Merely Absolute

As a way to warm up, perhaps I will deal with objections to yesterday's post (those that I didn't respond to in the comments). And I do welcome the objections. No need to be shy. I'm thinking this through in real time, so any criticism is helpful. We're in this together!

Ebony Raptor says "My questions have to do with how to describe the be-ing of God. Theologians I talk to see Hartshorne as saying questionable things about God's immanence in nature. There's something troubling to them about how he describes ontology."

Well, I suppose one must specify the things that trouble them. Hartshorne does say that God is immanent in nature, but also transcendent. Thus, this is not pantheism but panentheism, the latter of which is entirely orthodox.

Oopsie. At the end of that section we read that Hartshorne was a Unitarian, which for me is a little like finding out Don Colacho was a scientologist, or worse, Schuon was a Muslim. As I said yesterday, we need to rescue the poor man from himself. Or at least kidnap his heathen ideas and raise them in a proper Christian home.

Mushroom stumbles over the notion of change in God, which is perfectly understandable. In the classical view, if something is capable of change, then it isn't perfect. In other words, it if can develop, it implies that it wasn't perfect.

Here I think we need to be very careful about projecting our words onto God, and then being trapped in them. Furthermore, we need to be cautious about making deductions about the nature of God based upon such abstract logic, and then using the abstraction to trump the concrete. Doing so is a little like emphasizing transcendence to the exclusion of immanence and coming out with half a God.

Think of some of the primary attributes of God that render the concept of changelessness extremely problematic: personhood, creator, love, life, self-giving, etc. Again, if these words mean what they mean, then I don't see how they can possibly be reconciled with changelessness. What would it mean, for example, to be an unchanging person? Basically being dead, or insensate, or in a coma, or autistic, or an MSNBC host.

For Hartshorne, God is both absolute and relative: absolute in the abstract but relative in the concrete. In short, absolute/relative is an irreducible complementarity, something which I believe is a fundamental lesson of the Trinity.

The Trinity cannot be further reduced to something less (or more) than itself (i.e., a monad) without thereby losing its identifying features of love, relationship, knowledge, creation, etc. Behind or before the Father is not an ontological bachelor; we might even say that the Trinity is just as much an effect as a cause of eternal love-in-relation. Certainly it is a way to conceptualize, frame, and think about this eternal love.

For me, one of Hartshorne's most helpful ideas -- and it can be used in many contexts -- is that when faced with a complementarity, the more concrete of the two complements is the more fundamental. Thus, for example, the abstract and unchanging God is the form of "the supreme personality as such." It is like saying Joe is Joe. Without ever actually meeting him in the flesh, we can affirm that Joe is Joe, has always been Joe, and will always be Joe. In that sense, Joe is unchanging, for Joe=Joe.

But there is also the concrete state of "God as person caring for the creatures he has created." This is the real Joe, not just the idea of Joe. For Hartshorne, "The abstract does not act, only the concrete acts or is a person." Furthermore -- and this is the (for me) revolutionary part -- "it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa" -- just as "the man contains his character, not the character the man."

Here is where, I believe, human language lands the champion of changelessness in the soup. "Any concrete case," writes Hartshorne, "contains the entire unlimited form." For example, consistent with Aristotle, there is no abstract realm of disembodied ideas.

Rather, the idea is in the concrete expression: any man is an instance of man-as-such. Thus, the abstract form appears "unlimited, not because it has all possible cases in actualized form, but because it has no actual case within it, being the common form of all actuality, and no actuality whatever."

In short, abstract possibility "is unlimited because it is not actualized at all. It is everything in the form of possibility, nothing whatever in the form of actuality."

Therefore -- and I realize this is a Big Leap for many people, "God as merely absolute is nonactual," whereas God-as-relative is concrete person.

I love that "merely" absolute. For example, if someone tries to sell me on Islam, the first thing I would say is: "Allah? He is merely absolute. He can't be the real thing. He can't even be actual. He's just an abstraction, not a concrete person."

Perhaps this is why the only way to relate to the abstract Father is through the concrete Son, always and forever. God is our eternal relative, and we his.

[A]s absolute God is 'simple,' has no constituents. But this only shows once more that it is God as relative that is the inclusive conception.... A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity... --Hartshorne

Omniscience, Omnipotence, Omnipathos

Since recent posts haven't seemed to generate much interest, I am going to hunker down and write more for myself. You are, of course, free to eavesdrop on the process.

Although Hartshorne always identified himself as Christian, it seems that many Christians suspect him of being a closet pantheist. Says here that he came in for criticism on a number of grounds, such as the assumption that "there is an objective or rational structure to the whole universe," and that "human thought can acquire accurate and adequate knowledge of the universe."

I certainly don't have a problem with that one, so long as we specify that our knowledge is always asymptotic, meaning that it ceaselessly approaches its own completion without ever acquiring it.

But more generally, being that man is in the image of the creator, this reflection must quintessentially include the intellect. It doesn't mean that we are "omniscient," only that the intellect is conformed to the nature of things. If it isn't, then we are excluded from truth.

I don't know if it is true that Hartshorne denies a first cause, but if he does, that is of course a cosmic non-starter (but easy enough to remedy).

He does make the controversial claim that God "needs" the creation, but he doesn't just come out and say it like that! He has his reasons, which we might just get to in this post. At this point I would just say that to truly love something or someone is to permit oneself to "need," and that to do this is "higher" and more noble than its opposite. For example, does the Father "need" the Son? Perhaps we wouldn't put it like that, but that doesn't mean the question is out of bounds.

Others complain about his "denial of divine foreknowledge and predestination to salvation." True. We'll also get back to that one.

The following is more problematic for me: his "highly optimistic view of humanity, and hence its lack of emphasis on human depravity, guilt and sin." In short, he is definitely a liberal, sometimes an obnoxiously clueless one (but I repeat myself). Having spent his life in academia, he does seem to have uncritically assimilated its narrow-minded ambient liberalism. And yet, aspects of his theology strike me as undeniably true, thus my desire to see if we can rescue him from himself and situate him in a more traditional context.

One thing that Hartshorne highlights is the "omnipathos" of God. This is a very useful word, because it means that, in addition to being all-knowing and all-powerful, he is all-feeling. Right there we see an interesting Trinity consisting of truth, love, and power, each conditioned by the other. More to the point, if we deny God's omnipathos, there is no way for him to meaningfully relate to us -- to put himself in our shoes. But isn't this what the Incarnation is all about?

Since I'm only writing for myself, I'm not going to go in any particular order. In The Divine Relativity -- speaking of omnipathos -- Hartshorne makes the intriguing point that God is not only the cause of all effects (which seems to take care of the First Cause), but also the effect of all causes. This would be the metaphysical/theoretical basis of his all-feeling omnipathos, as it means that he is supremely receptive to his own creation (or better, perpetual creativity).

This leads to one of Hartshorne's most controversial ideas, that God "changes." Quite simply, he changes because he is truly receptive to his creation -- hence also the "suffering with." Hartshorne believes that the emphasis on the notion of Unchanging Absolute -- as we've discussed in the past -- is a Greek import, not truly biblical (not to mention incoherent and ultimately absurd). In the Greek conception, time is completely devalued in favor of eternity. Time is change, and change is bad because it cannot disclose unchanging truth.

But there is change and there is change. For example, there is decadence, deterioration, corruption, degradation, dissolution, decline -- you know, Obama style change.

But there is also growth, development, maturation, perfection, etc. These are very different things. For Hartshorne, God possesses super-eminent relativity, meaning that his omnipathos is to our empathy as his omniscience is to our knowing. But it is certainly not to be thought of as a deficit. Rather, it is a kind of perfect attunement.

On a purely logical basis, how could God even have knowledge unless that knowledge is related to a known? No, we don't want to simply anthropomorphize him, but we shouldn't say that God has knowledge if we mean something totally different by the word. As Hartshorne writes, if

"the divine knowledge is purely absolute, hence involves no relation to things known, what analogy can it have to what is commonly meant by knowledge, which seems to be nothing without such a relation?" Yes, he is the cause of this world, but here again, what is a cause without an effect? To say that in God cause and effect are one is to simply deny cause and effect, and to enclose him in a static monad.

The same applies to free will. If being omnipotent -- all-powerful -- means that we have no power, then that ends the discussion. But if omnipotence is bound up with omniscience (bearing in mind that to know is to relate) and omnipathos, then this changes the equation.

As Hartshorne writes, "Power to cause someone to perform by his own choice an act precisely defined by the cause is meaningless." Again, if God's omnipotence excludes our limited potency, then he is as pointlessly enclosed in his own circuitous locution as any deconstructionist.

If we consider the creation, we see that it is woven of chance and necessity, of freedom and constraint, of boundary conditions and emergent phenomena, of order and surprise. Perhaps this tells us something about its creator. Too much order equates to absolute omnipotence in the traditional sense, but a world of pure chance is inconceivable.

Even leaving all the specifics to the side, life makes no sense without this oddly "perfect" cosmic complementarity of design and freedom (which I would say is the very essence of creativity). Furthermore, "the reality of chance is the very thing that makes providence significant," because otherwise any intervention by God is just necessity in disguise.

Running out of time here, but perhaps "maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as supreme person." Unless by "personhood" we mean something totally alien to us.

For if God is "in all aspects absolute, then literally it is 'all the same' to him, a matter of utter indifference, whether we do this or do that, whether we live or die, whether we joy or suffer." In short, if this is "personal," then we aren't.

