Let Us Make Man in Our Image

Yesterday we alluded to Winnicott's crack that "there is no such thing as an infant," which is very much an analogue of the most ortho of paradoxes, that "there is no such thing as a God." That is, if man is going to be an image of the Creator(s), then we are going to have to have plurality somehow built into us.

Indeed, while there are many ways to fall, one of them is to presume a radical individuality, irrespective of whether or not one "believes" in God, for the more important point is that such a one is failing to "be" -- and three -- like God.

In Ratzinger's essay on The Notion of Person, he suggests that personhood was a Christian discovery or development, however you wish to characterize it.

It was Tertullian who, in the late second or early third century, nailed down the secret formula of "one being in three persons." For Ratzinger, this is when "the word 'person' entered intellectual history for the first time with its full weight." With this in mind, it is possible to understand such otherwise confusing data, such as God speaking in the plural, e.g., "Let us make man in our image and likeness," or "Adam has become like one of us."

And just lately I've been on a bit of a Sophia-Mary kick, and there is no gainsaying the fact that Ms. Wisdom seems to have been there from the start, even if she is created rather than -- like the second person -- begotten. I can't say that I recommend this book, because the author takes 400 pages to say what I just said in a sentence, but he compiles all of the material from the wisdom books of the OT that go to this, such as:

--Wisdom was first of all created things...

--The Lord created me the first of his works long ago, before all else was made.

--Then I was at his side each day, his darling and delight, playing in his presence continually...

So, wisdom is the first creation of the Creator. You might say that he creates creativity for us, which I think is alluded to in that second passage, i.e., playing in his presence continually. In this context, remember the words of our Unknown Friend, that it is all about transforming work into play. Remember too that mysterious word presence. We'll get back to that one, maybe later in the week.

In any event, with this radically new concept of person, we have the idea that personhood is "dialogical," only this is a three-person dialogue and thus a tria-logos. God is substance-in-relation, such that there is nothing beneath, behind, or above his relativity. Can you relate to God? Truly, you cannot not relate and still call yourself a person.

I remind you to keep the whole infancy thingy (discussed yesterday) in the back of your mind as we proceed.

As Ratzinger explains, "person must be understood as relation," whether we are talking about man or about God. With regard to the latter, "the three persons that exist in God are in their nature relations." They are "not substances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing relations and nothing besides."

To deeply appreciate this is to see, as it were, the negative of a photograph, except we're really talking about the positive of a pneumagraph. It's the same image, only seen insight-out from the proper perspective, or maybe with your x-ray specs. Really, it's how Blake can see God in a grain of sand and all that. If everything is relation, then cosmic alienation isn't just a drag, it's plain wrong.

Note that relation "is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation" -- which is why the Son cannot be created, because relation with the Son is what the Father is, so to speak (and vice versa).

This obviously brings to bear a novel way to think about oneself. It also goes to everything we have said about "idiom" in bygone posts, because that too goes to the relation(s) we are. You will never find yourself in yourself, rather, only in your relations, both to people and objects (the latter of which are always infused with personhood as well, however attenuated).

Truly, we are never alone, for the ultimate reality is person, and "person is the pure relativity of being turned toward the other."

However, note that it is not the person of Father, nor the person of the Holy Spirit, who incarnates in man. Rather, it is the person of the Son, whose personhood (even though it must be a fractal of the totality) is characterized by receptivity. The Son "receives" from the Father, and if it's good enough for him, it ought to be good enough for us.

Thus we read in John how Jesus says "The Son cannot do anything of himself." As Ratzinger explains, this is because "he does not place himself as a delimited substance next to the Father, but exists in total relativity toward him..."

This same ontological structure "is in turn transferred... to the disciples when Christ says, 'Without me you can do nothing.'" In this way, man "truly comes to himself and into the fullness of his own, because he enters into unity with the one to whom he is related."

You might say that this is how the flower of man's personhood turns toward the light and blooms, for man is "not a substance that closes itself in itself, but the phenomenon of complete relativity." We can only discover the reason for our being in relationship and in mutual giving, since each needs the other to be who he or she is. And Jesus is not the exception, but the rule. For spirit

"not only is," but in reaching "beyond itself, it comes to itself. In transcending itself it has itself; by being with the other it first becomes itself, it comes to itself. Expressed differently again: being with the other is its form of being with itself."

Which all goes to why the helpless infant and child must be prior to the man, not just chronologically but ontologically.

The Cosmic Baby and the Wholly (M)Other

Some of you may remember my take on psychogenesis -- i.e., the emergence, or better, presence, of mind -- found on pp. 109-123 of the bʘʘk.

It starts with a quote by John Bowlby, the father of modern attachment theory, which for me is one of the irreducible pillars of existence. In other words, if we want to have a Total View of Reality, we could no more exclude the interpersonal neurobiology of human attachment than we could physics or chemistry. It is that important, especially as elaborated by researchers such as Allan Schore.

My high altitude summary begins with a quote from Bowlby to the effect that "the least-studied phase of human development remains the phase during which a child is acquiring all that makes him most human. Here is a continent to conquer." This is followed by a comment from Tolstoy, who remarked that "it is but a step" from a five year old to an adult, "but from the newborn baby to the child of five is an appalling distance."

The basic idea is that the developmentally premature, neurologically incomplete, and therefore helpless, infant is truly the hinge of psychospiritual development, and without whom we could never have transcended Animal Planet, no matter how big and impressive our brains.

Since infancy is the narrow pain in the neck we must all pass through on the way to adulthood, it occurred to me (before writing the book) that mankind at large must have had to thread this same developmental needle. You might say that man needed to invent infancy in order to become man. So, who came first, the infant or the adult? This is similar -- probably identical -- to the question of what man "is" outside the social context, for man is always situated in a social context, without which he simply wouldn't be man.

One more quote, this one from Norbert Elias: "Over and over again, in the scientific myths of origin no less than the religious ones, [people] feel impelled to imagine: In the beginning was a single human being, who was an adult."

But to jump ahead -- and above -- a bit, there is a damn good reason that ultimate reality appears in history as an infant, because the infant is a quintessential analogue of this very principle -- so long as we bear in mind the orthoparadox that, to paraphrase D.W. Winnicott, there is no such thing as an infant.

Rather, "if you set out to describe a baby, you will find you are describing a baby and someone." That is the key, because the mother-infant dyad is very much a kind of link between two interiors. Indeed, it is the link that forges and deepens those interiors. Conversely, most mental illness (AKA Failure to Launch) is rooted in disturbances in attachment.

I don't know of too many other people who write of the cosmic importance of babies, so imagine my surprise when I see Schindler making the same point. In the chapter we are discussing, The Sanctity of the Intellectual Life, he speaks of "the miracle of the other," i.e., "the gift of one to another, and thereby the rhythm of giving and receiving."

How does this delicate gift-giving rhythm get in here, i.e., into the cosmos? This may sound poetic or sentimental, but it is not; or maybe it is, but it is also literal: "This rhythm has its paradigm in the mother's smile." Or, jumping way ahead of ourselves, we could say that its highest expression comes in the form of Mary's benevolent Yes, an eternal Yes that is the birth of Christianity.

"Being in its highest 'natural' kind," writes Schindler, "takes its primary meaning from the mother-child relation," for "the child's first experience of being lies in its encounter with the mother's smile, received by the child in a manner that is not yet conscious" but "in time liberates the child to respond: to smile in return."

Thus -- and this is the critical point -- this mutual confirmation of being (whose outward sign is the smile) completes an extra-neurological circuit which in turn opens up the ever-expanding sensorium of our worldspace.

Think about the alternative, which is to say, maternal or environmental rejection of the being-ness of the infant (or just failure to recognize and confirm it, which will amount to the same thing from the infant's perspective). This only happens all the time, which is why a psychologist never runs out of potential patients.

Winnicott was quick to point out that nobody is perfect, such that all the baby really requires is "good enough mothering," for humans are a Resilient Bunch, and besides, we need pain and frustration, only in tolerable doses (just as the immune system needs germs and viruses to strengthen itself). But you might be surprised to learn how frequently this minimom standard fails to be met.

Schindler alludes to the metacosmic angle of this subject, describing how "This rhythm of gift and receptivity -- which is to say, this other-centered rhythm" which is "found at the level of human being, provides an index or analogue in terms of which to approach all levels of being."

That is a bold statement, i.e., that the human baby explains everything! But look at it from the other way around, and you can appreciate the fact that without the baby, we could explain nothing, for we could never have exited the closed loop of animal neurology.

The baby ushers in two related realities, relation and interiority, for human relation is interior-to-interior -- and not just with other humans. That is, even knowledge of so-called "objects" involves an abstraction of their interior, which is to say, their intelligibility.

So ultimately, our whole stance toward reality is interior-to-interior, which is why we have access to truth, beauty, and unity, none of which are empirical objects.

