The Essence of Oneness and Oneness of Essence

More blathering from the past. I'm no longer able to discern the quality. I can only toss it out there:

When we say "one cosmos," the emphasis is always on both words: One and Cosmos.

"Cosmos" implies -- actually, it literally means -- order, not just of a superficial kind, but the deepest and most unitive structure of existence. And when we say "One," we obviously don't mean it in any numerical sense, but rather, in a qualitative way signifying the ultimate synthesis or integration of all particulars, both subjective and objective, spatial and temporal. No one has ever seen (or will ever see) the cosmos; rather, the cosmos is an implicit assumption in our ability to see anything at all, i.e., for things to be intelligible. If this weren't a cosmos, then we couldn't know it (or anything else)

Anything that exists partakes of oneness on pain of not existing; to exist is to be something. Conversely, to have no intelligible essence is to not exist. Many things we think of as "wrong" aren't so much erroneous as simply non-existent, and many of our political battles come down to the insistence that things that cannot exist must exist and shall exist. The word "marriage," for example, only exists because of the essential differences between male and female. New forms of marriage can only exist in a world without essences, but then marriage itself is drained of any essential meaning.

"Social justice" is another nonsense term with no essential meaning. I'm reminded of this because just yesterday I was rereading Hayek's indispensable Mirage of Social Justice. There is so much quoteworthy material in it; like Whitehead, he's better at cranking out memorable zingers than readable prose. This one is as good as any, and highlights the barbarism at the heart of the ironically named progressive. The idea of "social justice" is

a direct consequence of that anthropomorphism or personification by which naive thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes. It is a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions.

Yes, it isn't fair that Labron James plays basketball so much better than his teammates. But redistributing his points and rebounds to lesser players won't fix that.

Anyway, the Ground of reality is One, and this One is not a chaotic agglomeration but an integral whole. When we are in the Ground we are close to the One, and when we are at One we are floating in the Ground.

The Ground is also indistinguishable from the Center, the Center which is always present in the heart of every human being. Our task and our vocation is to live from this Center, which grounds, organizes, and unifies (which are all aspects of the same thing).

Although we journey through the finite, our home is in the Infinite. All men understand this, even when they deny it to themselves. A man who fails to transcend himself has failed to become one, precisely.

To say "transcendence" is to say openness to the Infinite. One could say that man reaches out to the Infinite, or that he cultivates a space within so as to allow its ingression.

Either way, this transitional space is where we live and where we are meant to live, not in some desiccated scientistic flatland with no water to drink or air to breath, just ice and rock.

Now, unity is always in the direction of inwardness; this is not to imply a pathological withdrawal from the world, but rather, the plain fact that oneness implies interiority.

Again, an "exterior one" is just a pile of stuff, so to speak, with no interior relations; its oneness is just our own projection, not anything intrinsic. But any complex whole -- say, the human body -- is characterized by an irreducibly complex system of internal relations, in which everything is "within" everything else.

Love unifies. Hate divides. Or, perhaps we could say that the deep unity we discover everywhere in the cosmos is what Dante was referring to when he spoke of "the love that moves the sun and other stars."

For Schuon, man "is capable of a love exceeding phenomena and opening out to the Infinite, and of an activity having its motive or its object beyond terrestrial interests."

Elsewhere Schuon has written to the effect that the purpose of life is quite simple: we are to know truth, will the good, and love beauty. Each of these three -- love, truth, beauty -- is a transcendental, meaning again that man's innate "cosmic direction" is beyond himself -- into, or toward, what surpasses him.

One might say that "horizontal life" is subjective and self-interested, while vertical life is disinterested and therefore objective (objectivity and disinterestedness amounting to the same thing). Now, there is no truth -- or knowledge of truth -- in the absence of these two.

Which is why the Way of Truth is a kind of sacrificial offering in which we transcend the passions and petty interests of the ego. To acknowledge a primordial truth is to die a little. But in a good way, since we die to fragmentation and are "resurrected" into unity. "A saint is a void open for the passage of God," and "To give oneself to God is to give God to the world" (Schuon).

Of course, you are free to try to be fulfilled within your own little absurcular orbit, but "It is a fact that man cannot find happiness within his own limits; his very nature condemns him to surpass himself, and in surpassing himself, to free himself" (ibid.)

I might add that we are condemned to surpass ourselves both horizontally and vertically. That is to say, our deiform nature means that we are trinitarian right down to the bones, so that even the most horizontal among us wants to escape from himself in the form of, say, a passionate love.

But love of man divorced from love of the Creator always ends badly, since no fellow human being can possibly embody the transcendence we seek. Bitterness, disillusionment, and recriminations follow, all for the inevitable discovery that every human is all too (another recent book discusses the details, On the Meaning of Sex).

Only the prior loss of God could transform an inevitability into a surprise: the surprise in discovering one's own idolatrous nature. Remembering God is our task, but forgetting God our hobby.

In Purcell, I came across a comment about St. John of the Cross, to the effect that his writing is "like a winding staircase always revolving around the same center, always recurring to the same topics, but at a higher level."

Again, this is the inspiraling "shape of man" that we've been discussing lately.

Schuon says something similar, that "Fundamentally there are only three miracles: existence, life, intelligence." And with intelligence, "the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring that in reality has never been parted from the Infinite."

Thus, intelligence is already a kind of "union with God" (i.e., Truth), as are virtue and beauty. Each shines through the sophicating blandscape of the tenured, and brings us back to our ground and center, our origin and destiny. If truth is the "food" of the journey, love is the living water, and beauty the otherworldy perfume.

(All of the Schuon references are from his Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, which I guess must be echoing through me. It'll do that.)

Contours of the Idiosphere

Two more edited and strung together posts on Purcell's From Big Bang to Big Mystery:

If we could ascribe a "shape" to man, it would be a kind of inwardly ascending spiral. Purcell says much the same thing; beginning with the ancient Greeks, "we make our own self the object of a quest," and this "odyssey within and beyond ourselves is a lifelong one, with the quest itself leading to a substantial deepening of who we are."

And substantial is the operative word, because it does indeed result in a kind of existential "heft" that is quite palpable when we encounter it, and more or less synonymous with (or even the measure of) real being.

Conversely, we all know lightweights of various kinds -- intellectual, emotional, spiritual, artistic, political, journalistic, etc. We routinely deal with so-called intellectuals who have no heft whatsoever, the types who generally compose our media and academic elite. The illusory weight they throw around results from mutual mirroring, or, to use the technical term, transactional fellatio.

As I've mentioned before, you can usually tell when you are dealing with one of these lightweights within a sentence or two of their writing. How are such persons able to instantaneously transmit so little with so little? Obama comes to mind. Probably because of the upward winds of affirmative action -- a perverse caricature of the inspiraling process -- he will never be able to perceive his own vacuity, which is protected by a bubble of fragility, pettiness, and unearned self-regard.

Schuon -- who is the opposite of the existentially heftless, since he communicates ontological weight with striking economy -- agrees that

The way towards God always involves an inversion: from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration [read: heft], from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity.

This serenity isn't a "blandness," which is what I imagined it must be when I lived at the periphery, where "excitement" is really just restlessness and agitation in disguise.

Rather,

In order to be happy, man must have a center; now this center is above all the Certitude of the One. The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery. To be a man is to be at the Center; it is to be Center.

I know what you're thinking: how does this differ from, say, the egocentric Obama, for whom delusions of mere adequacy would represent a great improvement? We can illuminate the difference quite easily with just three words: attractor, ego, and O.

As we've discussed in the past, there is clearly (for anyone can phenomenologically prove it to himself) something analogous to "gravity" -- or gravitational force -- in psychospiritual space. Just as, say, the moon is drawn into the orbit of the earth-attractor, and earth into the sun-attractor, vertical space is populated with a host of transpersonal attractors, to such an extent that it can truly be said that "you are what (or Whom) you orbit."

The very first step of the spiritual life -- for all subsequent steps follow from it -- is to leave one attractor for another. Call it what you want -- from the outer to inner, periphery to center, ego to nous, or just (•) to (¶) -- but this is in a sense our "perpetual practice," in which we are always beginners, because we are always taking that first booby step again and again. When finitude steps into infinitude -- or time into eternity, many into one -- every step is literally the first and last.

Schuon raises a subtle but orthoparadoxical point, to the effect that there is a kind of good and bad movement at both the periphery and center. On the one hand, the "spiritual immobility" of the infinite Center is "opposed to the endless movement of external phenomena." But on the other hand, there is a kind of higher "spiritual movement" which "is opposed to the natural inertia of the fallen soul."

To put it in plain language, the people whose lives seem so full of activity are often the most static, whereas the Raccoon is never moving more swiftly than when he is just sitting still, say, banging out a blog post. No one could look at me at the moment and know that I am soaring on wings of slack.

Here is another apt observation by Schuon:

The soul must withdraw itself from the dispersion of the world; this is the quality of Inwardness. Then the will must vanquish the passivity of life; this is the quality of Actuality. Finally, the mind must transcend the unconsciousness of the ego; this is the quality of Simplicity. To perceive the Substance intellectually, above the uproar of accidents, this is to realize Simplicity. To be one is to be simple; for Simplicity is to the One what Inwardness is to the Center and what Actuality is to the Present

(All the Schuon references are from his extremely pithy and yet weighty Echoes of Perennial Wisdom.)