Temporal and Spatial Oneness

A few months back I read Hartshorne's The Divine Relativity, but never got around to discussing it in detail. In retracing my steps, I see that I touched on it on August 22. At the conclusion of the post it says "Well, I didn't have time to get nearly as deeply into this as I had wanted, but we'll take another plunge on Monday." Evidently, this is the promised Monday.

Let me first review what I said before, so as not to repeat myself...

One line stands out this morning, the reference to a "spontaneous interior knowing, which in turn implies a wavelike connectedness or unity of things." This latter is an important principle to which we will return, in that the wave of being renders possible the particle of knowledge. Or in other words, ontology is to epistemology as wave is to particle. Thus, we may know as we do because being is as it is.

Coincidentally, yesterday afternoon I was dipping into Meditations on the Tarot, and our Friend from Beyond the Grave says much the same thing. In Letter I, he discusses the attainment of practical and theoretical unity, the first consisting of the unity of the self -- i.e., concentration without effort -- the second to "the basic unity of the natural world, the human world and the divine world." To perceive the latter one must be the former:

"As concentration is the basis of every practical achievement, the tenet of the basic unity of the world is the same with regard to knowledge -- without it no knowledge is conceivable." In other words, in the absence of the prior unity, not only can we not know knowledge, but we can't even know of knowledge.

Thus, "The ideal -- or ultimate aim -- of all philosophy and all science is TRUTH. But 'truth' has no other meaning than that of the reduction of the plurality of phenomenon to an essential unity -- of facts to laws, laws to principles, of principles to essence or being."

Bottom line: "Without this unity nothing would be knowable." There would be no possibility of venturing from the known to the unknown, because there would be no link, no common ground, between the two. But in reality, there is always a bridge of being between them, analogous to how the continents of the earth are separated by oceans but connected underneath.

To say that "the world is knowable" is to implicitly affirm "the tenet of the essential unity of the world." And if we pursue the latter principle to its logical end, we understand that the world is not a "mosaic," or jumble of fundamentally disconnected parts, but rather, an organism, "all of whose parts are governed by the same principle."

Which leads directly to Alfred North Whitehead's organicism (AKA process philosophy) and to his most prominent acolyte, Hartshorne. Hartshorne was the first to systematically apply Whitehead's insights to theology.

As we have discussed in the past, where most philosophers "spatialize" the cosmos, for Whitehead, time is central. As a consequence, where others see things-in-isolation, Whitehead sees processes-in-relation. There is nothing in the cosmos that is not concretely related to everything else, at all times. Yes, we can think otherwise, but that is an abstraction from the concrete reality.

For example, we can look at a cloud in the sky and imagine it as a separate thing (indeed, it is difficult not to), and yet, it is simply the visible expression of the infinitely complex process we call "weather." We could say the same of "price" vis-a-vis economics. Hayek's central idea is that the price of the most basic item is full of information about the entire economy.

Unless the state -- the great destroyer of information -- gets involved. A market economy is a vast organism that processes an infinite amount of information. The "fatal conceit" of the statists is to pretend to control a process that is fundamentally impossible for any human -- or group of humans -- to understand. (Same problem with Darwinism, global warming, and scientism more generally.)

What we commonly call "science" presupposes the unity of the horizontal. Not only does it not study the vertical, it knows nothing of it (at least explicitly). For example, because of the unity of the horizontal, we know exactly where the earth will be in relation to the sun in one, one hundred, or one thousand years (assuming no hidden variables science has not yet discovered).

The unity of the vertical is known in a different manner, via the method of analogy. It too is an artifact of the unity of the world. The most consequential vertical analogy is between God and man. Such analogies are "timeless" where science necessarily operates in time.

Take, for example, the myth of Genesis. To reduce it to a scientific statement about the horizontal world is to fundamentally misunderstand it. Rather, it embodies a number of key "typological symbols," or prototypes and their relations. Such vertical archetypes "manifest themselves endlessly in history and in each individual biography." Although they are in time, they are not of time. But they do impress their patterns on time, which is why they must be expressed via myth.

The myth is the story of the prototype as it moves through time. Our BFF from Beyond the Grave compares them to the undulations left in the sand as a result of desert winds. The undulations are not the wind, only its visible effect. Likewise the archetypes, which are not seen but which nevertheless leave their imprint on our lives.

This is why it was so easy for us to "see" where Obama would end, way back in 2008. For as Joyce wrote, -- and this is the one lesson of Finnegans Wake, repeated endlessly in an infinite number of ways -- "if you are abcedminded to this claybook," then "what curios of signs in this allaphbed!" For "it is the same told of all." (Man is the curious claybook written with the archetypal ABCs.)

Change? "Modern man calls 'change' walking faster on the same path in the same direction" (Aphorisms of Don Colacho).

Nothing

Yeah, this is it for today: circumstances have conspired to reduce today's offering to an open thread.

Getting Your Heart & Mind in Order (In That Order)

Knowledge is dangerous; that is, it can always cut both ways, depending upon who has it and what they intend to do with it. For example, no morally sane person is troubled by Israel having nuclear weapons. Conversely, all morally sane people are troubled by the prospect of Muslim nations possessing those same weapons.

Therefore, knowledge must always be subordinated to something beyond knowledge, at risk of sinking beneath itself. As Green writes, knowledge may well fuel pride, as in the timeless stories of Adam, Prometheus, Icarus, Gruber, and countless others.

But this should not discourage one from seeking knowledge, any more than Charles Manson's impending nuptials should steer us away from sex. In short, misuse of an object or idea does not detract from its proper use.

"The fact that knowledge can puff up," observes Green, illustrates the point that "knowledge is inherently a moral reality," and "can be used for good or ill" (emphasis in original).

This is elementary, similar to the principle that rights not only come with responsibilities, but that the responsibilities must be prior to the rights. In other words, you cannot give rights to an irresponsible entity, or one without free will. You can't give a bear the right to roam free through a city. Why? Because the bear has no responsibility.

The left, of course, never stops talking about rights, but these rights are always in the abstract, disconnected from the responsibilities that legitimize them. The notion of rights without responsibilities is precisely analogous to the absurdity of knowledge without truth or art without beauty. Not only is the one severed from the other, but rights, knowledge, and art are deprived of their sufficient reason. They become meaningless if not pernicious.

Want to confuse a liberal? Try this: let's assume for the sake of argument that you have the constitutional right to abort your baby. What is the corresponding responsibility in which this right is grounded, and without which it makes no sense? Remember, it must be something even "higher" and more fundamental than a dead baby. What could it be?

Now, one of our cosmic principles is that any truth speaks of the One Truth. It is this latter to whom (or in whom) our knowledge is ultimately answerable. "[W]henever we come to know something, our very capacity to know is brought about and sustained -- in every instance -- by God." So long as we bear that in mind, we avoid pride on the one hand, and the temptation of a false absolute -- idolatry -- on the other.

Yesterday I had a conversation with the mother of one of my son's friends. He's extremely bright, full of philosophical and theological questions that don't occur to most adults. He's also very interested in science; at nine years old, Stephen Hawking is one of his heroes. Therefore, he was quite distressed to learn of Hawking's pronouncement that God doesn't exist.

This is a fine example of knowledge not only severed from truth, but even from the possibility of truth. It's an elementary metaphysical error, entirely self-refuting but self-aggrandizing at the same time. It equates to saying: "there is no God, and I am that one." For if God doesn't exist, obviously only He can know it.

I would add that Hawking's denial serves as a kind of implicit acknowledgement of God. As Green writes, "all persons, at some fundamental level, know God but suppress this knowledge."

As we have discussed in the past, since our human personhood exists in a vertical space, we are just as prone to repress the higher as we are the lower. Just as one can only pretend that the unconscious doesn't exist, one can only pretend that the supra-conscious doesn't exist. But once one stops pretending, one sees evidence of both everywhere.

Imagine the vertical as an AM radio band reaching from 540 to 1600 kHz. The average station is set somewhere in the middle, at 93, or 1070, or 1110. But the rest of the band is always there, waiting for someone to tune into the frequency. Much of what we call "higher knowledge," for example, is just regular knowledge tuned to a higher frequency.

Take the example of a church. On the one hand it's just a building, not fundamentally different from any other. But tune into the higher sacred frequencies, and it is transformed to "heaven on earth." For that matter, a sacrament is an occasion for the inflow of those higher frequencies.

This also goes to why we cannot comprehend certain evils and certain people. We just can't pick up the frequency they are hearing. This is because "The mind's pursuits are always, and without fail, related to one's 'loves,' or to the state of the heart.... we really cannot know what we do not love" (Green).

This would explain a great deal -- for example, why Obama doesn't understand the constitution, and why we do not understand his animosity toward it (or toward Israel, or the police, or our military, etc.).

Well, the contractors are back, so that's the end of this post.

The Last Honest Liberal vs. The Spiritual Lepers

I'm starting to think Gruber is an angel sent by heaven on a divine mission:

(Here's another good summary of his angelic work.)

Everything I have ever written about the left is encrapsulated in this story, which reveals the corruption at the heart of the media-academic-government complex. Each is rotten to the core, but is kept from collapsing on itself by leaning on the other two for support. For example, a non-corrupt media would have exposed Obama's rot before he could even have become a viable candidate. Likewise, a non-corrupt academia would never have borne Obama upward on wings of affirmative action and neo-Marxian ideology.

