dialectic between two infinities, a "negative" and "positive" one. In reality there can be only the one infinite, but it is as if the infinite bifurcates into positive and negative images of itself, so to speak.

It's orthoparadoxical is what it is. Here is how Clarke describes it: man does not have the "positive infinite plenitude" which "is proper to God alone."

"But there can be an image of the divine infinity in silhouette -- in reverse, so to speak -- within man, precisely in his possession of an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less. This negative image points unerringly towards the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential (sic) capacity."

That's too much light. Can you dim it down a little?

Okay, it is as if "God had broken the coin of His infinity in two, holding on to the positive side Himself and giving us the negative side, then launching us into the world of finites with the mission to search until we have matched our half-coin with His."

But there's no such thing as a free launch. Rather, if you want the whole coin you have to pay with your ego.

A Quick Cure for News

Still a bit under the weather. Being that a head cold causes me to lose 20 IQ points, I don't want to risk posting, what with so many lives at stake.

However, it doesn't mean I can't exploit someone else's intelligence, in this case, Nicolás Gómez Dávila's.

I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if we could replace our worthless news media with a guy who simply reads a few astringent aphorisms into the camera?

Todays top stories, via Don Colacho's Aphorisms:

With a picture of campus crybullies in the background:

Liberty is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.

Over a stat showing broad support for Bernie Sanders among young adults:

Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists.

The gender perversion and bathroom confusion of the left?

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

Bernie Sanders' free stuff?

Compassion is the best excuse for envy.

Farcebook's anti-conservative news aggregation?

The journalist collects the previous day's garbage in order to feed it to us for breakfast.

Hillary's six figure speaking fees (not to mention the somehow wealthy community organizer occupying the White House)?

The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach.

Multiculturalism?

The man who says he is respectful of all ideas is admitting that he is ready to give in.

Progressivism?

The cost of progress is calculated in fools.

Social justice?

"Social justice" is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right

The Marriage of Time & Eternity

In Norris Clarke's The Philosophical Approach to God there is a helpful section that attempts to reconcile (orthodox) Christianity with process philosophy. For on the one hand, "process thought contains a number of basic insights that can and should be fruitfully recognized by Christian theism."

However, it is nevertheless "in serious tension, if not incompatibility, with traditional Christian theism on several key points..."

This is consistent with what I've said in the past -- that while Whitehead was one of my biggest influences, I could never be a "Whiteheadian" per se. You could say that certain aspects of process philosophy help me get past certain personal impasses in Christianity, while certain doctrines of Christianity help me get past the dodgier aspects of process philosophy.

Whitehead is probably more compatible with, say, Buddhism than Christianity, for like Buddhism he posits a world of pure process with no substantial reality underneath. But to jump ahead a bit, I am personal where he is impersonal, and trinitarian where he is... uni-processual, or something. I suppose that makes us Trinitarian Personalists, which about sums up the Secret Raccoon Doctrine.

By the way, I am still laboring under this manflu, so I'm hoping that much of this post can just consist of playgiarizing with Clarke instead of having to think for myself.

Here is a nice passage that clears up that whole predestination problem, which comes down to the nature of God's omnipotence:

"The actual carrying out of divine providence (and predestination) can take place... by persuasion, by luring to the good, not by coercion.....

"God determines the general set of goals He wishes to achieve, the goals at which he aims the universe, and knows that in general he will be able to achieve by His suasive power, but does not determine ahead of time in detail just whether or how each particular creature will achieve its share or not in this overall goal."

In keeping with the spirit of jazz, "Divine providence unfolds by constant instantaneous 'improvisation' of the divine mind and will -- from His always contemporaneous eternal now -- precisely to fit the actual ongoing activities, especially the free ones, of the creaturely players in the world drama" (or cosmic jazz combo).

One big issue is whether God changes. Process philosophy says Yes, of course, while orthodox Christianity says No Way. But the latter makes no sense to a Trinitarian Personalist, since God is not only related, but is relationship as such. And to be "in relationship" means to be relative to someone else.

Even so, the process philosophers are, in my opinion, a little too facile in positing a God of constant change.

For Clarke, "our metaphysics of God must certainly allow us to say that in some real and genuine way God is affected positively by what we do, that He receives love from us and experiences joy precisely because of our responses..."

However, "God does not become a more or less perfect being because of the love we return to him and the joy He experiences" therefrom.

As I've said before, if we can change but God can't, it means that we have a capacity that is denied God. Which can't be right.

God is Person, and "to receive love as a person... is not at all an imperfection, but precisely a dimension of the perfection of personal being as lovingly responsive." God never stops being "infinite perfection," it's just that the perfection of personal being is love and all it implies.