Now, if our task is to conform ourselves to the ultimate, the First and Last Word, then Jesus demonstrates how this is done, in that the second person of the trinity is "first" receptive, just as the baby is first receptive to the mother before "giving back" her love. So Christ "gives back" to the Father, but never "outgrows" this fundamental attitude of receptivity. He doesn't grow up to be Father, as if Sonship is a defect or partial thingy!

Likewise, in human terms, you could assert the orthoparadox that man never "outgrows" his childhood, for if he succeeds in doing so, he will fail to grow out of it. In other words, what sets humans apart from even the higher mammals is that we never transcend our neoteny, and therefore continue growing "forever," again, in imitation of the Trinity.

Here is how Ratzinger describes it in a fine paper called Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology:

"The content of Jesus' existence is 'being from someone toward someone,' the absolute openness of existence without any reservation of what is merely and properly one's own." And "As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you," but first you must willing to receive. Bottom line for today:

"Christ's doctrine is he himself, and he himself is not his own, because his 'I' exists entirely from the 'you."' And both are situated in the loving We. Thus, "The other through which the spirit comes to itself is finally that wholly other for which we use the stammering word 'God'.... The person is all the more itself the more it is with the wholly other, with God" (Ratzinger).

The Love of Science and the Science of Love

Next up in Schindler, The Sanctity of the Intellectual Life. Yes, sanctity, without which the intellectual life is not even worthless, but rather, perhaps the most harmful force in all of creation.

Yeah, you heard me, all of creation. For if human beings are the most precious things in all of creation -- which they are -- then nothing has destroyed more of us (not just physically, but mentally and spiritually) than intellectuals and the lies they propagate. So we're being quite literal here, not at all polemical.

A very quick google search leads me to this site called Necrometrics, estimating that in the 20th century, 203 million were killed as a result of war, genocide, and man-caused famine, 87 million alone from communism. By way of comparison, he calculates 8.5 million other murders worldwide in the same period.

And "3.5 million people were killed in 20th Century disasters such as floods, earthquakes, and volcanos," but even there, ideology has a lot to due with it, because a 7.0 earthquake in California may kill a handful, whereas thousands will die if it occurs in some craphole like Iran. It's the same with diseases. Relatively few people in first world countries die in epidemics, unless liberals get their way and everyone stops vaccinating their children.

It also says that exactly 34,075 people were killed by tigers in India between 1875 and 1912, but c'mon. I would file that under the general heading of Failure to Handle Your Bidness. Some things are just basic, like clearing out the snakes, bears, and malaria-bearing mosquitoes. (By the way, thanks again to liberal intellectuals, millions have died in Africa as a result of the ban on DDT.)

So, ideas have consequences, often deadly. At present, the most evil force in the world -- Islamism -- is an intellectual movement.

But let's get back to the main topic at hand, the sanctity of the intellect. What is it? Very simply, it is truth -- or, more precisely, reverence for truth. To paraphrase Schuon, nothing is more privileged than truth. If man is composed of intellect, sentiment, and will, then it is because we are proportioned to, and converge upon, truth, beauty, and goodness, respectively.

Just as "good" is what we are to do, truth is what we are to know, and beauty what we are to create. Each has its own special penumbra of sanctity. Each is loved for its own sake, not for any utilitarian reason. Like family and friendship, each is its own sufficient reason.

"Sanctity should provide the inner form of the intellectual life, in a way that affects both the methods and the content of the modern academic curriculum" (Schindler).

Just waiting for the laughter to die down.

Here is how Schuon defines sanctity: "it is the intuition of the spiritual nature of things; profound intuition which determines the entire soul, hence the entire being of man."

Now, truth is nothing if not spiritual. How's that? Because it is obviously immaterial, immateriality being one of the defining characteristics of Spirit. When I so much as see a tree as a tree, it is because -- recall the Helen Keller example last week -- the mind is able to perceive the abstract form in the particular substance. If we couldn't do this, we would be animals, precisely. Or, man is the animal with a rational soul, as Aristotle quipped. (But we are more than this as well.)

More Good Stuff from Schuon: "Metaphysical truth is in the first place discernment between the Real and the unreal or the less real." This implies that truth is hierarchically ordered from top to bottom (for it could never be vice versa, as per scientism, which literally elevates appearances to truth).

Truth is not what we make but what we discover. But this does not imply that truth is passive. To the contrary -- especially in the Christian view -- truth "offers itself" as a gift, so to speak, to the intellect. Reality is generous, self-giving, open -- but only to the mind that is similarly generous, self-giving, and open. As applied to man, these three go to the sanctity of the intellect.

A sanctified intellect is humble, open to the gift of truth, and even self-sacrificial, for clearly, in order to know any truth, we must "sacrifice" the interests and preferences of the ego.

Properly understood, science is most definitely a spiritual practice, something which virtually all scientists once knew. It clearly requires a kind of kenosis, or self-emptying in order to be properly filled by truth.

What scientism forgets is that it is rooted in this metaphysic of love. For what else do you call this mutual self-offering of truth and intellect? You could say, as Schindler does, that "all creation is dynamically ordered from and toward the love revealed by God in Jesus Christ." Yes, this is what you call real Christian science. Or just say science.

You know, the reason why the intellectual life is so rewarding is because it is this continuous gift of truth to intellect, right? It is a love affair. How can this be, if it is not built into the nature of things?

Oops. Just got called into work early. Let's abruptly conclude with this:

"[I]n Jesus Christ, God has assumed human nature, and, indeed, through human nature, in some sense all of nature. Nature from the beginning finds its integrity and freedom in obedience: in a relation of service to the Father, and thus in love.... Thus every created being in its depths exhibits an orientation and movement from God, and in this way... 'images' God" (Schindler).

God Is Dead, and So Is This Sentence

This next chapter in Schindler is called On the Meaning of the Death of God in the Academy, and it's a corker. He starts with the godlessfather of deconstruction, Derrida, who "criticizes Western thought in terms of what he calls its 'logocentrism,'" -- but, get this, uses words to do so. Doesn't that automatically call his method into question, i.e., using language to undermine the very basis of language?

No, not if the real point is destruction. It's like the Islamists who want 21st century military technology to bring us back to the 7th century, or progressives who want to limit our freedom in order to free us from freedom.

The joyously preposterous logocentrism of Raccoon tradition "presupposes that meaning is present to us, at least in principle." In premodern times this was consciously identified with the Christian logos and ultimately with the second person of the Trinity.

However, "with the secularization of the post-Enlightenment West, this link has been severed, but logocentrism nonetheless persists." In other words, some people haven't yet gotten the memo that God is dead, and don't realize that any possibility of meaning went out the door with him: "Simply stated, meaning and intelligibility presuppose God."

The eternal Logos pervades the universe -- it is immanent -- but is also the "transcendental signified," the "convergent object of reference to which all signs are somehow directed." Thanks to Logos Central, all truth speaks of, and is derived from, the One Truth -- or, in the words of de Lubac, All knowers know God implicitly in all that they know, whether they know it or not.

Derrida obviously knew what was at (the) stake here, so give him credit for that. For ultimately, "The sign and divinity have the same place and time of birth" (in Schindler). It's just that there is no divinity, so the sign is barren, the crib (and even womb) is empty, and meaning has no descendents. There is nothing for the sign to point to except other signs, so the system is as inbred as the Royal Family.

However, even if this were true, it wouldn't solve the "problem" of meaning, and make it go away. In the past we have discussed how fractal geometry proves that a coastline -- say, the coastline around Hawaii, or Great Britain -- is actually "infinite," like a real-life Zeno's paradox. I suppose that the closest and most accurate measurement will reach all the way into the infinite nothing of dark matter or something. In other words, you fall out of the cosmos from the bottom end.

The point is that language is actually open at both ends. You can't just close off the top -- transcendence -- and pretend you're done with it. This, I think, explains the insane fertility of language, which was one of Joyce's main points in Finnegans Wake.

There are references to this throughout the text. I could spend the rest of the morning playing this game, but let's just say that When a part so ptee does duty for the holos we soon grow to use of an allforabit. That's been my credo for some 30 years, and it hasn't failed me yet.

So, "the age of the sign is essentially theological" (Derrida). But we are beyond the theological age, so "No longer do we naively appeal to a Divine Logos which undergirds the intelligibility in and of things and their linguistic expression" (Schindler).

Now, when Schindler says "we," he obviously means the tenured, for whom this is no doubt true despite the fact that truth is no longer possible for them. Whatever. Fuck you pay me.

Thus, "Derrida represents the return of [Nietzsche's] madman, insisting that the requisite time has now passed: it is time now for the death of God to be seen and heard in its full implications. Intelligibility -- identifiable meaning -- does not, and cannot, outlive God. Rather, following the death of God, we stray 'as through an infinite nothing'" (ibid.).

Have you gnosissed how the Fall can take so many diverse forms? For in the deconstructed world, "theos has been replaced by anthropos" (ibid.), which is just a fancy way of ssssaying Ye shall be as gods! It doesn't matter what you believe, so long as it amounts to nothing.

Note also how the Word, instead of becoming flesh -- and vice versa -- is displaced by the flesh. Well played, Beelzebub, well payed too.

