Heaven on Earth in Two Easy Steps

For someone who hates capitalism, Marx is quite the salesman. Here's his pitch for communism:

It is the definitive resolution of the antagonism between man and nature, and between man and man. It is the true solution of the conflict between existence and essence, between freedom and necessity, between individual and species. It is the solution of the riddle of history and knows itself to be this solution (in Taylor).

Sold! I'll take one in moonlight blue metallic.

Sorry. Only have black. And those are out of stock. How about size 13 work boot in moonlight blue metallic?

Marx does indeed make an attractive offer. The problem -- one problem, anyway -- is that if one limits oneself to Marxist categories, no such claim is possible. But the founder of an ideology always makes an exception for himself, and this is one of its giveaways.

For Marx, consciousness is conditioned by class. Except for Marx, who is totally classless. As it so happens, everyone who knew Marx agrees that this was the case, but we're not taking about manners, hygiene, and body odor.

I was introduced to this problem back in graduate school. For example, Freud claims that all our thoughts and actions are motivated by unconscious conflict. Except for Freudianism. At the other end, Skinner claims that everything is reducible to conditioned responses. Except for the ideology of behaviorism, which is unconditionally true. Others prefer to reduce consciousness to electrochemical brain activity, but nevertheless expect us to take their brain activity seriously.

Back to Marx. Let's evaluate his claim. First of all, it is definitive, which means absolute and final. It is unsurpassable, just like any other revelation.

In the past we've explained that one of the enduring and ineradicable appeals of leftism is its promise of political solutions to inevitable existential problems that are part of the human condition. It can even make this appeal in a sincere and intellectually consistent manner by merely turning the cosmos upside down and inside out. Thus, by placing existence ontologically prior to essence, it follows that man has it within his power to transform both himself and the world.

Therefore, communism can indeed make the honest claim to resolve the antagonism between man and everything. As indicated in the paragraph above, it is the True Solution to the conflict between existence and essence, because it makes the latter a side effect of the former. It resolves freedom and necessity by conflating the two in the dialectic of history, and resolves the conflict between individual and species by subsuming them in the same inevitable movement.

Are you confused by the complexity of reality? Your perplexity is over: Marx has given us the definitive solution to the conundrum of history. He has seen the blueprint, "the laws which govern man and history with an iron necessity."

But before committing ourself to the sale, we might want to conduct a bit of due diligence, because Marx has an inflexible policy: all sales final. No returns. One vote, one time. Purchaser assumes all risk.

It reminds me of those signs that say You break it, you bought it. With Marxism, it's Since you bought it, your common sense must be broken. Or, If you buy it, make sure it's the Elite Package, because then you get to break lots of other people. Eggs & omelets.

Let's think about this product before we pull the trigger. Are there any other philosophies on offer that make the same extravagant claims as Marxism? National Socialism? Maybe, except for the bit about resolving the antagonism between man and man. Unlike Hitler's national socialism, Stalin's international socialism is totally nonviolent.

Wait. Christianity. Or, more to the point, the Incarnation. The purpose of the Incarnation is similar to that of communism, in that it too claims to be the definitive and unsurpassable resolution to various existential and ontological rifts between man and man, man and cosmos, man and God -- even man and woman!

The Incarnation is the very synthesis of existence and essence, freedom and necessity, individual and species. Why, it's the perfect (!) to the (?) of history.

So, now our choice is complicated. Or, perhaps not. For Marxism doesn't actually offer us a choice, since it is a science: unlike previous versions, this is scientific socialism, AKA dialectical materialism. All you anti-science conservative rubes don't get it: it doesn't matter whether you join Marx and Obama on the right side of history, it's coming anyway, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

Except perhaps join the vanguard of the revolution and participate in the dictatorship of the proletariat. That's the only way Lenin could figure out how to square Marx's absurcular thesis.

There's another commonality between communism and Marxism, and it is the "leap." Both require one and result in one. For Christianity there is the leap symbolized by vertical rebirth into the Kingdom, into open engagement with the divine attractor.

As to the communist leap into paradise, Marx

had an extremely simple-minded view of the transition. The revolution would abolish bourgeois society and hence the laws of its operation, and a united class of proletarians would take over and dispose freely of the economy it inherited....

[I]t is as though the laws of bourgeois society fall away with the abolition of this society the way the technology of carburetors would fall into irrelevance if we got rid of the internal combustion engine (ibid.).

So, paradise in two easy steps: 1) destroy existing power structures, and 2) usher in heaven on earth. Like what's happening in Democrat-run cities across the nation.

We're about out of time. The bottom line for today is that Marx makes claims and promises that literally only God could fulfill. No worries: as his followers might say, there is no God, and Marx is his prophet.

The Impossible Scheme

This and subsequent related posts are necessarily going to be a bit wild & wooly. Given the size and scope of the subject -- which touches on everything and everyone -- it can't be helped. We're trying our best. Well, not "trying." Rather, just letting it rip, as usual.

Godlessness does peculiar things to a mind. Under the best of circumstances,

When the gods are expelled from the cosmos, the world they have left becomes boring (Voegelin).

The world necessarily becomes boring -- at least to the intelligent-but-unwise -- because it is drained of intrinsic meaning. But this is easily remedied with recourse to politics and to political activism. For awhile, anyway. For human nature always catches the leftist by surprise. It can be distorted and suppressed for awhile, but not forever.

By the way, we're discussing an essay by Voegelin called On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery. Hegel is a particularly important thinker -- not to you and me per se, but indirectly, for he is one of the most important influences on Marx and on the first wave of American progressives -- in particular, on the odious Mr. Wilson, our first president from the tenured class of credentialed idiots (Obama being the second).

If you want the grotesque details, there are plenty of good books on this bad man, nor do we want Wilson to hijack the post. Suffice it to say that you may not care about Hegel, but that Hegel (via Wilson and his ilk) certainly cares about you -- about your rights, your property, and your so-called "living constitution" (their euphemism for a dead-because-they-murdered-it one):

Hegelians believe that, until we reach the end of History, "enduring" rights exist only to be negated by future generations. Thus, Wilson wrote, "Justly revered as our great constitution is, it could be stripped off and thrown aside like a garment, and the nation would still stand forth in the living vestment of flesh and sinew, warm with the heart-blood of one people, ready to recreate constitutions and laws."

Yes, he was an awful writer too.

But let's be fair to Hegel. Let's approach him with an open mind and try to understand what he was up to and sympathize with the problems he was attempting to remedy. As we've said before, every comprehensive philosophy begins with a diagnosis of the world and of man, which is followed by the prescription (whether explicit or implicit). The former can be *interesting* even if the latter will prove fatal if strictly applied.

Jumping ahead a bit, Marx famously placed more emphasis on the cure than the diagnosis. Inscribed on his gravestone is the diabolical boast to the effect that The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it. Well done, good and faithful servant!

What can we say of a man who wants to transform the whole world -- you included -- but can't even govern himself? Correct: you can say he's an activist: whether Antifa, BLM, homosexual, feminist, whatever. Each attempts to treat himself by curing society. It never works, neither for society nor certainly for the activist. Except perhaps financially.

However, I actually agree with leftists that we can't blame Marx for everything his wackolytes did with his ideas after he was safely beneath the sod, and this for at least two reasons: first and foremost, his principles are impossible, and nothing can render the impossible possible, not even the most fashionable word magic of the tenured. This is the problem of external inconsistency: to paraphrase E.O. Wilson, good theory, wrong species.

There is also the problem of internal inconsistency, not just between the young and old Marx, but in any number of areas that he simply patches up with abuse and vilification (as do leftists down to the present day). If your only tool is the hammer of denunciation, everyone looks like a class enemy. Who and Whom, Master and Slave, proletariat and bourgeois, end of story.

Back to the essay:

The new freedom and activism of self-salvation is experienced by Hegel as the core meaning in the great [revolutionary] events that shook the world.

Boom, there it is: self-cure via the manmade drama of imaginary meaning and real activism.

But in reality,

Nobody can heal the spiritual disorder of an "age." A philosopher can do no more than work himself free from the rubble of idols which, under the name of an "age," threaten to cripple and bury him.

Yes, I absolutely believe in liberation theology, but with this caveat: one assoul at a time! Would you like to do the world a lovely favor?

The first act of charity is to rid the soul of illusions and passions and thus rid the world of a maleficent being; it is to make a void so that God may fill it and, by this fullness, give Himself. A saint is a void open for the passage of God (Schuon).

This is what the ideologue refuses to do. Voegelin:

The deformed cognitive core, then, entails a deformed style of cognition by which the First Reality experienced in open existence is transformed into a Second Reality imagined in closed existence.

Models are nice, but they're not the world, let alone the cosmos, to say nothing of the meta-cosmos. As Schuon points out,

The rationalism of a frog living at the bottom of a well is to deny the existence of mountains: perhaps this is "logic," but it has nothing to do with reality.

So, ideology is rational within its own closed system. Even Paul Krugman makes sense to himself.

Shifting gears a bit, for my money, one of the best books I've read on our subject is Charles Taylor's Hegel. It is at once scholarly, sympathetic, and accessible. Regarding the sympathy, Taylor spends a good deal of time laying out the philosophical problems Hegel's philosophy attempts to address.

