Philosophy in Good Times

Just a brief one.

The true philosophy must apply equally to good and bad, happy and tragic, times -- in both joy and suffering, exaltation and despair. Which calls to mind a couple of aphorisms:

The same doctrine must serve in dim light and in bright light. The truth is only what is true without distinction for afflicted or exalted souls.

Nothing is more vapid than truths that mature in the spirit’s temperate zone.

There's a reason why Oprahesque new age philosophies flourish among the AWFULs (Affluent White Female Unmarried Leftists) who think microaggressions, mispronouning, and climate change are traumatic. 

No, traumatic is being kidnapped and raped by Nazi Gazis. Then your philosophy will be tested. It's easy to be a Chicken for KFC until you're in the frier. Only then might you have to rethink your principles.  

There's a subsection devoted to this subject in Wonder Confronts Certainty, called The Test, in which Morson observes that in the Soviet Union "Extreme conditions tested moral outlooks." I'm sure there are still atheists in foxholes, but how many of them would prefer to be captured by Islamists instead of Israelis? 

So let us ask: who behaved better under pressure, imprisoned Bolsheviks or religious believers? Materialists or those who acknowledged absolute standards of good and evil? Who acted nobly and who behaved like a scoundrel? 

Whose philosophy passed the Gulag Test? Turns out it was the believers who "would not do what they regarded as wrong," regardless of consequences. Conversely, "when arrested, Bolsheviks behaved the worst, and the higher up they had been, the more executions they had authorized, the baser they proved" (this according to Solzhenitsyn).  

Reminds me of those bad guys in movies, who turn out to be so pusillanimous when cornered or captured. Or university students who stand strong against Israeli Fascism and Apartheid, until the moment their careers are threatened. 

Likewise in the USSR, where 

"It was all very well philosophizing under shady boughs" or in comfortable university offices, but in the face of Soviet interrogation, "the great materialist's wisdom seemed like the prattle of a child."

Suddenly ethical relativism doesn't seems so sophisticated when you're being subjected to torture by ethical relativists. "How wise it all seems when you read these philosophers as a free man!," only to find out too late that there can be no appeal to "medieval" concepts of truth, beauty, goodness, decency, mercy, pity, etc. 

Among Russian writers, "Time and again, suffering leads to awareness of Truth or apprehension of God."

Just as in Life Itself, undistorted by ideology. To be continued...

Do Unto Others, Good and Hard

Reading this book on Russian writers, I'm sure seeing a lot of parallels between Soviet and Islamist ethics. I'm starting to suspect the problem isn't with the ideology, but with some *flaw* in human nature, for which the ideology is just a pretext or something.

If Antisemitism is the socialism of fools, then by extension, socialism is the foolishness of Antisemites. The Democratic Socialists of America doesn't disappoint:

DSA is steadfast in expressing our solidarity with Palestine. 

Today’s events are a direct result of Israel’s apartheid regime -- a regime that receives billions in funding from the United States. End the violence. End the Occupation. Free Palestine....

We cannot forget that the Israeli state has systematically denied Palestinians the right to self-determination for decades. This was not unprovoked. For over 60 years, Palestinians have faced ethnic cleansing, torture, bombings, and housing demolitions. Gaza is still under a blockade. 

Socialism? Check. Foolishness? Check. Antisemitism? Check.

This unethical ethic goes back to Lenin, for whom "All is permitted!" 

Nothing, however vile, should be condemned if it is committed by a man who is useful to the party.

The world is divided into exploiters and exploited, the former constituting "a race of worthless predators." Moreover,

Since their children were bound to "exhibit the same malice, cruelty, meanness, rapacity, and greed," the entire race had to be exterminated. 

Likewise Jewish children for Islamists. Indeed, it would be an act of cruelty to allow them to live. Lenin and Trotsky "sneered at the whole idea of 'the sanctity of human life.'" "Is there any reason not to target children themselves as a way to terrorize a population?" "Everything that promotes revolution is moral; everything that hinders it is immoral."

"Do not seek in your accusations proof of whether the prisoner rebelled against the Soviets with guns or by word. First you must ask him to what class he belongs.... These answers must determine the fate of the accused." 

"One must eliminate whatever groups that... foster undesired values or conditions." Another theorist of terror wrote that "the concept of personal innocence is a hangover from the Middle Ages. Pure superstition!" There is no objective morality, rather, each class defines right and wrong "to suit its own interests." "To us there is no such thing as a morality that stands outside human society; that is a fraud."

Even "to show compassion was to risk the accusation of covert religiosity," so "it therefore paid to be as cruel as possible. Cruelty, in short, became an atheist virtue." 

The Soviet credo was "always use human beings as mere means." Moreover, a "reverse golden rule operated," which is to say, "always treat others -- meaning class or other enemies -- as you would not want to be treated yourself. It was immoral not to."

Another key principle in Soviet ethics was the division of all people into two categories: "Each person in the bad category is automatically responsible for -- is essentially the same as -- all others."

Similarly, for Islamists, a Jew is a Jew, whether an infant, a Holocaust survivor, or a pro-Hamas useful schmendrick. Against such enemies, violence is "not a regrettable necessity, but a good in itself." But what if the shoe is on the other foot? Is it moral for enemies to defend themselves?

Of course not: "Russian revolutionaries not only dismissed it," but seemed unable to grasp it, as if to say "How dare they defend themselves!" This reflects the Leninist principle that "what is wrong for them is right for us."

One cannot ask "what if the shoe were on the other foot?" because to do so would suggest "an equality of moral rights."

You cannot equate communist and bourgeoisie any more than you can Muslim and Jew. 

Preventing Future Crimes Against the Regime

Soon enough we'll get back to the usual content, but I first have to get through this book -- Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter -- and it is striking how it illuminates the ideological terror of the day. 

If you're really bent on committing mass murder, then you need an ideology. Again, "Nothing limits the violence potentially flowing from the theoretist [AKA ideological] mindset, which can justify anything" (Morson). "The sanction of bloodshed by conscience is... more terrible than the official, legal sanction of bloodshed." 

Back when I was a psychologist we called this a "corrupt superego," or a conscience become evil due to a twisted environment. But this just begs the question of the source of morality. In other words, if there isn't an objective basis for morality, full stop, then on what basis can we judge this or that environment good or evil? Morality becomes completely relative and subjective. 