Look at the end of the second video, in which the honest man, Bret Baier, is attempting to pry truth from the dishonest man, Obama. Not only can it not be done, but Obama becomes edgy and indignant, when by all rights it should be the other way around.

I have seen this behavior innumerable times in the context of evaluating people who are attempting to defraud the workers comp system. An honest person welcomes scrutiny, whereas the dishonest person attempts to push away compassion and curiosity by aggressively filling the space with his narrative. Attempt to probe the narrative, and the patient will indignantly react as if you don't believe him, or as if you are conducting an aggressive cross examination on the witness stand.

In other words, the transitional space -- AKA the intersubjective space between two human beings -- is flooded with what Bion called beta elements, or raw, unmetabolized emotion. The reason it is unmetabolized is that it necessarily exists outside the more "refined" narrative; or, there is the unreal narrative accompanied by the real emotion, and the two are at odds. You essentially say to yourself: "if he's saying x, why is he feeling y? And why is y being directed at me? I didn't do anything."

What is so refreshing about Gruber is that he is the Last Honest Liberal -- or at least the last honest one I've ever encountered.

To be perfectly accurate, there are actually many honest liberals. We call them conservatives. True, there are many conservatives who were once liberals mugged by reality. But countless others, like myself, are former liberals appalled by the deception, illogic, and agenda-driven approach to reality, whereby evidence that doesn't fit the narrative is either ignored, or, if it persists, aggressively attacked.

It is instructive to consider how prominent liberals are reacting to the "simple truth" -- the naked factuality -- of Gruber. It's like the five stages of death, although most of them can't get past denial and anger -- mostly at conservatives for bearing the message. The genius economist they once put on a pedestal is now being demeaned and devalued like a self-aggrandizing intern, except this intern has received millions of dollars of taxpayer funds for the hard work of lying to the people paying his fees.

It's quite perverse, because if he had ever told the truth to the people paying his fees, then the fees would immediately stop, as now they have. He will never earn another dime from the state, because he has committed the unforgivable the crime of TELLING THE TRUTH. I mean, it's fine to drop the mask in the presence of fellow leftists, but not with the microphone on or the camera running!

After denial and anger comes bargaining, and I have already seen some of this. For example, a host on MSNBC, in true Stalinist fashion, conceded that Gruber said what he said, but hey, isn't it ironic how great the bill has turned out?! So, what's a few broken eggs if we ended up with this fabulous omelet in the process! But really, that's just denial in disguise, a refusal to look at what the bill has done, is doing, and will do, especially when the deliberately backloaded deceptions kick in. (I see that the New Yorker takes the same lying approach to bargaining the lies away.)

The other day, Ace of Spades had a link to a short piece on how one can spot a Lie. One of the rules of thumb goes to what was said above about beta elements: liars supposedly "feel subconsciously guilty about their lie (or at least uncomfortable at being in the position of lying)," and consequently "add in unnecessary negative emotional language into their lie."

I suppose that is sometimes true, although I would frame it somewhat differently. I would say that the liar necessarily divides his soul. In order to utter the lie, he must deny the very purpose of the mind, which is to know truth. Now, one cannot deny the purpose of any organ without suffering adverse consequences. Just as the wrong type of diet may redound to, say, heart disease, the wrong type of discourse will result in soul pathology. In soul pathology there must be pain, but the really sick person forces others to feel the pain.

This pathology can become so advanced that the person is no longer capable of "feeling" the barbs that occur when he deviates from truth. Obama is at this stage: like a leper who can no longer feel his extremities, and ends up causing them so much damage that they must be amputated, Obama -- and Reid and Pelosi and all the rest -- have such advanced cases of spiritual leprosy that they no longer even know when they are lying. They have become insensate to the epistemophilic pangs of conscience. Consider how they deny even knowing who Gruber is, when there is such extensive evidence to the contrary.

Another important point about lying -- not just the occasional fib, but someone truly immersed in the Lie -- is that it always partakes of omnipotence. It is as if the real liar believes that his lies have the power to shape reality.

Which they do! Consider how the media-academic-state complex managed to impose this monumental lie-of-a-bill -- literally, the greatest consumer fraud in history -- on the citizenry! We are only having this discussion because someone couldn't help himself from telling the truth about it.

Oddly enough, this was the healthy part of Gruber -- the corner of his soul that is somehow still in tact. Yes, part of the motivation was no doubt self-aggrandization, but nevertheless, truth has hijacked stranger things in order to escape into the world.

Another telltale sign of lying: liars "are forced to make up stories, and when they do make them up, they tend to be very simple, straightforward tales. Their stories tend not to have complexity and implied background details of stories about real events."

Here again, I've seen this pattern many times in cases of workers comp fraud. As to Gruber, consider the rich detail in his accounts of visits with Obama (e.g., he paused for a cigaret), vs. Obama's simplistic denials, or his assurances that everything about the bill was "transparent." None of what he says has the ring of truth. It's too cleverly simple by half.

But at the same time, the simplistic story may be couched in overly convoluted language. This has been one of Obama's trademarks from the beginning. Supporters hailed it as "nuance," but this is more like the nuance of a corrupt defense attorney defending an obviously guilty client. It is the oily nuance of Johnnie Cohchran.

Liars seem to realize "that something is missing from their stories -- that their stories aren't life-like, in being so simple -- and attempt to pad them out by using convoluted language, and irrelevant parenthetical details, to make them appear more complex than they actually are."

Truth is simple. Defenses against it are not. Likewise, Gruber's confessions are as straightforward as one could possibly hope for. But dropping truth into the left is like stepping onto an anthill and watching the ants freak out in all directions before settling back into their orderly patterns. At the moment the left is struggling to keep its drones in line, but new shoes keep dropping on the hive every day. Give them a couple weeks.

When Liberalism is in the Saddle, Lies are on the Move

It is interesting that lying has been so much in the news, but this is inevitable when liberalism is in the saddle. To cite a timely aphorism, "The lie is the muse of revolutions: it inspires their programs, their proclamations, their panegyrics. But it forgets to gag their witnesses" (Dávila).

But why should humanitarians like Jon Gruber shut up when they are doing God's work? Rather, it is in the nature of the Good that it wishes to radiate, to communicate, to share its goodness. This is why he is not only unashamed, but visibly giddy in the videos we have seen.

Now come to find out that his grubby co-conspirators not only want to gag him, but would be pleased to see him tossed into a shallow grave, maybe next to the guy who made the Mohammed video. What kind of strange goodness is this?

Above all else, human beings are wordlings. Language is what defines us, but what defines language? For the postmodernist, nothing defines language. Rather, each word refers to another, in an endless deferral of meaning. But they can't really say that meaning is deferred when they really mean it is strictly impossible.

Why then do we have the word? Apparently, if the postmodernists are correct, meaning is simply the word we use to refer to an arbitrary closure of its infinite deferral. It is precisely analogous to declaring an arbitrary end to pi, which otherwise goes on forever.

Let's try looking at this through the other end of the telos-scope: "It is not so much that the way language works helps us to understand the theology of the Incarnation, but rather that the theology of the Incarnation helps us profoundly to understand the way in which language works" (Jeffrey, in Green).

It seems that the way language works is that there is something about the world that enables it "to come to speech" (Gunton, ibid.). In other words, when we speak, it is as if speech is the "last word" of a spiroid process that must begin in God, or the Word. I would say that we can only pull words from reality because the Word is already there to be pulled.

In short, "To justify any sort of affirmation of the meaningfulness of language, we need to affirm that we really do live in God's created world" (Green): no creation, no meaning. And meaning deferred is meaning denied!

Think of how this works in practice, bearing in mind the principle that we are in the image of the creator. We begin with a silent thought, an invisible idea, which is then "uttered outwardly."

Isn't this a little like creation itself? Augustine observes that "our word becomes a bodily sound by assuming that in which it is manifested to the senses of men.... And just as our word becomes sound without being changed into sound, so the Word of God" becomes flesh without being reduced to flesh.

Even so, one never knows what will happen to an idea once it is let loose in the world (just ask God!). To speak the word is to incarnate the word, but it then must be re-incarnated in the listener, and, as in natural selection, there are mimetic errors along the way. This would imply that liberalism is analogous to an epistemological birth defect, a copying error -- assuming that somewhere in its genealogy there was an original truth, now turned monstrous.

But the issue is not just what *lies* behind speech, but what is up ahead. For example, "The notion of an ultimate telos to all language is what, of course, is missing in the deconstructionist universe..." This means that there are two ways for language that has gone off course to self-correct. The first way is to see to it that language refers to reality, i.e., to reaffirm the covenant between words and things.

But this is no assurance of ultimate truth, so we must also check our formulations against the telos of language, which can only be God: "God himself is the goal of all language," so to the extent that our ideas and theories don't point in his direction, you can be sure we have been derailed somewhere along the line.

Which is why language can be used to reach such a fallen person and lift him back up toward the Great Attractor. This itself implies that words must be accompanied by, or infused with, a kind of "generic" grace, which makes abundant sense if language indeed comes from (and returns to) God.

So, "words are instrumental in reaching out to the fallen man." They are "not an end in themselves," but "play a crucial role in leading people to" God, the "transcendental signified" (Green).

Which reminds me of something I heard yesterday on the radio. A caller mentioned how liberal elites regard voters as stupid, but the host cautioned him that conservatives do the same thing, what with our reference to "low information voters."