***

Purcell raises a subtle but critical point about our common Quest -- that it isn't just something personal and idiosyncratic, but "universal." In other words, just as in science, we are dealing with an objective world that therefore yields "public" information.

Indeed, when a spiritual journey goes wholly "private," so to speak, into the realms of personal imagination and fantasy, this isn't just the way of Error, but of (oc)cultism, gnosticism (religious and/or political), and potential tyranny, because tyranny occurs whenever we are forced to bow before a truth that we cannot freely accept and/or prove to ourselves.

America, for example, is rooted in natural law, which posits universal moral principles that any normal person can discover and confirm for himself (cf. What We Can't Not Know). In fact, when you think about it, the entire category of morality must be quintessentially "scientific," in the sense that it deals with principles that are both abstract and universal. A "private morality" is no morality at all.

In other words to affirm that morality is relative isn't just the opposite of morality as such, but renders morality strictly impossible (like "my truth"). If morals are relative, then there is no such thing -- just as if there are no laws of physics, there is no physics.

At present we see a dangerously media-inflamed lynch mob of the left in an uproar over a man who allegedly defended his life against a budding criminal who was beating his head against the sidewalk. Undoubtedly additional and perhaps even contradictory facts will emerge through the legal process, but why a moral relativist should be offended by the law of the jungle is a mystery, to say the least, for if there is no universal morality, there is only power, i.e., "might makes right."

Conversely, conservatives know there is a universal moral law. If, therefore, it turns out that the facts are not as we know them, and that Zimmerman victimized a wholly innocent person, then we will be the first to express moral outrage and to demand justice, because it is a first principle of morality that one doesn't harm innocent persons unless one has a damn good reason, e.g., self-defense.

Purcell discusses a psychological phenomenon that made the ascent of Hitler possible. He references Voegelin, who escaped Nazi Germany and was therefore in a position to understand what went on there.

Voegelin gave the phenomenon one of those extremely long German names, but it essentially comes down to a willful blindness, a refusal to perceive, a deliberate avoidance of "understanding what was going on." He traces the malady as far back as Heraclitus, who wrote that "those who refuse to ask questions of existence... are (spiritually) asleep."

The key point here is again a detachment from the Real, usually accomplished through what Bion called "attacks on linking" (the word "attack" is apt, for there is always an element of intra-psychic violence in this defense mechanism). That is to say, the easiest way to maintain the Lie is to sever any cognitive links that lead to Truth. This all happens unconsciously in a rapid and pre-emptive manner, which is why it is so difficult to correct.

In other words -- and this should go without saying -- in order to promulgate the Lie in a systematic manner, one must on some level be aware of the Truth. If one isn't aware of the Truth, then the lying won't be at all organized, but just ad hoc, chaotic, and scattershot. One might say that leftism is a systematic lie, hence its "robustness." It attacks truth at the very root, which saves a lot of time and trouble.

But for the same reason, it is not susceptible to correction until reality exacts a terrible vengeance. The longer one ignores reality, the more severe the retribution tends to be, for the cosmic scales must be balanced.

The source of our common reality -- and the possibility of intelligibility and meaningful communication -- is, of course, the logos. But as Voegelin explains, "many live as if they had a wisdom of their own. Those who are awake have a world [kosmos] one and common, but those who are asleep each turn aside into their private worlds" (in Purcell, emphasis mine).

This results in the pseudo-doctrine -- the absurd principle-of-no-principle -- represented by relativism, i.e., "perception is reality." If perception is indeed reality, then there is no reality, precisely; there is no possibility of an intelligible cosmos, neither scientifically nor morally. Man is reduced to animal, but then again, not really, for animals are at least guided by an unerring instinct universal to the species. Man alone would be condemned to his own private hell ruled by delusion and power.

Voegelin continues: "Through spirit man actualizes his potential to partake of the divine," which "is that which all men have in common..." Conversely, he "who closes himself against what is common, or who revolts against it, removes himself from the public life of human community. He becomes thereby a private man, or in the language of Heraclitus, an idiotes" (in Purcell).

To live inside this private idiosphere is to live outside the logosphere, which is again our common world. This very much reminds me of a discussion in Maritain's Degrees of Knowledge, about what are called "beings of reason."

That is to say, the mind of man "does not conceive only real beings, i.e., beings capable of existing." Rather, it can also construct "objects of thought that are incapable of existing outside the mind... which the ancients called beings of reason..."

Maritain points out that "God does not make beings of reason." Rather, they are products of the human mind, and are always intrinsically contradictory. An example would be Marxism (and all philosophies derived from it), which can only exist in the mind in general or the university in particular, never in reality. It can be forced upon reality, of course, but again, reality eventually takes its vengeance.

UPDATE: beings of reason conjured by the left have multiplied exponentially in the seven years since this post was first published, especially since 2016.

To Know We're In the Cosmos is to Know We're Not Of the Cosmos

To review: there is more difference between man and ape than between ape and existence, being that when cosmic evolution crosses the threshold of Man, it enters a vast and inexhaustible Within that might as well represent a second cosmos. And yet, there can be only One.

Hmmm.

No ape ever says hmmm. Which is the first word.

This second cosmos is somehow "within" the existing one, and yet, transcends it. Thus, in his own way, man has a similar relationship to the cosmos as does God, i.e., both immanent and transcendent (or in but not of; if we were only in, then we couldn't possibly know of it). To know there are appearances is to intuit the reality. Here again, no ape ever said "it may look like x, but x is just an appearance of y."

As Schuon writes, "One of the keys to understanding our true nature and ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence. Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing."

Absolute or Nothing. There is literally no in-between; or rather there can only be an in-between if it is a hierarchical descent from the Absolute. If there is no Absolute, then nothing is higher than anything else.

Now, this vast and protean cosmic interior is bound up with the universal Quest alluded to in the previous post. Obviously no material object embarks upon a quest to discover its origins and destiny, nor does a dog give a hoot about where it came from so long as it is fed, watered, and amused.

And yet, if one is a strict materialist, man's quest would have to be considered utterly quixotic and as doomed from the start as that of any other dog. A dog enjoys a walk for its own sake. He doesn't expect to come back from it a better dog. But man's life is a walk toward a nonlocal object. It has a teleological character.

Yes, there are some who conclude that human existence is absurd, and leave it at that (even fewer can actually consistently live in such a desiccated fantasy world without constantly barking at the ghosts they deny). But man is not built this way, and it goes against human nature to imagine and project an absurd cosmos. Rather, meaning is everywhere and at every level of existence. For

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners (NGD).

This being the case, it shouldn't be a surprise that existence is ultimately meaningful. Indeed, to say that meaning is everywhere except in the whole is analogous to saying that the cells in your body are alive but not the body itself.

Purcell's From Big Bang to Big Mystery is his own story, his own attempt to situate himself within our 13.85 billion year cosmodrama. As it so happens, this is impossible to do without recourse to thousands of other cosmodramas.

In fact, this is one of the most baleful effects of living in any kind of totalitarian regime: that only one drama is permitted, e.g., the drama of Darwinism, or of Marxism, White Privilege, or Toxic Masculinity. Yes, you are "free" to discover your life's meaning, so long as it is approved by the progressive indoctrinational complex.

"Mass education" is a key to facilitating the kind of concentrated power lusted after by the left, for if everyone thinks the same way -- lives in the same narrative bubble -- this makes their job a lot easier. "Thought," such as it is, runs in only one direction, converging upon the almighty state. There is a reason why so many of the wealthiest zip codes in the land encircle and ultimately strangle D.C.

Conversely, a (genuinely) liberal education is anathema to the state-media narrative of the progressive left, because people might discover a meaning that clashes with state interests. Thus, for the state to "allow" school vouchers is as likely as the IRS operating on the honor system. Without coercion -- whether intellectual or economic -- there is no left. One cannot claim to be "against bullying" while voting Democrat.

One of the keys to life is discovering the useful narratives. One might even say that this is the ultimate purpose of an education. How can it be that one can complete thirteen or seventeen or nineteen or twenty-four years of education without having encountered a multitude of these? That was me: after twenty-four years of schooling and one Ph.D., I wasn't just starting out, but had to dig myself out of all those false narratives.

Purcell writes that as he embarked upon his quest to explore the inner dimension of the cosmos (i.e., humanness), he discovered "a thousand and one mirror quests" in "the multiplicity and variety of quests of other individuals and cultures" down through the ages.

What this means is that, as we set out on our quest, our primary data is not the world per se. In other words, none of us starts from scratch with unmediated knowledge of things. At the very least we are given a language, a culture, a tradition, a particular family, etc. But for the person who wants to go beyond the given, our data includes the "quests" of a multitude of others, separated in time and space by hundreds of years and thousands of miles. Man is a temporal mountain range featuring many glorious peaks (there are of course countless valleys, or at least I can't keep up with all the Democrat candidates for president).

There is indeed a community saints, and not just the moral kind. For there is intellectual sanctity. Moreover, at the highest peaks there is a convergence of moral and intellectual purity. There one would be frankly mortified to believe certain ideas. To put it another way, the ideas that circulate in the typical university would cause acute embarrassment in the presence of God. You have been warned.

This is a key point raised by Chesterton in his Orthodoxy. That is, mankind is one, not just in space but in time. By no means are we permitted to consider the dead as mere links to us -- as if their only purpose was to serve as stepping stones to something better. But if one is an evolutionist, that is the inescapable conclusion: nothing simply "is," but is always on the way to something better.