For example, one Nazi physician stated that “Out of respect for human life, I would remove a gangrenous appendix from a diseased body. The Jew is the gangrenous appendix in the body of mankind.” Simple as.

Similarly, this guy says that if you grew up in Nazi Germany, then  

In such an authoritarian culture, the moral messaging you likely received would have resulted in your developing a so-called "evil superego," based largely on the anti-semitic biases systematically implanted within you. Ironically, the moral essence of who you were wouldn't be reflected by your prejudicial outlook. And parroting what, externally, you'd been convinced was ethical, would have driven you to act unethically.

Now, to say "moral essence" is to acknowledge a transcendent human nature which this author otherwise ignores. Well, at least that's the last time I will quote Psychology Today. .  

What is our ultimate defense against a corrupt superego? Gotta be a well-formed conscience, and how do we get one of those? One way: "Conscience is ordered to the task of holding to the most fundamental of all moral precepts: do good and avoid evil." 

But isn't one man's terrorist another man's freedom fighter, and all that? Nah, for conscience may grasp "objective moral truth" and know "what is truly good and what is truly evil.... Contrary to some popular misconceptions, conscience is not the 'source' of morality, but rather is its 'servant.'"

Suffice it to say, there is no such thing as natural law for communists or Islamists (nor even for mainstream Islam, for which Allah's absolute will overrides any influence from our end). 

Nor for scientism: Stanford Scientist, After Decades of Study, Concludes: We Don't Have Free Will.

Now, dialectical materialism also denies free will, except --unlike frivolous adolescents of tenure -- the communists took seriously the implications:

If no one is responsible, then punishment exists not to ensure justice but to direct behavior, and the only question is which punishments are most effective in doing so. Guilt is beside the point, and the concept of innocence disappears. What reason could there be not to lock up those who might commit crimes to prevent them from doing so? This is precisely the conclusion drawn in Soviet justice.

We're seeing something similar in our two-tier system of justice, with violent criminals of color being released back onto the streets because they can't help it (being victims of systemic racism or something), while the book is thrown at the leading presidential candidate to prevent future crimes against the Regime.

The Soviet criminal code... specified potential crimes as crimes in themselves.... Simply belonging to to the wrong class... was sufficient. After all, if all crime results from bad social conditions, and if one belongs to a group that might want to preserve those conditions, then one merits elimination simply by virtue of belonging to that group.

As one commissar put it, "We protect ourselves not only against the past but also against the future." So, the regime is doing its best to prevent Trump's future crimes against the the managerial class -- the swamp and its allies and supporters. And the DOJ is hard at work criminalizing those of us who belong to the wrong class -- MAGA supporters, traditional Catholics, pro-lifers, anti-groomer parents, etc.

The Magical Appeal of Violent Ideologies

Morson distinguishes between "revolution" and revolutionism, the latter going to the addictive mental state discussed in yesterday's post. And "the twentieth century demonstrates" -- or should have demonstrated --

that revolutionism, almost irrespective of ideology, can lead people to do anything. The magic of "the Revolution" renders destruction and murder sacred. 

It seems that the line between revolution and revolutionism has been crossed when the violence is "no longer a means to an end; it becomes an object of mystical worship." 

One commonality of communism and Islamism is that both are impossible. They have nothing to do with the real world, with human nature, with practical politics. We might think of this as a bug, but ideology makes the impossible seem possible by superimposing the map onto the territory. 

Then the ideologue takes up residence in the dramatic space of the ideology, from communism, Nazism, and Islamism, to global warmism, transgenderism, and CRT. Each allows the individual to trade in his own boring life for participation in a transcendent drama of good vs. evil. 

I remember what that was like. In 1980 I supported Barry Commoner for president. Jimmy Carter was too conservative, and Ronald Reagan was, of course, a fascist. 

It's hard to recall what I was thinking at the time, or rather, the state of mind that was the larger context for the appeal of the Drama of the Impossible. It seems that the possible is no match for the intoxication of the impossible, for if something can actually occur, it's no longer magic. The Aphorist has a number of zingers along these lines:

People do not choose someone to cure them, but someone to drug them.

After conversing with some "thoroughly modern" people, we see that humanity escaped the "centuries of faith" only to get stuck in those of credulity.

Reason, truth, and justice tend not to be man's goals, but the names he gives to his goals.  

Morson writes that  "If one is looking for the usual sort of rational explanation, it may be true that Stalin's actions make no sense. But if one bears in mind the logic of revolutionism -- which demands constant intensification, shock, and the deliberate defiance of everyday thinking," then the absurdity starts to become intelligible, if that's not a contradiction of terms.

In any event, "no consequences will extinguish the youthful appeal of the thrilling, dangerous, and addictive violence of the devoted revolutionist." Media apologists keep reminding us that half the citizens of Hamastan are under age 18, which is less an appeal to mercy than a dire threat. After all, the Hitlerjugend were also children.

The next chapter of the book gets into the psychological allure of impossible theories and preposterous abstractions. Living inside of one can be more compelling than the people and conditions of everyday life, or "more real" than the reality the theory is supposed to explain. 

Ideology, "theoretism," "certaintism," whatever you call it,  

It should come as no surprise that terrorists despised doubt. How could hesitant souls, constantly reexamining their own premises, ever resolve to kill?

People who behead infants are a lot of things, but self-critical is not one of them. Similarly, for Russian terrorists, "openness to different points of view testified not to a commitment to truth but to intellectual flabbiness.... For Lenin, doubt itself was reactionary." "Dialectical materialists do not seek truth; they already possess it." 

No one in the Arab world is going to weigh the evidence and conclude that baby killers might also blow up hospitals, for, as with ideologues,

An idea is true not because it corresponds to "objective" facts, but because it produces the right results....

If facts "contradict the theory, the facts must yield" to the ideology. Even better, "Nothing limits the violence potentially flowing from" such an inversion.  

Lifestyles of the Wretched & Depraved

Continuing with yesterday's post, it seems that it's not just the content of the terrorist mind that is different, but the container. This is well understood in cases of severe mental illness on an individual basis, but what is going on in a collective "terror culture" like Gaza?