However, there is literally an infinite difference between the two attitudes. In the case of the left, they need to lie to us because we are stupid. Conversely, we believe that voters are only low on information, for which reason we desperately wish to communicate the truth and thereby remedy the deficit. Under no circumstances do we wish to deceive them, let alone coerce and control them. God forbid!

If words do not replace anything, only they complete everything. --Dávila

The Spiritual Unthropology of the Left

What kind of person concocts hysterical lies about President Bush lying about WMD, or about "torture," and now casually lies about Obama's actual lies?

No, that's not just a rhetorical question, because the answer denotes a very different anthropology -- even an unthropology, really, since it is so anti-human. In my the margin notes to The Gospel and the Mind, I posed the questions: "what kind of person does liberalism produce?" and "What is the anthropology?"

Those questions were provoked by a brief discussion of Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, where he writes that "the teacher, particularly the teacher dedicated to liberal education, must constantly try to look toward the goal of human completeness..." (in Green). (Bloom is obviously referring to liberal in the classical, not contemporary political sense; in order to avoid confusion I will use the word "leftist" for the latter connotation.)

Since contemporary leftism knows nothing of "human completeness" (which it would reject on a priori grounds, i.e., a fixed human nature), this implies that an education steeped in leftism will not only fail to complete us, but actually aggravate our incompleteness and nurture a deeper alienation. It will thereby defeat the very purpose of education, and become a symptom of the disease it is supposed to treat.

It can hardly be overemphasized that Obama is our first president who is totally a creature of this illiberal, infrahuman, postmodern academic environment. A plurality of voters might well regard him as diabolical, but on a college campus, nothing about his beliefs would stand out.

For example, in The New Class Conflict, Gilder notes that 96% of presidential donations from Ivy League schools went to Obama. That is a level of ideological conformity that surpasses totalitarian states, because in the latter, people know they are being lied to and are therefore more skeptical.

And this depressing level of conformity is obviously similar in the media, so there is truly a media-academic-political complex at the root of the new anthropology: in short, it involves a system of people similar to Obama, reproducing people similar to Obama (foreseen by Bram Stoker's Dracula, in that the spiritually undead survive by putting the bite on the fresh living).

What does stand out about Obama -- and accounts for his success -- is a superior ability to conceal what he is about. In other words, what stands out about him is an ability to not stand out (at least to the "stupid" voters identified by Jonathan Gruber). Most likeminded ideologues are not the least bit ashamed of letting the world know what they think (speaking of Gruber).

For example, Dinesh D'Souza's America is full of leftists who are eager to beclown themselves, even knowing what D'Souza's project is about! That is, they are so insulated, that they think they can say the same things to D'Souza that they tell their impressionable students. Thus, they are clueless precisely where Obama is clever.

For us, the mandate is to be as wise as serpents but innocent as doves; but for Obama it's the other way around: dumb as a pigeon, cunning as a snake.

Everyone is a liberal and everyone is a conservative, in that we all have things we would like to change and things we'd like to conserve. Above all, the left wants to conserve its new anthropology, since it is the key to everything else.

Just as we have "organized crime," the left may be thought of as organized vice. For most of the history of the west, vice was recognized by the majority, and certainly had no articulate collective to defend it. The notion of vice being "organized" would have been absurd, except in the sense that satan must have his own way of organizing things.

But you name the vice, and it's there in the DNC's platform: class envy, homosexual lust, racial pride, slothful welfare dependency, greedy public employee unions, feminist wrath, and a fantastically gluttonous state -- not to mention violations of virtually every commandment, e.g., idolatry, atheism, theft, dishonoring the centrality of mother and father, and the main subject of this post, lying.

"What each generation is," writes Alan Bloom, "can be best discovered in its relation to the permanent concerns of mankind." To which the leftist responds: permanent things? No way.

In the relativistic and historicist fantasy world of the left, there can be no permanent things, which goes a long way toward explaining the systematic spiritual incompleteness it engenders.

That is to say, in reality, we are only made "complete" with reference (and in living relation) to things that are not only permanent, but outside and beyond us. Exclude these things from an education, and it is like excluding the answer from the equation. Or insisting there is no right answer, just meaningless equations for which we may supply our own answers.

Therefore, ironically, there is a kind of faux completeness to the left, something that has been true since at least Karl Marx. That is, Marx had all the answers; Marxism is a complete system that unfolds with scientific inevitability (the source of the progressives delusion that the left side is the right side of history). As with Islam, if it's not in the book, then it's untrue. Likewise scientism, despite Godel's assurances that such (merely) logical completeness is strictly impossible.

And nothing could possibly be as joyously incomplete as a genuine religious education, since this education is precisely a lifelong process of completing oneself via a living relationship with permanence as such.

"No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice" (Bloom).

Which means that academia is overflowing with unreal teachers who deny and stunt human nature with deforming forces of social convention and ideological prejudice.

You Can Learn A Lot From a Political Sociopath

About the authoritarian liberal bullshit machine (which is as close to perpetulant emotion as we'll ever get): Green writes that "when language becomes dislocated from truth, some power or set of powers other than truth is at work."

And among other things, it is always a narcissistic power -- or must partake of pathological narcissism -- since it sets the self over and above the truth it is designed to serve. It renders one superior to truth, something that is actually impossible in principle, since there can be nothing higher than truth. Therefore it is an absurdity.

It turns out that Milton was on the case four centuries ago, observing that when language "becomes irregular and depraved," it is followed by the "ruin and degradation" of the people, who become "listless, supine, and ripe for servitude." Low-information, servile, dependent -- when the left talks about its "ground game," these are the medullards it needs to rouse from the couch in order to support their masters on election day. Then they can go back go sleep.

But we can of course go back even further, since Christianity revolves around this question of Word and embodied truth. Words ultimately matter because the Word is en-mattered.

Two forms of corruption may enter language, one in the space between words and reality, another in the space between speaker and listener.

Note that modernism put the kibosh on the first, while postmodernism eradicates the second. In other words, Kant says we cannot know the world, only our own ideas about it, while Derrida and the rest of the postmodern rabble say we can't even do that -- rather, only issue words about words about words, in the absurcular conspiring fraud known as tenure.

Green references our good friend Josef Pieper, who says that "sophisticated language, disconnected from the roots of truth.... invariably turns into an instrument of power."

I've mentioned before that working with severely mentally ill patients can offer insight into the workings of the relatively sane, because they have the same mechanisms we do, only hypertrophied and distorted, e.g., splitting and projection. No doubt Pieper gained insight into the everyday pathologies of language by observing the Nazis up close.

If one is not guided by truth, then to what is one oriented? This question implies a telos to thought, but here again modernity has cut us off from this path. To insist that such a path exists is to exile oneself from the powerworld of the left.

Recall the two spaces, between person and world, and person and person. If there isn't truth between person and person, then what? Whoever "is guided by something other than the truth," writes Pieper, "no longer considers the other as partner, as equal. In fact, he no longer respects the other as a human person."

Which brings us right back to Jonathan Gruber and ObamaCare: he acknowledges that the Obama administration lies to us because we are stupid. But it's really the other way around: they first contemptuously deprive us of our personhood ("bitter clingers," and all the rest), then exert power over us, being that the lie is in the service of the greater end of power. "Such speech," adds Pieper, is "in contradiction to the nature of language," since it "intends not to communicate but to manipulate."

Remember, in our nation, ultimate power resides in the citizenry. Therefore, every time the state lies to us, it is for the purpose of transferring some of that power to itself.

Or in other words, the Obama administration cannot speak the truth, for it would empower the citizenry over and against the state. Gruber is absolutely correct that ObamaCare could never have passed under such circumstances of transparency and allegiance to truth (and reality).

And of course, the left destroys the human person at its very conception -- both literally and figuratively. The rest, you might say, is commentary. Which is to say, words about words, no longer grounded in the reality of the logos-infused person.

Politics also takes place in a space -- the space between citizens and state. Yes, there is power in this space, but the powers are enumerated, limited, and, most importantly, derived from the consent of the governed.

What if this space is filled with lies instead of truth? Then there is a total inversion, as the state then functions to exert its power to enforce a false and deviant version of reality. Instead of illumination and liberation, language is deployed for the purposes of "manipulation and domination."

The bottom line, since I'm short on time:

[T]he abuse of political power is fundamentally connected with the sophistic abuse of the word, indeed, finds in it the fertile soil in which to hide and grow... so that the latent potential of the totalitarian poison can be ascertained, as it were, by observing the symptom of the public abuse of language. --Josef Pieper

The credo of the left: come for the lies, stay for the power.

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood, and I Chose Authoritarian Liberal Bullshit Forever

Liberal compassion lends itself to bullshit by subordinating the putative concern with efficacy to the dominant but unannounced imperative of moral validation and exhibitionism. --William Voegeli

Probably the most serious domestic problem we face is the existence of this pervasive liberal bullshit, which is really just Christian bullshit in disguise; or a hollowed out Christianity that leaves only empty gestures of "peace on earth and good will toward all mankind." If this had been a Buddhist, or Muslim, or pagan country, no doubt the bullshit would have a different flavor.

Liberals and conservatives generally have similar notions of what it means to "be a good person," and these notions are rooted in our Judeo-Christian heritage. There is no politician, for example, who advertises a disinterest in, or lack of compassion for, "the poor."

This may have nothing to do with the actual poor, but rather, with upholding the Christian image: liberal bullshitters "are more concerned with conveying their ideals, of which idealized understandings of their true selves are a central component, than with making statements that correspond scrupulously to empirical or causal reality."