But just as it is immoral to treat a living person as a means and not an end, treating past generations as means robs them of their dignity as persons: "If we don't respect those who have gone before us, who will respect us when we are gone?" In short, you can't dehumanize your ancestors without dehumanizing their descendants: no them, no us. History is either one story or no story at all, just a chaotic and self-obsessed Grievance Studies Department.

For Purcell, "meditative re-enactment of the expressions of the quests of others, animates our existence with a heightened sense of the worth of human existence -- our own and others -- and grounds a sense of human family that is universal across space and time."

To be continued...

Can IT BE without I AM?

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason. --Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Let us continue with our story (of the cosmos), which has only two possible outcomes: for it is either the futile quest of a contingent and randomly evolved primate to understand his origins, OR it is the return to God of his only theomorphic creature. All else is just the frivolous noise of trousered monkeys and tenured flunkies.

As with Purcell, I was puzzled by that most basic ontological distinction in the cosmos between subject and object -- specifically, how IT IS (the great outdoors) relates to I AM (the great in here, or cosmic sensorium). In no way could I understand how one could ever derive the I from the IT, unless the former were somehow there with IT to begin with, whether implicitly or explicitly.

In any event, one cannot derive the greater from the lesser, let alone the infinitely greater (and the human person is infinitely greater than its material matrix, or we're back in the ivory tower of tenured babble).

A casual and eventually thoroughgoing acquaintance with science and philosophy establishes the fact that most thinkers don't actually deal with the issue, but rather, simply stop asking questions at some point, thus violating the principle of sufficient reason, which says that any effect requires a cause adequate to account for it; which is a fancy way of saying that you can't get blood out of a turnip.

In the golden words of our fine Colombian:

--Intelligence is a train from which few do not deboard, one after the other, in successive stations.

--The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

--To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions.

And this doozy, which in many ways reveils the entire Doctrine, if you cogitate on it:

--The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world. Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent.

In other words -- getting back to the thesis of this post -- IT IS being derived from I AM is at least conceivable, while the converse is strictly inconceivable: no one will ever explain how existence becomes experience, or how object becomes subject. It can't be done, and if it could, you couldn't be there to do it.

Another way of looking at this question is to say that before we accept an explanation, we have to first decide what would constitute one. In short, there is truth and there is adequacy, i.e., the principle of sufficient reason. To put in personal terms, some people are so stupid, or incurious, or compliant, that they'll believe anything. And The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions (NGD).

This is indeed where evolutionists and materialists in general run into so much trouble, e.g., "man is just another animal, animals are just the expression of selfish genes, and that's the truth." One of these three statements is not like the others (doubly so if it is true)!

Bryan Magee has a good analysis of the problem in his fine biography of Schopenhauer:

It is possible for us to pose some sort of Why? question with regard to anything. As Schopenhauer puts it: "The validity of the principle of sufficient reason is so much involved in the form of consciousness that we simply cannot imagine anything objectively of which no 'why?' could be further demanded."

In philosophy a single naïve question is sometimes enough to make an entire system come tumbling down (NGD).

Now, the core of any discipline, whether science, philosophy, history, or law, revolves around this question of sufficient reason, of which there are different kinds. For example, physical causation is not the same as moral causation. If this weren't the case, then we wouldn't have free will, including the freedom to know the truth about free will.

For Schopenhauer there are four main kinds of sufficient reason: the type of direct physical causation that occurs, say, between billiard balls; mathematical determination; logical entailment; and the sort of "motivated action" that can only arise from a free subject, or mind.

In each case, philosophical questions arise, but the first three categories aren't nearly as problematic as the fourth: "[T]he scientist gestures in the direction of the philosopher," who then pretends to answer the question. The metaphysical theologian raises his hand and says "I know I know I know," but they refuse to pick him.

The bottom line is that "science is, in a serious sense of the term, occult, in that it explains everything else without itself being explained" (ibid). Ironically, this is one of the definitions of God, i.e., the uncaused cause.

An “explanation” consists in the end in assimilating a strange mystery to a familiar mystery (NGD).

Equally ironic is that, at the end of the deity, after all the science has been, er, settled, "the mystery of the world as such would be as great at the end of the process as it had been at the beginning" (ibid). Why? That's why: because we can still ask why?

Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything (NGD).

In lieu of the above, we could probably save a lot of time with a one word, all purpose protest: Gödel!, proving once again that you can't crack the cosmic egg without breaking out the umlaut.

For "the laws of logic, like the basic concepts of science, and the axioms and the rules of mathematics... must involve circularity, since they themselves generate the justification procedures in their universe of discourse" (ibid).

But interestingly, we all recognize the flaw in this approach when it comes to moral justification. Our whole legal system is -- or was, before liberals hijacked it -- built around the idea that we do not allow people to get away with crimes just because they felt morally justified in committing them.

This whole discussion hits rather close to home, because, as a forensic psychologist, I am routinely asked to give a precise opinion as to what "caused" a patient's "psychiatric injury" (or "mental condition").

The problem here is that there is an utter conflation between the kind of causation that applies to matter vs. the kind of causation that is adequate to explain mental events. In no way am I permitted to provide fully comprehensive explanations appropriate to the subject -- for example, the percentage of causation that may be attributed to man's fallen nature, or just the fact that life is hard, so deal with it. Rather, I must pretend that the all mental causes are as discrete and proximate as those in a game of billiards. The whole absurd exercise rests on a massive category error, but it pays well.

In any event, as Magee explains, "there is a point where natural science, and indeed every branch of knowledge, leaves things as they are" and "does not go beyond this point."

Looked at this way, the belief that the "big bang" ends the discussion of our origins is no better than the belief that the cosmos was caused by the god Witoto taking a leak into the void. Neither one satisfies me. I mean, I certainly prefer the former, but it's not as if it's a self-sufficent explanation. Another key aphorism:

Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End.

For example, where do all those elegant equations governing the big bang come from? Who knows, maybe Witoto tinkles them into the void.

Or maybe, just maybe, as reveiled in the Encirclopedia Raccoonica, it was not good that this Godhead, the Most High, should be allone, so He expired with a big bong and said "let there be higher physics," and it was zo.

Two final aphorisms before we sign off. Both aren't only true, but alive with truth:

--Truth is a person.

--The truth is objective but not impersonal (NGD).

Coming Up with a Likely Story for an Unlikely Predicament

This is an extended multi-post review of Brendan Purcell's From Big Bang to Big Mystery: Human Origins in the Light of Creation and Evolution, which, like our One Cosmos, attempts to pack the whole existentialida -- the whole cosmic drama -- into a single combo-plate of about 300 pages. It's the only other recent book of which I am aware that synthesizes everything from physics to anthropology to paleontology to biology to history to mysticism to theology to mind parasites into one convenient narrative.

Who is this Brendan Purcell? According to Professor Backflap, he is an ordained priest who is currently adjunct professor of philosophy at Notre Dame. His previous book was called The Drama of Humanity: Towards a Philosophy of Humanity in History, while he also co-edited Voegelin's classic Hitler and the Germans. In fact, he is hugely influenced by Voegelin, whom he knew personally. In his bibliography there is more Voegelin than anyone else, essentially the complete works.

I see that our bibliographies contain many of the same names. This is not an academic observation, per se; rather, it reveals the "clues" we both regard as significant. In other words, faced with the infinite mass of data before us, we both honed in on particular hints, tips, signs, and knowing winks.

At the same time, we had some mutually exclusive influences, including some who are quite central to my approach, thus accounting for differences in sensibility and emphasis. "Individual" and "universal" interact in peculiar ways, but this goes to the very nature of personhood (which represents our ultimate category).

I think it's safe to say that Purcell's approach is much more mainstream, both scientifically and religiously. Obviously we are burdened -- or liberated, depending upon your EQ (eccentricity quotient) -- by the whole Raccoon sensibility, from which we couldn't escape even if we wanted. Again, persons will be persons, and it takes all kinds of them to make a world.

This post is only a brief intro, since I'm already pressed for time, so let's start with the big picture, and get into details later. This Big Picture is the idea that all human beings -- even the wrongheaded ones we don't like -- are motivated by the same Quest, which is none other than the Cosmic Adventure, the search for the Eternal Ground. Just as there are things we can't not know, it seems that there are things we can't not do, and this is one of them -- no, it must be the only one, to which everything else is necessarily related (just as all truth must be grounded in the Absolute, or no truth is possible).

Although their metaphysic will not allow them to admit it to themselves, even Marxists, leftists, metaphysical Darwinists, doctrinaire atheists, secular fundamentalists, and positivists of various kinds are all seeking the same ultimate Truth, except in a self-defeating way that assures failure. However, this hardly means that we can't benefit from this or that genuine relative truth they discover, since all truth is of the Holy Spirit.

***

According to Purcell, there is a universal Quest "that summons all true human beings to the heart of the human mystery."

To back up a bit, if you don't recognize that man -- i.e., your existence -- is a mystery, then you are living in a self-imposed Matrix that cuts you off from your essential personhood. In other words, you have performed a mysterectomy on yourself. For example, in a letter, Dostoyevsky wrote that "Man is a mystery.... I occupy myself with this mystery because I want to be a man" (in Purcell).

Now, you might suppose that a standard autobiography is a kind of transparent plunge into the mystery, but that approach usually leads nowhere if it fails to link up with the Source. In other words, the individual self is literally a kind of inexhaustible mystery, but this "inexhaustibility" provides a clue to the Big Mystery, since man is a kind of "finite infinitude" which mirrors the infinite infinitude of O.