Cut to the chase, the bottom line is that Hegel's problems aren't my problems, so his cure is certainly not my cure. Jumping ahead, even less are Marx's problems my problems, and let's not even talk about his cure for my non-problems.

True, every man that comes into this world is going to be aware of "alienation," but for us the sufficient explanation is Genesis 3 (understood metaphysically). It can only be "treated" on its own metaphysical plane, not by reducing this plane to the dialectic of class struggle or the labor theory of value. Nor is it in man's power to reinstate paradise lost; attempting to do so only ensures hell found.

What was Hegel's Big F-ing Problem? And why are we paying for it?

We cannot really understand what he was about until we see the basic problem and aspirations which gripped him, and these were those of the time (Taylor).

As we've mentioned before, it's always dangerous to apply permanent solutions to temporary problems. Rather, we're only interested in a permanent solution to permanent problems, i.e., those that are in the very nature of things, both human nature and the conditions and constraints of human existence. That Marx couldn't support himself is not my problem. There are plenty of explanations for his loserhood which don't involve the murder and enslavement of hundreds of millions of people to set things right.

Frankly, I don't know that I even want to get into Hegel's problems or Marx's issues. Bor-ring. Let's cut to the interesting part: how does it affect me, Bob? For this let's jump ahead to chapter 20, Hegel Today. Like Marx -- and generally through Marx -- Hegel is still torturing us, and not just through his tortuous prose.

For Taylor, Hegel's influence is obviously present in ideologies of the left, but also in the so-called right (which has nothing whatsoever in common with American-style conservatism). The leftist tradition of Marx is more "Promethean," while fascism is more "Dionysiac," but each is present in the other.

One has only to turn on the television to witness the ecstatic Dionysian violence of the left. The left's reactionary attempt to undo the principles of the founding is both totalitarian and fascist, half Prometheus and half Dionysius. We -- and the founders -- are at a bright angle to both their diagnoses and their cures (not to mention their pagan gods). Ordered liberty, limited constitutional government, and unalienable natural rights are incompatible with both.

One Rung Can't Make it Right: The Irrationality of Rationalism

We're still discussing Voegelin's essay on The Gospel and Culture, i.e., the hows and whys of the spread of Christianity. It's slow going, but I guess that's okay. I certainly find it interesting, because it touches on a number of "ultimates" beyond which there is no touching aloud, which is precisely the aim of this blog: the outer limits of what man may know.

About those ultimates: they involve little things such as what man is, what the cosmos is, and what history is. Turns out these three are interrelated in surprising ways, but then again not: for knowledge of what man is clearly has cosmic implications, nor does history exist in the absence of man. As for the cosmic implications, one has only to ask onesoph -- or one's oaf, depending -- in what sort of cosmos is man even possible?!

Voegelin observes that "The movement that engendered the saving tale of divine incarnation, death, and resurrection as the answer to the question of life and death is considerably more complex than classic philosophy."

This is true for a number of reasons, but in particular because it poses a challenge to the otherwise merely rationalistic mind to dialogue with and assimilate what grounds and transcends it.

In Other Word -- the Ultimate Word of the Absolute Other -- the gospel transcends reason in confronting us with the very source and ground of reason, AKA the Logos. It also challenges the mind to reconcile other limit categories and complementarities such as subject and object, person and cosmos, man and God, vertical and horizontal, etc.

But the real trick -- and a mark of its divine provenance -- is how the movement is "broader by its appeal to the inarticulate humanity of the common man" (emphasis mine). Let's see you come up with a metaphysic that makes as much sense to the unlettered as it does to a translettered being such as Thomas Aquinas. Here it is important to bear in mind that there is an "unarticulated knowledge" that can far surpass the merely articulated kind.

As it so happens, this is one of the recurring themes of the book I'm currently re-re-reading, Sowell's foundational Knowledge & Decisions. I don't want to veer in that direction, because it will hijack the post for the next six months.

Suffice it to say that articulated knowledge tends to be highly overrated, in particular, when intellectuals (the vulgar middlebrow kind) are dealing with complex systems such as the economy. This is not in any way opposed to reason; rather, it simply recognizes the limits of reason. And what could be more reasonable than that?

It is simply a recognition that the weight of generalized but unrecorded experience -- of the individual or of the culture -- may be greater than the weight of other experience which happens to have been written down and spelled out.

Consider the example of, say, Marxism, which presumes to be a total explanation of economics. However, the sum of all the articulated knowledge of every single Marxist who has ever existed is utterly dwarfed by the unarticulated knowledge that is spontaneously conveyed to and from free agents in the complex system of the market. Marxism isn't just wrong in the details but in principle.

Another example would be science; see Michael Polanyi for details. Now that I think about it, only a handful of thinkers have been with me on the bus since the beginning, and Polanyi is one of them. If you are one of those people who is enclosed and limited by what you pompously call reason, Polanyi is your way out; he is a portal to infinity, at which point other nonlocal operators will take your hand. Whom would I raccoomend once you cross that threshold?

Good question, BoB. Wouldn't it be interesting to describe the cosmic ladder by assigning a particular thinker to each rung? I suppose I did that in the book, albeit not consciously. The Cosmic Ladder... Let's think about it and get back to you.

Back to the Sowell quote: the philosophy of rationalism

accepts only what can "justify" itself to reason -- with reason being narrowly conceived to mean articulated specifics. If rationalism had remained within the bounds of philosophy, where it originated, it might be merely an intellectual curiosity. It is, however, a powerful component in contemporary attitudes, and affects -- or even determines -- much political and social policy.

Boy and how. Leftists routinely accuse us of being "anti-science" when we are plainly trans-scientific. They level the same charge when we are being ultra-scientific, for example, with regard to climate change hysteria. For to be ultra-scientific is to recognize the fatal conceit of pretending their articulated models actually describe the complex system of climate.

As the appropriately humble Richard Feynman put it, "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." Your climate model may well be a beaut, but since it can't even account for the present or retrodict the past, what makes you think it can predict the future? That's not good science, just bad religion.

Back to our main attraction -- and attractor: "the gospel agrees with classic philosophy in symbolizing existence as a field of pulls and counterpulls" (Voegelin). Christ says -- and how did he know? -- that "he will, when he is lifted up from the earth, draw all men to himself."

In John 6:44 "this drawing power of Christ is identified with the pull exerted by God." And "To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence in society and history." God's in-carnation is our ex-carnation; again, God's way in is our way out (and vice versa).

Yes, the good news implies the bad: there is a diabolical presence in "the man who has contracted his existence into a world-immanent self and refuses to live in the openness of the metaxy" (which refers to man's existence in the vertical space between the horizons of immanence and transcendence).

Oh, good. The end.

Saving Tales and Broken Minds

To repeat: The answer will not help the man who has lost the question. And the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer.

These are worth some further pondering. First, life is obviously a predicament. Always has been, always will be. And yet, Voegelin implies there is an answer, so long as we remember the question. Thus, a worse predicament than life itself is losing sight of the question, because it results in either no answer or a multitude of bad ones.

Speaking of which, our recent revisiting of Koestler's Creative Act prompted me to check out his biography. His most famous book is Darkness at Noon, an indictment of communism from the perspective of a former True Believer.

But he didn't fall for just communism. Rather, his whole life was a quest for meaning, going from one belief system to another, from communism to parapsychology and everything in between. And yet, nothing stuck.

The author suggests that he suffered a kind of "absolutitis," which sounds about right: as we said the other day, the Absolute always is, and cannot not be. Life is a perpetual engagement with it, failing which we will substitute one ideology or another and thereby foreclose the divine-human space. This is good news / bad news for the radical secularist, because his denial of God results in the abolition of man, whether symbolically or literally.

Koester's flight from one cause to another "was as psychologically important as the causes themselves," motivated by

a deep instinctual urge, powered by personal unhappiness and psychological frustration.... it was the cause of causes lurking behind everything he wrote, emblematic of the twentieth century's own flailing in search of a workable form of utopia. Koestler was bound to fail in the quest, of course, but the quest itself was the point.

Why was the quest bound to fail? He found plenty of answers. Yes, but The answer will not help the man who has lost the question.

In this regard, it is particularly important to avoid collapsing the vertical hierarchy, and thereby formulating answers that are appropriate to one level but wildly inappropriate to another (e.g., materialism). This always results in a form of tyranny -- it is auto-tyranny at best, but becomes collective tyranny when imposed upon others. Ideology is never a victimless crime.

His conversion to communism was literally a religious experience:

something had clicked in my brain which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had "seen the light" is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows. The new light seems to pour across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of a tortured past -- a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don't know.

Born again! With one small catch: for that is not the sound of liberation. Rather, it's the sound of the prison doors closing.

How do we know? The giveaway is the answer to every question and the dismal ignorance of those who don't know. This is a concise description of the political Gnosticism that characterizes modernity. Our struggle is always against those who would enclose us in their ideology by collapsing reality down to the size of their own shrunken heads and shriveled souls.