Thus, the typical liberal program "might actually work to some degree, but any such efficacy is inadvertent and tangential to the central purpose: demonstrating the depths of the prescriber’s concern for the problem and those who suffer from it, concerns impelling the determination to 'do something' about it."

One of Obama's problems is that he confuses the politician's tactical but empty gestures of compassion with coercive prescriptions that are supposed to actually be effective in the real world. In other words, he seems to believe everything he learned in college, whether it is about central planning, or "white privilege," or America's destructive role in the world. He is cynical about everything but his own bullshit.

There are only three ways to gain real knowledge: authority, reason, and experience. Experience and reason -- or sad history and sober common sense -- prove the inefficacy of liberalism, so it must ultimately root its appeal in authority (which is enforced via shame-inducing social mechanisms such as political correctness).

Yesterday I watched a bit of Hardball while exercising, and there was an outlandishly arrogant roundtable segment devoted to ridiculing conservatives over global warming. All four individuals are utterly convinced that a thing called "science" is in unanimous agreement about the issue, when this is not only demonstrably false, but slowly moving in the other direction, as more and more informed people reject the theory.

The Christian too believes in authority, but not to the exclusion of reason and experience. Rather, the opposite: just as we do not believe in a God who created a deceptive world, we do not believe in authoritative climate models that have not only failed to predict the future, but can't even retrodict the past.

As mentioned yesterday, science cannot function outside a wider context; it cannot be its own context without generating intellectual absurdities and human cruelties. In other words, it cannot be only human without becoming subhuman.

No, we don't mean this in a polemical way. For example, a strict Darwinian by definition reduces the human to the animal, and the animal to something less. That is, his first principle is not "life," let alone "person," but rather, copying error + environmental selection.

Green agrees that "science can live and prosper and develop only when it is related to a larger understanding of reality -- that is, only within a certain vision of the nature of things." But modernity essentially is a science "severed from its origin" and divorced from its foundation in a more comprehensive and integrated worldview.

Or, one could say that the separation occurred with modernity, the divorce with postmodernity. This means that the accumulated wealth of community property had to be divided and assigned to each side. Science was granted custody of truth, while the humanities were given beauty, and compassion handed off to the "social sciences."

But unfortunately, the latter two cannot flourish in a single-parent household, for beauty without truth redounds to hedonism, deception, or banality, while benevolence without truth leads to the idiot compassion of liberal bullshit.

"When you remove beauty from the human equation, it is going to come back in some other form, even as anti-beauty. A good deal of modern art can be understood in this light. In modernity, beauty has been seen as an appearance -- ornamentation, sugar coating. Secularists and believers alike have either rejected beauty altogether or argued that beauty should make the pills of truth and goodness go down easier" (Wolfe).

And what is truth violently wrenched from its sister transcendentals? I don't know. Maybe like an endless Hardball roundtable, or authoritarian liberal bullshit forever.

A Christian understanding of the intellectual life must take into account -- contrary to the typical modern understanding -- the inherently moral nature of knowledge, the way knowledge is linked to the heart and will of the knower... --Bradley Green

Principle Wonks and Policy Wankers

One irritating term that needs to be retired is "policy wonk." Have you noticed that everyone who is described as one just happens to be a liberal idiot?

I think this is because it is analogous to being a tree wonk and thereby systematically missing the forest. What we need is more righteous principle wonks. Ronald Reagan is an obvious example of a principle wonk: freedom, low taxes, strong defense, limited government, etc.

Obama is often described as a policy wonk, but, like Reagan, he is and always has been a principle wonk. It's just that his brand of ideological wonkery champions false and deviant principles: income redistribution, expansion of the state, weakness abroad, racial grievance, feminist penis envy, climate change, illegal immigration, etc.

I'm guessing that so-called wonks on both sides start with principles (either explicit or implicit) and then find the data they need to support them. Which is unnecessary if you simply begin with the correct principles, and let reality take care of the rest.

For example, we don't need a study to prove whether, say, equality before the law is a good idea. Even if someone were to come up with data showing it to be a harmful idea (for example, because it provokes envy of people who accomplish more with their freedom and equality), we still wouldn't reject it.

But for several decades now, the wonkers of the left have been busy eroding the very principles that uphold our civilization, under the guise of "policy." They then elevate policies to principles, which renders them incapable of thought (because they are excluded from the ground of reality).

To cite an obvious example, marriage is perhaps the most important pre-political principle of civilization. Until just a couple of decades ago, no one considered it to be in the realm of political policy. Even if someone showed us data suggesting that it isn't harmful to deprive a child of a mother and father, we would reject the whole idea on principle, because it is self-evidently loony (not to mention in defiance of biological reality).

The minimum wage is another example. If one understands the principle of supply and demand, then it is impossible to be fooled into believing that an increase in the cost of labor will have no effect on its demand.

Likewise socialized medicine: it does not work because it cannot work. Why? Among other reasons, because it destroys the information necessary to rationally calculate prices and thereby allocate scarce resources. No amount of government benevolence can replace the information it destroys through socialism, because, for all practical purposes, the amount is infinite (and certainly unknowable by any human being or group of human beings).

An economy is an infinitely complex, self-organizing, information processing organism. The ham-handed, truth-destroying, visibly grubby hand of the state sees to it that prices cannot reflect costs, which creates further distortions from which the state then proposes to rescue us. Same deal with the college bubble. Subsidization by the state increases demand, which increases cost, which calls for more subsidization.

In The Gospel and the Mind, the author demonstrates how the abandonment of Christian principles leads directly to intellectual insanity. This no doubt sounds polemical, but the insanity is here, and it has a rational explanation. It didn't "just happen." Rather, it happened because certain principles were abandoned and others adopted.

Beginning at the beginning, we must ask ourselves if the human mind is capable of knowing truth. If it isn't, then there can be no rational principles at all -- or no rational reason to put our faith in them.

To put it another way, we must inquire into whether it is possible for our minds to be "saved." As Green writes, if we are redeemed by Christ, then this must include the whole man, including the intellect. I would go further and say that, since the intellect is what truly defines man and sets him apart from the animals, then salvation bloody well better include it!

What is the alternative -- that Christ redeems our bodies but not our minds? No, that is the way of the left: the so-called "sexual revolution," for example, liberated the body (as if it can be isolated from the person). How did that work out? Any time a leftist uses the word "liberation," it's time to reach for your revolver, because your intellect is being liberated from your soul, in preparation for your power being liberated from your person and your money from your wallet.

The state not only has a vital interest in our being unable to think things through, but in denying access to the very principles that make this thinking-through possible. Or just say public education. If you don't believe me, then believe the refreshingly candid Jonathan Gruber. An honest liberal could never do all these wonderful things for to us.

A public, secularized education deprives us of the overall vision whereby knowledge finds its proper place. Absent this hierarchical vision, knowledge can just as easily become demonic, or even just sterile, and certainly dis-organizing.

As Green writes, the Christian vision of God, man, and cosmos "provides the necessary substructure, or precondition, for meaningful and enduring intellectus (understanding)." This doesn't necessarily mean our principles are correct, but it does mean that they are explicit and consistent.

These principles touch on ontology (the nature of being), on anthropology (the nature of man), and on epistemology (the nature of knowledge). Is a liberal politician ever explicit about his principles? If he is, then he cannot be consistent -- and certainly not electable -- which is why he doesn't go there.

"Without certain key theological realities and commitments," writes Green, "the cultivation of an enduring intellectual and cultural life becomes increasingly difficult, if not impossible." Of note, this does not imply that the left is beholden to no "theological realities and commitments." Rather, we just have to find out what they are, because these strange gods will explain the falseness -- and resultant dysfunction -- of everything else about them.

To be continued...

You Shall Not Turn Theft Into Compassion

So, we're out in the bewilderness with the unholy trinity of tempter, temptee, and temptation. It's a true mirror image of reality, because, as in the Trinity, nothing here is forced. Just as God only "offers" his love, so too does the Tempter only offer the temptation. He always respects our free will, otherwise, where's the sport? So in this sense, Satan is not as destructive to our dignity as is the state.

The first temptation is, of course, to turn stones into bread. There is an excellent analysis of this in Meditations on the Tarot, which I'm sure we have discussed in the past. Let's see if I can track it down...

Well, there is this:

"'Lead us not into temptation' has obvious resonance with Jesus' forty days in the desert, just after his baptism. If baptism is the 'purification,' then temptation is the test of purity.

"And as we have discussed before, the adversary never forces the issue; he does not operate through coercion, like some mid-level government functionary, but through temptation.

"Temptation is the test of purity, and purity is the victory over temptation. The purifying 'fire' that occurs in the space between these two poles is our phoenishing school, allowing us to make ashes of our former selves.

"Temptation is etymologically related to stretch, so that it implies a kind of centrifugal pulling of ourselves outward, from the center to the periphery, from coon-centration ("coon central") to dissipation. The world itself is a giant test, an opportunity to challenge our ability to resist its seductions."

Then there is this:

"Appropriately, the temptations all ultimately flow from the violation of the first Commandment, in which God is pushed aside 'as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying' (Benedict).

"With this primordial (vertical) act, man inverts the cosmos and places himself at the top.... Doing so redounds to countless errors of every kind, e.g., cognitive, spiritual, philosophical, political, scientific, moral, etc.

"This cosmic inversion cannot fail to result in epic falls, for no house can be built upon sand. In replacing God with man, we necessarily replace truth with opinion, virtue with convention, and wisdom with tenure."