In a trinitarian perspective, the Father never stops sharing and receiving his love. If the cosmos is a fractal of God -- in that every wee part will be a reflection of the Whole We -- then this would explain how "God's 'receiving' from us, being delighted at our response to His love," equates to "His original delight in sharing with us in His eternal now His own original power of loving and infinite goodness which has come back to him in return."

Or as Blake said, eternity is in love with the productions of time.

Pride Goeth Before an Economic Fall

It all begins with a seductive lie about man's ability to become godlike via a certain kind of knowledge.

And again, it is a permanent temptation, not just something that occurred at the dawn of history; or, it occurs at the dawn of both collective and individual psychospiritual development, and is always there waiting to be exploited.

Karl Marx was reenacting the drama when he claimed to have discovered the secret engine of history, just as Bernie Sanders does today in his crude reduction of the infinite complexity of the market to a simple and universal emotion such as greed.

In fact, doesn't our Unknown Friend touch on this? Marx, "being impressed by the partial truth... that it is first necessary to eat in order to be able to think, raised the economic interest to THE principle of man and the history of civilization." Which is why Marx's cheap omniscience destroys its supposed object, man.

The serpent "appeared to Karl Marx and showed him 'in an instant all the kingdoms of the world,' where all the slaves of the past are transformed into sovereign masters who no longer obey God, having dethroned him, or Nature, having subjected her" (ibid.).

Since the Marxist is neither of God nor of Nature, he is truly a monster. Note too the stolen omnipotence: they produce and eat a kind of bread "which they owe solely to their own knowledge and effort in transforming stones into bread."

Just as a practical matter, we have all heard the gag about the impossibility of one person producing so much as a single pencil. Here are three passages from the essay, which converge on everything we've been saying about Fatal Sin and the Original Conceit:

"There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me [the pencil] into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the invisible hand at work."

"Since only God can make a tree, I insist that only God could make me. Man can no more direct these millions of know-hows to bring me into being than he can put molecules together to create a tree."

"The lesson I have to teach is this: Leave all creative energies uninhibited. Merely organize society to act in harmony with this lesson. Let society's legal apparatus remove all obstacles the best it can. Permit these creative know-hows freely to flow. Have faith that free men and women will respond to the Invisible Hand. This faith will be confirmed."

Or, we can have Obamacare, government mandated mortgages to unqualified borrowers, and college subsidies. Is it any wonder that these three are the main goods (medical care, housing, and higher education) that are beyond the economic capacity of the typical American? As usual, Government creates the disease it then proposes to cure.

It is as if Satan tells the government: Command these stones to become loaves of bread, and the government responds white or whole wheat? Since the left also attacks religion from every angle, it means that the higher is collapsed into the lower, and that we become increasingly dependent upon the godlike state for our daily bread.

Satan embodies the principles of seduction, hypnosis, and intoxication. Or maybe you've never seen a liberal university campus or a Sanders rally (but I repeat myself).

In this passage from The Counter-Revolution of Science, Hayek speaks of this drunken hubris: "two fundamentally different and irreconcilable attitudes manifest themselves: on the one hand the essential humility of [liberal] individualism... and on the other hand, the hubris of [leftist] collectivism, which aims at conscious direction of all forces of society."

The latter operates under the assumption that it can comprehend systemic knowledge that no human being possesses or could possibly possess. Thus, "consistently pursued it must lead to a system in which all members of a society become merely instruments of the single directing mind and in which all the spontaneous social forces to which the growth of mind is due are destroyed."

And to bring the discussion full circle, it is urgently necessary for man to rationally comprehend the limits of his own reason. And guess what? "Historically this has been achieved by the influence of various religious creeds..." (Although a little familiarity with Gödel also goes a long way.)

There is no excuse for the pride that comes before our economic fall, because "Compared with the totality of knowledge which is continually utilized in the evolution of a dynamic civilization, the difference between the knowledge that the wisest and that which the most ignorant individual can deliberately employ is insignificant" (ibid.).

Hayek, the Fatal Conceit, and Original Sin

We begin with a pointed Dávilism: There are two kinds of men: those who believe in original sin and idiots.

Original sin is an important subject, being that it is the diagnosis for which Christianity is the cure. But the way it is conceptualized is not always helpful, at least for me. Ultimately, I suppose the important point -- in keeping with the spirit of the aphorism -- is that one believe in it (or "hear me now, believe me later," so to speak).

Let's see what the CCC says about it. "Where does evil come from?," it asks (p. 97). Well, we must "approach the question of the origin of evil by fixing the eyes of our faith on him who is alone its conqueror." "We must know Christ as the source of grace in order to know Adam as the source of sin."