Conveniently, the next subsection in this chapter is called Metaphysical Hatred, and it seems to me that anti-Semitism is the metaphysical hatred of hatreds. Such hatred "can never be satisfied. It feeds on itself."

So overwhelming is the hatred of Hamas that it easily overwhelms any practical concerns, including, of course, for their own people. Similarly,

For a true Leninist, nothing could be sweeter than hate-filled revenge. "When hatred motivated terrorists, the 'people' did not matter."

 These terrorists were hopeless idealists:

In this way of thinking, goals pollute the sacrifice by making it utilitarian and therefore impure. 

A pure sacrifice... where have I heard that before? "Even those who did not seek a martyr's death found self-sacrifice appealing." Anything less than total commitment "would not have satisfied us."

For Bakhunin, "the attraction of all messianic socialism was that it invested the inner dialectic of the personality with apocalyptic significance." In effect, he advanced "a mystical theory of self-realization through revolutionary action."

As with the Islamists, "The process of radicalization, once started, repeats and the terrorists grow ever more terrible."

From killing specific people only when necessary, they rapidly advanced to killing random people whenever possible. Soon enough, sheer sadism became common. "The need to inflict pain was transformed from an abnormal compulsion experienced only by unbalanced personalities into a formally verbalized obligation for all committed revolutionaries."

But again, "what explains this dynamic," which is "repeated in the history of other revolutionary organizations," including Hamas? One motive seems to be

the craving of lonely and alienated young people for an especially tightly knit community, a family bound together by the imminence of death.

Very much like the dynamic that motivates normal military cohesion, only turned diabolical, partly because it is for its own sake, not for any rational or achievable goal:

For those addicted to the thrill of danger and the intensity of the moment, familiar violence soon becomes routine and ceases to have the desired effect. As with addictive drugs, larger and larger doses are needed. The war on boredom grows boring: repeated violence soon seems almost peaceful... 

Hence the incredible barbarism of October 7, which, if one is attracted to such things, must furnish an intense dopamine high (or something like it). 

In fact, in a recent newsletter, Rob Henderson reviewed a book called Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty by psychologist Roy Baumeister. He writes that

Under intense stress, the body releases soothing and pleasant chemicals to return to normal (homeostasis). Over time, this feeling becomes addictive. 

This is how people come to enjoy bungee jumping or skydiving. I’ve done both. The act itself is both terrifying and thrilling, but the feeling of coming back down from the rush is enjoyable.... 

Baumeister suggests this happens with repeated acts of inflicting harm.... At first, people feel a sense of terror, anxiety, or disgust. The body then counteracts such feelings to restore itself to baseline. People gradually become addicted to this feeling. 

In this view, the pleasure of harming someone comes mostly from the restorative process, not the initial act. You pay the cost up front, and enjoy the benefit after. 

As the book puts it, “The thrill of killing may be closer to the thrill of parachute jumping than to the thrill of taking drugs.”

Another motive is the joy of victimhood: 

research in the book documents how, for perpetrators of genocide and ethnic violence, “The ones who carry out the massacres perceive themselves as victims of mistreatment and injustice.”

Hitler and the Nazis famously cast the Germans as victims of “nefarious” Jewish people.

Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and other communist leaders carried out horrific acts resulting in bloodbaths by demonizing anyone deemed to be a “class enemy,” i.e., an oppressor.

Henderson also highlights the danger of evil motivated by "idealism," beginning with an observation by a psychologist Jonathan Haidt that "The major atrocities of the 20th century were carried out largely by men who thought they were creating a Utopia.”

Henderson continues:

In a twisted way, idealism uses people’s moral intuitions against them. If you harm someone to take their money, you might feel guilty, even if you needed the cash. But if you harm someone because you believe they are an obstacle to the gates of paradise, then any guilt is quelled. 

This helps to explain how ordinary people became murderous in the regimes of the twentieth century. They believed themselves to be moral. And the more evil acts they committed, the more moral they believed themselves to be.... 

Committing mass murder might be unpleasant, but if in the end it’s for a good cause, then people will fulfill their duties....  

Idealistic perpetrators, full of self-righteous conviction, believe they have a license, or even a duty, to hate.

That's about it for today... 

Terrorist Time and Time for Terror

I'm reading a book called Wonder Confronts Certainty: Russian Writers on the Timeless Questions and Why Their Answers Matter, by Gary Saul Morson, and it turns out to be timely, because there's a chapter devoted to the revolutionist-terrorist personality. 

Suffice it to say that they're not like us, and yet, they rely on western dupes and useful idiots to treat them as if they are -- you know, just aggrieved people with rational and realistic goals.

The late 19th century

witnessed the birth of Russian terrorism.... Russia became the first country where young men and women, when asked their intended career, might answer "terrorist," an honorable, if dangerous, profession....

I know of no earlier society that made terror routine for everyone, celebrated "mercilessness" as a virtue, and taught schoolchildren that compassion is criminal.

Well, I know of a later one. And *coincidentally*,

Until 1964, the word “Palestinian” rarely described Arabs who once lived in Israel. That was when KGB Agents of Communist Russia created and funded a terrorist group called the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).... The PLO was as artificial as other effective and deadly groups communists used during the Cold War to take over Algeria, South Africa, Kenya, Vietnam, and Cuba.

Morson asks "What self-justifications do those who commit monstrous crimes invoke, what moral alibis do they seize upon, and what makes excuses persuasive to them?" As if he has never tuned into CNN or visited a college campus.  

Just like the Palestinians they sponsored, Russian terrorists "gave rise to a mythology and martyrology that conferred sanctity on killing." Their "readiness to slaughter innocent people, not just opponents, looked forward to later terrorists' dynamite in crowded public places and to Lenin's taking of random hostages..."

How are we to understand these people -- and not fall into the trap that they are somehow like us, sharing the same reality, motivations, and goals? One important point is that "The revolutionary (and terrorist) of this sort lived in a special temporality -- let us call it terrorist time..." Quoting Solzhenitsyn,  

They, the zealots, could not afford to wait, and so they sanctioned human sacrifice... to bring universal happiness nearer!

"Terrorist time led to the time of terror" (Morson). 