Therefore you're a meaningless god, or a god without meaning, but hey, nobody's perfect. Plus you are in competition with a horde of similarly atomized and meaningless godlings, but seize enough power and you can control or vanquish them.

Knowledge itself is broken up into smaller and smaller parts, which reminds me of how the psychotic person is haunted by a persecutory world of projected psychic bits with no hope of synthesis and unity. Postmodernism is institutionalized psychosis, or cosmic lunacy. Not only is it a flight from transcendence, but a violent repression of it, which is how someone once defined fascism (violent opposition to transcendence, or something like that).

If you have followed the argument this far, you could say that, deep down, liberalism is not only shallow, but non-existent. It is the metaphysics of nothing, or applied nihilism. Which is why a Harry Reid, or Hillary Clinton, or Dick Durbin, are the way they are (and aren't).

What Does Meaninglessness Mean?

"Unless our language signifies something definite and intelligible," writes Schindler, "we can hardly consider with seriousness questions of truth." However, questions of truth are precisely what the tenured tell us are -- literally -- out of bounds, since we are bounded by language, in a closed system of signifyin' jive.

To make a long story short, once upon a time there was construction. This was followed by deconstruction, proving that man can destroy in a single generation what it took 13.7 billion years to build. Our task then is reconstruction, only perhaps on a firmer and more self-critical basis, so as to be better able to fend off the inevitable intellectual vermin who embody the catabolic force, the spirit of darkness.

These combative assouls will always be with us, and they do render a cosmic service, in that they will either kill us or make us stronger in the ability to vindicate Truth. As Peter says, don't sweat it, but "always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you," and as Paul says, be prepared to demolish "arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God."

First of all, someone needs to explain how meaning can arise in a meaningless cosmos. Sounds basic, but there are certain universal principles that man is entitled to know (for God doesn't leave us wholly in the dark), such as the laws of identity, noncontradiction, and never walking the pitcher.

Another one is that the greater cannot come from the lesser. Yes, we are aware of the fact that local conditions may temporarily overcome entropy, but this begs the question, since it doesn't explain how the information got into the local conditions to begin with. Rather, it still assumes what needs to be proved.

Besides, how would it be possible to prove meaninglessness? Isn't any proof proof of meaning? One might well say: I prove, therefore truth is.

Now, meaning can only exist if a thing refers to something beyond itself, whether we are talking about an individual person, all of history, or the entire cosmos. If the cosmos is ultimately a closed system, referring to, or situated in, nothing beyond itself, then any meaning we come up with is just a dream.

Thus, Christian eschatology embodies the principle that history does not achieve its own consummation within history. Simple as. Or, either it does or it doesn't. There can be no in between.

This then is one of the ground-floor principles that divides left and right: the left always exploits the primordial but misguided hope (a corollary of the Fall) that history can achieve its own consummation here and now -- that we can "fundamentally transform" things in such a way that we waltz straight back into our lost paradise. Then we will live as large as the little gods we are.

But history cannot consummate itself in time for the same reason man cannot do so. Rather, as Ratzinger writes, "such an expectation is irreconcilable with the perpetual openness and the perpetually peccable [i.e., capable of sinning] freedom of man." You might say that the leftist's dreams of terrestrial utopia are an insult to man's propensity to badness. The leftist forgets that man likes to rebel on principle, and that if he can't rebel against the light, then he'll even rebel against darkness.

In this regard, the leftist makes the inverse error of libertarians who seem to believe that the free market alone is able to foster or regulate morality. As Ratzinger observes, in utopian socialist planning, "the salvation of the world" won't come "from the moral dignity of man." Rather, it is supposed to arise "from mechanisms that can be planned," but which ignore "the values which support the world." The conservative liberal occupies the middle ground, in the belief that the free market does not create morality but must assume it.

Another cosmic principle is alluded to above, in that man is a perpetually open system. Another name for this open system is person. Now, how does such an infinitely open system -- open to the infinite -- arise in a supposedly closed cosmos? All other animals are enclosed within their nervous systems, so Kant had the right idea, just the wrong species. Persons by definition are radically open to what is outside and above them, i.e., to relationship and transcendence.

Bottom line: "eschatology, precisely because it is not a political goal, functions as guarantor of meaning." Conversely, deny it and meaning evaporates. The eschaton, in our view, is the "divine attractor" at the end of history, or which draws history in its wake. In a formulation we have deployed before, Jesus is end-made-middle, or transcendence-made-immanent, or consummation revealed now, or beyond-history made history, or O made ʘ, or Person(s) made person (and ultimately mankind), etc.

Ratzinger even favorably (I think) references Teilhard, who "defines Christ as the Omega point of evolution. Natural history and human history are for him stages of one and the same process," which I think goes to Paul's comment about how the whole darn creation groans for salvation. History "keeps approaching this goal without ever reaching it," which is again why applied utopia is a recipe for genocide. The latter "becomes a design for a prison instead of a search for true freedom."

The dysluxians of the left habitually conflate goal and gaol.

Freedomism and Slavery

For Schindler, our cultural death spiral -- or plunge into the culture of death -- has to do with an implicit and a priori acceptance of the substance of liberalism. Specifically, the idea of an "empty freedom" "serves precisely to create the illusion that we remain simply free to choose our own ontology."

People say you are entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts. That's not true. Actually, you are entitled to your own facts as well, but not your own ontology. Facts are facts and reality is reality, but facts that aren't situated in the proper reality fail to be factual.

Freedom, of course, is of the highest value, on par with love, truth, unity, beauty, and virtue. But the liberal understanding of freedom coincides with an "anthropology which has always-already given that freedom its meaning."

However, thanks to the Cartesian Conspiracy, this freedom is "shaped by the liberal disjunction between subjectivity and objectivity" and thus "infected by the liberal dualism of will and intelligence, with its corresponding voluntaristic subjectivity and mechanistic objectivity."

In other words, freedom in this view has no intrinsic relation to truth or virtue, so freedom redounds to a grim Clintonian will to power, while our epistemological freedom is reduced to a kind of "perception is reality," so there is black truth, white truth, feminist truth, homosexual truth, etc. Which is no truth at all, being that truth converges on unity, not plurality. Truth and multiculturalism are antonymic.

We are all familiar with liberal bogies such as structural racism and white privilege, but far more problematic is structural sin, which goes to the existential reality of the fallenness into which we are born. Living as we must in "liberal structures," it is very difficult to avoid being naughty and still make a living.

For Schindler, "unless we recognize the ambiguity of present-day freedom at its very source, we risk colluding in the development of a culture that can easily... become the death of freedom." Note that this book was published in 1996, thirteen years before Obama took office and made it all rather obvious.

"Coincidentally," the Happy Acres Guy has a link to this interesting interview with a fellow who wrote a book called The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. He is saying pretty much the same thing we are, and yet, getting paid for it. From the interview:

"In your chapter A Brief History of Freedom, you propose what some might consider a damning interpretation of the anthropology of modern liberalism that suggests that the desire of 17th-century thinkers to free themselves from political authorities led to a rebellion against all external authority.

"The end result is not just a political, but an epistemic one: Reality ends up being self-constructed; we end up trapped in our heads. Your account starts with Descartes and his mind-body distinction, passes through Locke, and culminates in Kant [and drives Van nuts]. Does the modern political project we cherish -- liberal, democratic, rights-based, etc. -- and that those same thinkers developed necessitate the loss of genuine attention (and the consequent problems)?"

Crawford responds that his "critique of the anthropology we have inherited from early modern thought has a couple of dimensions. The first is sociological, simply noticing how autonomy-talk is pretty much the only idiom that is available to us for articulating our self-understanding, and how inadequate it is for capturing lived experience."

Exactly. Such "autonomy talk" is grounded in certain liberal assumptions about freedom that have nothing to do with the religious assumptions that gave freedom its original meaning and value.

He goes on to suggest that "Living in a culture saturated with vulgar freedomism, you may develop a jaundiced view of the whole project of liberation inaugurated by Descartes and Locke."

This parallels Schindler's observation that the implicit assumption of contemporary liberalism is that "truth and freedom are inversely related, in such a way that any clear claim of truth then becomes in principle a threat to (someone's) freedom."

This is how we end up with a liberal totolerantarianism that issues death threats to those who do not embrace the lie. It is very much as if liberals believe that truth enslaves instead of setting us free.

They are half-right about that, because for someone committed to the Lie, the truth will feel like an ominous prison: "liberalism's appeal to freedom, paradoxically, serves to enslave -- that is by virtue of its hidden dogma."

Conversely, the so-called dogma of Christianity wants desperately to liberate man into the metaphysical, ontological, epistemological, and anthropological reality of world-as-gift, or to situate our lives within the trinitarian dynamic of being for-being from-being with, or I-You-We, or just plain old Love.

You Complete Me!

The next chapter in Heart of the World is called Saving the Achievements of Liberalism. Funny how the left talks about the fatal contradictions of capitalism, but there is a genuinely fatal contradiction at the heart of left-liberalism.