Well, yeah. But that sort of begs the question by advertising the cure without ever answering the question of how we got sick.

But man is sick, no doubt about it -- sick in a way that other animals are not and can never be: "Sin is present in human history; any attempt to ignore it or to give this dark reality other names would be futile."

That's an important point: we cannot rid ourselves of sin by calling it something else. And "to try to understand it," we "must first recognize the profound relationship of man to God..."

Given my enthusiasm for abstract pneumaticons, we can say that sin exists in the space between O and (•); any number of things can occur in that space, including the thing we call sin. Indeed, sin is "an abuse of the freedom that God gives to created persons..."

We're again dancing around the subject. How did it get here? The account of the fall in Genesis 3 "affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man."

The other day we were speaking of how myth is at the threshold of history, or in the penumbra between history and prehistory.

It seems that something occurs in that dark space between the pure light of God and the reflected light of creation (I think it helps if we speak in the present tense, because Genesis is not about things that happened once upon a time, but which happen every time).

At the origin of history is a catastrophic choice (in the sense that it diverts us down a particular path). And Genesis is quite clear on the point that it has something to do with knowledge -- or "eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."

The exact nature of this tree is never spelled out, but the CCC says that it "symbolically evokes the insurmountable limits that man, being a creature, must freely recognize and respect with trust." There are certain "norms that govern the use of freedom."

Interestingly, freedom is presupposed. But freedom, in order to be free, must be situated -- like man himself -- in the "in between" space alluded to above. Deploying our trusty pneumaticons, the situation is really this: O <-> (•) <-> Ø (only in reality, that equation should be vertical instead of horizontal; the "fall" takes place in the more or less infinite space between O and Ø).

Note that to "prefer oneself to God" is to necessarily choose the descending arrow instead of the ascending one. Which is why egocentrism, which can appear relatively trivial on the surface, in actuality betrays a profound choice that is pregnant -- or stillborn, rather -- with ontological implications.

You know the rest of the official story. But this weekend I was thinking about it, and it occurred to me that Hayek would be an excellent witness for the prosecution. For although he was not a religious man, his most profound lesson touches on man's Fatal Conceit, i.e., of pretending to know what no man can know, thus plunging us into hell.

To put it another way, the most thorough expressions of hell on earth have been a direct consequence of eating from the economic tree of knowledge of good and evil -- or pretending that our good intentions will redound to good and moral results.

Looked at this way, we can see that Bernie Sanders is literally satanic. His promises certainly sound good on the surface, and I am even willing to concede that they come from a "moral" place.

Ah, but his whole program is founded on a pretense to knowledge that is strictly forbidden to man! And pretending to have this knowledge has been responsible for the most carnage in human history.

Thomas Sowell does an outstanding job of putting flesh on our pneumaticons in his classic A Conflict of Visions. He calls these two visions the Constrained and Unconstrained. Long story short, original sin, the fall of man, and eating from the wrong tree are all bound up with choosing the Unconstrained Vision.

I want to say "just read the book," then we'll talk about it. It's so rich with implications that nothing short of that will suffice. Plus I'm running out of time. But let me see if I can find some money quotes to show that I'm not completely goofy in trying to link theology and economic theory.

"In the constrained vision, any individual's own knowledge alone is grossly inadequate for social decision-making, and often even for his own personal decisions."

In short, don't eat from that tree, or untold disaster will ensue. Rather, progress is only possible because knowledge is infinitely dispersed among local agents and "even more vast numbers of those from generations past."

The judicial redefinition of marriage is about as profound an example of the unconstrained vision as one could conceive. For as long as man has been man, it is been his settled opinion that male and female are oriented to each other, and make no sense outside that ontological complementarity. But all it took was a single man in robes to reach out to the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and send us on a downward course.

Not the first time a Kennedy has left the road and plunged into dark waters.

"Knowledge is thus the social experience of the many, as embodied in behavior, sentiments, and habits, rather than the specially articulated reason of the few, however talented or gifted those few might be" (Sowell).

But the unconstrained leader assumes "an authority which [can] safely be trusted, not only to no single person, but to no council or senate whatever, and nowhere be so dangerous as in the hands of a man who had folly and presumption enough to fancy himself fit to exercise it' (Adam Smith, ibid.).

Obama has the folly. And the presumption. And the authority.

The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man... refuses to submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them. --F.A. Hayek

Like Father, Like Son, Like the Restavus

Doesn't seem to be much interest in our recent peregrinotions. Either that, or my appeal is becoming more selective.