Therefore, if you imagine that your bullshit will ever run dry, you're only fooling yourself. You'll never find God that way, because you're already in the ocean searching for water.

Now that it is understood that man is embedded in a cosmic drama extending back no less than 13.85 billion years -- that History is much longer than anyone ever supposed -- it is frankly impossible to write a comprehensive autobiography without taking into consideration, say, the big bang, the evolution of life, and the emergence of human consciousness.

By which I mean that if we are deprived of certain ground-floor experiences during this sensitive period, our quest for the Ground will be compromised later in life. The psychoanalyst Michael Balint wrote of the "basic fault" (as in "fault line"), which can even be seen as one way in which man perpetuates his ancestral Fall from generation to generation. A person haunted by the Basic Fault often spends his life in pursuit of what might be called "dark mysteries," or thrilling perversions and secret compulsions of various kinds.

It is gratifying to see another writer tackle the "discontinuity problem" of human beings. In fact, Purcell makes a useful distinction between the fact of evolution and the ideology of "evolutionism," which is analogous to the critical distinction between science and scientism, of which every educated person should be aware.

The dogma of evolutionism maintains that there is no ontological distinction between man and animal, an absurd metaphysic that immediately runs aground for reasons Darwin himself intuited:

With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or are at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

The answer is no, of course not. That being the case, where is the line in nature at which point monkey convictions become reliable and trustworthy? Darwinian ideology answers -- and disproves -- itself if one is honest.

Recall that in the Encirclopedia Raccoonica, the individual chapters are so arranged as to be both discontinuous -- i.e., discrete and numbered, just like any other book -- but also continuous and flowing, apparently unlike any other book. This complementarity signifies a number of things, including the ontological discontinuity -- the evolutionary leap, which evolution supposedly cannot do -- of man.

Yes, we are aware of the theory of punctuated equilibrium, but that is merely another attempt at a natural explanation to "save the appearances" of what is clearly a transnatural phenomenon.

One of the themes that runs through From Big Bang to Big Mystery is that human beings "are both continuous with the evolutionary process and discontinuous with it." I for one know exactly what he means when he references Walker Percy's observation that there is "more difference between a human and an animal -- let's say an orangutan -- than between the animal and the planet Saturn."

***

About that comment yesterday to the effect that there is more difference between a man and a monkey than between a monkey and an inanimate object. I would go even further and say that there is sometimes more difference between men than between men and animals.

One needs to be cautious here, because by no means does it imply that every person isn't of infinite value. But I was thinking of JWN Sullivan's remark to the effect that -- musically speaking, of course -- there is a greater distance between Beethoven and the average man than between the average man and a dog.

There are indeed a handful of men who tower above the rest, whether saints, or scientists, or novelists, poets and painters. Why is this?

I believe it is essentially a necessary consequence of the ontological category of "man," who contains within himself all the hierarchical degrees of being, and spans the entire cosmos in both space and time, vertically and horizontally.

This being the case... Put it this way: it is analogous to the biosphere, in which there are no gaps whatsoever. Everything has a job and a place, even if it means sprouting up through a slab of concrete, or dwelling in darkness at the bottom of the ocean, or eking out a living inside a scalding geyser.

In other words, wherever one goes on the planet, from the north pole, to the hottest desert, to the wastelands of MSNBC, there is some form of primitive life that has found a way to adapt itself to environmental conditions. It has found its niche.

But there is also a vertical space uniquely inhabited by man. This space too is populated wherever one travels within it. Indeed, one can go to hell and back -- Dante proved this -- but one will always find footprints of our predecessors and/or contemporaries (and occasionally descendants from the "future").

The point is that vertical space is densely populated, with some people near the top, others closer to the bottom. This is proven by various aphorisms:

--My brothers? Yes. My equals? No. Because there are younger ones and there are older ones.

--There is something definitively vile about the man who only admits equals, who does not tirelessly seek out his betters.

--Equality is not the fulfillment but the perversion of equity. Only a hierarchical ordering proceeds equitably with “the lion and the ox.”

But man possesses such protean gifts, that almost everyone has something that places him near the top, even if it is only -- only! -- kindness, or mothering, or decency, or sincerity. For example, although Beethoven was in the stratosphere musically, his interpersonal skills were evidently closer to a junkyard dog.

More generally, saints are not usually sages, scientists are not philosophers, celebrities are not political scientists, community organizers are not statesmen, etc.

Interesting, however, that someone like Thomas Aquinas was indeed both saint and sage, and at the highest levels. In his case, this convergence was necessary, because there is a kind of personal purity needed to disclose the highest realities he touches upon. Anyone less than a saint might burst into flames on contact.

I think I've mentioned in the past that the ultimate question motivating my book was: how is it that I am possible? And I don't necessarily mean that in any special way, rather, just the naked fact of the most unexpected thing one could possibly imagine in a cosmos: I AM.

It turns out that in order to answer the question, you can't just say, for example, "my parents just happened to stumble into one another, and you know the rest."

Yes there's that, but there's also cosmology, history, anthropology, religion, linguistics, etc., etc., etc. It turns out that Purcell is motivated by that same question -- the very Question that defines man:

"What led me back to philosophy from psychology was a sense that, as a human being, I myself wasn't really, at least not exclusively, 'an object,' the kind of a thing a science could wholly encompass [read: contain] and explain."

Rather, "I realized I'm something other than a world-immanent thing -- a subject -- and that there's an inexhaustibility to the within-ness that marks me out as a human being as distinct from a galaxy, an ecosystem, or an animal."

Same here. To be continued...

Progress is an Open Spiral, Progressivism a Circular Prison

Just more of the same:

When progressives talk about "progress," they cannot mean the same thing we do, for objective progress is precisely what is rendered impossible in their metaphysic. Rather, progress for the progressive always involves compelling others to the yield to the opinions and desires of the progressive. But real progress can never result from bypassing freedom and truth (i.e., truth freely accepted).

One can approach this from various angles, but the result is always the same, for a determined stupidity at the start of a journey assures stupidity at the end -- like insisting that if only one travels far enough, one can prove that parallel lines meet. Sleep with a premise, wake up with its conclusions.

Since there is no "fixed point" in leftism, it can claim no truth and hence no measure of progress. Schuon hits the troll on the head in his usual pithy style: "To claim that knowledge as such could only be relative amounts to saying that human ignorance is absolute."

Either that thought will appeal to you, and be used as a stepping stone to higher things, or you will literally find it "repulsive," in that it will repel you onto a relative and therefore subjective, idiosyncratic, and ultimately arbitrary path. You will go back to sleep, which is not quite as effective suicide, but a pretty good defense mechanism against transcendent truth.

Once on that false path, no matter how rigorously one otherwise applies reason, one will be in a world that is fundamentally unreal. Therefore, one will be apportioning clouds, nailing Jello, sowing wind, spanking the monkey, etc. That is the bad kind of cosmic circle, i.e., self-enclosed circularity.

The cosmos is, of course, "structured," so to speak, as a circle, but it is a benignly inspiraling one, not a viciously repetitive one, i.e. an eternal return (as feared by Nietzsche). When I first realized this, I thought I had hit on something kind of original. Now I wish I had compiled all of the statements I've subsequently stumbled upon that affirm the same thing.

For example, this one, by Schuon: "There are basically but three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring which in reality has never parted from the Infinite."

In fact, even prior to the establishment of the first Raccoon lodge on March 4, 1355, Thomas Aquinas had used exactly this organizational structure for the Summa -- a chain of interior and exterior certitudes forming a Great Circle of Being:

In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place.

There is a two-way journey; one can call it out and back, or down and up, or many and one, or conspiracy and slack, or fall and redemption, or just ø and O.

In any -- and every -- event, there is a

Journey away from Home, where creatures actively unfold their diverse dynamic natures as finite participations in the divine perfection and as centers of self-expressive and self-communicating action and interaction with each other, thus forming a universe, that is, a system of many real beings joined together by their interaction to form the community of all existents -- the ultimate of all communities. This part of the journey was called the exitus (journey out) (Clarke).

This is accompanied by the journey back toward the Great Attractor, O, whereby creation is "drawn by this same Source through the pull of the Good built in to the very nature of every being through the mediation of final causation," or what Bob calls the the personal telovator or cosmic eschalator.

The upshot is that this "ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all nature, of all finite beings."

It's just that in human beings, this restless longing, this passion for wholeness, has become conscious, and this consciousness, you might say, is the initial "spark" that occurs when two tingles intermingle and spark in the dark, i.e., the Divine and human:

There is religious conversion which is 'being grasped by ultimate concern. It is an other-worldly falling in love....' The outcome of such conversion is that the Holy Spirit and the human spirit encounter profoundly (Norris).

Love at first Light.

No Principles, No Problem

The problem with the left is not so much bad philosophy as no philosophy at all.

Progressives are truly "post-philosophical," which is what allows them to routinely hold views that are internally and externally inconsistent, and more generally, to appeal to "expedient principles" -- an oxymoron -- as the need arises to defend what can only amount to raw power and self-interest. (In other words, truthlessness actually has a purpose, and this purpose is to serve the acquisition and maintenance of power.)