We are seeing this inevitable auto-negation play out in real time, what with our authoritarian president and his lawless and/or clueless administration eroding our fundamental freedoms. But to attack a fundamental freedom is to equally attack a fundamental truth, the one being a necessary correlate of the other. And freedom + truth = responsibility.

Thus, we have reached the bizarre stage at which our federal government -- whose sufficient reason is to preserve and defend our God-given rights -- is presuming the right to force its citizens to pretend that a homosexual union is no different from a heterosexual twodom. As such, the state is reaching down to the very ground of being in order to pull our theomorphic nature out by the root.

I am reminded of people who complain that the Church won't "allow" female priests, when in reality, the Church has no right and no authority to do so. In short, unlike the left, it is not permitted to just make sh*t up. It certainly cannot be like Obama, one day having no authority to redefine marriage, the next day persecuting people who fail to do so.

You know the old crack, I don't believe in miracles, I only depend on them. Similarly, the left doesn't believe man is fallen, but rather, only relies on his being so. You could say that the fall is both a cause and consequence of leftism. This is what you call a bad infinite, in that it is at once a downward spiral and a mocking caricature of the Divine Spiral of Ascent.

Now, God is both the source and the vector of our freedom. You may have noticed that science cannot account for free will, for which reason it attempts to make it go away through various rationalizations, in such a way that it would make Gödel sick (or sicker). That is, if man is a closed system, then no truth of any kind can be known about man -- rather, it will all be self-referential and tautologous yada yada, AKA tenure.

As the philosopher of science Stanley Jaki wrote, "All arguments against free will are so many proofs of it," because "no determinist argues deterministically."

In a sense, free will "is subjectivity itself," that is, this mysterious subjective space we are privileged to inhabit. In the end, the reality of the human subject brings one "face to face with that realm of metaphysical reality which hangs in mid-air unless suspended from that Ultimate Reality, best called God, the Creator."

That is, what we call freedom "dangles," as it were, from the celestial to the terrestrial. True, it's Frank's world, but each of us holds a world by the string.

Interestingly, Jaki goes on to say that "the reality of free will" is "the only safe foundation of democracy. Political freedom without attention to free will invites rank irresponsibility, couched, of course, in convenient slogans about human fulfillment and economic prosperity." This is what I mean about the left being absolutely committed to man's fallenness.

The idea of freedom is a Christian one. Freedom is precious, but not for its own sake, since the latter redounds only to nihilism and absurdity.

Rather, "the conviction that man is born free" is an outgrowth "of the perspective that man was given freedom not in order to do anything he wants to but that he should be able to do what he is supposed to do" (ibid.).

It can hardly be overemphasized that our authoritarian state is forcing us to do what no one is supposed to do, under the guise of "liberation." If we are free to do everything, this is functionally equivalent to being free to believe anything. But we are only really free to believe truth. Believing lies hardly makes us more free, but rather, enslaves us. It's how Beelzebub rolls.

Note that freedom "cannot be reduced to anything else," and certainly to nothing merely quantitative. In this regard it reminds me of Planck's constant, which apparently defines how small something can be. In other words, there are irreducible units of tininess, tinier than which things cannot get. Likewise, man is "composed" of certain irreducible constants. These constants can be reduced, but only at the cost of eliminating man.

Not to change the focus -- or lack thereof -- of this post, but what are the constants that define man? One of the purposes of Jesus' mission is to show us these constants. Ultimately they revolve around the related concepts (or realities) of person and Trinity, and everything these imply.

Ratzinger has a profound essay on this in a book I just read, called Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology. It has too many explosions to assimilate in the time remaining, but he writes of how person is relation, and of how this relation is grounded in love.

But love is always a relation, so man is a relation of receiving and giving. Receiving and giving what? Oh, various gifts: Love. Truth. Beauty. Freedom. We do not generate these, but rather, as the Son is generated by the Father, we receive them -- not to hold onto or horde them, but rather, to pass the gifts along.

Thus, the very form of Jesus' existence is in "being from someone toward someone," in an "absolute openness of existence without any reservation of what is merely and properly one's own."

Yesterday a reader emailed me to let me know I sounded "needy and unappreciated" in my comment the other day about having so few comments the day before -- you know, like it's a bad thing. In my ingenuous and unsuspecting mind, that wasn't my point at all. Rather, I just wish more people wanted to receive what I have to give, in order to complete that cycle. True, so long as it reaches one person, that is sufficient. But still.

"For again, the point is that a word is essentially from someone else and toward someone else.... Your 'I' is on the one hand what is most your own and at the same time what you have least of yourself; it is most of all not your own, because it is only from the 'you' that it can exist as an 'I' in the first place" (Ratzinger).

Not to sound all needy and stuff, but what I mean is you guys complete me, and there's not a damn thing I can do about it.

Bombs Away!

I'm still struggling, if that's the right word, to assimilate all the truth bombs tucked away inside Heart of the World, Center of the Church. Every time I clean up one implosion, another goes off.

What's especially weird is how a bomb in this book sets off one in another book, in a kind of nonlocal chain reaction. Then a bomb goes off in my dreamworld, followed by another on a TV program I was watching (The Journey Home on EWTN). Is someone trying to tell me something? And how do I put all of these explosions together? It's hard enough to deal with one.

The image comes to mind of young Helen Keller. By way of analogy, imagine we are to the divine world as she was to the human world in her sound-, sight-, and speechless (non)existence. Then she has that one "little" explosion, in which she realizes that all her disparate experiences of wetness may be organized under one abstract and transcendent heading: water!

That is the ultimate WTF -- AKA (?!) -- and it never stops. Compared to it, the Big Bang and biogenesis are just distant echoes or foreshadows of greater detonations to come.

Irrespective of whether the story is apocryphal, it nevertheless conveys a profound truth, maybe even the Greatest Truth Ever Told, since it is the very ground and basis of the possibility of truth: that this is that, and vice versa.

Or in other words, that our cosmos is a web of symbolic exchange, such that transcendent meaning everywhere courses through its nonlocal veins, arteries, and capillaries. It is only for us to tap into this interior process and participate in the flow of truth-love-beauty.

Yesterday someone mentioned Polanyi in a comment. In another cosmic coincidence, he is mentioned in a footnote of the very page I am now looking at. As it so happens, his last book -- and the final summation of his thought -- is called Meaning. I haven't looked at it in a number of years, but I don't really have to, since I long ago absorbed anything worth plagiarizing.

Speaking of explosions, the book looks like something exploded inside of it. There are notes scrawled everywhere, which is the pneuma-archeological evidence of so many Helen Keller moments, as Polanyi's ideas collided with my brain. Toots Mondello referred to these as cooncussions.

Examples: "The act of understanding is more important than what is understood." "Only the wise ones see beyond the limitations." "Wisdom has always been non-literal, i.e., 'not meaning what we said.'" "Whatever is undetermined on a lower level is conditioned by the next." "Fusion of incompatibles in the time before time. God as integrative AND limiting factor."

This makes me want to go back in time and buy some pot from this guy.

In the preface, Polanyi's collaborator, Harry Prosch, describes how "the modern mind has destroyed meaning," but how Polanyi's "work on the reformation of epistemology and the philosophy of science has prepared the way for a possible restoration of meaning through the development of the notion of personal knowledge" -- the latter a term of art for how the mind always "sees through" the data to the meaning toward which it points. (Speaking of Helen Keller, one of Polanyi's favorite examples was how the blind man, by unconsciously attending to the sensory input from stick to hand, is able to construct and "perceive" a three-dimensional space.)

Today we are deep into the wayback machine, because when I first read this book I was more or less an atheist and certainly anti-Christian. If I was ever going to come back from the outskirts of the cosmos, the only way would have been through someone like Polanyi, who follows a purely logical line of thought, only to arrive at the threshold of mystery and Mister O.

In the Journey Home episode mentioned above -- here it is, right on youtube -- the guest, a former atheist, has great praise for real atheists who genuinely Don't Know and won't rest until they find out, as opposed to the fashionable strident atheists who presume to know and won't shut up until they have forced the rest of us to accept their narrow, flat, and shallow reality.

The guest's experience exactly parallels mine, because his impersonal pursuit of truth lead him right back to the Person -- which must happen, given sufficient time and honesty. Either it happens or you just die stupid.

Back to Polanyi. Writing in the 1950s, he described precisely the state of contemporary liberalism: "freedom of thought destroyed itself when thought pursued to its ultimate conclusions a self-contradictory conception of its own freedom." This is why the more liberalism, the less freedom of thought, the quintessential case being acadummia.

Imagine a place set aside and devoted to the unfettered pursuit of truth, becoming the one place where this is forbidden. What comes after irony? But this is the power of the Adversary: to transform something into its opposite with no effort at all.

To be sure, Polanyi was confused about some things. After all, he wasn't really a "philosopher" per se, rather, just a very curious scientist who refused to mind his own business and stay within the confines of his own department. But we forgive him his blind spots for the light he shed on so much tenured darkness. Like everything else, he must be "raised up" into a higher, total truth.