Koestler had similar quasi-mystical experiences with other creeds, and come to think of it, so did I -- sometimes with his help (back when I was a new-age/integralist type). I distinctly remember it happening with existentialism, psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, Zen, and others.

Another giveaway of Gnostic ideology is the internal and external inconsistency that can only be resolved by force, for example, the political correctness that has always characterized leftism. Leftism simply cannot be logically maintained, so certain avenues of thought must be forbidden or explained away. It is why their first resort is always to the accusation, the smear, the condemnation. Cancellation is the feature, not the bug. It is of course at antipodes to Christianity, in which forgiveness is the feature.

In fact, if you're a conservative and you haven't been called a racist, a fascist, or a Nazi, you're just not trying.

Another feature of the gnostic revolt is the inevitable attack on language, e.g., more murders and shootings of blacks = black lives matter. Upon Koestler's politico-religious conversion, "My vocabulary, grammar, syntax gradually changed." He "quickly learned an early form of doublethink" which "appeared as natural and justified as the choice of the cause we were championing."

"As a 'closed' system of thought," Marxism "could provide answers to every question in terms of its own theory..." He "was delighted with the dialectical muscles he was able to build, reveling in the competitive advantage they gave him in argument. He knew the 'right' questions and answers 'as though they were the opening variants in a chess game...'"

Here are some recent examples of Marxist dialectic, yoinked from our own comment section. Note that the sweeping condemnation is the argument, and vice versa. Marx himself could have been the author of any of these:

--Any black person stupid enough to support Trump is not going to change their mind over him being slightly more fascist today than he was a year ago.

--Religion is a powerful force for making people act against their own interests.

--The right has a large variety of morons and liars, but the ones who try to link the left and Nazism are really the cream of the crop.

--You are projecting from your shitty, imperialist, fundamentalist religion onto the more honest and humble faiths of the people Christianity aims to conquer

--Your racism is completely obvious. You should own it instead of denying it.

--Everything in conservative culture is basically lifeless, a feeble imitation of actual culture, which is alive and hence leftist by nature.

Well, let's stipulate that mass culture is indeed lifeless and broken, and that vulgar politics is downstream from this. We are

plainly in a period of massive deculturation through the deformation of reason.... the deculturation of the West is an historical phenomenon extending over centuries; the grotesque rubble into which the image of God is broken today is not somebody's wrong opinion about the nature of man but the result of a secular process of destruction....

The question of the search cannot be recovered by stirring around in the rubble; its recovery is not a matter of small repairs, of putting a patch on here or there, of criticizing this or that author whose work is a symptom of deculturation rather than its cause, and so forth (Voegelin).

It's not ideology vs. ideology, but ideology vs. reality:

there is no Saving Tale other than the tale of the divine pull to be followed by man; and there is no cognitive articulation of existence other than the noetic consciousness in which the movement becomes luminous to itself (ibid.).

****

There's a new Dane in town. One isn't enough:

Ask a Dishonest Question, Get a Dishonest Answer

Yesterday's post didn't come off as one might have hoped, so I checked the Catechism to see how far off we were.

Not that far. For example, regarding man the (?), it says that the human person is by nature open to truth, beauty, and goodness, which provokes "longings for the infinite" and "questions about God's existence." It's not as if such questions and longings are a little bit present in other animals. Rather, they coarise with and define man.

About (!), there are various allusions to an overwhelming communication to man of something that isn't man. Haven't you ever been (!)? I don't know anyone to whom it hasn't happened. It's part of the standard equipment.

For example, the Catchism speaks of faith as our response to "a superabundant light as [man] searches for the ultimate meaning of life." Not just abundant but superabundant, which is beyond extravagant; it is more than we could ever contain, "abounding to a great, abnormal, or excessive degree; being considerably more than is sufficient" (my dictionary).

Lucky for us, this "unapproachable light" deigns to approach man, albeit gradually. Baby steps. Milk before meat. It also does so endlessly: for even when God utters the last Word, "it remains for Christian faith gradually to grasp its full significance over the course of centuries." Moreover, "the sacred Scriptures grow with the one who reads them."

This superabundant L!ght communicates the certitude of its own truth, such that "the certainty that the divine light gives is greater than that which the light of natural reason gives." Seeing is believing and believing is seeing; rinse and repent.

I'll bet I can reduce the whole message to... seven aphorisms, each a rung in the vast Circular Ladder that is existence:

God does not reveal with discourses, but by means of experiences.

In certain moments of abundance, God overflows into the world like a spring gushing into the peace of midday.

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities.

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores...

Mysticism is the empiricism of transcendent knowledge.

Faith is not knowledge of the object. But communication with it.

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper (Dávila).

That last one is particularly important, as it speaks to our permanent condition. It can only be "cured" by ideology, but ideology is always the very disease it pretends to cure. Leftism, progressivism, feminism, scientism -- all are objectively pneumopathological.

Now, back to Voegelin's essay on The Gospel and Culture, with a particular focus on man the (?) and God the (!). He speaks of "man the questioner," i.e.,

the man moved by God to ask the questions that will lead him toward the cause of being. The search itself is the evidence of existential unrest; in the act of questioning, man's experience of his tension toward the divine ground breaks forth in the word of inquiry...

There is always a kind of ontological circularity at work that very much reminds me of Eckhart, but let's refrain from veering in that direction, because the Meister will inevitably hijack the bus. Voegelin:

Question and answer are intimately related one toward the other.... This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking of the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer, is the life of reason.

This is a subtle point, because we know all about the contemporary plague of intellectual dishonesty that pervades both academia and the liberal noise media. But there are also dishonest questions. Some people say there's no such thing as a stupid question. But this is only because they haven't seen a White House press briefing, where the superabundant stupidity of the media is on display.

Speaking of sick questioners and fake questions, Voegelin describes how man may

deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible. The gospel, to be heard, requires ears that can hear; philosophy is not the life of reason if the questioner's reason is depraved. The answer will not help the man who has lost the question; and the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer (emphasis m!ne).

Examples are everywhere. I receive a daily propaganda briefing from the NY Times, and this morning's spin is hilarious but typical. It concedes that President Trump is doing well with Blacks and Latinos, and that his support is higher than it was four years ago. "Why?," they pretend to ask.

Most political analysts admit they aren’t sure. “I don’t think there are obvious answers,” Shor said.

Yes, it's a Total Mystery. It makes no sense that blacks would support a racist, for which no evidence is needed or offered, since this is an a priori axiom of the left.

Black and Latino Americans who still vote Republican may simply not be bothered by it.

Riiiight. Or perhaps they don't share the group delusion that the president is a racist. That's not askable or even thinkable, any more than it is permissible for a Nazi or Islamist to wonder if Jews might not be subhuman after all.

Note how the field of honest answers is foreclosed by the dishonest question (and questioner). This pathological process is seen every day by the clinical psychologist, AKA me. But who needs psychotherapy if your sickness is mirrored and supported by millions of people who share the same sickness? If you normalize abnormality, there's no need to help the abnormal to be normal.

You get the point, but this one is just as funny. Why on earth are those Mostly Peaceful protests suddenly turning... volatile? It's Trump's fault!

Protests across the U.S. grew more volatile over the weekend, spurred by the presence of federal agents in Portland....

“I’m furious that Oakland may have played right into Donald Trump’s twisted campaign strategy,” said Libby Schaaf, the mayor of Oakland, Calif. “Images of a vandalized downtown is exactly what he wants to whip up his base and to potentially justify sending in federal troops that will only incite more unrest.”

Ask a dishonest question, get a dishonest answer.

And the (!) Became (?)

We've been discussing how and why Christianity spread and eventually triumphed over all its competitors, such that no one today practices Mithraism or worships Athena or Dionysus. To the extent that Christianity is true, or taken to be true, it must provide an answer -- even the most complete possible answer -- to the question What is man? Or, what is man, what is man, and what is man???

So, what is man? Let's approach this question with no preconceptions, religious or otherwise. I think we can agree that man is a mystery to himself, even to this day. Indeed, any thinker who claims to exhaust the mystery thereby renders himself a sophist and philodoxer: a lover of opinion and pseudo-thought. A counterfeit man. An ideologue. A troll.

Can we say that man is a permanent mystery to himself? If so, how could we know it? It's a little like saying "there is no truth, and that's the truth."

Let's try to go all the way back -- both horizontally and vertically -- to the existential and ontological birth of man (the second is less difficult to approach, since it's happening now, and in every now). We know we are different -- different from the animals and from every other thing in existence. But how?

Well, all other animals are complete on their own plane. Yes, they need to eat, but once they do, that's it: it is as if their little circle re-closes on itself. Nap time. My dog doesn't wonder about the nature of dogs, much less Danes.

Like other animals, man eats. But that doesn't complete the circle. Or, it completes the circle of biology, only to open other circles and render them more vivid or something. Scratch one itch and a new one takes its place.

Here again, this pattern persists down to the present day. Anyone who studies psychology learns about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, which I haven't thought about in forty years, but then again, have never stopped thinking about.

