No Vacancy!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued... assuming interest.

Adaptation to the Environment vs. Openness to Being

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Eavesdropping on Nature's God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Do Babies -- and Men and Women -- Come From?

Insufficient time for an all new post. But don't go away! I found one from SIX years ago and another from FOUR years ago, and if you're like me, you probably don't remember that far back anyway. Plus, they go to exactly the subject discussed in the latter half of yesterdays's comment section: whether heterosexuality and homosexuality are just relative societal constructs that mutually define each other, like up and down, or east and west.

The first post begins with a quote about a daring "artist" whose work, if I recall correctly, involves menstrual blood or her aborted baby or something:

Ms. Shvarts is engaged in performance art. The entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding the form and function of a woman’s body. --A Yale Woman

There is then a second quote from a psychoanalytic anthropologist, Weston LaBarre, who wrote an apparently obscure book back in the 1950s that I stumbled upon and found extremely useful in illuminating that yawning abyss between ape and man:

Luckily, there are always enough women who respect themselves as women to serve as models for those who do not.... Clearly, a society's attitudes toward women and toward maternity will deeply influence its psychological health and all its other institutional attitudes.

And then on to the substance of the post, which I am now reading and will edit or pad as necessary. Gags that don't pass the test will be ruthlessly striken:

Let's discuss one of my favorite subjects, the ambiguity surrounding the form and function of a woman's body...

The first thought that occurs to me is that leftism is neither scientific nor religious, so that it naturally results in ambiguity -- which is just a fancy word for confusion -- about the form and function of the human body -- indeed, about the very purpose of human existence. It is how and why one is reduced to being a "performance artist" to begin with. Suffice it to say, there are no conservative performance artists.

Feminist delusions aside, there is no confusion at all on the scientific level, nor is there confusion on the religious; the tricky part is harmonizing these two, which is the very purpose of the latter, esoterically understood, i.e., the conjunctio oppositorum of male-and-female.

Let's start with some psychoanalytic observations that are sure to bring some very surprised and disappointed google searchers to this site. As I discussed in the Coonifesto, the human being is intrinsically trimorphic, consisting of the three-in-one entity of father-mother-baby.

Let's set aside for the moment the question of whether these represent archetypal religious categories, and speak purely in terms of evolutionary psychology. The fact is, none of these three -- father, mother, baby -- could have evolved in the absence of the other two. As LaBarre puts it, the "functional togetherness of individuals is the essence of human nature; it is openly visible in the very physiques of women, children, and men."

For example, the helpless baby -- whose neoteny and neurological plasticity are the very gateway to humanness -- is only made possible by the full attention of the mother, who is in turn only made possible by the protection of the father. In this regard, both the baby and the father have diverse "claims" on the mother's body. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, you could say that the breast both refers to and rightfully "belongs" to the baby, while parts south are claimed by the father. (And please, no idiotic complaints about the oppression of "owning" someone else; that has precisely nothing to do with this discussion, which is about love, not hate.)

LaBarre explains: "No wild animal has a permanent breast. The female in Homo sapiens possesses such a specialization alone of all the mammals -- with the exception of the domesticated milch animals which are man's own creation long after the fact of his humanity. This anatomical feature in humans, however, is more than a mere 'domesticated' trait and certainly more than a merely cosmetic creation of sexual selection. It is, rather, one of the causes of human domestication itself, in a complex chain of mutually related factors."

But the baby is again key, as the greater closeness and intimacy of the mother-infant bond has later profound effects on our desire and ability to bond with the opposite sex and recreate that kind of physical-emotional intimacy. (The postmodernists definitely take love for granted, as if it has no prior necessary conditions in development.)

Let's pause here for a moment, and think about all the weird google searches that are going to end up here. But in a logoistic cosmos, the world is made of language, and the human body is no exception. And what is the message of the human body (restricting ourselves for the moment to science)?

It is that the body is not made for oneself, but for the other. I can't remember the psychoanalytic theorist who discusses this, nor does it really matter, but it is a kind of narcissism to presume that one's genitals belong to oneself, so to speak. Rather, penis "belongs" to vagina, and vice versa (obvious, right?). The one is obviously meaningless in the absence of the other, for it is robbed of its sufficient reason; each is a signifier that doesn't refer to itself, but to its complementary opposite, on which it has a "lawful" claim ("lawful," as in being "in the nature of things").

This, I suggest, is the "spirit" of the truth which the Biblical injunction condemning onanism (and homosexuality, for that matter) is really about, for it violates God's design: that it is not good for man to be alone (or with a narcissistic image of himself, which amounts to the same thing via proxy).

As LaBarre explains, one of the "wrong messages" one may internalize from a dysfunctional childhood is that "there is no love to be had in another's body, and his only pleasure resources are in his own body and his own mind; he is not taught by love of the Other, the not-self that lies outside his own organic skin." Thus, the real injunction is against a self-sufficiency that forecloses the space where love and knowledge (not to mention religion) occur. The same thing would apply to alcoholism, or food addiction, or any other activity that encloses us in vice instead of versa.

LaBarre writes that "the permanent human breast and heightened sexuality evidence a persistent and organically rooted inter-individual interest in other persons." (LaBarre was an atheist, but nevertheless, his focus on persons lifts him above and beyond his self-imposed naturalistic horizon.)

In other words, our intrinsic intersubjectivity -- which is what marks us as human -- rests upon a foundation of interobjectivity, of bodily need for the complementary other.

In this regard, the importance of father cannot be overemphasized, and more generally, the trimorphic situation that made (and makes) the emergence of the human being possible. For humanness could never have developed in a diadic, much less monadic, situation. Obviously this is a fruitful area for theological speculation as well, but we will defer that discussion for now.