About this "total truth." In order to reach it, one must follow the circuitous and soph-bewildering Raccoon path, and be a rank multi-undisciplinarian. In order to know a lot about the One Thing, you need to know a little about every thing, and vice versa.

This goes directly against the Conspiracy, which, as Schindler describes it, "presupposes an extrinsic or external relation among the contents of the disciplines." Thus, physics, for example, has nothing to do with anthropology, which has even less to do with theology.

Tertullian famously asked "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" Quite a lot, actually, so long as we put things in their proper order and don't try to trump God with our manmode philosophy.

Schindler points out that this division of disciplines "is already the expression of a mechanistic worldview, whose hallmark is [an] 'atomism' which assumes unrelated (or primitively externally related) parts." Therefore, no unifying worldview is possible, because you have uncritically denied it at the outset. Once again the Adversary doesn't even have to get up off the couch to accomplish this.

But guess what? Not even atoms behave like this, let alone minds! In other words, a metaphysic of logical atomism may in fact be ruled out from the get go.

I'm out of time, so I'll just conclude with a comment by Schindler that goes to how our task is to take the inverted cosmos bequeathed to us by liberal vulgarians and put it back on its feet: "physics and biology therefore, to be pursued intelligently ('critically'), must... remain intrinsically open to explanation on levels above them, indeed, to explanation all the way to the level of ultimacy (metaphysics, theology)."

Amen for a child's job. Because someone's gotta do it.

We Don't Need Your Stinking Creativity!

Every once in awhile I do find myself saying to myself: why only eight comments? That was solid metaphysical entertainment! Two nights ago I had a dream that goes to this question of what I'm doing here. Perhaps we'll be able to weave it into today's sophering.

Back to the topic at hand, which is the convertibility of love and logos. In a footnote that could have been clearer, Schindler adverts to this "convertibility of order and love in Jesus Christ," which is in turn "revelatory of the circumincession of order and love in the Trinity..."

Now, circumincession is synonymous with perichoresis, which you might say is the interior dance of the three Persons; but the whole thing is fractal, in that the same threeness is present in each one, so it must look like... I don't know, like a dancing trinitarian fractal:

If I understand him correctly, Schindler is saying that this circumincession of love and order in the Trinity is the "primary analogue" for what we experience as beauty herebelow. To reduce it to a mathematical equation, we might say that personal order (i.e., the ordered subject) + divine love = beauty.

But that's all Schindler says about it, so we're left wanting a little more.

Help us out, Schuon!

"Art is the quest for -- and the revelation of -- the center, within us as well as around us."

We might say that it is an exteriorization of an order that transcends us, thus a kind of immanent ordering of spirit-love. In this way we imitate the creativity of the Creator -- in whom, I might add, the two cannot be separated. In other words, even more than "doing" creation, the Creator is creation. Or, he is what he does, and vice versa.

Schuon even says so in that peculiar way of his: "The essential function of sacred art is to transfer Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring the accidental consciousness back to Substance.

"One could say also that sacred art transposes Being to the world of existence, of action or of becoming, or that it transposes in a certain way the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms; it thereby suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a way starting from appearance or accident and opening onto Substance or its celestial reverberations."

What this suggests is that "the man" Jesus is a kind of divine art, such that he is -- or in him is -- a continuous "transfer" of the divine beauty into our terrestrial order (and "personal order," quintessentially), for the purpose of raising that order into the divine beauty.

Yesterday we spoke of the divine attraction, of how "God is not force but attraction (to beauty and truth), persuasion, surrender-in-freedom. Or one might say that love is his force."

Therefore, we are (at least) equally attracted to the beauty as to the truth of Christ, and both paths are equally valid. Apparently this has become a controversial idea as a result of the iconoclastic tendencies of the protestant movement, but truth without beauty is... letter without spirit, light without warmth, absolute without infinite, particle without wave, etc.

So, "Art has a function that is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a 'sympathetic magic'; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our return to the 'kingdom of God that is within you'" (Schuon).

Right? In the book, I symbolize this sympathetic magic with the squiggly equal sign (≈). It can only take place between persons -- which doesn't mean that it cannot take place between you and an "inanimate" object.

What it means is that certain so-called inanimate objects -- works of genuine art -- have this effect on us because they communicate person, specifically, the Divine Person. We could say the same of the supernatural beauties of nature. Otherwise, how did they get here? These beauties are interior-to-interior communication, and ultimately person(s)-to-person(s).

Schuon kind of agrees that art is "a means of expression" of our personality, "a movement from ourselves to ourselves, or from the immanent Self to transcendent Being" and back again. The exteriorized work of art is like the contrail, or tracks left behind and below from this encounter(ing).

Which goes to why modern art is generally so deficient, because it fails to begin in reception, but rather, is mired in a promethean creativity that presumes to cut itself off from the very source of beauty. How stupid is that? Thus, it is a repetition of the Fall, only transposed to the key of art.

Again, Schuon kind of agrees, even though I'm thinking this through independently: "The modern conception of art is false insofar as it puts creative imagination – or even simply the impulse to create -- in the place of... an objective and spiritual" encounter.

In other words, we don't need your stinking creativity if it merely emerges from the abyss of your own festering sinkhole of inappropriate self-regard. For "profane art," as Schuon observes, "exists only for man and by that very fact betrays him." "Art for art's sake" is cosmic treason.

In reality, "beauty stems from the Divine Love, this Love being the will to deploy itself and to give itself, to realize itself in 'another'; thus it is that 'God created the world by love'" (Schuon).

And yes, cartesian dualism undermines all of the above, and leads directly to the grotesquely ugly world of contemporary liberalism. Schindler explains how:

"Liberalism's intended priority of method over content and its purely formal procedures entail a mechanizing of order and a 'subjectivizing' of love, thus involving us in the end in nothing less than an obstruction to holiness" and exclusion from the eternal perichoresis of order and love.

But -- and this is the good news -- nothing obligates us to participate in this cosmic inversion. At least so long as we can evade the Cake Nazis.

I Think Therefore I Am, or Maybe I'm Just a Little Oxygen Deprived

Now, when we say that the ultimate order of the cosmos is Love, the irony is that the modern materialist is the one who is anthropomorphizing things, not us. Rather, we are... theomorphizing in an utterly impersonal way. It just turns out that doing so results in a personalization of reality.

In other words, just because we say the world is personal, it doesn't necessarily mean that we have a personal interest in it being so, any more than we have a personal stake in two plus two equaling four. It's just the way it is, and we assume that it's good to conform ourselves to the way things are, i.e., for mind and reality to be attuned.

Was that clear?

No?

Okay, let's try to explain. As we know, all of western civilization went off the rails one cold night in Bavaria, when Descartes shut himself inside with the oven turned up to 11, and had several hypoxia-induced visions as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning -- similar to the first time Paul McCartney took LSD and concluded that THERE ARE SEVEN LEVELS!

In Descartes' case, he concluded that THERE ARE TWO LEVELS! Or rather, that there is one level divided by two: I and AM, matter and mind, object and subject.

This resulted in the infamous "mind-matter problem," in that people immediately forgot that the problem was only a chronic residual of the original carbon monoxide poisoning. It is very much like the man who keeps smashing his head against the wall while complaining of a headache. In other words, the dualists are suffering from a problem of their own making: they are laboring under a persistent metaphysical or ontological neurosis.

Oddly enough, I am not the only one who thinks this way. For example, Schindler alludes to "the anthropocentric Cartesian horizon that has largely prevailed since the seventeenth century, which makes subjectivity coextensive with human subjectivity" (emphasis mine).

Well, who says? That's right: some giddy mathematical genius with too much time and too little oxygen. If that's our standard, then let's filter carbon monoxide into every math department and see what they come up with, instead of just filtering it into humanities departments.

Let's go back to step one, before the bifurcation of reality. "What I have in mind," writes Schindler, is "a subjectivity that takes its first meaning in terms of a properly metaphysical interiority."

In other words, rather than splitting the world into interior and exterior, why don't we begin with the way things actually are, and recognize that interior and exterior are entangled in an irreducible way?

As alluded to in yesterday's post, this was one of Whitehead's central conclusions (although realization is probably a better word). As Harthsorne describes, Whitehead recognizes not only that "the general potentiality of the universe must be somewhere" (emphasis mine), but that this somewhere "can only be in a primordial mind."

Whitehead's "doctrine is that experience is the principle of all being" and "ground of order." This is why everything doesn't happen at once, or why there isn't pure chaos or entropy: his point is that "a multitude of agents could not select a common world and must indeed simply nullify one another's efforts, unless some common limitation or bias pervades their acts."

Thus, among other conveniences, God is what you might call limitation-on-probablility; or in other words, he provides the boundary conditions through which he exerts a top-down influence on creation. So we got that going for us.

All splitting aside, "only a being with universal influence" could exert such order, even while maintaining freedom -- the freedom of potential (which are two sides of the same reality).