No, this isn't just polemical, because this is precisely what the more sophisticated among them aver: to disagree with their relativism is to render oneself an authoritarian or fascist. We are indeed living in a "post-metaphysical" age, which is indistinguishable from a post-philosophical age, which in turn redounds to a post-serious thinking age, or even a "post-adult" one.

Things become stupid and childish when principles are absent. For, Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. Indeed, Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Which is why, by the way, Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time (NGD). You will have noticed that the only way the left can get around this truism is to ban our assumptions wherever they have the power to do so, e.g., on college campuses.

When the tenured break out the "post-metaphysical" canard, what they really mean is post-Western civilization in general and post-Judeo-Christian in particular. The only way to jettison those two obstacles to power is to discredit them entirely. Not to seriously engage them, because to engage them would be to leave oneself beclowned (just as engaging rather than ignoring the Constitution would put an end to the left's schemes).

Therefore, our bedrock principles must be dismissed with a kind of a priori contempt, as if man learned nothing about the nature of man during his first 200,000 years on the planet. Now, the mere presence of a species for 200,000 years argues for an essence or nature that defines the species. But this isn't a problem if one's post-philosphical and post-intellectual outlook tosses aside the whole notion of essence: if human nature is a an obstacle, just deny it up front.

Here metaphysical Darwinism comes in handy, for if man is but the effect of wholly random causes, then he has no essence. This being the case, we are free to turn man into anything we wish. For example, if we raise a boy as a girl, he will become one. For the left, the only thing in man that is absolutely fixed is homosexuality. That and the right to a dead baby. Unless the baby is homosexual. Then it's murder. And murder is a sin. Except there's no such thing as sin.

Principles!

The only way to overcome what man has learned about himself over the eons -- much of it rather unflattering -- is to adopt an attitude of abject cynicism. Now, as we see in our troll [William], this attitude is one of extreme corrosiveness, in the sense that it naively prides itself on being able to dissolve any argument before reaching its conclusion. This is why I refer to it as "negative omniscience."

Unlike positive omniscience, or "knowing everything," this is the negative capability of knowing nothing, but in a way that renders oneself superior. One routinely encounters it in clinical practice, among paranoiacs (in a more crude form) and narcissists (in more subtle forms).

As Clarke discusses, "The very notion of constructing a unified systematic philosophical inquiry into being as a whole... has been abandoned by contemporary philosophers." An exception to the rule is Whiteheadian process philosophy, which is how I initially got into the racket. In fact, I don't think he can be surpassed if one is attempting to construct a metaphysic on merely scientific grounds, i.e., to draw out the metaphysical implications of modern science.

But man is obviously not restricted to the scientific mode of knowing (to believe otherwise is to have internalized an implicit principle before the investigation has even begun). Rather, as Schuon writes, "One of the keys to the understanding of our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world never measure up to the real range of our intelligence." For "Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or it is nothing."

I don't regard this statement as remotely poetical, or romantic, or "in a manner of speaking." Rather, everything must have its sufficient reason, and the only sufficient reason for man's restless search for Absoluteness is the Absolute. This is the real reason why science never rests content with any hypothesis (with the exception of manmade global warming, which, like homosexuality and the right to abortion, is another absolute).

But if man were only provoked to seek out the Absolute from the relative end of the cosmos, this would be a cosmic itch he could never scratch, for it is not possible for a finite being to reach or even know of the Infinite; to say finite is to implicitly know infinitude.

Therefore, just as man is on a perpetual search for God, history reveals God's perpetual search for man. If one prefers, one may express it in abstract terms and say that man, everywhere we find him, is characterized by (↑). But likewise, culture, everywhere we find it, is imbued with traces of (↓).

In the end -- as we shall see -- man's search for God is God's search for man, for there is no other way of looking at it, assuming God is God (in other words, transcendence necessarily spills over into immanence, as immanence points back and returns to transcendence).

To put it another way, every culture is characterized by a search for the ground, source, origin, or center -- the unchanging, or Ultimate Principle. Norris calls this the "search from below." He references Cardinal Newman, who remarked that "all the nations" seek God, and that "by feeling their way toward him, succeed in finding him." However, it is necessary to discern the principial truth within "the corrupt legends" with which it is inevitably mixed.

The story of the people of Israel isn't just another story of (↑), but more importantly, a -- the -- story of (↓): "it is not we who seek God, it is rather God who seeks us out." And for Christians, (↑) and (↓) meet -- or Cross paths -- in the person of Christ, who is both ground and destiny: "Here the human search from below, in its many different modalities and incarnations... effectively meets the divine descending search..."

Thus, "the Eternal enters time, the Whole lies hidden in the part, God takes on a human face." More to the point, "dialogue" becomes the possibility of "union" when the Absolute crosses "the ontological abyss separating the infinite and infinite." Again, to say that man cannot accomplish this union in the absence of (↓) is a truism.

Which is where I would say the Holy Spirit comes in, for he may be fruitfully thought of as an ongoing form of (↓), so that our sincere search is never in vain. The Holy Spirit "is the finisher and polisher of divine revelation with regard to us." Norris references an illuminating passage by the Orthodox bishop Ignatios of Latakia:

Without the Holy Spirit, God is far away, / Christ stays in the past, / the Gospel is a dead letter, / the Church is simply an organization, / authority a matter of dominion, / mission a matter of propaganda, / the liturgy no more than an evocation, / Christian living a slave morality.

Intelligibility and Freedom, Absurdity and Compulsion

Just another post that held my interest...

****

One of the perverse characteristics of our age is that the world is simultaneously regarded as exquisitely intelligible and yet completely absurd.

Which is itself absurd, because it is impossible to understand how these two can be reconciled. I would go so far as to say that if the world were absurd, we could never know it; and that to think the world absurd results from an implicit expectation of non-absurdity.

When I say that the world is seen as exquisitely intelligible, what I mean is that we just assume -- correctly so -- that whatever or wherever we investigate in the cosmos, it will make sense -- that it will speak to us and disclose its secret. Intelligible order is everywhere (which is one of the operating assumptions of science). Faith in the rationality and intelligibility of the cosmos is a faith in God once removed (non-Judeo-Christian cultures have no such faith, unless it has been imported from the West).

As it bears upon ultimate questions, science is every bit as "faith based" as is religion (except in a naive and uncritical way). What I mean is that, for example, science actually has no idea -- nor will it ever, on its own terms -- how a supposedly dead universe suddenly sprang to life 3.85 billion years ago.

Nevertheless, most scientists (if they think about it at all) seem to have a serene confidence that this ultimate discontinuity is unproblematic. Which is why I felt so fortunate to encounter the brilliant Robert Rosen during the years I spent puzzling over the problem of Life Itself (can't really recommend him to layfolk; he didn't live long enough to maybe dumb it down a notch for our benefit).

Likewise the transition -- or leap -- from (mere) animal to man. You will have noticed that in facing this question, science doesn't really work inductively from the actual evidence. Rather, it begins with a Darwinian conclusion -- for them, an axiomatic truth -- and deduces how this or that human trait must have come about via random copying errors naturally selected.

Yes, the results are comical -- for one thing, any properly credentialed mediocrity can play the game -- but no more so than a religious person who, say, begins with the axiomatic truth that the world is 6,000 years old, and then tries to cram all the empirical evidence into that hypothesis. Both can be done, but only badly.

We endured an example of this type of pseudo-analysis the other day, with reader William's appeal to cosmic ignorance in support of his negative omniscience (similar to how scientism marshals intelligibility in support of absurdity). That is, in response to our belief that the universe must in principle be finite, he commented that he is

limited in [my] perception of the observable universe by the space time continuum in which [I] exist, and that [I am] able to perceive and theorize"; [and that] the particle horizon -- the maximum distance from which particles can or have traveled in the age of the universe -- represents the boundary between the observable and the unobservable universe.

Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it. An intrinsically absurd way. For example, is it even remotely true that man's understanding is limited to the laws of physics, or to what is empirically present to the senses? If this were true, then we couldn't even know the laws of physics, for we would merely be an expression of them; the answer to every human problem would be E = mc2, or Planck's constant.

More to the point, man is capable of pondering universal truths that operate in the realm of existence as such, in any conceivable cosmos. It isn't as if these universal truths are reducible to physics; to the contrary, physics must be a prolongation of metaphysics.

In other words, in order for something to be intelligible at all, it must share certain characteristics (which I will discuss in a subsequent post). Therefore, to the extent that there are things outside our "space-time continuum," if they are intelligible, then we can understand them. If they are absurd, then we can't.

However, there is every reason to conclude that "existence" and "intelligibility" are so intimately related that to exist is to be intelligible. To put it the other way around, it is obviously impossible for us to conceive of something that "exists" in an unintelligible way.

We can go so far as to say that the cosmos is "fulfilled" in knowledge of itself -- which is simultaneously man's fulfillment, at least on the natural plane (i.e., that being ends in contemplation of itself).

But even then, there can be no contradiction between Reason and Revelation, since both are creations of the same Author. Thus, in the face of apparent contradiction, we must re-examine and rethink the matter through. Atheists and other trolls never tire of raising such contradictions, precisely because they haven't thought them through. In other words, they take note of the contradiction and stop right there, instead of discerning the unity from a higher perspective.

While it is no doubt true that in premodern times epistemology was subordinated to metaphysics (or, more likely, theology), in our day it is the converse, such that metaphysics is subordinated to positivistic science, a strangely oedipal scenario in which the child (science) murders its parent (natural theology).

Norris Clarke writes that man innately possesses an "unrestricted drive" to know "all that there is to know about all that there is."