What LaBarre means is that the female was able to specialize in motherhood only by "luring" the male with year round sexual availability (i.e., the loss of estrus). So you could say that the human female was the "domesticate" of the male; or, you could say that the human female was clever enough to trick the human male into imagining that she was his domesticate. Or, you could say that the helpless baby was cleverest of all, ensuring his own survival by coaxing intersubjectivity and monogamy out of proto-human apes.

But the story obviously didn't end there. As LaBarre explains, once the trimorphic situation was in place, human beings were subjectively "plugged in" to one another in an entirely novel way that allowed us to fully transcend Darwinian evolution in an ever-upward spiral. "The real evolutionary unit now is not man's mere body; it is 'all - mankind's - brains - together - with - all - the - extrabodily - materials - that - come - under - the - manipulation - of - their - hands."

Here I should point out that the emergence of the human hand (or something similar) was another necessary condition for the emergence of humanness, as its infinite uses emancipated man into the world of abstraction (for example, many evolutionary psychologists believe that human language first began as sign language, which would explain why the language center is in the left brain, as it controls the right hand).

LaBarre notes that "It is a tragedy of our male-centered culture that women do not fully enough know how important they are as women." In this regard, we can see how the sort of contemporary feminism embraced by an Aliza Shvarts is simply a pathological image of the "patriarchy" it presumes to overturn. In reality, it does not advance the cause of women, but undermines the very possibility being one, Shvarts herself being a fine example. She represents a cutting edge that cuts only downward:

"... [W]e reward those that discover, as Shvarts has, new and ever more deeply depraved, depths. And don't think this little episode of glorifying multiple spontaneous abortions is the end. I often think 'Surely, we've reached the bottom.' And just as often I am reminded, as I am by the depraved Ms. Shvarts, that there really is no bottom.... I'm predicting, and I won't be wrong, that her 'show' will be attended by throngs and a major gallery in New York will sign her. Few of the people involved will have children. Childless and soulless are the hallmarks of that tribe. Such is the nature of the parasites we've allowed to infest us" (Vanderleun, emphasis mine).

In attacking the very foundation of society, radical feminism drags down men and babies with it, and then wonders why everything is so "ambiguous." Once you determine that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, you are only one step away from the human jungle from which we emerged. Babies don't need mothers, boys don't need to be men or husbands or fathers, and -- pardon my Greek -- penises might just as well refer to anuses as vaginas.

I had wanted to get into the religious angle of all this, but that will have to await the next post.

The human female is in every significant respect exuberantly more mammalian than any other mammal. Among mammalian infants, the human infant is as extravagantly infantile as they come. And among male animals, the human male is too without a doubt the best mammal in the business. In these [evolutionary] circumstances, with father come home to stay, it is clearly the inescapable predicament of Homo sapiens to become human. --Weston LaBarre

That's enough for today. I don't want to abuse the reader's attention span...

The Monkey in the Middle of the Cosmo-Christic Revolution

I suppose a few more words about words are in order, since I don't have time to come up with a new subject.

Balthasar shares the Raccoon principle that "the true image of God lies in the reciprocity of man and woman" (to which I might add the baby; the tripartite family strikes me as the most adequate earthly icon of God).

In order to eliminate God -- or the vertical, if you like -- the left has succeeded in changing the plain meaning of man, woman, child, and marriage. Now, grace is a force multiplier. I frankly don't understand how a marriage can truly thrive in its absence. Seems a rather foolish and shortsighted thing to exclude it before one even embarks upon the project.

Odd that a complete nobody from nowhere would suggest that though the heavens and the earth may pass away, his words will not. This can only mean -- among other things -- that these words are both prior to and beyond existence: before Abraham was, I AM. This would also explain their peculiar power, in that they must be grounded in a different source. Thus his words possess an "incomprehensible, and yet evident, superiority over all things past and present" (ibid.). Which is why they persist.

The closest analogue would be poetry, which is also "powerful speech" -- or speech that draws part of its power from some extra-linguistic source. Note that this is not just a question of true-or-false in the conventional sense. Dávila has an aphorism to the effect that A work of art has, properly speaking, not meaning but power. Likewise the divine Word: there is meaning, yes, but it is a curious kind of meaning that has the power to perpetually deepen and surpass itself. (So much for being opposed to change!)

So words, if they are not rooted in vertical reality, are indeed like the light of dead stars. Balthasar writes that "Man and his language can certainly 'abstract,' but only as the tree draws its sap up from the earth." Thus, "every spreading of the upper leaves requires a deeper taking root below, otherwise the top breaks" and "everything has to start growing again from below."

Or above rather, since this must be that Upanishadic tree we hear so much about, its roots aloft, its convenient local branches down below. But without that nonlocal tree, what are words, really? Just piles of dead and fallen leaves swept into temporary piles by your crazy deconstructionist gardner.

Furthermore, the mad gardner assures us that the piles have no intrinsic meaning, but rather, are just masks for power. Which is a curious thing, because words, in forsaking their real power, partake of a another. But this latter is merely human power, or the fallen power of the tenured, or of the state, or of the slack-denying agents of the department of Fuck You, Pay Me.

Man is the bipedal creature with one foot in the horizontal, the other in the vertical dimension. The latter "reaches without a break from the spirit through the soul and the living body down into matter" (ibid.). Lately we've been discussing the radical discontinuities between matter and life, life and intellect, Petey and troll, etc. Importantly, the discontinuity is only from the horizontal perspective, or from the bottom-up. From the top-down it vanishes, as per the inverted tree discussed above.

If this were not the case, then there would be no accounting for how "matter blooms into spirit" -- which it is capable of doing because "prior" to this, spirit has taken root in matter. We put "prior" in scare quotes because this is obviously something that is outside time.

This is one of the key principles of the Cosmo-Christic revolution, IMHO -- that there is a simultaneous "corporalization of the spirit" and "spiritualization of the body, neither existing without the other" (ibid.).