Therefore, God must be a person. After all, he's certainly personal. And "personality, as any psychologist knows, is a sort of cluster of habits and purposes and ideas," with the caveat that analogies to God must be balanced by the lack thereof. Or in other words, you might say that we are like God, but God is not like us. So to speak, yada yada.

But in any event, "God's influence is supreme because he is the supreme actuality, supremely beautiful and attractive." And "there is no 'power' anywhere, on earth or in heaven, except the direct and indirect workings of [divine] attractiveness."

In other words, God is not force, but attraction (to beauty and truth), persuasion, surrender-in-freedom. Or one might say that love is his force. May it be with you. And take your head out of that damn oven.

You Are Ordered to Love!

This is the sort of idea that I would have once considered hopelessly sappy -- maybe not even sappy -- but now believe to be not only truth, but the Truth of truth. "Thus my fundamental claim" -- hey, mine too! -- "is that, in our understanding of the basic structure of the cosmos, logos and love are convertible" (Schindler).

Thus, way before it is a human emotion or attitude, it is "the meaning or order basic to the universe, even as the meaning or order basic to the universe is now understood always to include love." Or as God said to creation, "I order you to love!"

First, of all, no, I can't sell you any pot. Second, what does this even mean?

It means that the universe cannot be subjected to that naughty cartesian dualism without doing it great harm. You could even say that Descartes ushers in a metaphysics of hate. Or at least a lot of hateful ideologies eventually spring forth from that initial bifurcation of reality -- for example, Marxism, scientism, reductionistic Darwinism, etc. I don't mean this in a polemical way, but rather, quite literally. I'm just sayin'.

Explain.

Okay, assuming the convertibility of Love and Logos, "it follows that the basic order of the universe -- hence the primitive meaning of object(-ivity) and subject(-ivity) -- is not mechanistic; and that love -- hence subject(-ivity) -- in its primitive meaning is not arbitrary" (ibid.).

There are so many new age books on how cartesian dualism is all wrong blah blah blah that it has become an empty cliché. And you hear so much from those divine salesmen about how God-is-luv-yada-yada-now-give-me-money that it too can become a platitude.

But put the cliché and the platitude together, and now you've got something: "In short, the Christian understanding of creatures as made in the image of Jesus Christ entails a convertibility of 'logic' (logos) and love," and therefore -- and this is the key to God's whole thingdom -- "a convertibility of object(-ivity) and subject(-ivity)."

In other words, no-thing is merely a thing, if by thing you mean something radically separate from the primordial love of the Divine Subject.

I came to this coonclusion long ago, at least insofar as the Subject is concerned. Six years ago I wrote a post about it, called Getting Intimate with Sophia. Let's see if it contains any memoirs or premumblings of this future post we're working on right now.

Not surprisingly, the old post is discussing Balthasar, who seems to be Schindler's main influence too. There is a quote from von B. to the effect that "The intimate character of being, which reaches its completed end in the conscious spirit, has its preliminary stages in unconscious nature. There is no being that does not enjoy an interiority, however liminal and rudimentary it may be."

Realizing this latter was a major (?!) WTF moment for me. It even says so: "I was idly contemplating something Whitehead had said along similar lines, when the Gagdad coconut 'snapped' in such a way that the inside was now out, and the outside in. I suppose you could say that it was like the sudden solution to a koan, which is not an intellectual affair, but more of a breakthrough into the ground of being."

And "once you have secured this realization, then so many other pieces of the puzzle naturally fall into place. In other words, once one understands that interiority is not somehow magically confined to animal brains in such a way that it defies all explanation, then the most intractable problems of philosophy more or less vanish. We see that these 'problems' were just the inevitable residue of our defective mode of knowing" -- you know, the cartesian mode.

You could say that the cartesian split is literally a kind of brainwash, to the point of brain sterilization: like chemotherapy, it kills everything living, both the good and bad, the ugly and the beautiful. It makes sense of one narrow dimension while making nonsense of a much larger one. It is precisely what renders the infertile eggheads infertile and their yolks so laughable.

In the old post there's even a riff on how the end is the beginning and all that, just as we -- or Balthasar -- were riffing on about yesterday. Coincidence? I don't think so.

HvB: "Here every ending becomes a beginning...." Me: "O me ga!" is "the shocking realization of the end (omega), the telos, which tells us all about the beginning [the Bigending referred to yesterday and forever]. Thus, we can 'explain everything,' but only in the eternal now, where there is no longer a radical disjunction between the 'it' and the 'I,' or subject and object (no 'it'). It's the same place, but now we know it in an entirely different, participatory manner."

And this "participatory manner" is none other than Love. "'It is accomplished' by the One who has already rejoined heaven and earth, inside and outside, man and God. And he's always happy to extend a little nonlocal assistance to get it accompliced" (note the same stupid pun with which we ended last Friday's post. The prophecy has been foolfilled!).

"With regard to scientific law, one could never say 'it is accomplished,' since the laws apply only to a finite realm that has already been unnaturally split into rigid categories of subject and object." Or, conversely, one could say that it is too facilely accomplished, as I was telling my friend Victor yesterday. Oddly enough, we were speaking in a place called Paradise Cove, and it was Easter Sunday, and a Victor was present... In any event, we agreed that the world described by science is infinitely smaller than the one described by theology. The more you know about latter, the bigger it gets. Exponentially.

Which is also why "at their margins, both science in general and the scientific method in particular generate metaphysical absurdities that can never be resolved within the realm of science, since they assume up front what they try to eliminate at the back. This is strictly impossible, but don't tell the tenured. It would be cruel to deprive a primitive people of their comforting myths" (Bob).

In other words, you might say that the cartesian split takes out a huge epistemological loan on future discoveries which can never happen. Or, it is like setting off in search of the back of one's head, or trying to kiss one's aseity. It encloses one in an absurcular process from which one can never escape, or his name isn't Gödel.

In fact, Gödel would agree that the realm of nature "must always remain richer than any cognition of it," such that "the truth of the lowest level of being contains a richness that so utterly eludes exhaustive investigation that it can continue to engage inquirers until the end of time..." Ouch, that's a whole umlautta love.

To sum up, it seems possible that John Lennon was right all along, and that these lyrics aren't quite as trite as they sound:

In the Bigending

"No one is witness to the birth of a world. No one knows how the night of that Saturday's hell was transformed into the light of the Easter dawn. Asleep it was that we were all carried on wings over the abyss, and asleep did we receive the grace of Easter....

"And today is your Last Day (your youngest day), the newest, most childlike of days. No other day will ever be as young for you as this today, when Eternal Life has called you by name....

"This Now when our two names have met is my birthday in eternity, and no time shall ever be this Now. Here is where the starting point has been set. Here is creation and a new beginning....

"Through my death this has been spared you, and no one will ever experience what it really means to die: This was my victory. While I was falling and did nothing but fall, the New World was emerging....

"My descent, my vertiginous collapse, my going under (under myself) into everything that was foreign and contrary to God -- down to the underworld: this was the ascent of this world into me, into God. My victory....

"Here the old man is replaced by the new. Here the world dies and another world rises. Here the two eons intersect. Here every ending becomes a beginning....

"But just as the earth rounds itself off into a ball, so, too, do the veins make a return to the Heart and love goes out and comes back eternally. Slowly you will master the rhythm.... the departure and the return are one and the same. Nothing any longer exists outside of this one and only flowing life....

"And so in the end you remain alone, all in you. You are one with yourself, and without losing yourself you pour yourself out into the many. By remaining in the multiplicity of the members, you bring them all home into the unity of the Body..."

(Hans urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World)

Mind-Matter Dualism and Incarnational Trialism

Come to think of it, we can't blame Descartes for everything. After all, there's the rest of the world. It has always been a trainwreck.

Furthermore, Descartes is hardly the first to commit the error of dualism. Rather, Manichaeism, Gnosticism, neoplatonism, and even Buddhism fall into the same cosmic heresy of dividing the world into naughty and nice, and then escaping into the nice.

Yes, but isn't this the whole point of religion? How is this different from the whole satan thingy?

There is no doubt that some forms of Christianity have and continue to fall into dualism, even though the whole Christian message is rooted in a metaphysic that is supposed to render this impossible. Rather, there is one creator, and everything he creates is good. To the extent that something fails to be good, then it is not the result of an evil co-creator or co-equal force of darkness -- as, for example, Ahriman is to Ahura Mazda in Zoroastrianism.

I would suggest that it is a permanent human temptation to divide the world in this manner. In modern times it is most effectively practiced by the left, which cannot function without demonization, vilification, and calumny.

For example, one of the (admittedly many) reasons MSNBC has tanked so badly is that demonization works fine when someone else is in charge. When the left is in charge, who's left to demonize? Pizza parlors, bakers, imaginary rapists, nonexistent racists, dissenting tea partiers, etc.

As Ace wrote, "the left is now patrolling the already-won battlefield to find survivors and shoot them -- while forever casting itself as the trespassed-upon victim." Or as Iowahawk tweeted, "Don't compare yourself to a Selma marcher when you're unleashing the dogs and firehoses." Another tweetist reminds us of how "the civil rights movement really got going when Rosa Parks went door to door trying to find someone who wouldn't give her a ride." The left desperately searches for demons to account for the evils it unleashes.