I'm going to skip past a couple of important chapters on The Intelligentsia and The Idealist and go straight to The Revolutionist, the latter often supported and rationalized by the former two. But

For many terrorists, goals, programs, and ideology were irrelevant. What they loved was revolutionary activity itself....

Time and again, the means for achieving a goal became the goal itself.... if at first revolution was the end and terrorism the means, terrorism soon became the end in itself. 

As it is for Hamas, who care about Jews only slightly less than their own people: "For revolutionists, aiding workers and peasants was at best secondary." Like today, there were those progressive voices  claiming that "they turned to terror only as a last resort," but this excuse "does not pass the smell test." Rather, "it is the decision to murder that leads to the justification."

Now to the main question, which is "If relieving human suffering is beside the point," why does the terrorist murder, rape, torture, and risk his life? "What motivates the revolutionist to engage in terror?"

I guess we'll get into it in the next post, but let me end by going back to what was said above about Terrorist Time. Morson writes that "Terrorists may sense themselves living in a special sort of timeless time" which he calls "living in liminality." It's definitely a spiritual state, in that it's a little like being dead while alive, and thus liberated from every quotidian concern:

This feeling of living posthumously frees him from ordinary concerns and places him beyond good and evil. He becomes a superman....

Consequences, for oneself and others, no longer matter. The present moment is all there is. Sheer liminality -- betweenness, transitionality, contradiction, and freedom from all definition -- becomes addictive....

We wonder how they can be living like rats in those underground terror tunnels, but they would no doubt find it tedious beyond belief to devote themselves to banalities such as economic development, or proper education and healthcare, or turning Gaza into a seaside vacation spot. Such terror addicts "aren't at home in anything except change and turmoil.... They aren't trained for anything else, they don't know anything else except that."

Trapped in liminality, in "never-ending preparations," they cannot create anything, let alone an earthly utopia.

On the Deep Structure of the Progressive-Terror Industrial Complex

There is no shortage of opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they mostly touch on the symptoms and not the cause -- the surface and not deep structure. What I wonder about is the deeper structure that accounts for the agreement between, say, Hamas and BLM. What does beheading Jewish children have to do with exploiting white guilt to finance a real estate empire? What's the connection?

Some events are like a sword slicing through history and dividing one side from the other. For example, Pearl Harbor was such an event. Prior to it there was still a lot isolationist sentiment, but after the sword fell, most everyone found themselves on the same side. Certainly one would have been hard-pressed to find pro-Japanese sentiments, let alone demonstrations and "days of rage" against American colonizers.

But in this case, the moral revulsion didn't last 24 hours before the usual suspects were making excuses, adding "context," and blaming the victim. 

This week we have been witness to the greatest atrocities and mass slaughter perpetrated against Jews since the Holocaust. Sickeningly, on many of your campuses, events are being held to support those who carried out this savagery and to blame the victims, innocent Israelis.

VDH  describes the sword of (a)morality cutting through history:

In a strange way, this reign of death has become a touchstone, an acid test of sorts that has revealed the utter amorality of enemies abroad and quite dangerous people at home.

For example, 

the overt support for Hamas killers by the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd on a lot of campuses exposes to Americans the real moral and intellectual rot in higher education.

So, diversity, equity, inclusion, and... genocide. We could say that this nexus us just a coincidence, or again, search for some deeper structure that renders the connection perfectly intelligible.   

For example, this guy says

The war in Gaza is part of a global war between an alliance of militant Islam and communists on one side [of the Sword], and Judeo-Christian Western civilization on the other.

This one agrees that 

None of the horrors you are witnessing this week -- not the massacre of Jews, not the betrayal by public figures and popular activist movements, not the moral insanity of our universities and cultural spaces -- happened by accident.

Rather, there's that deep structure again:

Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives -- intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns -- a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality....

The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”

But what unites the lunatics? Is there an order to it, or just an axis of bad or stupid actors wanting to cause chaos and suffering? 

There's also decolonization, the outcome of which 

is barbarism. For Hamas, it means murdering women, children, and the elderly, executing innocent people on the street, and mutilating infants in their homes. For the radical academics..., it means destroying our best institutions, obliterating academic standards, and elevating witchcraft, voodoo, and pseudo-science into positions of prestige. The philosopher Leo Strauss once defined nihilism as opposition to civilization as such—and this is precisely what the decolonizing academics have done....

Americans need to understand that the massacre in Gaza is not only a foreign outrage. The same ethno-radicals who cheer Hamas’s destruction of civilization abroad also want to commit civilizational suicide here at home.

So, is nihilism the answer to the question of deep structure? But nihilism is no structure at all. The following may be crazy, but it insists on its own necessary logical structure:

"Academics in the area of border studies: you cannot teach about displacement, dispossession, suffering, resistance, decolonization, and abolition without Palestine. You can’t be for Abolish ICE, anti-border violence, or anti-carceral without supporting freedom for Palestinians.” 

”When I say ‘no walls, no prisons, no cages’ this is what I mean," Martinez posted on X earlier this week above a picture of the Hamas terrorists storming into Israel on their way to rape women, slaughter babies, and take elderly Holocaust survivors prisoner.  

So, in a way, we don't have to look hard for the deep structure, since they never shut-up about the intrinsic relationship between diversity, equity, inclusion, decolonization, open borders, freeing violent criminals, Jew-hatred, CRT, White Privilege, the destruction of western institutions and intellectual standards, and outright genocide. 

What's the first step one needs to take in order to find oneself on the lunatic side of the Sword? It's easier to describe what things look like from our side of it:

To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.

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

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.

What is called the modern mentality is the process of exonerating the deadly sins.

Let us say frankly to our opponent that we do not share his ideas because we understand them and that he does not share our ideas because he does not understand them.

If the leftist is not persecuting, he feels persecuted.

The cult of Humanity is celebrated with human sacrifices.

The political platforms of the left are gradually transformed into scaffolds.

Specific advice for Gazans:

Educating the soul consists in teaching it to transform its envy into admiration.

But unfortunately,

It is customary to proclaim rights in order to violate duties.

Annotations To An Implicit Text About Western Intellectuals and Islamist Barbarism

Just combing through the Aphorisms for oblique references to the barbarism and depravity of the day. Those with ears, yada yada.