In practical terms, this means that "If the body strove one-sidedly to become spirit, without allowing the spirit correspondingly to penetrate the body and become one with it, then man would be striving away from himself into a chimerical self-alienation" (ibid.).

Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man pick apart and destroy. Or at least don't elect such a man to high office, or let him near our children, or place him on the Supreme Court.

Within the vertical there are the Two Pneumatic Winds, which we like to symbolize with the up and down arrows (⇅). Yes, you can try to have one without the other, but it will always end badly.

"[I]n this dual movement man is suspended in the middle, since neither the Dionysian drive back to the material origins, nor the Promethean drive to pure spirit brings him nearer to himself, and the two tendencies cannot be made into one.

"As a product of the maternal earth and paternal heaven he has to turn his face toward both, without being able to see both at once. He cannot find his ground or take his rest in either, or both at once, but only in him who has created heaven and earth, spirit, and matter, day and night" (ibid.).

Obvious when you think about it.

By man's keeping himself open in the suspended center to movement toward the depths, his language is constantly enriched from heaven and earth.... [But] when the mystery of the ground of being fades, then the expressive power of words fades also. --Balthasar

See our progressive troll for the fascinating details.

Sudden, Like a Word

"In OUR beginning was the Word." Or so says Joan d'Argghh!: It "is the miracle that happened when man became a living soul. To even form a thought, a Word has to precede it. An Articulation of everything had to happen, a thing said, that contains everything that came into being after it."

Yes. The human word is very much like the metabolism which is the basis of life. There is nothing "in between" metabolism and death, just as there is nothing between word and... What could be its opposite, anyway? Anything we can come up with will be another word.

I think this equates to the Thomistic idea that to exist is to be intelligible, and to be intelligible is to partake of the Word. Likewise man: he has a soul, which is both his seat of intelligence and the intimate form of his identity. Thus, it has a public and private face, one that exteriorizes itself toward the objective horizon, another that is the invisible essence of the subjective horizon.

"I tried to think of my first thought and it's as impossible to know and as far away as the Big Bang. And yet, it's as true for the first man is it is for the cosmos. The Word is our soul" (J of A). Or as Aristotle put it, "the soul is all it knows." And it can know any-thing in potential: again, there is nothing in existence that cannot potentially be known, because to exist is to be intelligible.

Thus, it makes no sense to search for the "beginning" of man in historical time, for the simple reason that his beginning transcends time. "His body may have evolved from the brutes," writes GKC, "but we know nothing of any such transition that throws the smallest light upon his soul as it has shown itself in history."

The ambiguous term "prehistory" tends to elide this irruption (or vertical ingression) of soul within biology. It again implies a gradual transition where there cannot be one. It draws a linguistic veil over an intrinsic mystery and pretends the mystery is due to the veil, not vice versa. It is somewhat like the linguistic misdirection of calling a baby a fetus, not in order to comprehend, but in order to mis-comprehend or de-understand -- to render what must be a singularity into something gradual so as to avoid the sixth commandment.

Just so, the "monkey does not draw clumsily and a man cleverly.... A monkey does not do it at all; he does not begin to do it at all; he does not begin to begin to do it at all" (GKC). For to begin to do it is to be doing it: "A line of some kind is crossed before the first faint line can begin."

More generally -- you know, logic -- "it is hardly an adequate explanation of how a thing appeared for the first time to say it existed already." Unless the "already existing" is a radically different thing than we had thought it to be. Either way, the conventional explanation fails.

Importantly, it doesn't just fail atheists and other materialists, but it fails man. It is wholly unworthy of him, infinitely beneath his station. Now, why would man want to auto-castrate in this manner? I don't know, but it is mighty similar to the ubiquitous compulsion on the left to denigrate western civilization, or our Judeo-Christian heritage, or the United States, or the founders, or the free market, or technology...

But why, Bob, why? I'll tell you why: because man, as man, loves truth. Therefore, all one must do in order to pervert a man is to convince him that the lie is true, and he will defend it to the death. Or, in the case of a craven liberal, until it is extremely inconvenient to do so. Otherwise he requires a bodyguard of likeminded bullies to defend his outrageous claims.

This is why the left requires near total dominance of the media, academia, and the culture just to gain roughly fifty percent of the vote. Think about that: suppression of truth cannot occur on terms of equal power, because then truth can rely upon logic and evidence to win the day.

But the lie can hold 90% of the ideological ground, and this will never be sufficient, hence the inevitable "totalitarian temptation" of the left. Truth must be burned from our midst and its ground salted in order to kill it, but even then, you can't, because truth isn't ours to create or destroy (see the Resurrection for details). Or, at the other end, see the Soviet Union for details.

Yes, God makes a special covenant with the Jews, but Balthasar reminds us that prior to this, with Noah, he makes a more general covenant "with the whole of mankind and the whole of creation." I hadn't thought of that one before, but in Noah all peoples are explicitly blessed, although "they had already been implicitly blessed since Adam..." Even so, it's good to get things down on paper.

The wider point is that there exists "an historical logos proper to the 'peoples' as such," something touched upon by Joan, who writes of how interesting it is "that Man's first 'work' was to name the animals; to name them was to recognize his transcendence, his otherness. To see that none of them were like him was the first philosophy lesson of Man." In order to name at all, reality must first be intelligible; thus, to name is to recognize essences, which is the very basis of transcendent intelligence.

Balthasar writes of how, in the early fathers, there is "the curious alternation between two contradictory motifs. The first is a logos in the nonbiblical peoples, which in turn has in it seeds of the whole, which ripen toward the fullness of the incarnate Logos in the gospel." The second is the elucidation of the Logos as such, again, as particular is to universal. The task is actually to situate the latter in the former -- which is say, situate man in Christ rather than vice versa.