Good credo for the masthead: All There is to Know about All There Is.

As such, our mind is by its nature "oriented toward the totality of being as knowable, as its final goal which alone can satisfy its desire to know." Further, this is a kind of "natural hope" -- to go along with our natural faith -- "in the radical intelligibility in principle of all real being."

Blah blah yada yada, if you pursue this line of thought to its inevitable end, you are faced with a choice: "Either the universe is unintelligible," in which case you free -- or compelled, rather -- to wallow in your own absurdity.

If not, then "there must exist one and only one Infinite Source of all other beings, both of their actual existence and all the perfections (goodness) within them.... Our journey of the intellect, in search of the full intelligibility of what it means to be, has now finally arrived at the single Infinite Source of all beings, of the whole community of real existents."

O!

The original desire for the good takes its energy from the ever-pulsating momentum of that Origin in which man, answering the creative call of God, flew across the abyss which parts nothingness from existence. It is the moment with which the possible bursts forth with a roar into the radiant dawn of its first realization: the swift current of a stream that originating in the bright darkness of mere Nature and steadily fed by its source, crosses by the dictates of innate conscience into the realm of freedom (Josef Pieper).

The Body, Soul, and Divinity of Truth

Just a couple of old posts strung together. I have to put them someplace, and this is the place...

This post is about Truth and Freedom, since we can by no means have one without the other. For who could argue with the following proposition, that

The actualization of truth is no mere natural process but a spiritual event, which takes place only in the lightning-like encounter and fusion of two words -- the word of the subject and the word of the object. Outside of this event, there is no truth" (Balthasar, Theo-Logic).

Nature may embody truth, but it takes a supernatural act to pull the truthy rabbit out of its material hat, to quote Aquinas on one of his rare off days. No: "The truth of the object exists only so long as infinite or finite spirit turns to it in an act of knowing; the truth of the subject exists only as long as it abides in this act" (ibid.).

Our encounter with the object world releases the truth of the subject into being. This is why we all respond differently to different objects -- and subjects, i.e., persons -- which have a way of giving birth to a latent part of ourselves. This has much in common with the Platonic idea of education, the purpose of which is more to draw out what is within than to shove into us what we lack ("doctor" is cognate to docer, to "draw out.")

One cannot get to the freedom of truth unless one first appreciates the unfreedom that often surrounds it. The spirit must first apprentice itself to the object world before it can "attain to itself." This is similar to the manner in which one must first master scales and chords before one is truly free to play a musical instrument. In fact, for a true master, the unfreedom and freedom will live side by side for the remainder of one's life. John Coltrane used to practice eight hours a day long after he attained virtuosity.

Things are more than things, and facts are more than facts. If this weren't the case, then knowledge of them would be strictly impossible.

For human beings, facts are always enshrouded in mystery, for they are an occasion to know the great Mystery of Withinness. Facts speak to humans, again, in ways that engage us in particularly intimate ways. Take the simple example of this book we're discussing today. Not a single person in the world would have highlighted the exact same passages I have, either because it speaks to me or I hear it in a uniquely individualized way. So are the facts in the book? Or in me? Or in the space between?

If it weren't for the erotic mystery that enshrouds truth, we'd all be singing the same tune from the same boring hymnal. "The event of knowledge would cast a cold, pitiful, shadowless light into every corner, and there would be no possibility of escaping this scorching sun. Being, stripped of mystery, would be, so to speak, prostituted" (ibid.).

This epistemological ambiguity is the precise opposite of a cynical relativism or spiritually barren deconstruction. Rather, "radical cynicism only becomes possible wherever man no longer has a flair for the central mystery of being, whenever he has unlearned reverence, wonder, and adoration, whenever, having denied God, whose essence is always characterized by the wonderful, man also overlooks the wondrousness of every single created entity" (ibid.).

There is a perverse joy in this radical cynicism, which is just the negative form of omniscience. Nor is it difficult to trace its roots, now that I have a four year old boy who likes to build things, but not nearly as much as he enjoys tearing them apart, knocking them down, or disassembling them to see "what's inside." But of course, there is no inside without the outside. The outside is the manifestation of the inside, just as the inside is the invisible "essence" of the outside. Jettison either, and the cosmos is reduced to a flat and empty place.

The outside reveals the inside, just as the downside reveals the upside.

*****

The human being is faced with a range of phenomena -- both exterior and interior, i.e., thoughts and things -- of which he needs to take account and make sense. And if he is to comprehend the totality of existence, i.e., the Kosmos, then the True Philosopher, the extreme seeker after knowledge, the ardent lover of wisdom, the off-road spiritual adventurer, must exclude nothing (including, of course, Nothing; in other words, he must also be mindful of non-being, or more or less complete privations of the Good and True).

If embracing the fancies of a Dawkins or Dennett means rejecting the oceanic depths of an Aquinas or Maritain, then so much the worse for the modern misosophers who are blind to any reality that surpasses the circular limits of their projected models. For example, reader William, as usual, turns reality on its head by appealing to what he calls "the infinite" in order to maintain his rigidly finite, parochial, and earthbound attitudes.

What he forgets is that to posit the Infinite -- which only man can do, and which in a certain sense defines him -- carries with it certain immediate implications. If nothing else, to take seriously the principle of the Infinite is to to have left vulgar materialism behind and to have entered the realm of pure metaphysics. If the Infinite "exists," then it is obviously a first principle, since it cannot be surpassed. By definition nothing can surpass infinitude.

Looked at from the other end, "To say Absolute, is to say Infinite" (Schuon). "Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute." As such, "It is from this 'dimension' of Infinitude that the world necessarily springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude."

Now, we all know the cosmos is "expanding," for that is an implication of Infinitude. Schuon:

The Infinite is that which, in the world, appears as modes of expanse or of extension, such as space, time, form or diversity, number or multiplicity, matter or substance...

In other words, and to be more precise: there is a conserving mode, and this is space; a transforming mode, and this is time; a qualitative mode, and this is form, not inasmuch as it limits, but inasmuch as it implies indefinite diversity; a quantitative mode, and this is number, not inasmuch as it fixes a given quantity, but inasmuch as it too is indefinite; a substantial mode, and this is matter, it too being without limit as is shown by the star-filled sky. Each of these modes has its prolongation" in our world, "for these modes are the very pillars of universal existence.

Those who "go off the deep end" receive all of the attention from mental health professionals, but it is also possible -- and more common, actually -- to fall off the shallow end, "to lose everything but one's reason," as Chesterton put it. These people can't really be helped, since they find the shallow end to be quite congenial to their desiccated souls. They know how to wade, to tread water, to dog-paddle, and that's all they want or need to know.

Materialists propose what amounts to an absurdly false hierarchy with man at the top, but no way to explain how he got up there (since there can be no objective progress in a random and meaningless cosmos). As Schuon explains,

To say that man is the measure of all things is meaningless unless one starts from the idea that God is the measure of man, or that the absolute is the measure of the relative, or again, that the universal Intellect is the measure of individual existence....

Once man makes himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses.

This is why there can be no philosophy more anti-human than secular (as opposed to Christian) humanism; you cannot turn man into a god without placing him beneath himself, for you will simply create a demon who is beyond good and evil.

"Intelligence is the perception of a reality, and a fortiori the perception of the Real as such" (Schuon). Therefore, intelligence is the ability to discern the Real from the unreal, or from the "less real."

Furthermore, intelligence itself must share something of the substance of the Real, or it couldn't possibly know it. Ultimately, Truth and Intelligence must be two aspects of the same thing, or both are meaningless, at least as far as humans are concerned.

As Schuon explains, "the sources of our transcendent intuitions are innate data, consubstantial with pure intelligence" (emphasis mine). This is a key insight into how and why the intellect "resonates" with divine revelation and with the "inward appearance" of things in general. As mentioned a couple of posts back, just as our physical eye perceives empirical reality, our spiritual vision is able to perceive the vertical realm. Or, as Eckhart says, "the eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me."

To put it another way, Intelligence itself is proof of eternal values, since man's intellect would be inexplicable -- for it would lose its sufficent reason -- if deprived of "its most fundamental or loftiest contents," which include Truth, Reality, the One, the Infinite, the Absolute. To recognize the Infinite is to reject all idols and graven images, including those of science.

Conversely, you can claim that objective truth doesn't exist; but if so, then neither does intelligence, so there is no reason to pay any attention to your avowed lack thereof.

Scientific materialism provides us with facts and details, but no wisdom as to what they mean, or even whether it is worthwhile to know them. Philosophy, in the words of Josef Pieper, is simply "the hunt for that which is worth knowing, for that wisdom which makes one unconditionally wise..." "Without philosophy," aphorizes the Aphorist, "the sciences do not know what they know."

In fact, Pieper's conception is quite similar to Schuon's, in that he regards philosophy as being concerned with reality as a whole and with wisdom in its entirety, which can be seen as two aspects of the same underlying unity. He quotes Plato to the effect that the lover of wisdom seeks not this or that part, but "integrity and wholeness in all things human and divine."

Clearly this is not so of science (nor should it be), which explicitly limits itself (or should, anyway) to this or that aspect or part of the cosmos, not its totality. It does, however, assume that there is a totality, even though this totality can obviously never be observed or proven empirically. No one but the Creator has ever "seen" the cosmos. We only know of it because of our deiformity.