I think it's fair to say that people truly long for a simplistic, dualistic world, because then it's so easy to recognize and eliminate the problem. But if the problem runs straight through the human heart, then it's not so easy. Then it's even possible for a negro to be racist, or a person with a vagina to be incompetent, or a sodomist to be a bully, or an immigrant to be a drain on the rest of us, or a man of tenure to be a retard!

Yesterday I saw a clip of Bill Maher going on about how all religions are stupid. Easy for him to say, since his religion of Pure Light by definition has only intelligent and virtuous people like himself.

Along these lines, I recently read a book called At the Heart of the Gospel, which is a kind of popular summary of Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, which in turn is -- in JP's view -- a summary of Christianity itself.

For at the heart of the gospel is what? A union of God and man, of spirit and flesh, of time and eternity -- as opposed to a division of these things. Not only is this is a radical notion, but it must be counter-intuitive, otherwise why would God have to go to all that trouble of making it known to us? And one reason why it is so radical is that it goes against our tendency to reach for a facile dualism.

At the heart of the gospel are actually two principles: Incarnation and Trinity, the latter of which counters the dualistic temptation from a different angle.

West starts with a passage from the Catechism: "The flesh is the hinge of salvation," and "We believe in the Word made flesh in order to redeem the flesh."

But there have always been misbelievers who split "body and soul in order to 'free' love from... the 'unflattering' and 'unholy' realities of bodiliness." Again, that is the easy way out (and a mirror of the other easy alternative into a soulless hedonism): the former is "angelism," the latter "animalism" (Descartes and his descendants are angelists).

But just as Jesus is God and man, we are human and animal, not one or the other. The task is not to repress or deny the animal, but rather, to elevate it; or better, to infuse it with the same "divine descent" that came into the flesh more generally. That descent goes all the way down.

Thus, in the words of Cardinal Newman (quoted by West), the object "is to reunite things which were in the beginning joined together by God and have been put asunder by man." We need to re-integrate our dis-integration (or rather, recognize that "it is accomplished").

The "descent of God is intended to draw us into a movement of ascent" (Ratzinger, ibid). I find it useful to visualize this as a continuous spiral of (⇅), whereby man may participate in this trinitarian movement. The movement, of course, goes all the way down and all the way up -- to hell and back, you might say. We know it goes all the way to hell, because we have read and heard countless spiritual autobiographies of people who were reached in hell's kitchen and managed to turn their lives around.

We will get back to our main subject on Monday, but this is very much related to it, because "by fleeing the material world in search of the spirit, we actually embrace the essential tenet of materialism" (West).

In other words, one can be a materialist both by embracing or rejecting matter, i.e., by taking one side of the Cartesian dualism. In this way, the rejection only gives more force to its opposite tendency, otherwise those atheist activists would be out of business.

In short, "The Christian response to both materialism and spiritualism is the Incarnation," such that "there is no reaching the 'higher' without pondering the 'lower'"; or, "we reach the 'higher' precisely because" it "has descended into the 'lower'" (West). This is both the logic of the logos and the logos of logic.

And we can't accomplice this climb this without a body, "which has been created to transfer into the visible reality of the world" the otherwise hidden mystery of God.

Abstractions, Nightmares, and the Frustrated Gods of the Left

While the old brain is warming up, let's review.

Yesterday we figured out that Descartes has been ruining everybody's lives and eating all our steak. But it's a free country and he can do whatever he wants. Or is it? Free, I mean?

That's one of the themes of Heart of the World, in that it is an inquiry into modern liberalism and its ugly twin, "liberation." (And he includes conservative liberalism in his critique, even though it is merely inadequate where left liberalism is frankly diabolical.)

For example, contemporary liberalism posits human freedom, but it is a radically disconnected freedom that isn't grounded in anything prior, nor is it rendered meaningful by having any telos. In short, it is utterly pointless, just another name for nihilism. Besides, on what basis can we say that freedom is even a good?

In the Christian view, we are first given our freedom; which means that we receive it before we act on it. Conversely, in the secular view, we just take it and act on it. But where did it come from? How did it get here?

This goes to yesterday's penultimate paragraph about how liberalism is founded upon a divided reality, with the false objectivity of bonehead scientism on one side, and the radical subjectivism and relativism of postmodernity on the other. For the former, freedom must be an illusion (since science by definition cannot account for it), while for the latter it reduces to either power or desire (or both in the case of leftist politics).

So, here's the heteroparadox -- or cosmic heresy -- at the heart of contemporary liberalism: "on the one hand, Descartes turns to the subject, making the human subject dominant in determining what is to count truly as an object, or as objective." Again, sounds harmless enough. Man is the measure of all things, and all that.

However, "in making the human subject dominant, he simultaneously eliminates what is distinctly subjective about the human subject." In other words, he turns the human subject itself into a kind of object, being that it corresponds with a reality conceived of as mechanical and mathematical. Or in other words, the subject is liberated only to be pulled right back down into the object; or, quality reduces to quantity, semantics to syntax, reality to appearances.

Remember Marshall McLuhan's famous crack about the medium being the message? Well, in this case the method is the message. That's right, the scientific method, which seems so free of content, is the message if it is detached from the real world of the human subject.

Come to think of it, Al Whitehead warned of the same thing in Science and the Modern World, and probably in Adventures of Ideas and Modes of Thought as well if I remember correctly. And in fact, the whole thrust of Schindler's argument leads in a process direction which for some reason he seems to find a bit uncomfortable, but we'll fix that. No worries.

Back to the Cartesian Split: it "involves at once a mechanizing of the meaning of objectivity and a setting aside of subjectivity as irrelevant, indeed as intrusive..."

So, what does this orphaned and unwanted subjectivity do? It obviously still exists, only now untethered to any comprehensive view of reality. I'll tell you what it does: it runs wild all over the place while flattering itself with the name "liberation." It ruins everybody's lives and eats all our steak.

I don't know about you, but back in college I learned such idiocies as "perception is reality" so you can't judge other lifestyles and people and cultures and stuff! This liberal lunacy is an inevitable consequence of a metaphysic that renders subjectivity completely unhinged from any objective reality.

People talk about the division between red and blue, or liberal and conservative, but think of the more primordial divide between the engineering or business departments and the gender studies or queer theory departments. That is an unbridgeable cosmic abyss, and it all goes back to the idea that the human subject is anything we want it to be, because it is not first received as gift, but rather, just this inexplicable thing we act on.

This goes to the deepest of depths, in that for the Christian, essence precedes existence, while for the modern liberal existence precedes essence. In other words, for the Christian, since we receive our being from elsewhere, we are who we damn well are before we act on our freedom. But contemporary liberals make themselves into what that are. In short, they become their own gods, since they give the form to their own existence.

But even here they are never consistent, since they never run out of excuses as to why they can't be who they want to be. They are gods, to be sure, but very frustrated gods. There is structural racism, or campus rape, or gender oppression, or birth control that isn't free, or "marriage inequality," or the "wage gap," or oppressive "religious freedom," etc. It's always something!

Some god. Some freedom. It is why the so-called freedom of the left always results in less freedom. It is why the denial of sexual reality leads directly to the Cake Police and the Pizza Thugs. The little gods need a big machine-god to force reality into a shape that pleases them.

I'm a little lazy this morning, so we'll just leave off with a summary quote by Schindler:

"Thus Descartes' vaunted claim of a method essentially neutral toward any content already and in principle favors an ontology which primitively separates subject and object and dichotomizes objectivity and subjectivity."

An airy abstraction at one end, an all too concrete nightmare at the other.

The Adversary's Solution to the Mind-Matter Conundrum: Divide and Conquer

I was out late last night, and now I'm tired. Therefore, this will not be a challenging post. I'm not up for any deep pondering. Maybe just some groundwork. Plus it will no doubt be more rambly than usual. I predict that it will struggle to get off the ground before running out of steam at the end. So maybe you should just skip it.

Last night someone asked me what this book is about -- Heart of the World, Center of the Church -- but I was pretty much stumped for an answer. It kind of blows my circuits as I'm reading, which seems to interfere with memory, and certainly synthesis. There's too much to wrap one's mind around, and if I can't grasp the whole, I have trouble retaining the parts.

So, I'm going to just revisit the parts I highlighted, and try to unscramble my egghead and put my humpty back together.

For me, the author doesn't really hit his stride until about midway through the book, with a chapter called Catholicism and the Liberal Model of the Academy in America. It goes to the more general question: of what should a Catholic education consist?

I would prefer to just say Christian education, but that might be part of the problem, because -- if Schindler is correct -- Protestantism already cedes so much ground to secularism at the outset, that it loses the battle before it has begun. In other words, certain Protestant assumptions entail secular liberal conclusions.