As to how this gets inverted, coincidentally, Balthasar cites Chesterton, who wrote of how "the world is full of Christian ideas gone mad. The Gospels and the Church are plundered like a fruit tree, but the fruit when separated from the trees goes rotten and cannot be used." Nor can the "ideas" of Christ be separated from the person of Christ without losing their value.

Here we confront the question of "stars that have long become extinct continuing to shine." How to tell the difference? In other words, we can look up to the night sky and the living star will look identical to the long dead one.

Every visible star is "a long time ago." But man is always "in the beginning," for we are the occasion for the light to be seen at all. It is again a matter of the Logos, for "wherever being is illuminated, however obscurely, there is [man's] humanity, and he becomes illuminated to himself as spirit."

The "miracle of language" involves an orthoparadoxical "unity of oneness and distance" (Balthasar). It is (as alluded to by Joan) "what gives man dominion over nature and raises him like a king above all the beasts.... By themselves they are unnamed, as they are incapable of raising themselves into the light of self-comprehension; but the word of man knows and names them from the height of his light, and, thus, he dominates them in their innermost being from a higher point than they can themselves" (Balthasar).

Secular Myth and Religious Science

"The simplest truth about man," writes Chesterton, "is that he is a very strange being."

Just as it is impossible to look at a dead universe and foresee life, it is impossible to look at animals and see an incipient man. You could say that man is just a weird animal, but that doesn't quite cut it; for he appears more like an alien "from another land" than "a mere growth of this one."

As we hope to explain, "It is not natural to see man as a natural product" (ibid.). For man is not simply an extension of animality, nor a prolongation of biology. What then?

Well, for starters -- and this is as true today as it was when Chesterton wrote it in 1925 -- "there is not a shadow of evidence that this thing was evolved at all." The thing to which he refers is "a mind with a new dimension of depth."

Again, this dimension is at a right angle to everything that came (chronologically) before. As we have argued declared in number of posts, depth is the dimension of soul; or of height, if you like (or even breadth). Either way, soul is the nonlocal organ of verticality, or of vertical perception. It is truly what defines the human person and sets him apart from all other things in existence. A man without a soul would be an animal; I'll give you that.

The soul is not a product of evolution because it cannot be a product of evolution. No one has ever explained how this could even be possible, let alone actual.

Nor is there "a particle of proof that this transition came slowly, or even that it came naturally." Indeed, how could something that is self-evidently trans-natural ever have arisen via nature? If nature is capable of rising up and outside itself, then this only proves that we have no idea what nature really is. Show me the naturalistic principle that renders the human subject even possible (just the subject, mind you, not even the soul).

We are told that there is a definable line between this cosmos and whatever "preceded" it, i.e., the Big Bang. To be sure, the Big Bang cannot be the beginning of existence per se, only of this existence (or order). Similarly, there is an identifiable boundary between life and death, or living and nonliving matter. Neither is a continuum, but rather, a singularity: a sudden transition.

Likewise the human person: "It was not and it was; we know not in what instant or in what infinity of years. Something happened; and it has all the appearance of a transaction outside of time" (emphasis mine).

Now, why is the Conspiracy resistant to such a self-evident truth? It didn't used to be this way. Rather, all men at all times have intuited the vertical ground of the soul.

Consider the cave painting in yesterday's post. Someone was driven to produce that. He did not first attend kindergarten, where he was furnished with crayons and finger paint and encouraged to express his creativity. Nor can one say it was simply "spontaneous," because there was nothing in his environment answering to the spontaneous urge. Rather, the creative impulse must have come "out of nowhere."

Besides: urge to do what, exactly? Yes, to create an aesthetically beautiful image. Is your soul really satisfied by a deduction from a priori Darwinian principles, through which you may confidently affirm that he did it for reasons of more booty? Then you, sir, have lost your soul. And that includes your intellect.

Clearly, that image is prima facie evidence of a "transaction outside of time." How do we know this? For starters, because it is timeless -- 30,000 years later, and we're still admiring it. Furthermore, it is something that human beings -- so long as they are human -- will always and forever be capable of admiring. There will never be a man incapable of appreciating timeless beauty -- nor timeless truth or universal virtue. Although the left is certainly doing its best to abolish man, there will never be a day when humans cannot potentially know and appreciate transtemporal truth and objective morality.

Humanness is an irreducible cosmic category, something we must simply accept and move on. This is the point, say, of the Declaration of Independence, i.e., that all men are created, and created equal. Just declare it and move along, for to deny it renders any good polis strictly impossible.

In other words, to say that there are no self-evident truths about man is to not only say that we shall argue over first principles forever, but that there is no way to arrive at the truth anyway. What is left? Power, or the law of the Obama jungle.

Chesterton cooncurs that the existence of the soul "has nothing to do with with history in the ordinary sense." Rather, "the historian must take it or something like it for granted; it is not his business as a historian to explain it." He can, like an idiot, defer to the biologist, but the biologist is even less equipped to deal with the question.

What is the question again? How did this mysterious alien being get here?

The other day, our invincibly dense anonymous troll expressed disdain for the function of myth. What is myth? First, myth is something produced by (or better, "in") man, not by a man. It embodies a kind of higher (which is to say, vertical) collective wisdom; one might say that it is analogous to what instinct is in animals. Thus, a proper myth reveals vital truths about human nature. Are there myths in Genesis? Of course. As if this is an insult!

There are also secular myths that provide a ground for psychic unity, making us spiritual brothers, so to speak. When I was a child, I heard the one about George Washington having never told a lie. When I was in college, I heard the one about him being nothing more than a racist slaveholder looking after his own economic interests.

The former is infinitely closer to the truth of the matter, the truth being that every American (and frankly, every human being) must count himself lucky and grateful that such a great soul appeared when and where he did in the stream of history. And that's the point of the myth, jackass. Not only does it save a lot of time, but it inoculates one against infectious tenure.

A Mirror, Wrapped in a Space, Inside a Cave

If we find a turtle on top of a fencepost, we can be sure it didn't get there by itself. And if we stumble upon a painting, we know it was made by man.