How's that? Well, in those three or four decades I've generally had adequate food, water, shelter, safety, relationships, and prestige (yes, I have low standards), leaving only the toppermost of the poppermost unfillfulled:

That's right: self-actualization, i.e., achieving one's full potential, including creative activities. Yeah, this: I'm doing it now. What can I say? A modest thing but thine own.

Interestingly, one thing I've noticed over the years is that by indulging in activities at the top of the pyramid, they've gradually come to displace or at least overshadow those at the bottom. Of course I still need to eat, but I scarcely care what I eat, so long as my blood sugar stays low. Whatever a "foodie" is, I'm the opposite.

Likewise "prestige." I'm mostly autotelic, with the caveat that I care very much about the opinions of God and a few other persons. A pure autotelicism would be anti-trinitarian in the extreme. But I'm always focused on that which surpasses me and is just over the subjective horizon. Anything less than this is frankly boring.

The moment arrives in which one is only interested in stalking God. --Dávila

Here's a thought: let's call man (?), the being who never stops asking questions, such that no answer is sufficient to eliminate the questions. I would add that a philosopher is simply someone with an acute case of (?), such that it becomes (?!). But for the true philosopher, (?!) is a truly chronic condition. In one sense there is no cure, but in another sense (?!) is the cure, or at least treatment.

No, I'm not trying to be cute or paradoxical. I try never to be the former, and to the extent that we're indulging in the latter, it is in the nature of the subject under discussion: writing of infinitude within the context of finitude always comes out paradoxical, and the paradoxes must be respected and preserved, otherwise they cease being generative and fruitful. Every heresy -- whether religious, philosophical, or ideological -- always defaults to one side of the paradox.

So, man is (?). The question before us is, what is the relationship between Christianity and (?)? People walking around in first century Palestine were (?), like anyone else. How and why was Christianity such an adequate response to (?)?

Recall Maslow's hierarchy: for early Christian martyrs, Christianity -- or Christ, rather -- literally displaced everything below. Christ was more important than food, social standing, and even life itself.

Again, let's try to dispense with preconceptions. Just looking at the situation historically, for these early Christians, Christ was the perfect and unsurpassable answer to (?). But wait -- didn't we say that man is the being who by definition never stops asking questions?

Yes, that still holds true. But let's suppose that the ultimate Answer -- the Absolute, Infinite, Eternal, Ground, Source Beyond Being -- becomes the (?). Supposing it happened, what would that be like?

It would be somewhat like (!) becoming (?), a kind of endless and inexhaustible explosion on his end and implosion on ours. But we're out of time. To be continued...

Fact-Checking God

Yesterday a commenter took issue with our characterization of the purpose of religion, which is to provide man with knowledge of the Absolute -- not absolute knowledge, of course, since this is reserved for the Absolute, AKA God. As he so eloquently put it, in speaking of the Absolute, I am simply projecting my "shitty, imperialist, fundamentalist religion onto the more honest and humble faiths of the people Christianity aims to conquer."

Which isn't exactly what I said, but details can get lost in the heat of the moment.

Of course -- contrary to the imputation of fundamentalism -- the language of religion is often conveyed via symbolic points of reference; by way of analogy, this is similar to the relationship between a two-dimensional painting and a three-dimensional landscape. The painting is a transformation of the landscape made possible by various constants that are preserved and transmitted to the viewer.

In the absence of the Absolute no genuine knowledge of any kind is possible, since all knowledge partakes of absoluteness insofar as it is true. We might go so far as to say that any "proven fact" is like a fragment of God: a luminous clue coming into view.

So human beings have an implicit grasp of the Absolute, regardless of whether they choose to deny it. To the extent that we think at all, we are engaging it, either in a from-->to or to-->from direction (i.e., inductive or deductive, respectively, leaving aside direct vision or intuition for the moment).

One of our favorite little books is Schuon's Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, which reduces his thought to bite-sized aphorisms. Here's the first one:

The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute.

Boom. Please don't misunderstand him and say to yourself, "I'm not aware of this Absolute of which he speaks. Is he saying I'm worthless?"

No, the opposite: you are a human being and therefore conscious of the Absolute, whether implicitly or explicitly. You may not think well, but you can't even think badly in the absence of this ground.

With this in mind, we see that dysfunctional thinking is obviously a privation -- just as, say, blindness isn't just another type of sight. In order to repair and restore our thinking... well, we'll get into that later. But this is certainly one of the purposes of religion: to helps us to think properly and fruitfully about ultimate things -- the Permanent Real -- and to adjust our behavior accordingly.

Second aphorism:

Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny.

One can see the necessity of this metaphysical truth directly via intellection, as we are now doing; one can also see it via the grace of faith, which provides man with a way to know truths he cannot or does not grasp on his own; or one can grasp it implicitly, say, by disagreeing with it. For on what basis do you disagree? Keep thinking, and don't stop. You'll get there.

Jumping down to the fifth aphorism,

Our deiformity implies that our spirit is made of absoluteness, our will of freedom, and our soul of generosity...

"Deiformity" is one way of putting it. America, for example, is explicitly founded upon this self-evident principle: that man is created by God, which has a number or immediate implications, in particular, natural law and natural rights.

Although these two -- law and right, truth and freedom/will -- are horizontally complementary, the former nevertheless takes precedence, for who -- besides the left -- would want to give absolute rights to an intrinsically irresponsible being? Rather, we are given rights because we are first responsible, i.e., capable of knowing the Law and feeling guilty when we transgress it.

Of course, our fallen nature shuffles the cards, clouds the intellect, disorients the will, and generally disrupts our intimacy with the Absolute. We'll no doubt return to this subject later, but again bear in mind that our fallenness is a privation. Thank God we can know of the privation, for if we can't, then... well, ideology is just one of nasty developments that follow the denial of this reality.

One more passage from Schuon before we jump back to Voegelin:

One of the keys to understanding our true nature and our 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. The Absolute alone confers on our intelligence the power to accomplish to the full what it can accomplish and to be wholly what it is.

Wait -- let me fact check that....

Yup. I have consulted both the cosmos and my own head, and I rate this fact absolutely true: I AM contains the cosmos, not vice versa; and we can either know truth or we can't, and our vertical adventure in consciousness never ends. Nor can the cosmos be just a little bit pregnant with meaning.

In his Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, Schuon has a whole essay devoted to The Sense of the Absolute in Religions. It is highly raccommended, but I think we'll move on, because we've discussed it all before ad gnoseam.

If I hadn't first read and assimilated Schuon, I don't know what I'd have been able to make sense of Voegelin's claim (mentioned in yesterday's post) to the effect that "Christianity is not an alternative to philosophy, it is philosophy itself in its state of perfection."

Another one of our favorite books is The Roots of Christian Mysticism by Olivier Clement. If we're not careful, this post will end up excerpting it until the clock runs out. Oh well. Can't be helped. The Spirit bellows where it will.

Christianity is in the first place an Oriental religion, and it is a mystical religion.... When we see the shallow syncretism, the sentimental fascination with anything Eastern, and the bogus "gurus" crowding round for the pickings, it is easy to sneer. Whose fault is it that so many have had to resort to Tao or Zen in order to rediscover truths which were actually part of the Christian heritage right from the beginning?

So, don't blame the pneumopathic Chopras of the world for Deepaking the pockets of the ignorant rubes. I myself was once one of them. I suppose every new age nitwit is hoping that he too can learn the Secret -- the secret of charging the rubes $100 a month to be a resident of nirvana. The Brooklyn Bridge? That's $200 a month.

Remember: A Raccoon will never ask for money, because where they get it, it doesn't cost a thing.

This is beyond the satirical powers of the Babylon Bee:

The Integral community includes tens and even hundreds of thousands of people all across the globe —- but, due to something we might call “developmental privilege”, remains predominately white.

We white folks can't help it how enlightened we are! Don't hate us because we're more brilliant and virtuous than negroes!

Back to Clement. Recall what was said yesterday about how "the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth." Clement agrees that for early Christian thinkers, "The whole of life, the whole universe was interpreted in the light of Christ's death and resurrection."

"Our higher faculties reflect divine qualities" and arouse "within us an attraction towards what transcends us, a 'desire for eternity'":

Thereby we become greater than the universe into which we were born and which seeks to take possession of us. Thereby we assert our basic freedom. Ultimately, then, being in the image of God signifies personality, freedom.

Wait. Better fact-check that one too.

100% true, at least for those with eyes wide open. Of course, for "someone who chooses to hide his eyes by lowering his eyelids, the sun is not responsible for the fact that he cannot see it" (Gregory of Nyssa).

Again, ignorance of the Absolute is a privation. If not, then absolute ignorance is the standard, and our trolls -- not to mention the new age integralists, the most virtuous and evolved white people ever -- are the best and brightest the cosmos has to offer. And that's a fact.

Word Made Fresh

Back to the questions raised in the previous post: how and why did Christianity triumph over its cut-rate competitors, e.g., pagan polytheism, human and animal sacrifice, ancestor worship, various spiritual nostrums & Gnosticisms? Was it just survival of the fittest & littest?

Yes, in a sense, in that Christianity is obviously... how to put it... a more adequate reflection of human nature and therefore of our pneumo-cognitive striving. It's a far superior map to what preceded it (and to what lay ahead), to put it mildly.