Now, the promise to turn stones to bread is the central promise of the left. It even has a technical name: the Keynesian Multiplier, whereby one can simultaneously feed the masses by stealing from them; it may be visualized as a vast circle of human beings, each with his hand in the next guy's pocket. Or perhaps using a bucket to remove water from one end of the pool and pour it into the other end.

As we expressed this infallible truth back then,

"One popular way to try to turn stones to bread is through the apparatus of the welfare state. In its case, it attempts to transform money obtained through coercion into compassion. But the state has only enumerated powers, not innumerable feelings." Or in other words, it mainly has a feeling for power. To paraphrase someone, when a liberal politician asks us for power to do good, it's usually wise to subtract those last three words.

Bottom lyin': The liberal fuses magical faith and raw power with an irony so thick that his own mind cannot penetrate it, so the self-deception -- the auto-pullwoolery -- is complete, and the totalitarian temptation is able clothe itself in mercy. (See, for example, Jonathan Gruber's candid acknowledgement that it was necessary for the state to lie to its stupid citizens in order gain the power to control their healthcare.)

Yes, for the statist, taxes are his eucharist and entitlements his benediction. His appeal to "progress" is likewise an empty gesture in a world deprived of hierarchy. For how does the materialist measure progress except in the form of more and bigger stones?

Which generations to come will carry on their backs, trundling around in fiscal circles. Americans will still be paying for Obama's stone soup long after we're all gone.

Obama's temptation in the political desert went like this: "if you are truly the One, then transform this stolen pork into prosperity!" Might as well try to turn the bacon back into the pig.

(Sign yoinked from American Digest)

Any materialist has failed the first test of spirituality -- or "temptation in the wilderness" -- which is to not attempt to turn stones into bread, or quantity into quality. For in so doing, the materialist inevitably reduces bread to stones, or life to death, spirit to matter. We are left with only stones, so there is "nothing left to eat," speaking metaphysically. And with nothing to eat, there is no way to grow into spiritual manhood. --That Would Be Me Again

Miracles Under the Reign of Quantity

It seems that Jesus' first temptation is food, being that he fasts for forty days and nights while undergoing the other Big Three. This number, according to Benedict, is not arbitrary, but has symbolic resonance with Israel's forty years of wandering in the bewilderness and Moses' forty days on Mount Sinai, and perhaps even Abraham's forty days on the way to Mount Horeb, where the sacrifice of Isaac was to take place.

It can admittedly be difficult for we moderns, who live under the Reign of Quantity -- not to mention Obama's IRS -- to appreciate a more playful approach to numbers. Think of all the numbers that convey a qualitative meaning; in fact, now that I think about it, numbers one through nine all have highly symbolic resonance, and now that I think about it a little bit more, quantities must stand for concrete qualities or else they are just airy and abstract platonic nothings. Math is just a highly symbolic language, but it's still a language.

The early Fathers, according to Benedict, "regarded forty as a cosmic number, as the numerical sign for this world. The four 'corners' encompass the whole world, and ten is the number of the commandments." Multiply them and we have "a symbolic statement about the history of the world as a whole," which "Jesus takes into himself and bears all the way through to the end."

Even before the specific temptations comes the trash talking if you are the Son of God... This is like Bill Maher-level trolling: if your God is so great, why doesn't he prove it to me? It also previews the later mockery of "If you are the Son of God, come down from that cross!"

Well? Is there any truth to the charge? On the one hand, one might well ask: is this any way for a God to appear in history? No, it is not. It is probably accurate to say that no human being would have anticipated or even fantasized about it occurring in such a seemingly feeble manner.

However, this obviously cuts two ways, because it emphasizes that no human being would have concocted such a counter-intuitive script. Why? What would be the point? It seems to be the very opposite of what anyone would have wanted or thought they needed.

This "demand for proof is a constantly recurring theme in the history of Jesus' life; again and again he is reproached for having failed to prove himself sufficiently," and clearing up any and all ambiguity about his identity and mission -- in short, for having failed the Bill Maher test.

The other day, the Happy Acres Guy made a passing comment to the effect that (I'm paraphrasing) a "miracle" is not a cause, but a consequence, of faith. Seen with the eyes of faith, all sorts of things suddenly appear as miraculous. Conversely, seen through the eyes of a corrosive cynicism, nothing is miraculous. Everything just is what it is, and couldn't be otherwise. For such a person, a miracle is a priori impossible, so even if one were to occur, it would be explained away.

Indeed we know this is true, because contrary to the sacred dogma of the Reign of Quantity, existence is a non-stop miracle. Once one starts believing this, then the knowledge follows -- you know, give me faith that I may believe. It's just we are so conditioned by the modern world to not think in this way. But imagine the ancient mind, which had no such difficulty.

Now admittedly, it is entirely possible that they overshot too far in the opposite direction, regarding as miraculous things that have banal scientific explanations. But this doesn't undermine the principle that miracles not only can occur, but must occur, given the fabric of reality.

Fabric of reality? You mean physics? There you go again, trying to reduce quality to quantity! You really must stop doing that. Abstractions are fine, but don't start with them, rather, start with the real world.

I would also say that the miraculous is at the edge of articulation. The typical infertile egghead conflates the linguistically mappable world with the world itself, and therefore excludes himself from the miraculous. Much of Christian dogma is designed, so to speak, to prevent this constriction from occurring, because it can in no way be "contained" by the mind or by language. The "unexpectedness" of Jesus is just one example of this.

As usual, Schuon has some very helpful things to say on this subject. The miraculous, he writes, is "an interference of the marvelous in the sensory realm." And I say, if this weren't happening all the time, the world would be a rather boring place indeed. Even the fact that it is not boring is evidence of the miraculous. In other words, from where does all this novelty, creativity, and upside surprise come?

How did life appear out of matter? Consciousness from biology? Truth and beauty from monkeys? "This phenomenon has in itself nothing mysterious or problematical about it: the so-called natural laws of a lower degree of Existence can always be suspended through the intervention of a higher degree, whence the perfectly logical term 'supernatural'" (Schuon). "Scientists," he adds, "confuse the miraculous with the irrational and the arbitrary."

In other words, what is natural on one level might be supernatural on another. Looked at this way, from the standpoint of mere physics, biology is supernatural. It is trans-physics, just as the human person is trans-biology.

Thus, each "degree also has its laws, which means that the miracle is 'natural' on the universal scale, while being 'supernatural' on the earthly scale." Assuming there is a scale above the human, then from its perspective, the miraculous vertical ingressions herebelow are quite "natural," as natural as when an artist decides to create something beautiful. Which is to say, supernatural.

In Eric Metaxes' new book on the subject, he points out that the Greek word for what we translate as "miracle" is sign. Thus, in the words of Schuon, "The purpose of the miraculous phenomenon is the same as that of the Revelation which it accompanies or as a result of which, or in the shadow of which, it is produced: to elicit or to confirm faith."

The First and Last Temptation of Barack

I'll be spending Thanksgiving with the liberal relatives. As always, I would prefer not to discuss politics, but I can't help imagining what I'll say if this or that question comes up. Every year around this time, we see articles written by liberals on how to talk to your racist, Fox-watching, science-denying uncle. Maybe I'll write one for conservatives, if only to get rid of the voices in my head. But not today.

Unless the question of why one should believe in God comes up (which it has in the past). There are purely utilitarian reasons for choosing to believe in God, just as there are purely utilitarian reasons for getting married, even though there are better reasons. Likewise, behaving morally is a good way to avoid getting in trouble with the law, but it is preferable to actually love virtue and self-mastery.

Speaking of which, after baptism comes temptation: if Jesus incarnates the descent of the absolute, then the temptation in the desert involves a further "descent into the perils besetting mankind" (Benedict). In order for this thing (meaning the whole project) to be efficacious, he "has to enter into the drama of human existence, for that belongs to the core of his mission."

You could say that there is no man without a narrative. Therefore, in order to "become" man, one must not only enter the flesh -- incarnate -- but the story, the essential drama -- for which I can't think of a word at the moment... historify? Enmyth? Bechronicle? Whatever the word, "he has to penetrate it completely, down to its uttermost depths" so as "to bear it on his shoulders and to bring it home," full circle.

The descent is not a one-time-only deal, "but accompanies him along his entire journey. He must recapitulate the whole of history from its beginning..., in order to transform it." A constant part of life is temptation, therefore he must expose himself "to the risks and perils of human existence."

Cut to a barren desert, which is a nice contrast to the leafy paradise of Eden, where things went off the rails in vertical space. Man made (and makes) himself ill among plenty, and now we shall see if he can be made whole amidst danger, deprivation, and temptation.

First of all, what is a temptation? Is it outside or inside? Animals don't experience temptation, because it presumes free will: I am tempted to do that, but I choose to do this.

But every temptation holds out a promise, whether explicit or implicit: choose this and _______ (fill in the blank). Often if we simply fill in the blank, the temptation loses its allure. I've been working with my son on this for years in order to demonstrate to him how a desire fulfilled is just replaced by another, in an endless, compulsive cycle. (There are, of course, worthwhile desires, but one must be able to discern the difference.)

If we visualize the mind as a complex phase space, then temptations are like fixed point attractors, i.e., basins toward which desire is drawn. To the extent that we repeatedly engage in the compulsion, then it is as if our subjective phase space is characterized by these semi-permanent and relatively autonomous valleys. Through repetition, these can eventually become as wide as the Grand Canyon, as in alcoholism and drug addiction.