Religious pathology is the key to history.

No one is more respectful of “others’ beliefs” than the devil.

Unlimited tolerance is nothing more than a hypocritical way of giving up.

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.

The partisans of a cause are often the best arguments against it. 

The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates.

The forces that will ruin a civilization collaborate from its birth with the forces that construct it.

The left does not condemn violence until it hears it pounding on its door.

The leftism of the majority of leftists is perfectly explicable, but the intelligent man who has left-wing ideas must severely examine his conscience.

“Racism” has made its enemies say as many stupid things as its partisans.

The comments of the liberal about any war reveal the type of mentality that makes the next war inevitable.

The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who covets another’s goods but the one who defends his own.

The leftist screams that freedom perishes when his victims refuse to finance their own murder.

Every “liberator” finally passes on the bill.

Having promulgated the dogma of original innocence, democracy concludes that the man guilty of the crime is not the envious murderer but the victim who aroused his envy.

In this century, compassion is an ideological weapon.

In order to corrupt the individual it is enough to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses.

One must learn to handle the weapons of the adversary, but with appropriate disgust.

Mere Ignorance and Learned Ignorance

Feel free to stop bloviating on the ins & outs of unchecked aggression and the what-have-yous of geopolitics, and stick to what you know best, Bob, which is nothing. 

Point well taken. As a multi-undisciplinary vertical slacker, I like to think I know a little nothing about everything. Which is just knowing that the best conceivable map is never the territory -- certainly including theological maps. Eckhart, for example, speaks of God and the soul as mutual abysses of infinitude, and 

taught a form of negative mystical anthropology in which God and soul are ultimately one because both are radically unknowable.

So, "striving to know God... is a constant pursuit of what is by definition unattainable," but this "unknown-knowing keeps the soul constant and still on the hunt." 

Every morning we try to bring back a little nothing from from this hunt for the unknown, starting from nowhere, for "There must be stillness and silence for the Word to make itself heard." 

Nevertheless,

Though it may be called an unknowing, an uncomprehending, it still has more within it than in all knowing and comprehending outside it, for this unknowing lures and draws you from all that is known, and also from yourself.

It lures us so long as we establish diplomatic relations with the Divine Attractor. Or rather, vice versa, for "the eternal birth of the Word from the Father is actually 'now born in time, in human nature.'" 

We must distinguish between two forms of ignorance, or between "mere ignorance" and "learned ignorance." What we know is always dwarfed by what we don't, so "from knowing one must come into unknowing":

Then, we will become knowing with divine knowing and then our unknowing will be ennobled and clothed with supernatural knowing.

It's as simple as making a space of unknowing for the reception of the higher unknown -- or of making a space of darkness for the reception of light. You don't light a match to look for the sun. 

We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

Speaking of which, "one must become as empty and bare as the desert," maybe even be the desert. 

Or, from a Jewish perspective, we are always on-the-way in the desert bewilderness:

The wilderness is not just a desert through which we wandered for forty years. It is a way of being. Even if just for a moment every now and then each day. For it is the only way to begin.

And that must surely be why He brought us out there. For there and only there might we be able to encounter the mystery.

Oh, and if "The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery" the second mystery must be that we are open to it, and that "Spiritual awareness is born of encounters with the mystery."

Which sounds similar to Eckhart's path of no path:

Leave place, leave time, / Avoid even image! / Go forth without a way / On the narrow path, / Then you will find the desert track.

"'God is a God of the present." And to go back to Jewish mysticism, 

Entrances to holiness are everywhere. / The possibility of ascent is all the time. / Even at unlikely times and through unlikely places. / There is no place on earth without the Presence (Kushner).

So, give us this day our daily... what then? Does this post have any practical purpose or advice? Well, every day I spend half an hour trying to follow the wayless way of the pilgrim, in a kind of radical openness to come-what-may. I just try to show up and let God take care of the rest. Or, to paraphrase the Aphorist, the only sensible thing to do is to keep pestering God with our prayers. I don't know what else to do, much less not-do.

(Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing.)

Justice for Palestine?

Not much in the way of inspiration in recent days, even predating recent world-historical intrusions. Yesterday I pulled out a volume of Jewish mysticism from the shelf, and I considered writing a post on its similarity to Eckhart. But there's a time for medieval mysticism and a time for getting medieval, period:

Is this the time? If not, when is the time? Is there some objective standard for when to break out the pliers and blowtorches? True, there is "just war doctrine," but I don't see anything in there about justice per se. 

Therefore, I consulted Josef Pieper for a little more guidance on the subject -- in particular, the question of what sort of justice is owed a genocidal terror group with no universal standard of justice. No doubt they believe they delivered justice on October 7 -- as do our own progressive neobarbarians and Islamist apologists -- whereas the civilized world is unanimous in condemning their actions as unjust, to put it mildly. Who's right?

As Pieper says, "evil and suffering in our world have many names, but primarily that of 'injustice.'" Now, justice "is the notion that each man is to be given what is his due," but this definition presupposes the possibility of a universal definition discoverable by man qua man. 

What if the people in question have no such definition -- rather, only a particular one revolving around their own perceived benefit, whether attained justly or unjustly? Do Gazans have a universal definition of justice? Obviously not, because they have a completely different standard as to what constitutes justice for Jews: what they call justice, we recognize as intrinsically unjust.

Which shows the ridiculousness of Hamas concealing their genocidal ambitions behind other universals such as "freedom for Palestine," for in no way do they mean freedom as we define it. Any Arab living in Israel is already more free than anyone condemned to live in an Islamic state (criminal elites notwithstanding), so if they really wanted to be free, Hamas would organize a state along Israeli lines, where Arabs even serve in parliament. 

If we apply a universal standard of justice to, say, Iran, we would say that the Iranian people have the right not to be ruled by an Islamist theocracy, just as Gazans have the right not to be ruled by Hamas. But the latter voted for Hamas, and surveys indicate that the support for Hamas continues. What sort of justice is owed to people who actually don't want what is due to them by natural right, and want to inflict maximum injustice on others?