Indeed, if it is what it says it is, it should be the most adequate map conceivable, of both man and cosmos (speaking metaphysically, of course). However, bear in mind that we're attempting to approach this subject with as few preconceptions as possible, religious or otherwise.

For example, we could say that Christianity triumphed because of the Holy Spirit, or because Christ promised it would, or because of the supernaturally graced courage of Paul, but these beg the question and assume what needs to be proved. Leaving out purely supernatural factors, what was the appeal and why did it spread?

Well, we can't leave out all supernatural factors, for the simple reason that man qua man is the being with inherent supernatural needs and drives. (I will henceforth use the less saturated term transnatural.)

As the saying goes, you can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back. But you can also drive out the transnatural with a pitchfork -- or with anything from lions to guillotines to Antifa mobs -- but he always comes back too. With a vengeance. Which our contemporary political religions prove every day. The gods of godlessness are a jealous, zealous, and bellicose bunch.

Let's be perfectly accurate: man is a religious being with a transnatural nature and transnatural needs. This is so obvious that we shouldn't even need to say it, but we are living in an age in which a host of perfectly settled fundamental truths and natural laws are under assault and being relitigated by the left -- everything from freedom of speech to human equality to the right to self-defense and more.

It is wrong to think of this as a war between the religious and irreligious. Unless -- ironically -- the left is regarded as the former and we represent the latter (or perhaps better, they are merely religious while we are transreligious).

It is clear enough that leftism in all its forms is a political religion. What is less well understood is that Christianity may be regarded as a cure for the primordial religiosity that has plagued mankind since time out of mind (c.f. Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled or God's Gamble: The Gravitational Power of Crucified Love).

In other words -- again, if it is what it says it is -- Christianity cannot be "a" religion; it cannot be merely a particular species of a more general class. Rather, it would have to be the other way around: Christianity is the kingdom, as it were, of which other religions must be members.

Of course, this is what all religions claim, or people wouldn't follow them. No religion announces that it has discovered a small piece of the puzzle, so we ought to adhere to it with our hearts, minds, and lives. Rather, every religion claims to be an absolute and total explanation.

Or, let's just focus on the Absolute. Man has an an implicit understanding of this category, for it is the ground of the very possibility of thought. I could explain in detail why this must be the case, but if I do, it will swallow the whole post.

Really, it's rather self-evident. Axiomatic. You can always argue your way to the principle, but arguing itself presupposes the principle, or why bother arguing? By virtue of what principle do you suppose that argument -- or reasoning -- will arrive at truth? In other words, why argue if there is no ground from which it proceeds or telos to which it is ordered?

So, the Absolute is. And truth is conformity to it. What's the alternative? There is truth but we can't know it? There is no truth and we can know it? There is no truth and we can't know it? These are all logically self-refuting, so we have only the one alternative: there is truth and man may know it; the universe is intelligible to intelligence, and these two resolve to One, AKA the Absolute.

Or, viewed from the top down, the absolute bifurcates waaaaaay updream into subject and object, knower and known, transcendence and immanence, heavens and earth, vertical and horizontal, Adam & Evolution, yada yada and blah blah.

Again, I could say much more, but longtime readers are already falling asleep. Let's move on.

Recall that we're rereading an essay by Voegelin called The Gospel and Culture. In it he writes that

If the community of the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history.

He goes on to say that -- and this is still big, it's the thinkers that got small -- "The culture of reason"

had arrived at a state that was sensed by eager young men as an impasse in which the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth.

In other words, Christianity didn't just spread because it appealed to the unlettered peasantry, but because it explained a great deal more to intellectual elites. "The Logos of the gospel," writes Voegelin, is the sophsame Logos of philosophy, reason, and history, from Abraham to Plato and everyone in between (and since):

Hence, Christianity is not an alternative to philosophy, it is philosophy itself in its state of perfection; the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation of the Word in Christ.

Okay, but is it still perfect?

As if perfection could ever surpass itself! It only goes to 10, not 11.

True, but lʘʘked at from a slightly different, orthoparadoxical angle: as if it could ever stop surpassing itself!

What could we mean by this? What we mean is that Christianity isn't just about a fixed doctrine.

Yes, it is that, but the purpose of this affixed doctrine is to ceaselessly surpass ourselves; we can never arrive at the father shore toward which the surpassing is ordered in this lifetime. It is the Word baked fresh anew each morning in boundless depth, toward the infinite horizon.

Throughout all ages, world without end. A drop embraced by the sea held within the drop. The food that never runs out, the dream that never runs dry, the son who never stops rising in the yeast, the yada beyond which there is no yadder.

We are All Christians Now

Especially secular and anti-Christian westerners. We could delve into the reasons why, but this would be the subject of a different post. Suffice it to say that there are plenty of excellent books on the subject, and that leftism is just another boring and stupid Christian heresy.

One thing that renders it heretical is that it can only be imposed by force, because ultimately it is force. Christianity has the force of truth, whereas leftism must always force its truth, beginning with the young and immature. We certainly teach our son about the left, but I would never force it (or any other ideology) on him. In other words, we homeschool him.

The left is always at war with freedom and truth (each being unthinkable in the absence of the other) because it is at war with transcendence. When this war goes from symbolic to literal -- as we are seeing in our streets -- this is fascism (now unironically referred to as antifascism).

For fascism is the violent resistance to transcendence. For example, to recognize the transcendent greatness of a Washington or Lincoln, let alone Jesus and Mary, is to understand the reasons for the left's antipathy toward their symbolic representations. In the words of the Aphorist, The progressive travels around among literary works as the Puritan did among cathedrals: with hammer in hand. On the other hand -- the hammerless one -- symbols of immanent terror such as Marx, Lenin, Castro, and Che won't be touched.

In an essay called The Gospel and Culture, Voegelin asks,

Why could the gospel be victorious in the Hellenistic-Roman environment of its origin? Why did it attract an intellectual elite who restated the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy and, by this procedure, created a Christian doctrine? Why could this doctrine become become the state religion of the Roman Empire?

How could the church, having gone through this process of acculturation, survive the Roman Empire and become the chrysalis, as Toynbee called it, of Western civilization? -- And what has blighted this triumphant cultural force, so that today the churches are on the defensive against the dominant intellectual movements of the time... ?

That's a lot of questions, and the questions could scarcely be deeper, because they go to the very foundations of everything and everyone. Moreover, we still live in the light of the reality that engenders these questions. And as we know, there is far more Light in a good question than a bad answer.

As to the latter, much of the contemporary crisis of culture consists of bad answers to poorly formulated questions. Nevertheless, the questions arise out of Christian civilization and could only arise out of Christian civilization.

(BTW, in order to comprehend the Christian west, we must properly speak of the Judeo-Christian stream that begins with Abraham's Yes to God; prior to this -- or between Abraham and Genesis -- is a general typological/mythopoetic sketch that applies to mankind as such, or to HCE [Here Comes Everybody].)

After all, only a Christian can logically affirm that black lives matter, because saying so is rooted in the deeper principle that all lives matter. And all lives matter because human beings are uniquely individual persons created in the image of God.

To insist that black lives matter merely because they are black is to sacrifice a universal principle to a concrete and contingent attribute. There's a name for the ideology that privileges the particularity of race over universal principle: Nazism.

Unlike in the Christian west, there is no principle in Chinese Marxism -- or any other form of Marxism -- affirming the inviolable dignity of Uighurs, let alone the Christians whom they presumably marytred just yesterday because they do so pretty much everyday.

Nor in Islam is there anything about Jews and Christians -- the kaffir -- being equal to the ummah. Rather, these vertical distinctions of human beings are built into their heretical teaching. I myself live in California, where conservatives are routinely persecuted and silenced for their wrongthink by the Caliban. I can't blame them, given their twisted assumptions and post-Christian superstitions: garbage in, Gavin out.

Ramblin' again, and now we're out of transcendent timelessness. To be continued for sure...

Meta-Mystery and Mega-Stupidity

Whatever we can know of this world is always bisected by mystery. And there can be nothing more mysterious than subjectivity itself, which is the very light that illuminates the world.

But this light cannot be parthenogenetic. Rather, it must have its own sufficient reason, as there is no such thing as an effect without a cause, nor can the effect contain something that isn't in the cause.

For this reason we invented the term "fertile egghead" for those of us who are fertilized -- "overshadowed," so to speak -- by light from above. Others are rendered infertile by the darkness below. These we call eunuchs for the kingdom of man.

These sentiments were provoked by a passage in The Human Wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas, which reduces some of the great man's thoughts into bite-sized aphorisms worthy of Dávila, except without the humor and the sting.

For the usual mysterious reasons, I was guided toward the book this morning. Let's try to find out why. In the introduction, Pieper says that,

In the opinion of Thomas, not only does mystery put a limit to the penetrability of reality, but ordo itself is interwoven and crossed by mystery.

And not just theological mystery. Then again, perhaps lesser forms of mystery are actually rooted in this deeper metaphysical principle: in the meta-mystery. I'm gonna go with that, because I like to be cosmically consistent. I don't like loose ends, especially with regard to something so fundamental.