How to rid ourselves of these malevolent attractors? I would say that this space is always dynamic and fluid, like an ocean. Spiritual peace is none other than a kind of "flattening" of the ocean, which immediately brings to mind Matthew 14, with Jesus calmly walking on the storm-tossed lake. Well, the world -- last time I checked, anyway -- is one big storm-tossed lake, is it not?

In any event, if Jesus is going to go to all the trouble of being tempted in the desert, these particular temptations had better have rather wide application. They will need to stand for and subsume any number of lesser ones (there can be attractors within attractors, as in a fractal).

At the very heart of spiritual temptation must be a bad choice: we could even depict this in a completely abstract way: if O is the Great Attractor, then Ø represents the alternative. We could even say that this is the perpetual serpentine Gnostic promise: don't choose O! That's just a lie told to children to keep them in line and limit their freedom. Choose Ø!

Looks like Benedict is on the same page: "At the heart of all temptations... is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives." Thus the refusal "to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material, while setting God aside as an illusion."

Not to get all insultaining, but that is quite literally how one becomes a liberal. I do not mean this in a polemical or insulting way. Indeed, the fact that most liberals do not believe in God (or are confused about God) -- that they reject O -- is a source of pride, not shame. Does Bill Maher look ashamed of being an atheist? The rebellious rejection of O is very much a part of their identity.

Furthermore, as Benedict writes, "moral posturing is part and parcel of temptation." It always goes hand in hand with pride, for which reason it is difficult to find a truly humble liberal. They are all about presuming "to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and throw ourselves into" the hard work of making the state even bigger and more intrusive than it already is. And of course, these overeducated yahoos always claim "to speak for true realism" (as if Truth isn't the realest of the real).

So, this is the same eternal drama into which Jesus inserts himself. And indeed, he is faced with the eternal temptation of the left, which is to reduce the world to "what is right there in front of us -- power and bread." Although circuses are also important to the left, hence MSNBC, or unreality TV in general.

I would say that this divide between O and Ø is the eternal crossroads, and that a human being can only pretend to make it go away. Man is a moral being, and that's that. Language itself is a moral medium, being that its purpose is to communicate truth.

Therefore, every time you open your mouth, you're making the world more heavenly or more hellish, which explains the aroma that emanates from MSNBC or from Dear Leader himself. Did you see his press conference? One suspects that O turned away from O well before he could have been consciously aware of the craniorectal insertion. His ideology -- and ideolatry -- goes all the way to the bone. Or large intestine, rather.

Heaven Scent

I guess I have time this morning to get back to the Jesus project, now on to his ministry -- which seems like too banal a description. A ministry is obviously the activity of a minister, "a person whose job involves leading church services, performing religious ceremonies (such as marriages), and providing spiritual or religious guidance to other people." Okay, but...

For starters, who made him a minister? By what authority? We can see where he gives that authority; in Acts 26:16 he says "I have appeared to you for this purpose, to make you a minister and a witness both of the things which you have seen and of things which I will yet reveal to you."

Benedict writes that this is a question that confronts any reader of the Gospels: that is, where did he get this stuff? "The reaction of his hearers was clear: This teaching does not come from any school. It is radically different from what can be learned in schools."

And yet, it is taught with great authority. Which doesn't automatically mean it's true. But it does raise a second question: how is it that he is so eerily -- one might say charismatically -- confident about what he professes?

How does one ever attain certainty on any matter? Schuon writes that it is not a question of mere logic, since logic can only deduce proof from premises that must be furnished by another source. He says that certainty is actually "an aspect of knowledge," somewhat like an attribute of the truth it confirms:

"It is situated beyond the domain of the sentiments but on the individual plane it nonetheless possesses a perfume which allows us to look on it as a sentiment. One can likewise speak of a sentiment of doubt; doubt is nothing else but the void left by absent certainty..."

Of course, we can always be certain of error and doubt the truth, or Obama would have no explanation. How then to discern the difference?

I would say that if you read and understood what Schuon said above, then you are well on the way to understanding where real certainty comes from. Conversely, if you have no earthly idea of what he's talking about, then -- among other problems -- you will be insensitive to the perfume that attends Jesus' ministry (or better, Jesus himself).

Jesus is truth and presence, or the presence of truth. "Thus," writes Schuon, "Christ is essentially a manifestation of Divine Presence, but he is thereby also Truth."

One might also say that he is the manifestation of the metacosmic Center at the cosmic periphery. Importantly, this is both a spatial and temporal center, or the axis of history. Jesus is both "the Word which manifests itself in the Universe as the divine Spirit," and "the Real Presence affirming itself at the center of the soul..." Or in other words, the metacosmic and microcosmic personal centers.

I am reminded of how neurologists say it is possible to diagnose incipient senility: don't panic, but if you hold a jar of peanut butter a few centimeters from your nose, and can't smell it, then you may be developing Alzheimer's. I suppose something similar must occur to the spiritual olfactory system to cause spiritual dementias such as atheism.

As to the ultimate source of his certainty, Benedict writes that "Jesus' teaching is not the product of human learning," but "originates from immediate contact with the Father" -- whatever that means.

What it means is that it is grounded in the ultimate principle, except that this principle is not an abstraction, but rather, a concrete person. Thus, it is grounded in relationship and in dialogue, which are prior to any specific content.

For Jesus, it appears that "prayer" is the name for this dialogue. "Again and again the Gospels note that Jesus 'withdrew to the mountain' to spend nights in prayer 'alone' with his Father." To con-verse is to flow-with, so we are talking about a mysterious spiral of communion.

Now, it seems to me that the (or a) deeper meaning of baptism is a radical reorientation to the metacosmic center: "it is meant to be the concrete enactment of a conversion that gives the whole of life a new direction forever" (ibid.). It is to simultaneously turn toward, to be in, and to be drawn toward, this Center, so it embodies both the already and the not yet: real change and real hope.

You are now on the vertical path, which consists of many roads all leading to the same place. Unlike profane philosophy, which consists of many roads leading from nothing to nowhere, here all roads lead from anywhere to everything (or from anyone to the One and back again, in a round trip of ascent and descent).

But one still has to give up the Nothing (which resembles the "false plenitude" alluded to above), or in other words, die to death, so "immersion into the waters is a symbol of death." Water always has two symbolic meanings; on the one hand, it can be "the annihilating, destructive power of the ocean flood," "a permanent threat to the cosmos, to the earth..." At the same time, "the flowing waters of the river are above all a symbol of life" (ibid.).

So, while you can't fight fire with fire, I suppose one can vanquish water with Water, so this post ends not with a bang but with a groaner.

Have You Lost Your Christian Mind?!

I may have to set the Jesus thingy aside for the moment, since I haven't had the temporal slack to thoroughly plunderize Ratzinger, and I don't want to grow it alone. I suppose I could, but that would take even more time -- i.e., time for reflection, contemplation, and trialogue.

Also, I have a hard time planning ahead anyway. Not only does the spirit blow where it will, but this particular spirit can only blow where it will. You call it undisciplined, I call it spontaneity. Or multi-undisciplinary.

At the moment, I'm preoccupied with this nice-looking book (which I just started) called The Gospel and the Mind: Recovering and Shaping the Intellectual Life. It goes to many of the ideas we bandy about here, albeit in a less polemical, sharp-elbowed, and over-the-top manner. He's a professor, not a blogger.

The overall thesis of the book is alarming enough, even if stated in a dispassionate way. Stated in a bobastic way, it would be something like: failing to be Christian makes one intellectually insane. Or in other words, if the purpose of Christianity is salvation, this certainly includes a rescue operation of our capacity to think.

As always, Jews are a special case, therefore much of this may not apply to them; then again, you will have no doubt noticed how common it is for the irreligious (or even Reform) Jew to become intellectually -- and politically -- insane, so perhaps it will; we shall see. We are particularly interested to know if there is some identifiable point that the mind goes off the rails.

Genesis, of course, speaks to this, but in a rather general way: that is, we are all faced with the primordial choice of recognizing God or of being God. Even so, choosing the former is no guarantee of sanity; it's just that choosing the latter is a guarantee of intellectual un- or insanity.

For that matter, it is not as if self-identifying Christians don't lose their marbles. Hardly! We don't want to fall into the No True Scotsman fallacy. Therefore, we will have to inquire into why this is the case: how does the cure seem to become the illness -- as in, say, that homosexual-hating pastor, or Obama's demented mentor?

The No True Scotsman fallacy, by the way, occurs when confronted with a counter-example to a universal claim. Thus, if I affirm that Christianity allows one to think properly, you may reasonably ask: "What about Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Bill Clinton?" To which I indignantly draw myself to my full height and respond, "no true Christian would think as they do." (Similarly, our anonymous troll's favorite fallacy is the "no true progressive" dodge.)

Perhaps we will weave in a bit of the infancy narratives after all, specifically, the star that alerted and guided those Wise Men to Jesus. As Benedict writes, they not only "represent the journeying of humanity toward Christ," but "initiate a procession that continues throughout history."

Furthermore, they symbolize "the inner aspiration of the human spirit, the dynamism of religious and human reason toward him." Also, this makes the implicit connection between cosmos and Christ: there is now something fully in the cosmos that is fully beyond the cosmos: the Creative Reason is here with us, and creativity never stops surpassing itself.

That idea of an intellectual north star: everyone's got one, whether implicit or explicit. One cannot not have a metaphysic and still presume to think. The North Star is the First Principle.