What are we trying to do here, anyway? First and foremost we are aiming words at eternity for the fun of seeing what we can hit. That is our verticalisthenic exercise. But to paraphrase Schopenhauer, we are like an archer trying to hit a target that can't be seen. How do we know then when we've hit it?

Far be it from me to complain about having too much fun. However, I suppose it's even more fun when a reader says something like, "Ouch. I've been hit, dammit!" Otherwise it's less like archery and more like placing a message in a bottle and tossing it in the sea. Which I'll keep doing, if necessary. But it's a little like writing comedy. How do you know if something is funny if there's no one there to laugh?

When I say we are shooting arrows at the nonlocal target, what I really mean is that we are firing our eros into Celestial Central. "Every created spiritual intellect," writes Clarke, "is endowed... with a radical innate drive toward the whole of being, the unlimited horizon of being as intelligible."

Therefore, it is not accurate to say that man cannot understand God. True, we cannot understand God as he is in himsoph, but that's true of anything, from other persons to rocks. It's a banality. However, we can understand God "in the mode of man," so to speak.

To put it another way, we can understand all we really need to know about God. The rest is none of our isness.

Which is why we are all born with the drive to know God. We wouldn't have this bally drive if it had no object at the other end, any more than we would experience hunger in the absence of food. To express it in philosophical terms, God is the sufficient reason for our zeal to know Him.

"[T]here is in every spiritual intellect a natural drive to know God as Source, fullness of being, and final goal of all knowing..." (ibid.).

Note the operative word, natural. Knowing that we have this drive requires no supernatural revelation, for it is as natural as any other innate drive. In reality, like most things about man, it is "supernaturally natural," but the point is, it is an empirical fact, not some wooly spookulation.

Now, God is love, meaning that God is first and foremost a being of self-giving. That statement -- that God is luuuv -- used to repel me as being overly cloying and sentimental, but now I see it as completely objective and rational. It has great explanatory power; conversely, if God isn't love, then it unexplains mountains and valleys of evidence.

For example, "The fullness of personal development turns out to be a losing or letting go of oneself that is simultaneously and by that very fact a new finding of oneself at a deeper level" (ibid.).

Analogously, might we not say that the Father lets go infinitely of himself, only to find himself in the Son?

"Self-transcendence is thus of the very essence of all personal development at its highest.... Only by reaching beyond the human can we succeed in becoming fully human. To refuse to do so condemns us to fall short of the human itself. To be a human person fully means to self-transcend toward the Infinite" (ibid.).

It is as if -- in a manner of speaking -- only by reaching beyond God does God succeed in becoming fully God. This statement only makes total nonsense in a trinitarian Christian context.

"Since the person is not something added onto being from the outside, but is the highest perfection and most intense expression of existential being itself, the person takes on more intensely the whole dynamism of existence as expansive, self-communicating act..." (ibid.).

Like Father, like Son; like Creator, like creature.

To be fully a person consists in living out to the full the alternating rhythm of self-possession and openness to others, or... 'self-mastery for self-giving'; for it is in the spark that passes from one of these poles to the other and back again that lies the secret of all authentic personal growth, creativity, life, and love that make the living person the supreme manifestation and glory of being. --W. Norris Clarke

Perpetual Motion, Proof of God, and a Cure for Finitude

To be human is "to live on the edge, on the frontier of matter and spirit, time and eternity..." As such, it is to be an ontological I-AMphibian; we are freely able to choose "either direction, down toward matter or up toward spirit." Our "destiny is thus to journey through matter toward a fulfillment beyond matter" (Clarke).

Never mind that this is not something you will ever learn from the Conspiracy, for it is obviously not in their interest to highlight man's vertical freedom. More scandalous is the fact that one can be exposed to conventional religion without ever being shown the damn cosmic roadmap.

To the extent that we have free will, it is only explained with reference to its proper object, which we call O. Freedom itself is a good, but only -- obviously -- if it is oriented to the Good. Failing that, it is a dubious gift at best, analogous to knowledge without truth or creativity without beauty or "values" without virtue -- or, in a word, tenure.

"The human will," writes Clarke, "is necessarily oriented towards nothing less than the Infinite Good as its only adequate fulfillment..." But finite goods are a reflection or prolongation of the one Good, and there are an infinite number of pathways through them.

It reminds me of jazz: a solo is like a journey from this chord to that, but there are an infinite humber of melodic pathways one can take along the way.

Likewise, the human intellect "is naturally ordered, as to its adequate object, to the whole of being as intelligible." Nothing short of God fully satisfies, but this doesn't mean that sub-divine knowledge is worthless.