Back beyond the horizon of myth, some 30 or 40 thousand years ago, our first parents tunneled to the center of the earth, to the womb of nature, and left their pneumagraphs. These were not just men, but artists, or maybe you can pull this off (and remember, you first have to invent paint and brushes, and don't forget to bring a flashlight):

The first thing one wants to say is: how is it possible that artistic standards have so deteriorated since then?

For Chesterton, these efforts show "the experimental and adventurous spirit of the artist, the spirit that does not avoid but attempts difficult things.... In this and twenty other details it is clear that the artist had watched animals with a certain interest and presumably a certain pleasure."

Or in other words, the paintings reveal the uniquely human combination of objectivity and disinterest on the one hand, and aesthetic delight on the other.

Now, objectivity is transcendence; it stands outside and above, "uncontaminated" by the passions. Conversely, the delight of aesthetic pleasure is obviously subjective; it is not only embodied, but impossible to know in the absence of a body. But this is what man IS: to paraphrase Schuon, he is intellect, sentiment, and will; and he is these things because there is truth, love, and freedom. Intellect is conformed to truth, sentiment to beauty, and will to virtue.

The paintings are of course beautiful, but they also (obviously) reveal a break in nature from necessity to freedom: only an idiot would suggest that these paintings reveal no more freedom than do the spider's web or beaver's dam. There is nothing superfluous in those instinctive constructions, whereas the cave paintings are joyously useless. And when I say "useless," I mean that in the best possible sense. Even if they had some "utilitarian" purpose, they are far more accomplished than they needed to be in order to serve that purpose.

So, I suppose what we want to know is, 1) how did man transcend nature and exit the physical cosmos?, and 2) how did he seemingly enter it more deeply and become so passionately involved in it? As I mentioned a few posts back, it is as if all other vertebrates are on a two-dimensional line (we could say that invertebrates are one-dimensional points). But humans exist in a three- (or four-, really, including time) dimensional space that extends both up and down, forward and back. Perhaps you may have gnosissed how incredibly "roomy" it is in here. How is this so? What is going on in here?

If you have been to college -- or worse, graduate school -- these questions do not come up, because they have long ago been barricaded by the Conspiracy -- the Conspiracy to Steal Your Slack. And Slack is nothing if it is not this expansive and ever expanding soulspace "inside" our heads. I put that in scare quotes, because it is literally the case that our heads are in this space, as per yesterday's post. Although body and soul go together, the body is in the soul, not vice versa (which would be impossible); in other words, form transcends substance.

Long story short -- or maybe 100,000 years is actually a very short span of time relative to a 14 billion year-old cosmos. It would represent what... math is hard... you figure it out. The point is, when speaking of matters that are sui generis, who knows what constitutes a long time? It is not as if we have anything else to compare it to. No doubt for God it is a blink of the eye. You might ask: why did he wait so long to incarnate? To which I might respond: why did the Big Bang wait so long to bang?

So, the two people who first discovered the cave paintings "dug very deep and found the place where a man had drawn the picture of a reindeer. But [they] would dig a good deal deeper before [they] found a place were a reindeer had drawn a picture of a man" (ibid.). This sounds frivolous, and yet, it entails a deep truth: everyone who hasn't been to graduate school appreciates the infinite gap between animals and man, and will not waste his life trying to prove the gap isn't real, or that reindeers can draw more than sleighs, or that spider webs really are works of art.

Yes but: those latter can be quite beautiful, can't they? Now, what is that all about? I'm kind of partial to this one -- in a completely disinterested way, of course:

What we want to know is, why was there so much damn beauty in the cosmos, with no one there to appreciate it? Why is the world beautiful at all? Why does this category even exist?

The reason is that the world is created. Man, being in the image of the Creator, is the co-creator. Creation and freedom go together like intellect and truth. Man is free. Free to do what? Free to create. Create what? Beauty.

Or maybe you have a better idea of what to do with yours. Certainly that is true of the left, for whom artistic creativity is subordinated to an ideology that denies both freedom and beauty -- and therefore man.

The existence of primitive art also speaks to absoluteness, for knowledge of perfection is knowledge of the Absolute. Again, no animal endeavors to improve itself or its behaviors. But the human effort to do so is only possible in light of a transcendent standard. Which is in turn why no great work of art can surpass another -- each has reached the threshold of the absolute, and therefore done its job. What's better, the Pieta or the Divine Comedy?

This would explain why in the cave paintings we see no evidence of "development or degree. Monkeys did not begin pictures and men finish them; Pithecanthropus did not draw a reindeer badly and Homo sapiens draw it well" (ibid.). Rather, as soon as art commences, it is attuned to transcendent perfection. This is indeed what makes it art and not just postmodern scribbling.

So, "we cannot even talk about it without treating man as something separate from nature. In other words, every sane sort of history must begin with man as man, a thing standing absolute and alone" (ibid.).

Man's ultimate origin is not only beyond the horizon of myth, but beyond the horizon of science, since it is not only at a right angle to science, but reveals the very space in which science takes place.

"This creature was truly different from all other creatures; because he was a creator as well as a creature.... somehow or other a new thing had appeared in the cavernous night of nature, a mind that is like a mirror.... as in the furniture of a room a table may be round like a mirror or a cupboard may be larger than a mirror. But the mirror is the only thing that can contain them all. Man is the microcosm; man is the measure of all things; man is in the image of God" (Chesterton).

Slow Motion Miracles

Continuing with the spirit of yesterday's post -- which everyone agrees was much too short -- we are batting around the idea that man is not an evolution but a revolution; not a genetic stroll but an ontological leap; not a random reshuffling of existent materials but an entirely novel development.