Note, for example, how much mischief and mayhem could be avoided if only our ideological eunuchs for the kingdom of Marx could abide by this principle! No one would be rioting in order to force their ideological dreamworlds on the restavus, that's for sure.

When Hayek's knowledge problem is ignored by the left (and this ignorance defines the left), it forms the basis of their chronic stupidity problem. Which would be fine if it only affected them. But unfortunately, their stupidity affects all of us, especially when allied with state power. Good intentions + the unlimited coercive power of the state is by far the most successful recipe for hell on earth. Or just say socialism.

This same subject is discussed from various angles in Sowell's foundational Knowledge & Decisions. The book is so dense with principles and rich with their implications that it's impossible to summarize. Here's the first paragraph:

Ideas are everywhere but knowledge is rare. Even a so-called "knowledgeable" person usually has solid knowledge only within some special area, representing a tiny fraction of the whole spectrum of human concerns. Humorist Will Rogers said, "Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects."

Those of you who have attended college know better than anyone that "Ideas are everywhere but knowledge is rare." And if you haven't yet figured that out, it is in all likelihood because the indoctrination was a complete success: only the patient died.

There's a paradox -- or twist -- at play here, because the evolution of civilization correlates with increased ignorance. For example, you don't have to go too far back in history to a time when almost everyone had to know how to farm or hunt. Now almost no one does, and yet, there is more food than ever.

Likewise, my ignorance of computer technology is essentially total, and yet, here I am. It reminds me of Bloomberg's comment a few months back about farming: "I can teach anyone how to be a farmer 1 dig a hole 2 put a seed in 3 put dirt on top 4 add water 5 up comes the corn."

Notice the deeper pattern: total ignorance arrogantly masquerading as total mastery. It's analogous to me teaching a writing class: "1 plug in the computer 2 turn it on 3 log on to the internet 4 start typing 5 out comes the post."

A few posts back we were goofing on Native Americans who seem to think it possible to inhabit the microcosmos of an actual Native American. The problem is, they are at once too intelligent -- they know too much -- and too ignorant -- they know too little. Regarding the latter, how many of them would know how to survive in the wild under paleolithic conditions? How many would want to?

Sowell asks,

What then is the intellectual advantage of civilization over primitive savagery? It is not necessarily that each civilized man has more knowledge but that he requires far less. A primitive savage must be able to produce a wide variety of goods and services for himself...

Conversely, I don't know how to make a moccasin, locate roots & berries that won't make me sick, or hunt for animals with weapons I don't know how to make. In a pinch I could probably scalp someone -- the right someone -- but that's about it.

You've probably heard the old cliche about how modern man knows more and more about less and less, to the point of knowing everything about nothing. But the converse is equally true: with the advance of civilization we know less and less about more and more, to the point that we know nothing about nearly everything.

This blog teaches that the two punchlines are but sides of a single metacosmic gag, and tries to integrate and synthesize the Everything and Nothing, Knowledge and Ignorance, Mystery and Mister O.

How does this relate to Aquinas? We don't know, but we're about to find out. I hope.

Try this on for size:

the boundary between order and mystery passes through this world itself; the effort of human thought, says Thomas, has not been able to track down the essence of a single gnat.

Not only is this true, it will always be true: whatever we know will always be surrounded -- or bisected -- by what we don't know. This ignorance is a precondition of knowledge. If everything were already lit up, we could never see the light.

The intellectual light dwelling in us is nothing else than a kind of participated image of the uncreated light...

Correct. See paragraph 2 above. And the Light of intellection contains the principle of freedom within itself: "Wherever there is intellectual knowledge, there is also free will."

Any truth partakes of All Truth, because light comes from Light. That's my bottom line. How?

The highest perfection of human life consists of the mind of man being open to God.

From the one first truth there result many truths in the human mind, just as the one human face produces many images in a broken mirror.

[T]he light of our intellect, which is either natural or a gift of grace, is nothing other than an imprint of the first truth.

[S]o also the interior light of the mind is the principle cause of knowledge.

Every rational being knows God implicitly in every act of knowledge.... nothing is knowable except through its likeness to the first truth.

The natural desire for knowledge cannot be satisfied in us until we know the first cause.... Hence last end of the creature endowed with a spiritual intellect is to see God in his essence.

So,

The last end is the first principle of being...

Now, having said all this,

This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.

And to come full circle back to the first paragraph above, knowledge from top to bottom is always bisected by mystery. For

Whatever is comprehended by a finite being is itself finite.

Live on Radio KBOB

This post took an abrupt and unanticipated turn, and it's too late to turn back now.

Last week I was rifling through Voegelin's mail, and noticed a reference to Balthasar's A Theology of History, which prompted me to reread it. Akashic records indicate that I first read it in 2004, which is well before I could have possibly understood it.

Looks like I only got up to page 40 or so before throwing in the towel, so "reread" isn't quite accurate. But nor is "reading" the correct word, because I was just as capable of reading then as I am today. What's going on here?

Whether due to limitations in von B or in me, I often find him obscure. However, this time around I understood way more than I did the first time. And I wonder if this in turn speaks to Voegelin's theory of history, in that the cosmos I inhabited in 2004 was less luminous than the one I'm sitting in today. It reminds me of the phrase "shedding light on the subject." The subject hasn't changed, but somehow I'm able to shed more light on it (or it on me?).

Voegelin (writing in 1950) calls it a "masterwork of its kind," and claims it "is the most competent philosophy of history from a strict Catholic position that has ever come under my eyes." I still can't give it a general raccoommendation, for the same reason I don't advise cracking a textbook on quantum mechanics just for fun, or going to the batting cage and trying to hit a 95 mph fastball.

That last one is an apt metaphor, because the first time I tried to hit off Balthasar, I whiffed. Couldn't hit his hard stuff, let alone the curveballs, of which there are many. At this point I can at least make contact, but I don't pretend to be a .300 hitter.

I do understand the first sentence:

Since man began to philosophize he has sought to grasp things by distinguishing two elements: the factual, singular, sensible, concrete and contingent; and the necessary and universal (and because universal, abstract), which has the validity of a law rising above the individual case and determining it.

That was clear enough: man -- human consciousness -- always inhabits two realms which can be formulated in different ways, but it is strictly impossible to reduce one to the other. Not only does this correspond "to man's way of knowing" but "to the structure of being." Which is a good thing, because it means that knowing corresponds to being. How convenient!

Consider the Kantian alternative: knowing and being are like two circles with no contact. All we can ever know is the phenomenal. The noumenal -- the thing in itself -- is forever unknowable.

Like anybody could know that! In other words, to claim reality is unknowable is to claim a great deal indeed about reality. How does he know it's unknowable? What, is he God?

Notice that Kant can't help distinguishing the two elements as described by Balthasar. However, he doesn't so much distinguish as drive a permanent wedge between them. For the Raccoon, this is literally the most soph-defeating thing one could possibly do, for it seals one in a state of permanent and ineradicable stupidity, and why? Just to preserve a perverse form of poorly understood Christianity?

Let's open up the lines. Our first caller is Frithjof from Bloomington, Indiana. Hello Frithjof. Am I pronouncing that right?

No. Not close.

Okay. May I call you Fritz?

No you may not.

Let's move on. I understand that you disagree with Kant?

Yes, Bob -- is that how you pronounce it? Longtime listener, first time caller.

For starters*, Kant's whole approach is reducible to a gratuitous reaction against all that lies beyond the reach of reason; it is an instinctive revolt against truths which are rationally ungraspable and which are considered annoying on account of this very inaccessibility. All the rest is nothing but dialectical scaffolding, ingenious or "brilliant" if one wishes, but contrary to truth.

Wo, that's a little harsh! Sounds like you're accusing Kant of an impeccable logic starting from a basic error?

That's right, Bob. What is crucial in Kantianism is its altogether irrational desire to limit intelligence; this results in a dehumanization of the intelligence and opens the door to all the inhuman aberrations of our century, to say nothing of the last.

In short, if to be man means the possibility of transcending oneself intellectually, Kantianism is the negation of all that is essentially and integrally human.

So by committing logicide, modern and postmodern philosophy commits genocide?

Indeed, Bob. Negations on this scale are an assault on the very dignity, value, and meaning of the human station. The true philosopher and metaphysician is not just open to reality, but open to the fact of intellection itself. In the grand scheme of things, primordial intellection is as it were the "first word" that never stops speaking. Our friend Eckhart says as much.

Conversely, the modern philosopher wishes to have the "last word," and this last word is ideology in all its ghastly forms, from Marx to Comte -- scientism, positivism, progressivism, the whole ball of wax.

Wax or whacks?

The latter. Seeking to free himself from the servitude of the mind, the ideologue falls into infra-logic. In closing himself above to the light of the intellect, he opens himself below to the darkness of the subconscious.

Isn't that an insult to Satan? Is he really that stupid -- as stupid as, say, AOC, or Pelosi, or Obama?

No, he is not that stupid. But the people who are seduced by him render themselves stupid thereby. You've heard the old line by Mencken: the demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots. Satan is the world's most accomplished demagogue. As it applies to Kant, unintelligence is put forward as a "doctrine" and definitively installed in European "thought," giving birth to countless monsters of ideology.