It is possible to attack this question from either end: in other words, assuming one is capable of thinking, one may drill down to the principle that makes this possible.

To cite one obvious example, let's say I am thinking about natural selection. To the extent that I am truly thinking -- or thinking truly -- natural selection cannot possibly be the principle that is responsible for my ability to think about it. That's what you call an epistemological non-starter, because there is simply no way to get from natural selection to truth. This also explains why the metaphysical Darwinian is not only an unserious thinker, but cannot possibly be serious. It is the type of thing we can confidently reject out of hand as a false path.

However, atheism has its benefits, or it wouldn't exist. For example, it exalts the human mind (without the proper complement of humility). Such a mind cannot really know truth, but it can know a kind of pretend truth. It is similar to pretend wealth. Let's say I loan you a great sum of money. You will live large while the money lasts, but all the while you are accruing interest.

Likewise for one who enjoys the flood of cheap Darwinian cash. Eventually -- again, if you drill all the way down -- you will find that your principal is exhausted, and your mind is writing checks that the spirit can't cash. It's all just funny money, and you've been living in an ideological bubble, with one person of tenure living off the worthless checks of another until the whole thing collapses.

Kind of like what happened yesterday.

To be continued...

Hope and Change, AKA Resentment and Coercion

Well, to be honest, I haven't had time to get much further in the Jesus trilogy, so this post will consist of beating one idea to death. But it's a terribly destructive idea that deserves to die, and not just at the ballot box.

Both Balthasar and Chesterton make much of the very idea of God-as-child. The former speaks of "the eternal mystery of the childhood of Christ" flowing "into the eternal childhood which is given to men: hope."

For if you think about it, hope is indeed the essence of childhood. Why? A number of reasons, but I was thinking of how children are always changing and growing. They are like little arrows that always point toward their own telos -- which is to say, perfection, or completion, or maturity. I would suggest that America is infused with this idea -- or rather, that the very idea of America is infused with Christian hope in the sense we have just stated.

What I mean is that there is no reason for hope in a static society: things are as they are and will be as they will be because they have always been this way (and this way is decreed by the gods, so it is not for us to change it).

Against the American ideal is the European import of Marxism, which both sees and creates static classes. Sowell touches on this in his indispensable Intellectuals and Race: just as the caste system tethers individuals to their societal place, thus depriving them of hope, multiculturalism seals people into so many boxes of petrified failure. The difference is that the leftist exchanges hope for envy, thus the crude appeals to race, class, sexual preference, etc. In other words, the leftist croctrine of diversity

"tends to freeze people where the accident of birth has placed them. Unlike the caste system, multiculturalism holds out the prospect that, all cultures being equal, one's life chances should be the same -- and that it is society's fault if these chances are not the same." So instead of hope for betterment, the left promotes resentment of the better off, accompanied by a demand for "social justice," which is simply envy with a truncheon.

So, one man's hope is another man's hell. Which, of course, is playing out all over the country today. If only the people who were deluded into voting for Obama in 2008 could exercise a little self-awareness, and appreciate that we are now living in the reality that in 2008 was only a "hope." This is it. This is what happens when Christian -- or at least American -- hope is displaced by Marxist resentment.

Did we see the future in 2008? No, only the present. Obama supporters blinded themselves to the present in order to indulge a fanciful hope that is both anti-American and un-Christian. It makes their world go around -- in a downward spiral.

As Sowell states, "the caste system preaches resignation to one's fate," while "multiculturalism preaches resentment of one's fate." Unlike these, Americanism kicks fate in the nuts and says get outta' my way!

Imagine placing children into unchanging castes; or imagine that we didn't move through school grades, but rather, were assigned one grade for life. The idea is preposterous, but not as preposterous as the left's "war on women" or its crude appeals to racial hatred, fear, and stupidity.

Jesus, of course, makes a point of counseling us to be as children, but surely he doesn't mean this in any pejorative sense -- i.e., to be as naive, credulous, and easily led as a Democrat.

Again, what characterizes the child? Well, for starters, a child is what man uniquely is, in the sense that -- alone among the animals -- he specializes in immaturity because his neoteny never ceases.

To say neoteny is to say neo-nate, which simply means "new birth." Thus, to say that man must be "born again" implies that one must not conflate, say, biological and spiritual birth, in that the former happens just once.

Now a child, just because he is constantly learning and therefore "permanently immature," is not thereby a little nothing. Rather, he is the very symbol of our own eros shot into the heart of the divine center. We are all as children growing toward our proper end.

The psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott once wrote an article on the psychodynamics of shoplifting, suggesting that it wasn't so much motivated by want or by greed, but by hope. That is, in the instant the shoplifter is engaged in his theft, he is temporarily buoyed by the hope that the painful emptiness at the core of his being will be filled. But it never is, so he must repeat the process in a compulsive manner.

More generally, as Boethius wrote, if the mere satisfaction of desire were the cause of happiness, "there is no reason why beasts should not be thought blessed, whose whole intention is bent to supply their corporal wants." By extrapolation, a life of pursuing false hope converts man to an animal.

In any compulsion, there is an existential component of hope; but this is not real hope. Rather, it is merely a defense against hopelessness. Nothing is more deflating than an illusory desire satisfied, because its satisfaction co-arises with hopelessness. In fact, we could say that any compulsion -- and few people are completely free of them -- is simply hopelessness deferred.

For this reason, gratitude is the best revenge -- even a preemptive strike -- against the wily one: "Gratitude is a virtue that allows us, not only to be content with little things -- this is holy childhood -- but also to appreciate or respect little things or big things because they come from God, beginning with the beauty and the gifts of nature; one must be sensitive to the innocence and mystery of the divine works" (Schuon).

But leftist ideology rests upon an ontology which inverts the order of the cosmos, elevating existence over and above essence. In so doing, it essentially sanctifies a perversion, as it instantiates at its very foundation false hope. That is, we all know ahead of time that the fanciful schemes and discredited economic ideas of the left can never "deliver the goods" -- not the material goods and certainly not the spiritual ones.

Jesus, Mary & Joysoph

Barely any time this morning, as can be discerned by that wince-inducing title.

As Lincoln might have said about the Incarnation: let us resolve that this species, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.

It is as if the entire cosmos and whole history of man are focused to a point, conferring "a decisive re-orientation toward a new manner of human existence" (Benedict).

This new beginning "opens up" new possibilities for man, possibilities that had previously been foreclosed. Now we not only have a horizontal genealogy, but also, so to speak, a vertical "pneumalogy" -- a direct line of common descent from the Father.

However, since this is a new birth of freedom, the link is not compulsory but voluntary. No one is forced into anything. The adoption papers have been drawn, but we still have to sign the dotted line.

On Friday night I watched what is supposed to be the Best Zombie Movie of All Time, I Walked With a Zombie. In it, one of the characters says something to the effect that their life is so miserable -- these are descendants of slaves who still toil on sugar plantations -- that they weep when a baby is born and "make merry" at funerals.

I suppose one could say the same of being born a peasant at the margins of the brutal Roman regime in 3 or 4 BC. There is indeed a great deal of pessimism in ancient thought, and it is difficult to see why there wouldn't be.

Chesterton touches on this in The Everlasting Man -- that even if one was not a slave, the vast majority of people were "insignificant or even invisible." Unlike today, the state didn't even bother pretending to be your friend. He speaks, for example, of the pyramids, which were erected

"under those everlasting skies for ever by the labour of numberless and nameless men, toiling like ants and dying like flies, wiped out by the work of their own hands."

The pyramids are supposed to be an enduring monument to man's greatness, but we forget that they point in two directions, or rather, like any Tower of Babel, they try to transform what is a meaningless existence into a meaningful one in a self-nullifying way -- like trying to prove the eternal greatness of Nazi Germany via a monument built by Jewish slave labor.

In this context, the annunciation of Jesus' conception is quite odd. As Benedict writes, the angel does not greet Mary with the usual Shalom or a colloquial Whassup?, but rather, with a word that translates to Rejoice!

For Benedict, this "marks the true beginning of the New Testament." You might say that the Gospel -- good news -- begins here, in a surprisingly literal manner. This joy is a "particular gift of the Holy Spirit.... a chord is sounded with the angel's salutation which then resounds through the life of the Church." Thus, "Rejoice, full of grace!" implicitly connects these two -- joy and grace -- which are "joined at the same root."

Remember, we can always say NO! to the offer of joy and grace. We are all entitled to spiritual birth control, which is none other than free will, or the power to render ourselves infertile and prevent a divine conception (and birth and growth). There is terrestrial abortion and there is celestial abortion, but the two are not unrelated.

Speaking of fertility, Benedict has a brief passage on Joseph. Not a great deal is said about him, but then again, to describe him as a "just man" says a great deal.

For Benedict it implies "one who maintains living contact with the word of God.... He is like a tree, planted beside the flowing waters, constantly bringing forth fruit." These vertical waters, "from which he draws nourishment, naturally refer to the living word of God, into which he sinks the roots of his being."

Furthermore, this is not something "imposed" from without or from on high, but something recognized and loved for what it is: it is that same Joy alluded to above:

"The image of the man with roots in the living waters of God's word, whose life is spent in dialogue with God and who therefore brings forth constant fruit -- this image becomes concrete in the event recounted here [his attitude toward Mary's surprising pregnancy], as well as in everything we are subsequently told about Joseph of Nazareth."