For example, should a "Christian" university try to be like any other university, only with a little religion sprinkled on top? Naturally it is easier in the liberal arts, where one can simply have a curriculum that revolves around the artistic treasures of western civilization instead of degrading us with the hideous gobshite of postmodernity.

But what about more generally? I look at my son's Catholic school, and sometimes wonder how it is supposed to be distinctively different from a secular school. In my mind, rather than having the religious dimension added on, his education should be infused with the Christian spirit. What would this look like, and how can we tell the difference? What does it mean to think as a Christian -- not so much the content, but the form?

"To have a Catholic university... it is necessary (also) to develop a Catholic mind." Simply learning about religion is a necessary but not sufficient condition for this transformation of the mind.

And when I say "trans-formation," it is very much as if the mind must be refashioned and re-formed by transcendental causes to which it must be open. If that fails to occur, then you haven't had a "Christian education," no matter how much theology, dogma, and scripture you have committed to memory.

"Is it meaningful to speak of a mind... internally Catholic in any discipline other than theology? What could 'internally Catholic' mean, for example, in philosophy, or in biology and physics, or in accounting and computer science?"

In short, if truth is universal, how could there be secular truth and Christian truth in the disciplines he mentions? I'll tell you how. In a minute.

But if you simply swallow these disciplines whole, without criticism (i.e., the secular approach to them), you're going to take in a whole lot of hidden assumptions with them. Then, once these assumptions are in place, they will actually interfere with a properly religious understanding. Like how a virus gets into your computer.

Very insidious, don't you know. Once this happens, to the extent that you want to continue being religious, then it will be as if religion needs to exist side by side with the other disciplines. Any possibility of Total Cosmic Unity will be lost, and you will live in a bifurcated, dualistic world in which you retain your faith in spite of what you learned in school, instead of because of it.

But -- and here I think is the key -- you actually assimilated this bifurcated world before you even began your journey. That's how they ensnare you! You think you're just learning content, when in reality you're assimilating a whole way of looking at things that is anti-religious (and, more to the point, anti-reality) to the core.

Liberalism -- and this is one of the points Jonah Goldberg drives home in Liberal Fascism -- "embodies above all the claim to neutrality" (and he's not talking about political liberalism per se, rather, the whole project of modernity). It presumes "to avoid any a priori assumption of content" which might "prejudice the (putative) pure openness of the methods."

This is what modern liberals are referring to when they accuse conservatives of being "anti-science." That is, we're the ones who supposedly approach reality with all this theological baggage, whereas they do so with a completely blank slate. They claim to accept truth where they find it, with no ideological, metaphysical, or philosophical commitments whatsoever.

The cosmos apparently went off the rails with Descartes. I personally have trouble blaming one guy for this mess, so let's just take him as the focal point of a more general trend. Descartes "strove to remove the ghostly residue of subjectivity from method and indeed to determine the form of method prior to its being conditioned by any content whatsoever."

Seems like a good idea. It's even rather seductive, isn't it? What could possibly go wrong? We'll just empty our heads of all assumptions and proceed in a purely rational manner: "We are committed in advance only to pure form and not at all to content."

Seems innocent enough, but do this and you have swallowed a whole cosmos -- an alternative cosmos. Or, one might say that you have stepped into a parallel universe, under the assumption that man has finally, after 100,000 years of wandering in the bewilderness, entered the Real World.

But remember, Descartes actually divides the world "in half" before he even starts. That is, if you begin by presupposing radically divided worlds of mind and matter, you shouldn't be surprised that this radical division will persist wherever you look and no matter how much your thinking evolves. Dude, you've rended the fabric of reality, such that there is no way to put Humpty back together, and no area rug big enough to sweep his broken fragments under it!

There is orthoparadox and there is paradox, and Descartes lands us in the latter, for in dividing reality, we end with a "false objectivity" mirrored by an arbitrary subjectivism. Or -- and this is what you'll get in a modern education -- scientism at one end and relativism at the other. Each of these is an intellectual tyranny -- for they destroy the soul's freedom -- and yet, are opposites.

I think I'll stop now, before things get too heavy for my brain to lift.

Creation is a Gift, and There's Not a Damn Thing We Can Do About It

I'm reading a book that's pulling together a lot of loose strands of the cosmic area rug, called Heart of the World, Center of the Church, by David Schindler. I don't remember how he appeared on my radar, but he is helping me see some things on a deeper and more unified level. (Very turgid, however -- can't make a general recommendation.)

Among other things, the book is a critique of liberalism, not just the fake and malevolent liberalism of the left, but the real liberalism of American conservatism. Not a condemnation of the latter, mind you, just an acknowledgement of its limitations, or better, its inherent contradictions if separated from the Christian metaphysic that first animated it.

Here is a provocative statement, but it is the key to understanding what's going on in Indiana, with the left's assault on religious freedom:

"The increasing nihilism of liberal culture is unmasked as fundamentally gay in character," ultimately grounded in a "non-nuptial" relation to God. In the Christian view, the soul is feminine in relation to God, as is the Church to Christ. Therefore, "the world's response to God" necessarily takes "the feminine form," otherwise spiritual infertility results.

Vis-a-vis Indiana, we see a total inversion of cosmic and constitutional reality, whereby sexual perversion is literally sacralized, whereas religion is deemed perverse. How has it come to this? (I'll address this question more directly in a subsequent post.)

Schindler writes of how the "marian fiat" -- the primordial Yes to God -- is "the primary or originating act that serves as the ground of all Christian life and action." Mary's "'emptiness' and her humility [o] are what make it possible for her soul to magnify -- not herself, but the Lord."

Thus, in terms of Christian anthropology, "human freedom is receptive freedom before it is creative freedom -- or better, is a freedom that becomes authentically creative only by being anteriorly receptive." This is another way of saying that (↓) is always prior to (↑) in the transnatural cosmic spiral. Which should be obvious, or not even Darwin could get off the evolutionary ground.

You might say that (↓) is pure Gift. It is given to us, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Except give it back, "by generously extending to others what has first been given and what we have always-already first received. All that is, is gift." We "gratefully receive from God," and "this provides both the warrant for the deepest meaning of [our] giving to others." This is nothing less than the "soul's magnification of the Lord and of the riches of his creation."

Now, it goes a little deeper than this, because even more than "giver," God is gift per se; or, one might say that he is irreducibly giver-gift-recipient (or love-generosity-gratitude), each always implying the other.

Conversely, the left always wants to force the giving, which of course isn't giving at all, if only because it is predicated on taking from someone else. But more insidiously, the faux-giving is just a pretext for the usurpation of force. We see this playing out in Indiana: the left doesn't really want to "give" anything to homosexuals, rather, just use the force of the state to suppress our constitutional (and before that, natural) right to freedom of religion. Obviously there can be no natural right to what is by any definition unnatural.

The creation, being a reflection of God, is gift. One might say that the gift is simply the objectification of love. Thus, for Schindler, in "the basic structure of the cosmos, logos and love are convertible."

This is why creation "opens out" to the intellect, just as the intellect is receptive to the creation. "Simply stated, meaning and intelligibility presuppose God," such that "if God goes, so go the foundations of meaning." This is the very basis of science -- and all the further gifts it brings. Or, try engaging in science with a passive-aggressive cosmos that refuses to share its secrets!

"Intelligibility -- identifiable meaning -- does not, and cannot, outlive God. Rather, following the death of God, we stray 'as through an infinite nothing.'"

The other day, Taranto linked to this thread at Reddit on the pointlessness of life. Yes, these are deranged liberals who have strayed through the infinite nothing, but one can at least admire their honesty:

"What's the point?... Happiness? Pleasure? Why would I want happiness? Why would I want others to be happy? Why should I care about other people? Why should I care about myself? Happiness is just an illusion, free will is an illusion, pleasure is an illusion, love is an illusion, sadness is an illusion, fear is an illusion, suffering is an illusion, and we are just a bunch of atoms trying to maximize entropy.

"Nothing has intrinsic meaning nor value. If the only way to create your own meaning and value is based on your own happiness, how can I create my own value knowing that emotions are just an evolutionary biological illusions to keep us running on the treadmill of life to maximize our chance to pass down our gene pool?"

Given this premise, the conclusion follows ineluctably: "And now I have very little motivation to keep studying or doing anything."

A commenter responds "I think the exact same way.... Everything just seems pointless to me, we live a life trying to achieve happiness only to die. I just don't see the point."

Interestingly, the poster ticks off all of his liberal dreams but sadly concludes that "there is a chance that I'm going to die before I can do and see all of of those things, and all the hard work is going to be for nothing. So I come to this world, struggle for imaginary happiness and die. What's the point?"

This is a transparent reflection of the left's always-futile attempt to immanentize Christian eschatological hope. When you realize you've founded your life on an illusion, it is depressing.

Note that the unconscious assumption of the leftist is that somehow he will become happy and fulfilled if he forces the rest of us to be happy on his terms. I say, why not skip the middleman -- the coercive state -- and just be happy? If you can't make yourself happy, then what makes you think the state can by proxy?

Besides, my happiness won't really make you happy. Rather, only more envious.