Are you being a little rough on Kant?

Some people may reproach us with a lack of due consideration, but we would ask what due consideration is shown by philosophers who shamelessly slash down the wisdom of countless centuries. For Kant, intellectual intuition -- of which he does not understand the first word -- is a fraudulent manipulation which throws a moral discredit onto all authentic intellectuality. That includes you, Bob. Are you going to just take it, or fight back with equal energy?

No one knows the limits of thought. To the extent that he pretends to know them, he has discovered only his own self-imposed limits. By its very nature the intellect is in principle unlimited or it is nothing.

We're coming up against a hard break. Care to summarize?

One can try. Kantian “criticism" decrees that no one can know anything, just because they themselves know nothing, or desire to know nothing. And if the intelligence as such is limited, what guarantee do we have that its operations, including those of critical philosophy, are valid? Any so-called philosopher who casts doubt on man’s normal subjectivity thereby casts doubt upon his own doubting.

If there is nothing to prove our intelligence is capable of adequation, then there is likewise nothing to prove that the intelligence expressing this doubt is competent to doubt. If the optic nerve has to be examined in order to be sure that vision is real, it will likewise be necessary to examine that which examines the optic nerve, an absurdity which proves in its own indirect way that knowledge of suprasensible things is intuitive and cannot be other than intuitive.

Moreover, since philosophy by definition could never limit itself to the description of phenomena available to common observation, it is perfectly consistent only when exceeding itself -- like man himself, who, should he fail to transcend himself, sinks beneath himself.

Speaking of putting listeners to sleep, I want to say a few words about my friend Mike Lindell at my pillow.com...

(*Much of what follows is shamelessly plagiaphrased from this page.)

I Don't Troll on Shabbos

It's one thing to conserve objects, concepts, institutions, symbols, or doctrines, another thing entirely to conserve the experiences they are intended to symbolize, preserve, transmit, and deepen.

Let's take an obvious example: let's say I have an encounter with the divine presence. I call this encounter "God." So long as I'm alive, I can monitor the use or misuse of the word, i.e., "exactly!" or "no, that's not what I meant!"

More generally, the higher up vertical food chain, the more language becomes... problematic, or at least we must be as precise as possible, because the chances of misunderstanding -- or miscommunication -- tend to increase.

Empirical and rational knowledge are easy enough to pass along -- or at least they used to be before the left began undermining these as well. The founding principle of the left is an attack on the Logos, and this attack is by no means limited to the religious sphere, rather, to the very possibility of knowledge and knowing, of intelligence and intelligibility. Or just say relativism. Which is a kind of crucifixion of the Word.

Time out for aphoristic back-up:

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

A lexicon of ten words is sufficient for the Marxist to explain history.

True, but progressives have made significant progress with regard to the latter. They've got it down to one word: racist!

Reality is indeed pretty simple for the flatlander who confines himself to the horizontal world. Take even one step out, though, and things become more complex, ambiguous, and nuanced. Virtually nothing is what it appears to be.

To put it another way, to recognize verticality is to put a space between appearances and reality. But there's a twist, for the space is the reality: as Voegelin puts it, it is "penultimately ultimate." It is always in movement, and yet, it has an axis, a center, and a telos, otherwise it couldn't exist; it would be ultimate and we would be God.

Now, what -- or who -- is the center, axis, and telos? Yes, one way or another, it is you. So it comes down to defining what You is. In other words, exactly what is the human subject? What is its ontological status? You might be tempted to say it is wholly contingent, meaningless, and unimportant. But if it's unimportant, then why should we take seriously a word it says?

A word it says. It says words. Who said? I said. Who said I? God did. Weren't you listening? He said I AM. I AM is prior to IT IS. The converse is strictly impossible. No one will ever explain how objects can turn into subjects, how stones can become bread, how blood can come from a turnip, or how information can come from non-information.

This is hopeless. This post is all over the place. I started writing it yesterday, and I can't relocate the place it was coming from. But while looking, I found this one from a thousand posts ago, lightly edited:

If you don't know human history, then you're like a man with amnesia, right? Or worse, like Obama, which proves that leaders who don't know our history condemn us to relive the bad parts.

But what if you don't know your prehistory? Actually, we all implicitly know our prehistory, since we are evidently -- if evolutionary psychologists are correct -- doomed (or privileged, depending) to repeat it. We know it by way of our "instinctive" actions, inclinations, preferences, institutions, etc.

As alluded to yesterday, it is possible that we are all related to a single tribe of common ancestors that split from Africa 50,000 years ago. And who knows, maybe that tribe included a couple of elders we know of as Adam and Eve.

Whatever the case, their descendants have been wandering in the bewilderness ever since, adapting to novel environments quite different from what they would have encountered in Africa.

A group of hunter-gatherers can only sustain about 100 to 150 people before it spins off into another sitcom: "Those migrating eastward faced new environments" and "would have had to relearn how to survive in each new habitat" (Wade).

The first wave of migration was into more friendly and familiar latitudes, but humans eventually pressed northward into Europe, where "the problems of keeping warm and finding sustenance during the winter months were severe." Note that this was before the present period of comfy global warming that began some 10,000 years ago, so environmental pressures would have been exceptionally harsh: like natural selection, only worse.

Interestingly, there was also the matter of confronting the protohumans of a previous wave of migration, e.g., Neanderthals. These primitive Homos were apparently the residue of a group that had split from Africa some 500,000 years before, meaning they had been evolving independently of the new wave -- which is our wave.

Now that I think about it, it's almost like a premature birth, isn't it? Their timing was just a little bit off -- okay, half a billion years off -- so they weren't quite ready to leave the womb of Mother Africa, not yet fully half-baked humans.

Could the story of Cain and Abel be an archetypal recollection of our genocide of these distant cousins? Whatever the case, the world wasn't big enough for two kinds of humans, so Neanderthals "disappeared about the time that modern humans entered their territories."

Next time some leftist clown blames us for what happened to Native Americans or some other victim group, remind him of what we all did to the Neanderthals. End the occupation! Of the world.

In any event, once these different human groups were situated in their unique environments, "each little population started to accumulate its own set of mutations in addition to those inherited from the common ancestral population."

So, as I wrote in a comment yesterday, it is as if there is a common genetic clay that is further tweaked by unique circumstances. If the human clay didn't have this shape-shifting potential, then we'd all still be in Africa. Anyone who attempted to leave would have simply died out like a palm tree trying to live in Alaska, or like a professor trying to survive outside the artificial hothouse environment of academia.

Which leads to the question: how much of the human genome is shared, how much unique to particular groups/races? This is difficult to assess, but Wade suggests that perhaps 14% of the genome would have been subject to recent selective pressures and local adaptations. He also mentions that an analysis of the genomes of 2,000 African Americans "found that 22% of their DNA came from European ancestors and the rest from African groups..."

Another big leap occurs with the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent settlements around 15,000 years ago. This required a major rewiring, not so much for exterior circumstances as interior -- i.e., psychic -- ones.

Living in much more population-dense communities obviously required vastly more subtle and wide-ranging interpersonal skills, diminished aggression, delayed gratification, and a hierarchical instead of purely horizontal group organization. Are we to believe that such dramatic phenotypic changes influenced, and were under the influence of, no genotypic changes?

Indeed, fossil records show that there is a gradual thinning of our bones at this time, implying that we didn't require such heavy skeletal underarmor for the constant head-bashing: "humans shed bone mass because extreme aggressivity no longer carried the same survival advantages."

Those New Guineans mentioned in yesterday's post didn't have to remember their prehistory, because they were still living in prehistory, "using Stone Age technology and embroiled in endemic warfare." If those are the new Guineans, imagine the old ones.

It would be an interesting experiment to adopt one of those New Guinean babies and see how he does in modern society. Would he be under no genetic constraints whatsoever? That would be a rather extreme position, but if true, then Wade's ideas would pretty much be out the window.

In the Coonifesto there is a wise crack by Norbert Elias to the effect that

"It seems as if grown-up people, in thinking about their origins, involuntarily lose sight of the fact that they themselves and all adults came into the world as little children. Over and over again, in the scientific myths of origin no less than religious ones, they feel impelled to imagine: In the beginning was a single human being, who was an adult" (emphasis mine).

Well, Wade has another headslapper by Elias, that "Many people seem to have the unspoken opinion that 'What happened in the twelfth, fifteenth or eighteenth centuries is past -- what has it to do with me?' In reality, though, the contemporary problems of a group are crucially influenced by earlier fortunes, by their beginningless development."

So, it is as if there is a personal prehistory in the form of a preverbal infancy etched into our neurology, and a collective one etched into our genome.

Human Being and Being Anti-Human

We've spoken before of how the cosmos isn't any kind of empirical fact or observation, nor can it ever be. Obviously, no one has ever seen the cosmos in its totality. Rather, it is an abstraction from equations of physics that are presumed to be universal.

Thus, the cosmos -- the total and unified order of reality -- is a concept, an abstraction, an assumption. And thanks to sober thinkers such as A.N. Whitehead, we know that this concept is rooted in Judeo-Christianity, against which all those 18th and 19th century philosophers drunk on the radical Enlightenment were rebelling.