That word, evolution: I don't think it means what they think it means -- or at least their definition begs the (?!). For Chesterton, "this notion of something smooth and slow, like the ascent of a slope, is a great part of the illusion. It is an illogicality as well as an illusion; for slowness has really nothing to do with the question. An event is not any more intrinsically intelligible or unintelligible because of the pace at which it moves" (emphasis mine).

In other words, if I pull a rabbit out of a hat rrrreeealllllly sloooooooooowwwwlllly, it doesn't make it any less of a trick. Likewise if I pull life out of matter or man out of ape. If you don't believe in miracles, then "a slow miracle would be just as incredible as a swift one." But our fast-talking scientistic magicians engage in a kind of sleight of hand, or misdirection, by waving their evolutionary wands over what is nevertheless a roiling mystery.

The fundamental question remains, and cannot be "answered by some substitution of gradual for abrupt change," by "the same story being spun out or rattled rapidly through, as can be done with any story at a cinema by turning a handle." Or pressing the fast-forward button.

After all, Genesis presents the same story, only vry qkly. (That must be why Hebrew has no vowels, right? You can write it even faster.)

The other evening I was confessing to some friends that I have never actually read the Bible in its entirety. Why? Because I can hardly get past Genesis. It's just too rich. After all, in a remarkably compact narrative, it provides us with timeless lessons in cosmogony, ontology, metaphysics, anthropology, psychology, human sexuality, marriage, linguistics, sibling rivalry, snake-handling, and a bunch of other things I can't think of at the moment. Although brief, Genesis provokes a kind of "endless understanding" -- like some kind of bush that burns forever without being consumed. (Here is a book that tries to explicate all that is implicit in it, but it can only scratch the sophitch.)

I have the same problem with the book of John, by the way. John even alludes to this at the very end, with his crack about the "many other things that Jesus did, which if they were written one by one, I suppose even the world itself could not contain the books that would be written." I believe that one hunnerd percent. Why? Because he's still doing them, for starters.

Recall what was said a few posts back about the nature of mystery: it is not mysterious because unintelligible, but rather, the converse: because of an excess of intelligibility. In other words, it is a fount of endless understanding -- like Genesis. From where does this excess arise? How does this blinding light inhere in here? How can a container be so much smaller than its content?

Well, just look at your head -- or your brain. It is "finite," right? -- encased inside your skull. And yet, it is for all intents and purposes infinite, or at least partakes of infinity. No one will ever write the last poem or compose the last melody, unless there are no men left to write and compose.

We can see the begending of the cosmos -- the background radiation from the big bang -- but will never get to the end of the mind. Being is rich beyond the gift of language; words are like the shovels we use to dig into the ground -- which is why philosophy is waaaay beyond useful, to the point of complete and utter uselessness. To reduce it to some practical formula is to suffocate it in tenure.

Now, when I say that the mind is infinite, I am of course referring to our own queer kind, not the Other folkers. Other subspecies of man -- other Homos -- most certainly get to the end of their minds and then call it a life -- leftists, for example, who already know everything, and never tire of telling us so. They are the ones who superimpose magic upon mystery and call it "science." But real science is literally a never-ending process that does not disclose the nature of reality, because it is a consequence of that prior reality.

But despite their magical word games, "a mystery still attaches to the two great transitions: the origin of the universe itself and the origin of the principle of life itself." Furthermore, with man, "a third bridge was built across a third abyss of the unthinkable when there came into the world what we call reason and what we call will" (Chesterton) -- i.e., intellect and freedom, or truth and virtue.

This talk of a "bridge" highlights an extremely important principle, because this bridge is not just from the past to the present but from the top down; what I mean is that the human bridge doesn't just face down and back, but all the way up; or, from God's perspective, all the way down.

Irrespective of the contribution from the genetic/horizontal side of things, there was a moment when man became "ensouled" (and therefore man) and stepped upon this bridge. There was some mythterious moment when primate neurology was capable of hosting a human soul -- or when an animal became a person -- when God breathed a living soul into him.

Almost in passing, Rizzi suggests something similar in The Science Before Science -- that between man and "penultimate man" is "an infinite abyss: the difference between not having and having the ability to abstract ideas, the difference between having and not having an intellect....

"Such a transition," he continues, "is the most important transition of [the] universe. It marks a transitional event of a unique and profound type. At the transition point, something is about to join the universe that is infinitely greater than the entire mere material universe" (emphasis mine).

Think about that: it is very much analogous the the skull/brain relation described above. Suddenly we have the ingression of something vaster than the universe in the universe.

Wo. Can I buy some pot from you?

Here's the orthoparadoxical deal: if man weren't already a person, he could never become one. It's all-or-none, like non-existence/existence and matter/life. Nor can a person be "made," rather, only created. Thus, persons as such are evidence of the Creator-person.

So, how did it all go down, if not via natural selection? That's for God to know and us to find out. Besides, if he told you, the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.

Man: Miracle or Monster?

Hmm. As our president is fond of saying of his Straw Man of the Day, I reject this false choice!

I read Chesterton's The Everlasting Man several weeks ago, and remember being impressed at how he was able to apprehend certain ideas of mine before I was even born. Later we will get into the metaphysics of clairvoyant plagiarism and eschatological theft, but right now I want to set my bitterness aside and review what I discovered. I'll even be magnanimous and say "co-discovered."

Readers who have been with me from the beginning will recall one of our central principles -- that our cosmos has not been subject to just one bang, but several. And indeed, the later bangs are even more inexplicable than the first, since it is always possible to imagine that there was something prior to that initial one -- a big suck, for example.

What I mean is that the Big Bang of cosmology is not necessarily a case of creation from nothing, whereas this is not true of the subsequent bangs. They truly are creatio ex nihilo -- or, to be precise, there is nothing from the past that can explain them. They are cases of radical novelty that can in no way be reduced to their antecedent conditions.