What is the basis for the moral obligation to give a man his due? Here in the United States it is in virtue of being endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, so that to deny these rights without due process is intrinsically unjust:

"It is through creation that the created being first comes to have his rights." By virtue of creation first arises the possibility of saying: "Something is my due."

We could say this same something is due Islamists, except they don't want it, nor do they want anyone else to have it. One could inform the Islamist that "I have my rights!," but for them the dar al-harb has no intrinsic rights the dar al-Islam is bound to respect. Clearly, rights of non-Muslims are not -- nor could they be -- an inalienable possession.

Therefore, by our universal standards, Islamism is intrinsically unjust, for any appeal to "natural right" would be an unforgivable usurpation of our only real right, which is to submit to Allah. 

The anthropology of Christendom is quite different, in which our inalienable rights -- and obligations -- are grounded in human nature. But in the Age of Equity and two-tiered justice, we are back to a pre-Christian and non-universal standard of justice (which, properly speaking, is no longer justice except in the particularistic tribal sense).

Perhaps when all the consequences of a false presupposition suddenly become a direct threat, men in their great terror will suddenly become aware that it is no longer possible to call back... a truth they have allowed to become remote...

Nor is it "completely fantastic to think that a day may come"

when not the executioners alone will deny the existence of inalienable rights of men, but when even the victims will not be able to say why it is that they are suffering injustice.

Actually, it's completely fantastic to believe we're not already well on the way there. There were no pro-Japanese demonstrations in the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, nor any pro-Nazi rallies, let alone Nazi supporters in congress and the media. But today our own Democrats support the so-called Palestinians over Israel by 49% to 38%. Which means they support injustice for everyone. 

Breaking News and the Breakthrough of Eternity

Well, I wasted yesterday watching sports and news out of Israel. I could write about the latter, but one of the original purposes of the blog was to turn the cosmos upside down and report on the "eternals" instead of the news (or to interpret the news in light of the eternal). Instead of covering "breaking news," the idea was to report on eternity breaking into time. 

Come to think of it, there are moments in history when the two -- time and eternity -- converge, quintessentially so in the Incarnation. This is just an image, but I'm imagining time as a wave-like function that can be closer to, or more distant from, eternity (even though, properly speaking, eternity must be equidistant to all times). 

I think we can sense when eternity breaks through, or when we are somehow closer to it. Certainly we know this individually, but it happens collectively as well. When something real occurs, it temporarily wipes away all the lies, silliness, and distractions we typically call "news": "eternity is the measure of permanence, time the measure of change." 

The return of eternity can feel like a big change, but it has always been here, only more or less ignored. I suppose you could say that ignorance of it is the largest conceivable "intelligence failure," since it is the failure of intelligence as such -- a failure to bear eternal principles in mind.

Eckhart often uses the word "breakthrough" to describe God's relation to the soul, e.g., "just as he breaks through into me, so I break through in turn into him." 

What would be at antipodes to the bad breaking news of the day? I guess it would the good of eternity breaking into the nous, or something. This latter, AKA the intellective soul, is "untouched by time and corporality." It is the primordial Light referenced in John, only reflected in the mirror of the intellect.

There is nothing that the divine Intellect does not know actually, nor the human intellect potentially.

This appears to be the deepest possible interpretation of being made in the image of God -- only it's an inverse image, being that God is overflowing fullness, whereas we are relative emptiness and impoverishment. It is also why 

Our natural "intellectual desire," or unlimited will to know, "is never quieted until we know the first Principle, not from its reflection but directly by its very essence.... the ultimate end of rational creatures is immediate knowledge of the essence of God."

This is what Eckhart calls the birth of the Word in the very ground of the soul: "the eternal birth which God the Father effects unceasingly in eternity is the same birth he effected here in time, in human nature.... What is all-important is that it should happen in me."

Which would be good news indeed -- news from, in, and back to eternity. Conversely, at the other (temporal) end, 

The idea that social or political change can satisfy man's intellectual or spiritual needs is perhaps the "greatest deception" to which man is susceptible. 

The author is quick to add that "This in no sense means that society is to be ignored," rather that

Whatever social good is ever accomplished can only be the result of men and women who, in their intellectual ground, understand that there is something far more important to be actualized than just trying to save this world. 

After all, the world can no more be for its own sake than it can be the cause of itself. Rather, it both flows from and returns to its Principle, apart from which there is "strictly nothing." 

And "strict nothing" means contradiction, nonpossibility, the total absence of actual or possible being.

In a word, absurdity. In other words, manifestation minus its principle is like smoke without fire or a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, with no original image. Which is why "The world of manifestation must be inverted, for it, including ourselves in manifestation, is already 'upside down.'" 

Oaky, break through is over. Back on your heads. 

Theology for God

In the previous post, we wondered what Christianity says about reality -- both what it explicitly asserts and what it implicitly presumes. 

In pursuit of this question I innocently picked up a book about Meister Eckhart and ended up getting turned turned upside down and inside out. The book is so relentlessly paradoxical that I can't say I recommend it. It did give me something to think about, though. Or unthink about, rather.  

When I say "turned upside down and inside out," what I mean is this: while I was hoping to find some insights into reality, what I had been calling reality turned out to be nothing but appearances, or even the appearance of nothing: Eckhart's perspective 

is constituted as it were from within God in his Godhead and not externally in terms of approach toward God.... the doctrine he expounds must always be considered from that in divinas standpoint.  

In other words, from inside the Godhead out, not from the outside in. Is this even possible? How can we think about God except insofar as being in relation to, or in terms of, us and of creation more generally? What is God without us?

Well, with us out of the way, "the doctrine [Eckhart] expounds will never cease to be contemporary and always accessible to those who, naturally unsatisfied with mere living, desire to know how to live, regardless of time or place." 

It seems that the one knowledge that will always be true leaves us out of the loop. Or at least "It is meant, rather, for those who are dissatisfied with any teaching restricted by the mental horizon of mere human thought," and for those "who are disturbed by the closed systematizations" of various off-the-shelf human theologies. 

Theology for God?

I don't know, but whatever it is, it is "an abiding ground beneath the quicksand of relative values." Absolute absolutism, I guess.

The problem with theology from and for man is that it is external to the object it is supposed to be about; it "is at best only an approximation to unconditioned Godhead." We are always reflections of this principial reality, but is there some way to get inside the looking glass? Absent a heroic dose of LSD?