Rather, as St. Thomas quipped, "Every knower knows God implicitly in anything it knows." If this is not the case, then we can ultimately know nothing -- or nothing can actually be known.

Yes, we just proved the existence of God. Or, alternatively, the impossibility of proving anything, including this statement. Take your pick.

In the past I have referred to O as the Great Attractor. This was before I even knew that other folks characterized it in the same way, albeit in different terms.

For example, "we are magnetized, so to speak, by our very nature towards the Infinite Good, which draws us in our very depths" in its wake (Clarke). This is "the great hidden dynamo that energizes our whole lives, driving us on to ever new levels of growth and development, and refusing to let us be ultimately contented with any merely finite, especially material, goods."

Clarke makes an important point about the dynamo that energizes us. Any kind of energy is the result of a polarity; in this case, the polarity is between God and man. Being that he is infinite and we are finite... well, in addition to proving the existence of God, we have now proven the existence of perpetual motion.

What we call development takes place in the tension between these complementary extremes: "the spiral of self-development should ideally go on, alternating harmoniously between the two poles," which are really two streams of metacosmic energy, one going out and up, the other down and in. As such,

"the life of every human person unfolds as a journey of the spirit through an ever-developing spiral circulation between self-presence and active self-expressive presence," or "between inward-facing self-possession and outward-facing openness to the other" -- both horizontal others and the vertical Other.

Which is why those who give shall receive, those who are empty shall be filled, the last shall be first, the love you take is equal to the love you make, etc.

Again, the I is always a We, AKA substance-in-relation. How does it all end? "In a word, the final goal and perfection of the whole universe is, literally, the communion between persons, who in turn gather up the whole universe in their consciousness and love and thus lead it back to its Source."

So I guess we've also discovered a cure for finitude.

You're welcome.

[A]s we move more and more into the phase of vertical self-transcendence, putting off our self-centered consciousness to open up the Great Center and its transforming power, then a profound reversal in the movement of self-development takes place: it now flows primarily from above downwards, transforming us from above. --W. Norris Clarke

Science vs. Truth

Eh, too late to start a new post, too early to just give up.

Two posts back I ended with an aphorism by Dávila that not only deftly twists the knife into goofball popularizers such as Bill Nye and Neil deGrasse Tyson, but into scientism in general.

You ask yourself: Bob, how are you able to so rapidly find an Aphorism to fit the O-->(k)sion?

Well, a few years ago I transcribed every single aphorism from a blog that published them, and then organized them into categories beginning with Art and Atheism, and ending with Wisdom and Writing.

"Scientism" is one of the categories, and assimilating the relevant aphorisms would be the equivalent of a PhD in the philosophy of science, or maybe even avoiding graduate school altogether.

Dávila tells us all we need to know about the subject -- often all we can know -- with a minimum of words and maximum of verve. Nor does he ever throw a straight fastball. Rather, like Mariano Rivera, every pitch has late movement.

Example.

Okay, "Whoever has understood a notion from the natural sciences has understood all that can be understood; whoever has understood a notion from the humanities has understood only what he can understand."

BAM!

That's a direct hit not only on scientific pseudo-intellectuals but on the typical postmodern humanities professor whose skill consists in projecting his own victimhood into any work of art -- or converting his personal unhappiness into a problem of politics.

Which goes to the next aphorism: "Where he is easy to refute, as in the natural sciences, the imbecile can be useful without being dangerous. Where he is difficult to refute, as in the humanities, the imbecile is dangerous without being useful."

Which is to say, unemployable.

Nevertheless, we should be forced to pay for the university indoctrination that has made him a dangerous, useless, and unemployable parasite.

Thankfully, the most devout atheist nourishes implicit religious sentiments that prevent him from being intellectually consistent and acting on his beliefs. In other words,

"What still protects man in our time is his natural incoherence. That is to say: his spontaneous horror before consequences implicit in principles he admires." Show me a metaphysical Darwinian with the courage of his convictions and I'll show you a Darwin Award winner.

"Nothing is more alarming than science in the hands of an ignoramus."

Global Warming in the hands of Obama.

You can only pretend to avoid faith:

"There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap."

If you truly understand that last one, you will realize what a willful fantasy world you've been living in.

Because in reality,

"Intelligence should battle without respite the sclerosis of its findings."

That last one is true because human intelligence is ordered to the tOtality, such that nothing short of this totality will satisfy it. Vulgar scientism just stops asking Why at an arbitrary point, and calls it a metaphysic (or pretends it is no metaphysic at all).

Truth courses through the descending arteries and ascending veins of the cosmos, and God is its beating heart. Unless you have suffered a metaphysical stroke or pneumocardial infarction.