Specifically, there is nothing we know about matter per se that allows us to entertain the notion that it might suddenly come alive, or play host to life. Frankly, it is the last thing in the world we would expect of matter, which is, after all, material. That's why we call it matter: because it is dead. You could stare at a pile of dirt and wait for it to start moving around of its own accord, but this is like watching paint dry and expecting it to turn into a painter.

Likewise -- and this will be the main subject of our post -- there is nothing about living (subhuman) animals that would permit us to see in them a budding Mozart, or an Aquinas struggling to get out. Nothing.

To the extent that scientistic types do see something, that constitutes literary backshadowing of the most naively childish kind -- similar to (as in yesterday's comments) foolish progressives who look at Christopher Columbus and see Josef Stalin. In short, we cannot understand a past reality with knowledge that was unavailable at the time. We cannot look at animals from the perspective of a reality totally unknown and unknowable to them. Truly, we have no idea what it is like to be a bat (or any other animal, for that matter), nor they us.

In other words -- and this is the nub of the gist -- there is not a line between animals and man, but an infinite and unbridgeable gap. To be sure, we may discern some some horizontal/material lines, but the gap between Bach and birdsong is as wide as the one between matter and life. No one with knowledge of birds only would anticipate symphonies.

If we are honest with ourselves, we see that "man is not an evolution, but a revolution" (Azar, from the introduction). Take those paleolithic cave-paintings, for example: "Nowhere do we find pictures of dogs drawn by cats," nor paintings of men produced by monkeys. Thus, "art is the signature of man." If we see it, we know without question that a man produced it.

But this self-evident observation has profound implications, first, "that man is not only a creature, but a creator as well" (ibid). And ultimately -- and I would say self-evidently, if we follow the logic to its end -- this is because man is in the image of the Creator.

In other words, man does not create creativity, so you can stop pondering how all the novelty got here, and forget about trying to shoehorn it all back into matter and necessity. Truly, doing so is precisely analogous to shoving the cosmos back into the singularity of 13.7 billion years ago and saying "that's all it is." Or, it is to equate the oak and the acorn and insist that only the latter is really real.

The game is easy to play, and is a favorite pastime of the progressive ignorantsia: for example, a human being is just selfish genes, the global economy is just the white man's greed, human nature is a war on women, etc. Each case involves the weird compulsion to auto-castrate and render oneself spiritually and intellectually infertile. True, it makes the mystery of man go away, but at the cost of genocide. And make no mistake: the real genocides of this world wouldn't have been possible without first making man less than what he is. Doing so isn't a sufficient condition for genocide, but it is a necessary one.

The attributes that define man are not to be found in the past, in antecedents. We alluded to one of them above, creativity. Others include freedom, speech, love, objectivity, and the apprehension of beauty.

To paraphrase Chesterton, Man either stands among the living as a miracle or a monster. For the left, man is a monster that they propose to "cure" or reform through state-sponsored coercion. For us, man is a kind of fallen miracle who may heal and elevate himself through a living relationship with what surpasses him, with his vertical source. In other words, man is the measure of things to the extent that he is in turn measured by something above and beyond, not down and back (otherwise he has unexplained himself and therefore his measurements).

Returning to the question of real creativity: again, it always has an element of appearing "from nothing." For example, there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare's plays would have come into existence in the absence of Shakespeare. And where he got 'em, no one knows. But this is true of all genuine creativity. As Chesterton writes,

"Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something." And more to the point, "Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else." Do you see the point? We can well understand decay. We can also understand lateral translation, like a Marxist into a global warmist. But creative transformation from one thing to another -- like a progressive into a conservative? To call this "evolution" is to beg the question entirely, the question being "how is this even possible?" How does the higher emerge from the lower?

For something to occur -- and this is a truism -- it must first be possible to occur. And if something is possible, then we must say that its principle is somehow implicated in its antecedents.

Thus, for example, we now know that life is implicit in matter, but this knowledge also happens to undermine everything we think we know about matter, or at least reorders it. For as far as I am concerned, the most important property of matter is that it is susceptible to this weird thing called "living," and you can't get to life from physics. Man explains physics, not vice versa.

One can, of course, choose to go from life to matter, but that's what we call suicide.

To be continued...

A Word of Silence

In honor of Indigenous People's Day there will be no post today, since indigenous Americans didn't have writing. Besides, I have to leave for work. So, open thread. Feel free to put in a request for a future topic, or to point out anything I've left out so far.

Man's Perfect Incompleteness

About that hole in the center of man: again, it is unlike anything else found in all of nature. No one expects a pig to be a better pig. A pig is just a pig. It can't fall short of its piggyness, any more than a community organizer can surpass being a community organizer. It is as if there is no space in the pig -- or the dreaded C.O. -- to be anything other than what it is.

Thus, the human space is associated first and foremost with freedom and possibility: if necessity is a two-dimensional line, then freedom is a three-dimensional space (four if we add the time component).

You could say that the pig is already "perfect," because he never fails to be one. But man is never perfect: rather, perfectible. And unless I am mistaken, perfectibility is oddly superior to perfection.

Here again, this has to do with the psycho-pneumatic space we inhabit: because it is empty, it is able to be filled (but never completely). In short, if you never have a question, then you'll never have an answer. But if you have The Answer (in the static, secular sense of the term), then you have no questions and therefore no creative space or love shack.

Balthasar writes of how "man sees himself as the sum and perfect image of the cosmos"; in him there is "a kind of concentration, which makes man the synthesis of the world and raises him above it."

And yet, as with Adam, we are always aware of incompleteness, hence the complementary creation of Eve, thank you very much. Of note, Eve is a part of Adam, and yet, someone obviously separate and distinct.

This is a mythic way of expressing our irreducible intersubjectivity, whereby we are simultaneously one and two. However, the oneness must be prior, otherwise there would be no way for two to return to one. Twoness is an existential fact, oneness an "ontological memory," so to speak. It may be also bound up with memories of paradise, for all I know.