Speaking of which, I can see why Eckhart made a big comeback in the '60s and was popular among the hippie crowd. But this goes way beyond such new age diversions. Rather, this is really, really irritating. It is not inside you or me or anyone else, but "supraindividual, supranature, beyond distinctions, and situated as it were within the all-inclusive Principle." 

It transcends "all experience, all abstractions or conceptual graspings of the mind and, indeed, all individual manifestation.... it can in no way be enclosed in any experience, mystical or otherwise, or in any system whatsoever."

Well what then? It seems Eckhart is trying to provide a "springboard primarily designed to facilitate an openness to the uncreated grace requisite for a sustained insight into the unmanifested and unrestricted knowledge which God is."

In the book I just called it O → (n), and let the reader fill in the experiential blanks. 

None of this sounds very orthodox to me, and yet, the very next paragraph claims that "this precisely is the significance of the Word considered as God's unique communication to man." 

Moreover, the Gospel of John "ranks as supreme" because "it pre-eminently sets forth in direct manner the very Divine Knowledge with which Eckhart is above all concerned." It "constitutes, in figures of speech and thought, pure knowledge in principle," and "beyond all humanistic dimensions." 

Again, it is not man that enters God, but rather, "God intervenes in time, the infinite shatters the finite whereby the Word becomes known to man.... the unique possibility is granted man to understand all things in principle from the standpoint as it were of the unconditioned Godhead." 

So again, we apparently have things upside down, since this isn't our testimony of God but God's testimony of himself. And "no person can attain it save by his own unlimited will to know effected and sustained by the grace of the Word" -- or something like (↑) and (↓), only on steroids or something.

Not to be continued. I think I'll move on to something a little more accessible.

If Christ is the Answer, What is the Question?

What does Christianity say about reality: what does it presume, and what does it add that we couldn't have just as well figured out on our own? 

As to the former, I think it presumes a philosophy of common sense realism; after all, Christianity is a non-starter if, for example, existentialism is case, existentialism being for Sartre the attempt to draw out the implications of a strict atheism.

Nor can Christianity be reconciled with positivism, materialism, rationalism, idealism, Marxism, hedonism, nominalism, and so many more. If these are true, then Christianity is not only false but cannot possibly be true.

Let's see, going down the list, there's absurdism, atomism, advaita Vedanta, analytic philosophy, Averroism, academic skepticism... and that's just some of the A's. 

I'm not sure if anything on the list short of Thomism -- or let us say the perennial philosophy more generally -- is capacious enough to do the job. Admittedly, I have no familiarity with some of those schools of thought, but surely they would have crossed my desk by now if they had something to them. In any case, my mind is always open. 

Clearly Christianity presumes a number of things about reality that have become controverted over the past half millennium or so -- for example, that a text means what it says, that there is such a thing as objectivity, that the universe is intelligible, that man possesses free will, that there is a reality transcending nature, etc. 

In our view, denial of any of these assumptions results in a self-refuting reductio absurdum -- for example, to say that objectivity is impossible is an objective statement. Likewise, to say that ultimate reality is material is the denial of spirit by spirit. If there is no free will, we could never know it, for truth is transcendent. And if a text has no fixed meaning, then nor does deconstruction -- it just becomes self-canceling nonsense.

Yesterday we spoke of how, for early Christian thinkers, "the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth." Voegelin goes on to say that for these men, Christianity was "not an alternative to philosophy," but "philosophy itself in its state of perfection." Okay, like how?

The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according to reason... have in a sense been Christians.

This is in accord with what Augustine said:  

That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity.

The Logos is eternal, but "the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation of the Word in Christ" (Voegelin, emphasis mine). It seems that the Logos is in history in a general way before becoming particularized in Christ. It's a strange idea, but once you accept the existence of the Logos, why not? 

For what exactly is the Logos? Reason, rationality, intelligible structure, intelligent beings. Who says the fullness of the Logos couldn't dwell in a single person? This is essentially the metaphysical claim in the prologue to John -- that the Light that gives light to man qua man becomes flesh and dwells among us, not just then but now. Indeed, it must always be now as a consequence of infinitude assuming finitude.

 Anyway, Voegelin suggests that

a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man.

Ouch. I wouldn't go that far -- not everyone is cut out for philosophy -- but what is the question to which the Incarnation is the answer, and how does this event (and person) answer it?

There is no conflict "between gospel and philosophy," only "between the gospel and its uninquiring possession as doctrine." In other words, the latter is an unphilosophical attitude because it reduces the mystery to some explicit formulation, essentially conflating the words and the reality to which they point.

Instead of simply memorizing cutandry answers, "a sensible first step toward regaining for the gospel the reality it has lost through doctrinal hardening" is "to restore the inquiring mind to the position that is his due." 

Because "question and answer are intimately related one toward the other," the Answer "will not help the man who has lost the question." The life of reason involves

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. 

So, between question and answer is the luminous search; but man "can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible."

No luminosity for you! (A reminder that the light shines in the darkness but that the willfully dark cannot comprehend it.) 

Even prior to Christ, there is always the divine pull accompanied by man's restless seeking, both taking place in the tension of the in-between. For Voegelin these are reducible to a single movement: "In the one movement there is experienced a seeking from the human, [and] a being drawn from the divine pole." Put another way, God is "the mover who attracts or draws man to himself."

And Christ incarnates this very movement, from and to the Father-Source?

That was a question. It says in John that Christ will "draw all men to himself." And

This drawing power of Christ is identified with the pull exerted by God.

Was that the answer? If so, could you elaborate?

To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence in society and history.... of God's pull becoming effective in the world through Christ...

I don't know what else to say, so we'll end with this passage by Josef Pieper: there is a

rounding out of the circle in which the beginning and the end, the primal Origin of the creation and the ultimate Consummation of the creative process, meet and touch in Christ. 

And

we have no alternative but to conceive of this Incarnation as something which is still present and which will remain present for all future time. 

Supposing you're asking the right question. Right?

What Is It All About?

There's no reason to follow a religion unless one not only believes it is true, but conveys the ultimate truth(s). But in what manner does it do this? Literally? Symbolically? Experientially? Explicitly? Implicitly? And by what standard, and compared to what? In other words, how do we judge its truth? 