In fact, one could say that Cosmos and Creator are two aspects of a single reality. There is no cosmos that cannot be known, nor knowledge in the absence of a hierarchically structured cosmos. Again, Being is Truth, which is why knowledge is possible.

To reduce reality to what may be clearly and unambiguously known through the scientific method is to in effect say that "I want to know only what can be made blindingly obvious and is thoroughly demonstrable to the densest man."

The modern man only admits the evidence that the vulgar perceive. For the objective, as well, he limits it to the consensus of dull minds. --NGD

Secular Faith and Religious Knowledge

This is a repost of a repost going all the way back to 2008. Again, I'm just republishing things that Meet the Standard and hold my interest -- that make me wonder, where is BoB going with this?

*****

Yesterday we took a peek from behind the veil that separates us from five years ago. Today -- since I am once again pressed for timelessness -- we shall dial the time machine back four years, to March 2008, in order to examine the state of the cosmos at that particular moment.

Since this blog is an exercise in vertical downloading -- or verticalisthenics -- time should be of no consequence anyway.

I'm not saying they always succeed, but even stale bobservations are supposed to retain a degree of freshness, since things that are temporally distant in the horizontal are co-present in the vertical -- just as in our hyperdimensional dreamspace, where past and present blend into the eternal yesternow.

Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that the previous 1,899 posts -- like them or hate them -- have been "the work of a moment," that moment being the now. As such, in addition to revealing whatever they do about this and that, perhaps they also reveal something about the contours of the now, i.e., the form and not just the content.

After all, the aperture of the now is all we have -- it is our only opening on eternity, from which we must gather those rays of light into a coherent picture. Yes, there is Tradition, but Tradition can only be vivified in the now, otherwise it is a corpse.

So, what is the form of the now? Well, for one thing, it is not reducible to efficient causation, since that specifically runs past-to-present, and is the domain of science. Rather, this is a vertical causation that runs from the top down. You might say that, of the four forms of causation, material and efficient are in the horizontal, while formal and final are in the vertical.

Anyway, on to the post:

[R]eligion translates metaphysical or universal truths into dogmatic language. Now, though dogma is not accessible to all men in its intrinsic truth, which can only be directly attained by the Intellect, it is none the less accessible through faith....

[I]ntellectual knowledge... proceeds neither from belief nor from a process of reasoning, [but] goes beyond dogma in the sense that, without ever contradicting the latter, penetrates its "internal dimension," that is, the infinite Truth which dominates all forms. --F. Schuon

As we've discussed in the past, what makes man unique is not just his capacity for knowledge, but his capacity to know so many things that are manifestly false. To call this latter thing "knowledge" is a perversion of the term, for knowledge that isn't true isn't proper knowledge at all. Then what is it? Why are human beings so prone to believe nonsense?

Even (especially?) for most so-called intellectuals, most of what they know is not necessarily knowledge. Rather, it is plainly "belief." Belief is knowledge once or twice removed, for it means we are placing our trust in the experience of another, or participating in the knowledge of another knower. We don't really know, but somebody does, and we trust them.

For example, no one asks if you "know" about global warming; rather, they appropriately ask if you "believe" in it. And whether you believe in it depends upon whom you trust. In my case, I have enough common sense not to trust those who claim to know what the weather will be like in 100 years. The world will not end in 11.5 years, nor do 97% of scientists believe it will. QED.

So much of what people think they know -- but which they really don't know at all -- comes down to whom they trust. For example, with regard to economics, I trust, say, Thomas Sowell, but regard Paul Krugman to be not only untrustworthy, but mentally (and spiritually) ill. I say this as a psychologist, but any normal person can see there's something wrong with him.

But it's much deeper than that, because one's understanding of economics is always shaped by one's values. For example, I value individualism, low taxes, the rule of law, and a limited government regardless of the economic implications, because I believe these values are in accord with human nature and result in better human beings. The best economic theory in the world is pointless if, like Marxism, it only applies to a different species.

On the other hand, the leftist values collectivism, dependency, big government, high taxes, and an extremely elastic law interpreted by elites, depending upon the needs of the state. I derive my values from religious metaphysics and natural law, whereas the leftist derives his from... from what? From his feelings, I suppose. Or the feelings of his professors and preferred journalists.

For example, if an economist came along and "proved" that slavery created more wealth and affluence, I would still reject that economic theory on deeper grounds. Likewise leftists who reject the principle of non-discrimination, and insist that the law should discriminate on the basis of race. I am against discrimination for the same reason I am against genocide or child abuse. Even a little of it isn't a good thing.

Belief cannot establish its own legitimacy, but derives its legitimacy from someone who either knows, thinks he knows, or pretends to know. In this sense, it is superficially similar to faith.

However, belief is generally a static thing. It takes the unknown and superimposes the known upon it, thus foreclosing the unknown. Once one believes something, the issue becomes settled, even if in reality it isn't.

Again, for those who do believe in global warming, "the science is settled." But it's actually the reverse -- that is, the science is only "settled" because they believe in the theory. Nothing is truly settled until we have arrived at first principles, axiomatic truths, or empirico-sensory bedrock. Anything short of this is just arbitrary. (Climate models, for example, are entirely circular and cannot arrive at anything the believer hasn't plugged into them; conclusions are fore-ordained.)

Secular fundamentalism has certain superficial similarities to religious belief -- for example, our faith that the universe was created. For me this is indeed a "settled" matter, and no amount of sophistry could change my opinion, because it is a necessary (not contingent) truth. But that isn't to say my opinion is "static."

To the contrary, with the exercise of faith -- which is to be distinguished from mere belief -- one's understanding will deepen and deepen, in a kind of endless spiral. Looked at in this manner, faith is merely a placeholder for the accumulation of meaning along a gradient of depth and coherence.

This is again because profane belief is foreclosure of the known, whereas living faith is a dynamic engagement with the greater unKnown (ultimately with a person). Faith, properly understood, is not a cognitive structure or grid to be superimposed upon reality. Rather, it is a psychospiritual probe with which to explore transcendent reality -- somewhat like the way a blind person might use a cane to to construct an internal image of the dark space around him (to borrow an analogy from Polanyi).

Furthermore, unlike mere belief, faith should be convertible to real, i.e., "eternal" knowledge. It is actually a subtle and sophisticated way to gain knowledge that transcends the senses, not a means to provide false but comforting answers and to vanquish curiosity.

Scientific knowledge, by definition, is always relative, whereas religious knowledge is the closest human beings can come to knowledge that is absolute. In fact, religious knowledge partakes of the Absolute; or, to be exact, it is "infused" with the Absolute, such that any part of revelation mirrors the whole, so to speak, as in a fractal. (It reminds me of how Christ is entirely present in any part of the host, at any time or place.)

Thus, many people of faith are actually "people of (implicit) knowledge," whereas many so called intellectuals are actually no more than simple "people of faith." You can really see what little genuine knowledge people have when the discussion revolves around something you do happen to know about, whether it is quantum physics or plumbing repair.

For example, in my case, I happen to possess a lot of theoretical and first hand knowledge of psychology. Most intellectuals who claim to know about psychology don't actually have this kind of first hand knowledge. Rather, they have simply placed their trust in an expert whom they choose to believe. In so doing, they have placed the will higher than the intellect; or, at the very least, the intellect is in service to the will to believe.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, so long as the will is in the service of Truth. But most of the really serious problems of mankind -- the real wholesale evil -- are a result of the will in service to falsehood, e.g., communism and national (or "democratic") socialism.

I remember having a number of discussions with a world-renowned leftist historian who shall go unread. His historical thinking presumed a great deal of psychological knowledge, for how can one claim to study human history without some kind of implicit or explicit theory of human development and motivation?

And yet, his psychological ideas were so outdated (meaning absolutely up-to-date) and unsophisticated as to be laughable. Yes, he had his own psychological "experts" whom he relied upon -- fashionable ideas he picked up here and there from fellow leftists in the faculty lounge -- but I knew that his faith in these experts was entirely misplaced.

For example, he thought it outrageously presumptuous of me, not to say reactionary, to suggest that men and women are fundamentally different. Now, imagine studying history on the assumption that men and women are identical. Everywhere you look, differences appear. But instead of appealing to nature, you will require an alternate mechanism to explain the differences, such as The Patriarchy. All because of your stupid faith.

Ironically, it is just so in any debate between an obligatory atheist, or secular fundamentalist, and a man of genuine faith or gnosis. True, many people of faith simply place their trust in someone who knows -- or claims to know -- and leave it at that.

But others do know. They know directly, in the manner of vision or hearing. How then to discuss this knowledge with the obligatory atheist -- that simple and unsophisticated secular man of faith -- who has placed his childlike trust in those who not only do not know but obnoxiously insist that there is nothing to know and no way to know it anyway?

Imagine, say, an 18th century medical expert, the kind of quack that killed George Washington. He has internalized all the latest knowledge on disease. He knows all about the four humors, about the proper placement of leeches, about how germs are spontaneously generated by bad air, etc. Someone comes along and tells this arrogant fellow that germs aren't spontaneously generated. Rather, there are invisible microorganisms covering his hands, living things that he is actually unwittingly transmitting to his patients. Would this doctor not be far closer to the truth if he ceased believing his experts and stopped trusting his self-confirming personal experience?

As expressed by Josef Pieper, "belief has the extraordinary property of endowing the believer with knowledge which would not be available to him by the exercise of his own powers."

This is the point of practicing a proper religion.