In any event, twoness is always in search of oneness, or of higher unity, integration, totality, etc. It's the arc of our lives. The part wants to know it is more than just a meaningless fragment, but rather, part of a higher unity. God's modus operandi -- and vivendi -- is always "unity in diversity" (Pursell).

So, thanks to our perfect incompleteness, "man finds his completion and his happiness only in communion with another human being" (Balthasar). But at the same time, this "gap in man's nature affects also his relationship to God." That is, our very incompleteness -- which can never complete itself -- points beyond itself toward its own possible fulfillment in relation to God.

For Balthasar, there are really only three ways to pull this off, and two of them may be reduced to one. Therefore, we're really talking about the Human way and the Christian way. This former way "consists in a soaring movement of the heart, which leaves the whole world of contradictory earthly existence beneath it in order to seek a home in the region of a superterrestrial divine power."

Underneath this is the simple premise that "all multiplicity is opposed to unity and has in some mysterious way fallen away from it; only unity can be true being." That being the case, the world is a kind of opaque barrier instead of luminous ladder; the difference between God and world is identical to the difference between true and false, or appearance and reality, or forsakenness and salvation.

As such, this "way of salvation demands an inner renunciation of worldly differences," of "seeing through them all to their identical divine ground."

Now, that idea is not completely wrong; rather, like all cosmic heresies, it is a partial truth inflated to the whole of things. Obviously the world is not God, so in that sense it is not the Truth. And yet, it is everywhere filled with truth and beauty, with intelligibility and harmony, and that's no accident. One might say that it is not Truth but not non-Truth either.

In the heresy under discussion, there is still a residue of love, but it is subtly different from the Christian version, for it involves "fidelity to the thou, not in its difference, but in its ultimate identity with the loving self." In other words, it is not like one loving the other and thereby discovering a higher unity-in-difference, but an obliteration of the twoness -- which results in a profound devaluation of our end of the bargain. We're just God playing hide-and-seek with himself.

Likewise, "compassion" still exists, but in the form of feeling sorry for those poor saps still imprisoned in individuality.

But I like my individuality, and I don't need anyone feeling sorry for it. Thanks but no thanks. I would prefer to participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world than to pretend they're not really happening to someone who doesn't actually exist.

"This negation," writes Balthasar, "is directed against the very nature of man," in that it preserves its own version of truth -- its wholeness -- at the expense of "abandoning [man's] whole worldly reality." And where's the bloody sport in achieving wholeness by "draw[ing] out conclusions which ultimately cancel out man"? I can shoot myself and do that.

Lost Time is Not Found Again. Unless...

Well, the happiness seminar turned out to be even more unhappy than I had imagined. I brought along some Theological Anthropology to keep me amused, but I should have chosen something lighter and less Germanic, because it was too hard to concentrate amidst the babble. Plus I arrived late, so I couldn't even claim a chair in the back row. And the reception was poor inside the building, so no covert talk radio. The horror! A first world problem of the most painful kind.

The presenter was a 350 pound psychologist/stand-up comedian with a voice and delivery eerily similar to Jay Leno. He said everything as if he were Leno being funny, except not a single thing was remotely witty, so it was just irritating. And the wisdom he imparted was on the level of the Sphinx, e.g., "in order to be happy you must avoid what makes you unhappy."

Hey, remember when man supposedly ventured to the moon and planted his flag there? It's a little like God visiting earth and planting his flag here, isn't it? Except it happens everyday; or every Today, rather.

As Balthasar describes it, "'Today' is the present of vertical salvation time," "suspended in and over the horizontal 'now.'" I've never heard it expressed quite that way, in the sense that there are these two sides to every moment, so to speak. Horizontal time necessarily passes away and "cannot be anchored" in anything: it's that slippery thing that is always slipping through our fingers.

But God's visit to earth -- "an event of divine freedom breaking in" -- means there is a kind of vertical anchor and rope. If God is always breaking in and pulling out, it seems that we may reverse the direction of time by "cleaving in love to God," i.e., "to the one being ascending." So we got that going for us.

Just flipping pages here. God not only enters profane time "with all its inner futility," but descends "to the bottom of the abyss of time." Only through this "total passage" through to the bitter end can there be a "reversal of the whole."

In this orthoparadoxical way, "the point of greatest antithesis -- between sinful time run to its end and spotless eternity -- becomes the place of the most intimate loving union between Father and Son." Like us, God plants his flag on a dead rock.

So, now it is as if time isn't just perpetual dissipation and loss. Rather, it has a kind of curvature that bends back toward eternity. Our earthly pilgrimage -- or bewilderness adventure -- is still a "journey in a foreign land," but at least the road back home is no longer blocked.

In the absence of this vertical road back home, then man is not only hopelessly fragmented, but pointlessly so (the two are related, but not identical).

What I mean is that man, being man, is born with "delusions of wholeness." Why? Other animals are already whole, with no awareness of being incomplete or in need of some missing piece of the puzzle. But at the center of man is a big (?!). Now, either there is a reason for that, or no reason at all. And if the latter, what makes us think we can do anything about it? It's just an ontological itch that can't be epistemologically scratched.

Existentialists are surely correct about one thing: in the absence of God, man is indeed a big fat nothing, with no possible meaning or significance other than what we make up. We need to be honest about that, and not recoil from the absolute nihilism of secular atheism.

But the religious view takes that same nothingness and transforms it from meaningless accident to ontological necessity: in the end, we are essentially nothing because we are creatures, not Creator. But that nothing turns out to be everything, because it is not just an abyss but a space and a gap over which there is a bridge.

Now, this bridge is not an "object," but rather, a relationship -- or at least the offer of one. It is that same vertical lifeline alluded to above which completes the temporal circuit. There is the possibility of wholeness amidst temporal fragmentation, such that Today becomes a gift instead of a burden. Unlike yesterday.