Yesterday's post set me off into an unplanned exploration of these and related questions, and now I'm going to share some of my preliminary findings, for example, 

every philosophical interpretation of the world and human existence relies, at least subconsciously, on certain general assumptions, which are not so much "knowledge" as rather "belief."

And Christian doctrine in particular, although its primary focus is salvation,

implies as well certain fundamental teachings on specifically philosophical matters -- the world and existence as such (Pieper).   

After all, it's not falsehood that sets one free. And to engage in philosophy as such "means to reflect on the totality of things we encounter, in view of their ultimate reasons," so there is an unavoidable convergence of philosophy and religion, unless one begins by placing arbitrary limits on one's philosophizing. No, "philosophy consists in the simple question, 'What is it all about?'"

And who is it that knows what it's all about? If we're reflecting on the totality of things, "the subject as well as the object is part of the totality encountered," and "true philosophy deals with everything given, within as well as without." 

Yesterday we touched on the ever-present distinction between reality and appearances. Now, no one ever says "ultimate appearances," since this would be an oxymoron; rather an appearance is always of a "deeper" reality (i.e, toward synthesis and unity). And

Precisely this dimension constitutes the aim of the philosopher's question. He investigates the ultimate, the "real" meaning -- not of this or that but of all that is.

Conversely, "Each science formulates one particular aspect" of the totality, and "studies only one tiny slice of reality but does so with extreme precision."

Which reminds me of an aphorism: 

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact.

Likewise, we are proposing a view of religion that considers it to be the ultimate science of the inexact, for "exactitude" and "infinitude" are at antipodes. Thus,

there exists a certain dimension the philosopher is concentrating on, about which the empirical sciences have little or nothing to say.

I think we need both, although philosophy must be subordinate -- or ordered -- to something transcending philosophy per se. Pieper suggests "the image of a polyphonic counterpoint," and why not? After all, as Balhasar says, truth is symphonic, thus implying a vertical harmony of voices within a horizontal melodic development:

In such a composition, independent melodies correlate with each other, accentuate, challenge, perhaps even disturb each other in such a way as to create a fresh, rich and captivating harmony that can no longer be explained by merely adding together its individual components (Pieper).

Yes. Sounds like the cosmic symphony to which I alluded on pp. 22-23 of The Book. Let's glance at it, and hope it's not too embarrassing:

The universe is like a holographic, multidimensional score that must be read, understood, and performed. Like the score of a symphony, it is full of information that can be rendered in different ways.

A little fruity for current tastes, but the point is well taken.

Today's little symphony will attempt to harmonize Pieper and Voegelin, although we won't have time to finish. In an essay called The Gospel and Culture, Voegelin asks why early Christianity attracted "an intellectual elite who restated the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy and, by this procedure, created a Christian doctrine?"

Come to think of it, that's precisely what this post is trying to be about: restating the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy.  

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...

Which I'm afraid it will do if it fails to reenter the culture of our time. It's too late to enter it's life of reason, since there isn't one. But perhaps it's not too late to resuscitate that life of reason, if not collectively, at least one assoul at a time. But in any event, consider the fact that once upon a time, "the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth" (emphasis mine).

That would be total truth, or the truth of the totality, but how does it do this? To be continued...

Religiology and Ultimate Reality

At the end of yesterday's post the following sentence popped unthinkingly from my fingertips, and now we have to figure out of it's true, true-ish, or what: 

For whatever else a religion is, it is a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality, or the absolute, or one's deepest concerns.

Well, it is symbolic, since it is conveyed to us via language. And it is more or less systematic; certainly Catholic doctrine is highly systematic, while other denominations are less so -- for example, Quakerism, which, from what little I know, is grounded in immediate experience:

Unprogrammed worship is based on silence and inward listening to the Spirit, from which any participant may share a message. In unprogrammed meetings for worship, someone speaks when that person feels that God/Spirit/the universe has given them a message for others. After anyone speaks, several minutes are allowed to pass before anyone else speaks, to allow the message to be considered carefully. Friends do not answer or argue about others' messages during meeting for worship.

So, the religion the almighty & them works out betwixt 'em. Silent head & open heart. 

Then there's Zen, which is also refreshingly dogma-free and grounded in experience. Taoism too is pretty uncluttered. 

But let's get back to the claim: a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality. Our first witness will be Schuon, even though, like a bad lawyer, I'm not certain how he will answer the question.

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral.

That seems to track with our thesis: a system to help us discern between reality and appearances. Elsewhere he writes that religion  

is an integral whole comparable to a living organism that develops according to necessary and exact laws; one might therefore call it a spiritual organism, or a social one in its most outward aspect. 

In any case, it is an organism and not a construction of arbitrary conventions; one cannot therefore legitimately consider the constituent elements of a religion independently of their inward unity, as if one were concerned with a mere collection of facts.

Ah ha. That's helpful, for it implies that the system we're talking about is not static, but rather, a holistic or organismic "process structure" with interior relations. 

Analogously, a single part of a biological organism cannot be understood outside the whole. Certainly Catholic theology looks at revelation in this way: for example, it exercises the old hermeneutic circle vis-a-vis scriptural interpretation, in which the whole is in the part and vice versa. I guess you could say that Christ vivifies each part. 

Next witness: our Aphorist, of course, and again, I'm not sure of his testimony, but this first one is a favorite:

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

True, but this presumes the existence of the soul to which religion speaks. Just how does it speak to the soul?

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

And

Even in the immensity of space we feel caged. Mystery is the only infinity that does not seem like a prison.

Conversely, 

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be.

Instant karma:

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment. 

Back to our thesis. To put it another way, religion is a symbolic system to help us navigate the farthest reaches of the soul.

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...

Depending on how you look at it, it is a dimension of height or depth, but in any case, 

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

 Moreover,

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

 This is partly because

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

So, to lose one is is to lose the ability to make sense of the the other. Returning full circle to religiology and ultimate reality,  

As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded on rock.

And speaking of the whole vivifying the parts, 

The voice of God passes through the sacred text as a wind storm through the leaves of the forest trees.

Beautiful simile. To be continued...