Furthermore, "being wise with the head of someone else is undoubtedly a smaller thing than possessing knowledge oneself, but it is far to be preferred to the sterile arrogance of one who does not achieve the independence of the knower and simultaneously despises the dependence of the believer."

Since we begin the spiritual path without explicit knowledge, we must inevitably place our faith in the testimony of someone who does (or did) know (or who is perhaps knowledge itself). Ah, but how do we know that this person isn't a mere believer himself? How do we assess their credibility and trustworthiness? By what signs do we judge the false from the true prophet? It can't be turtles all the way back. Can we get a witness?

Human beings are equipped with means (i.e., senses) to apprehend exterior reality. But we are also curiously equipped to apprehend the interior reality of persons. It is said that a sophisticated scientist, strictly speaking, doesn't only judge the merits of a scientific theory on the basis of whether it is "true" or "false." Rather, he does so (at least partly) on the basis of its generativity, that is, by how much it explains, how well it ties together various other facts and observations, and the extent to which it gives rise to new and "interesting" problems.

Have you ever known a generative person in whose presence you experience the bracing flow of "life" along your keel? Have you ever been in the presence of a stagnant and lifeless person in whose psychic presence you feel your soul being sucked out of your body? Perhaps you've never read our comment section.

The spiritually generative lumin being doesn't merely report reality. Rather, such an individual imparts reality. They know. And we know that they know. And soon enough, we know too. Put it this way: we are equipped with the authority to recognize Authority (someone authorized by the Author himself).

An esotericism is addressed precisely to those "that have ears to hear" and for that reason have no need of the explanations and "proofs" which may be desired by those for whom esotericism is not intended.... Christ necessarily spoke from an absolute standpoint, by reason of a certain "subjectivization" of the Absolute.... --F. Schuon

Progressives & Other Humanized Personifications of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power

More of the same, this one on the relation between politics and devilry:

What the devil?

Good question. According Schuon -- and this sounds plausible -- the devil may be thought of as

the humanized personification -- humanized on contact with man -- of the subversive aspect of the centrifugal existential power; not the personification of this power in so far as its mission is positively to manifest Divine Possibility.

(This implies a non-subversive or legitimate aspect of this existential power. We don't have time to trace the implications, but this would go to all those obstacles, trials, and sundry Crosses to Bear that are necessary for our growth and maturity, and without which we would be too comfortable and complacent for our own good.)

In other words, the Absolute, insofar as it manifests in time and space, radiates from a cosmic center to the periphery ("the centrifugal existential power"), somewhat like a series of concentric circles with God at the center. God's energies are like radii emanating from the center outward (or top down), while the different concentric circles are the various levels of being, or the cosmic hierarchy. (You can also picture it as a cone, with the "point" of God at the top, degrees of manifestation below.)

Therefore, although everything is ultimately God, not everything is equally God. The idea that everything is equally God leads to pantheism, which is an indiscriminate flatland philosophy no more sophisticated than bonehead atheism. Call it a metaphysical heresy, one of those possibilities we can eliminate at the outset, like "there is no such thing as truth."

In any event, nothing is that simple, let alone everything.

Yes, ultimately everything "is God" in some sense, but God is not the sum total of everything. Things vary in their proximity to God. You yourself know when you are closer to, or more distant from, God, even though God hasn't gone anywhere. Even a child can see that, say, Notre Dame cathedral is (was) closer to God than the UN building. Come to think of it, the cathedral could be burned to the ground and would still be closer, since the UN building exists in a negative existentiating space.

At any rate, the greater cannot be derived from the lesser, and no merely scientistic theory will ever account for the miracle of the human subject, which represents a miniature "cosmic center" within the whole of existence.

And like the cosmic center of which it is a mirror (the "the centrifugal existential power"), the individual center has a natural tendency to radiate outward and lose itself in the playful phenomena of its own creation, or the form of its own sensibility, as Kant would have it.

However, in its properly balanced way, this radiation leads to further centration, not dissipation. For example, when we love what is beautiful, we identify the soul's "within" by locating it in the without, which has the effect of strengthening our central being. (This is what it means to "form the soul" of the child, which is the whole point of parenting.)

Conversely, if we love that which is ugly or "know" what is false, this has the effect of diminishing our center -- which, at the same time, necessarily pulls us further from God, the cosmic center.

The periphery must be -- i.e., there must be things that are more or less distant from God -- but it doesn't follow that they must be evil. Nevertheless, as Schuon implies, the divine radiation inevitably results in "cosmic interstices," so to speak, where evil enters the picture. This is where the soul-cancers arise and take root. It is one of the inevitable, even though unsanctioned, possibilities of the Divine radiation, somewhat like an existential blood clot. If you will the circulatory system, you may end up with blood clots, even though they aren't the point of the system.

The cosmos is permeated with arteries that carry "oxidized" energies away from God and veins through which creation returns to its source. Only human beings may partake of this vertical circulatory system in a conscious way, and become co-partners in the divine plan. It's an offer we can and do refuse, although no one in their right mind would do so.

On the one hand, creation is already "perfect," being that it created and sustained in, through, and by God. Nevertheless, by virtue of it not being God, it cannot be perfect, but can only "become" perfect (which is to say, move toward its archetypal telos) through man's conscious participation (i.e., cooperating with grace).

Or let us say that perfection is only a possibility because it is woven into the very warp and weft of creation. If it weren't, we wouldn't even have the word. Nor would we have words for truth and beauty if they were not coursing through the arteries of existence as divine possibilities. Truth is either "invented" or it is "discovered." If invented, then it isn't true. And if discovered, then it is of God -- or at least underwritten by God, the Absolute. Truth or atheism: take your pick.

Today (as always) we find ourselves in a struggle of truly cosmic proportions between forces representing the human personification of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existentiating Power -- which is a very real, even if derivative and parasitic, power -- and those representing the center (or evolutionary return to the center).

It's funny where one can pick up important ideas, but a couple days ago I heard a promo for the new Dennis Miller radio program. In reference to the weather hysteria of Al Gore, Miller said words to the effect of, "hey, I'm not worried about the earth -- I'm worried about the world."

Exactly. The earth is simply a physical object deposited somewhere at the periphery creation. It is both anywhere and nowhere. The human world, on the other hand, is very near the top -- or at least the bottom of the top. If you imagine the earth is a fragile and delicate thing but the world is not, then you are quite naive, and possibly on the way to becoming a Humanoid Personification of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power.

Now, the cosmo-political battle in which we are (always) engaged is ultimately between forces who deny hierarchy and those who affirm it; and those power-mad drunks who ride the centrifugal waves to the periphery, vs. those who soberly partake of the centripetal return.

Importantly, those who deny hierarchy do so -- either consciously or unconsciously -- with the intention of replacing our naturally supernatural hierarchy with their own illegitimate, infra-natural one. This is where all the false absolutes of the left enter the picture and set up shop (remember those cosmic interstices alluded to above). Left alone they become cancers, which means that, as they grow in strength and intensity, they actually begin to take on a gravitational attraction of their own. It's why, say, AOC has become so popular: she is a personification par excellence of the Subversive Aspect of the Centrifugal Existential Power.

You might even say that these idols participate (or graft themselves to the vine of) an alternative cosmic center that sets itself against the real one. It opposes and arrests progress -- the cosmic return -- by pulling both the innocent and guilty into its dark principalities. Its methods are moral relativism, multiculturalism, and "critical theory," or deconstruction; its defender and guarantor is the coercion of political correctness rather than the "lure" of Truth; and its goal is the reversal of the cosmic order, the institutionalization of the Fall, the obliteration of the vertical, and the exaltation (and therefore bestialization) of man, thus sealing his spiritual fate and ending the possibility of divine co-creation and theosis, or God-realization.

It is appropriate that these cosmic tyrants are called "Democrats," for democracy is a system of information flow that can lead to the higher or to the lower. In fact, it will inevitably lead to the lower if we do not acknowledge at the outset that there is a higher toward which democracy must orient itself (for example, the preservation of our natural rights, including of course freedom of speech). In other words, in the absence of hierarchy, demo-cracy will become exactly what the word implies, which is to say, tyranny of the horizontalized masses, or demo-crazies.

The crazies of the left are half correct, in that we are ultimately faced with the choice between democracy and theocracy. Our founders, in their infinite wisdom, chose theo-cracy, in the sense that the only legitimate purpose of democracy could be to preserve and protect the spiritual freedom -- the complementary rights and obligations -- of the properly theocentric individual. In short, they created a benign theocracy that would be mediated not from the top down -- which is never a real theocracy, but man-archy -- through thousands and now millions of individual godlings, or "divine centers." But a democracy mediated by mere animal-men will sooner or later lead to the Reign of the Beast. The Founders were well aware of this and wrote of it at length (i.e., the need for virtuous citizens oriented toward transcendence).

In the specific sense we are using the word, theocracy is "the only guarantee of a realistic liberty" (Schuon). Otherwise, the centrifugal riptide in which secular man stands soon leads to the following ideas: that "truth amounts to the belief of the majority," and therefore, that the majority for all intents and purposes creates the truth, which is one of the explicit assumptions of the left -- i.e., "perception is reality."

The adage vox populi vox Dei has no meaning except in a religious framework which confers a function of “medium” on the crowds; they then express themselves not by thought but by intuition and under the influence of Heaven..., so that the feeling of the majority coincides in any case with what may be called “the good".... --F. Schuon

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing. --NGD