Come to think of it, those radical thinkers (we're not speaking of the moderate Anglo-Scottish Enlightenment to which we are heir) were very much like our reactionary progressives and anti-Trumpers: if it's Jewish or Christian, the opposite must be true.

For example, if we believe race to be unimportant, then race must be all important; if we believe men and women are very different, then they must be identical; if we believe in the nuclear family, it must be a quintessential form of oppression; if we believe children are entitled to a mother and father, then fathers must be superfluous; if we think liberty is impossible in the absence of law and order, they think it would be great to abolish the police. If school vouchers are the most important civil rights issue of the day, then children should be forced to attend mandatory state indoctrination centers. The list is endless.

Exaggerate much, BoB? Well, here's a handy chart yoinked from PowerLine. It's not racist at all:

White people believe in all the bad things such as individualism, self-reliance, the nuclear family, and fatherhood. Worse yet, in order to understand the world, white folks look to objectivity, cause-and-effect relationships, and quantitative analysis. In fact, I'll admit to abusing my son, because I taught him to delay gratification, plan ahead, and not waste time.

Check out some of the laughable stereotypes: we prefer our food bland, our culture European, our thinkers white, and our women Barbies. Am I triggered? Absolutely, in the sense that I'm laughing at these imbeciles.

Yesterday one of them called me racist again. I'm old enough to remember when this was just an admission that the accuser had lost the argument. Now it is the argument. Are my feelings hurt? Yes, I can't believe I have only one reader calling me racist. After 15 years of blogging, I should have hundreds by now.

Anyway, back to our subject: our cosmos. Which no one has ever seen. As it so happens, the above insultainment actually goes to our subject, because another thing no one has ever seen is mankind:

Mankind is not a given thing. Mankind stretches back into the past toward unknown beginnings. It moves into the future toward unknown times. What we call mankind is simply an idea, which arises on the occasion of certain experiences of revelation or illumination, and which is extended to all other people who do not have such insights (Voegelin).

This is a critical idea for a number of reasons. First, as we mentioned a couple of posts back, you can't blame people of the past for not understanding that all human beings are created equal. After all, Africans themselves were unacquainted with this principle, because they're the ones who kidnapped fellow Africans in order to sell them to Arab or European slave traders.

Today we understand -- advocates of identity politics notwithstanding -- that cultures vary but mankind is one. Human nature is real, and confers certain inalienable rights. The left is adamantly opposed to the principles of human nature and natural rights, not just because they can only come from the Creator, but also because they limit state power and undercut their project of inventing positive rights.

It has now become controversial -- even racist -- to suggest that some cultures are better than others. This critique itself is racist to the core, because we're obviously referring to culture, not race.

Conversely, the left, in insisting that all black people ought to think alike, conflates race and culture: Al Sharpton or Cornell West or Ilhan Omar think like Black people ought to think; Thomas Sowell or Clarence Thomas or Candace Owens aren't just wrong, they're not even properly Black.

I know. And they call us racist! Their absence of self-awareness, let alone irony, is literally disorienting. They'd no doubt call the following racist as well, despite the fact that it is the opposite, because it is again affirming the principle that Blacks are not defined or constrained by culture, just like anyone else:

We include within mankind, for example, all Africans, yet in all Africa there never was an insight that would have enabled an African tribe to conceive the idea of man or mankind. There simply was no such thing. These are Western, or at least largely Western, ideas -- classical and Christian ideas (ibid.).

The operative word isn't "African" but tribal: tribalism isn't just a form of social organization but a mode of thinking. Yes, identity politics has always been with us. Identity politics is post- rather then pre-Christian, but both subordinate universal man to particular tribe, rather than vice versa.

More abstractly, this again means that mankind is not, and can never be, an empirical object. It would be more accurate to say that man is a kind of "location" where something quite marvelous is occurring and never stops occurring. In this luminous space occurs history, creativity, civilization, philosophy, theology, everything. Indeed, what is happening is Being itself:

everything that happens and which we call history, including our idea of mankind, is happening in Being itself, which is behind all specific things and all specific happenings (ibid.).

We'll end with one of my favorite aphorisms, because it is one of the Keys to the Cosmos:

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.

One of its logical entailments is that

History is the series of universes present to the consciousness of successive subjects. -Dávila

A Nation of (Vertical) Immigrants

Horizontal movement would mean little if it weren't bisected by the vertical tension we've been discussing in recent posts. America was settled by people who weren't just interested in physical space, but in a vertical space where they would be free to encounter God in ways not defined and enforced by the state.

As John Adams observed, the horizontal revolution of 1776 was preceded by a vertical revolution that had occurred a generation before. Even Jefferson pleaded for the assistance of “that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them” in this new world. He further proposed a design for the Great Seal of the U.S. depicting "the children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night."

As Novak writes in his On Two Wings, revolutionary era Americans "did not believe that time is cyclical, going nowhere, spinning in circles pointlessly. They believed that history had a beginning and was guided by providence for a purpose":

Time (in the view of the founders) was created for the unfolding of human liberty, for human emancipation.

Regarding the vertical movement -- AKA exodus -- how do we know which way is which, i.e., up from down? Is this in fact a relativistic universe, or has the left always been the vanguard of intrinsic metacosmic error?

History is a record of progress (or decline), measured by permanent standards, God's standards, as learned from and tested by long experience (Novak, emphasis mine).

So, it is possible that the left isn't in error. But only if there exist no permanent standards and transcendent truths by which to judge their ideological pronouncements. How convenient.

History, for the founders, is "open, purposive, contingent in liberty." It

is not a Greek or Roman idea. It is Hebraic.... Probably most of the humans who had ever lived before the arrival of Judaism on the world stage never even heard of "progress".... For Jews and Christians, by contrast, history is heading somewhere new...

All of this is of course bound up with the nature of time: what is it? We've already alluded to Judeo-Christian time, so we won't belabor the point. There is also pre-Hebraic time. We won't belabor that point either. Suffice it to say that pagan time is circular and backward looking, toward a mythic golden age. It is gnostalgic, ordered to a paradisal time before time, about which they are half correct. For in the words of the Aphorist,

The error lies not in dreaming that secret gardens exist, but in dreaming that they have gates.

This much we can know with certainty in this life: the gate is the direction and the direction is the gate. Before Abraham was I AM surely is, and I AM is Truth, Way, Door, Bread, Life, Light, Vine, Shepherd, Resurrection.

But Liberals describe a past that never existed and predict a future that is never realized. Which explains why The liberal mentality is an angelic visitor impervious to earthly experiences. (NGD).

In the words of Petey, the left invents the past it needs in order to justify the impossible future it desires. Moreover, the present crimes of the left are purified of their criminality by the angels of Good Intention.

Back to our permanent exodus. Recall what Novak says above about history being contingent in liberty. In other words, if history is contingent -- and it is -- this is because liberty is necessary. This is a somewhat paradoxical formulation, because we normally think of liberty as that which is free of constraint. It is the necessary condition of our own contingent choices.

Here we must draw a distinction between freedom as such, which is necessary, and what we do with our freedom, which is contingent. There is a distant analogy with God, who is radically free, and yet, "constrained," so to speak, by his own nature -- by love, truth, beauty, goodness, etc. Man too is free and constrained, such that the highest expression of freedom is in conformity with the will of God -- quintessentially so in Jesus, but also in Mary, in whom obedience and freedom converge in one big YES.

"Liberty is the axis of the universe, the ground of the possibility of love, human and divine" (Novak). It is the vertical axis, although it obviously plays out and is prolonged in the horizontal. It very much reminds me of another aphorism, that

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

In other words, man qua man, the individual person, doesn't only exist in the tension between immanence and transcendence, he is this tension. Thus, for God, there are only individuals relating -- or not -- to him in this bidirectional space.

The antagonism comes into play with man (man as such as opposed to such-and-such a man), symbolized by the fall and expressed historically in more ways than can possibly be chronicled: in ideology, identity politics, racism (and racialism), superstition, scapegoating, projection, envy, hatred, et al.

It's not possible to neatly wrap up a post like this. We'll end with some remarks by Voegelin and let you sort it all out:

the very idea that there is a humanity, that there is a mankind, and that one can generalize about man, appears only when certain revelatory insights occur. These are spiritual outbursts.... Only when spiritual insights are attained does man become defined as that being who receives his order through existence from God.

There is therefore a tremendous importance attaching to these spiritual outbursts and insights. The recipients of such insights act as representatives of humanity, with the obligation to communicate their insights to all mankind.... every new insight into order is the beginning of a revolution of more or less considerable dimensions.

In this context, conservatives who specifically wish to conserve the revolutionary insights of the founders are the radicals, while progressive leftists are the backward looking reactionaries. Advocates of these Gnostic and totalitarian movements "feel themselves to be the representatives of mankind, and they feel everyone must be converted to the representative type of truth."

Or face cancellation and exile, which is the shadow of exodus.

As inversions of the archangel in the Bible, Marxist archangels prevent men from fleeing their paradises. --Dávila