When God Knocks You Over

I need to clear the desk of books that don't merit a whole post or series of posts, but nevertheless might contain some nuggets of joy. Books without merit are consigned to the closet, while the essential ones are in smallish bookcase to my right. Other books are categorized by subject in the much more expansive surrounding shelves.

These deskborne books occupy an ambiguous limboland. Usually they were disappointing in some way, beginning with this one on Aesthetics, by the Catholic theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand. Like any Raccoon, he

understood the centrality of beauty not merely to art but to philosophy, theology, and ethics. In his ambitious and comprehensive Aesthetics, Hildebrand rehabilitates the concept of beauty as an objective rather and purely subjective phenomenon. His systematic account renews the Classical and Christian vision of beauty as a reliable mode of perception that leads humanity toward the true, the good, and ultimately the divine. There is no more important issue in our culture -- sacred or secular -- than the restoration of beauty.

Agreed. Well, maybe not quite. I would say there is no more important issue in our culture than the restoration of truth. But where truth is like the foundation or axis, beauty is more like the ambiance or aroma. Its absence is suffocating, or dry and desiccating. It can chap your soul real bad.

Where truth speaks more directly to the mind, beauty.... whispers or something to the soul. In any event, you really don't want to have one without the other, nor obviously is there any clash between them. They are two sides of the same summit named God.

The author has one Big Idea, namely, that beauty, like truth, is objective. I've always suspected this, even when I was ten years old. For example, I knew the Beatles were objectively superior to most of their competitors.

How can this be? This is not the sort of assertion that is susceptible to objective proof. Nevertheless, it is objectively the case. In the words of the Aphorist: The relativity of taste is an excuse adopted by ages that have bad taste. So, Madonna is indeed as good as Beethoven, if only you have sufficiently bad taste.

It reminds me of what Stanley Jaki said about words. From a distance words have sharp outlines, like clouds in the sky. But approach the cloud and its boundaries become blurry and eventually nonexistent. Inside the cloud you can't see the boundaries at all.

Many of our fundamental concepts are like this: beauty, time, virtue, origins, etc. Indeed, we know that matter itself, which seems so solid, dissolves into vibrating waves of nonlocal energy. So, everything is a little blurry if you look too close.

Because of its objective value, you might say the genuine work of art judges us rather than vice versa. If a university department stops teaching Shakespeare on the basis of "diversity," who is being judged -- condemned, even -- Shakespeare or his tenured despisers?

Back to the distinction between truth and beauty. Where truth elicits a dispassionate consent, beauty is more direct and unmediated. One of my favorite aphorisms is that A work of art has, properly speaking, not meaning but power. You might say its power comes first, the meaning(s) second; conversely, with truth the meaning comes first, the power second. Think of the problems that occur when truth is conflated with power.

That is the way of the left, as is the insistence that art begin with a predigested and superimposed meaning. So much modern art has no power, nor can you know what it means unless the artist tells you what sort of idiotic idea he is trying to convey. But genuine art not only speaks for itself, but says things completely independent of the artist's intentions.

In short, in our postmodern aesthetic hell, beauty is deemed "a social fiction or political strategy with no objective connection to nature or reality."

Interestingly, while most people probably convert to Christianity for emotional or social reasons, a relative minority for intellectual and apologetic ones, in Hildebrand's case it was for aesthetic reasons, including the radiant beauty of the saints:

"It was the metaphysical beauty of Christian holiness and of the God-man of Christianity that caught and fired Hildebrand's religious imagination." Recall what was said above about power: Hildebrand was knocked over by the beauty before assimilating its truth. Or, one could say the experience of being knocked down made him want to explore what or Who did the knocking.

Now, if this beauty is objective, it means that people who fail to register it "also fail to experience what is really there." Just as the untutored mind will be foreclosed from various dimensions and modes of truth, so too will the vulgar soul be exiled from objective dimensions of beauty. This beauty registers on the soul no less than light does on the retina. This means we must render ourselves adequate to the task; again, failure to experience the power is a judgment on us.

Note that light and sound waves have a "carrying capacity" that far exceeds the naked physical phenomena. In other words, one of the most striking aspects of our cosmos -- perhaps the most striking one -- is its ability to convey information from one mind to another, AKA its intelligence and intelligibility.

When we listen to the radio, for example, it is because voices are able to ride piggyback on the radio waves. But what's happening when we, say, stare at Michelangelo's Pieta? It's just light and shade, photons striking the back of the eyes. How is the aesthetic power encoded into the waves, such that it is impossible to miss the power?

The point is, "beauty mysteriously exceeds the aesthetic capacity of the visible and audible elements out of which it arises." It can by no means be reduced to its carrier, but uses the medium the way our brains deploy sound vibrations to convey meaning from mind to mind.

Well, what I hoped would be a quick wrap-up has turned into a windy introduction. To be continued...

Living in the Real Worlds

There are always the Two Worlds alluded to in the previous post. A sane -- or let's just say rightly ordered -- person knows them as science and religion, or spirit and matter, or subject and object, etc. What he will not do is conflate the two, or refer to one by the name of the other.

For example, a properly religious person doesn't confuse, say, the book of Genesis with science, just as a properly scientific person doesn't confuse the Big Bang with divine creation (which is vertical and necessary, not horizontal and contingent).

The two worlds could be a consequence of our "two brains," i.e., left and right cerebral hemispheres. However, I think it is more likely that the two brains are a consequence of the two worlds.

There are many ways to approach this question of the Two Worlds. When I was a boy, I attended Sunday School, which promulgated a world utterly different from the one I learned about -- or, more problematically, experienced -- the other six days. There was no way to reconcile the two, so I just jettisoned the Sunday world by the time I was ten or eleven.

For a while I got by on the one world hypothesis. But not for long. Early on in my adolescence I was rudely reintroduced to the multiword hypothesis. Or rather, it reintroduced itself, splitting me in two. No, I wasn't schizophrenic, but there was no question of being inhabited by an Other that I could never quite reconcile with my "self."

Probably this is what prompted me to enter grad school in psychology, but that wasn't until I was about 25. Prior to that I had begun to informally study psychology, and in hindsight I can see that it was in order to try to make sense of the two worlds.

I was immediately drawn to psychoanalysis, since it begins with the principle that we always live within this tension of two worlds, the conscious (CS) and unconscious (UCS) minds. The second world that wordlessly shadows your existence is the "unconscious." The purpose of psychoanalytic therapy is to assimilate more of the UCS into the CS, so that one might live a more harmonious life -- without the two constantly bickering over their different agendas.

Very shortly after Freud invented psychoanalysis, the field splintered into dozens of variants, because everyone had a different idea about the nature of the second world. Jung, for example, thought it opened out into religious concerns; some thought it was about power, or identity, or sexual release, or "being."

Bion was the most flexible, in that he thought it was just a confrontation with O. You could say that O is simply the other world in all its possibilities. We could -- we do -- spend our lives metabolizing O, but there is no end to it, for it is literally inexhaustible.

It seems to me that this creates a fertile field for irony, the reason being that no matter how complete our world, it will always be haunted by O, making it impossible to speak of this world in a completely earnest and "singleminded" manner. Rather, any world we posit is really a quote-unquote "world." Something in us always knows it can't be the real world, and that there is always more to it.

Now interestingly, it also seems to me that we might very well rename Gödel incompleteness theorem the "irony theorem." Thanks to Gödel, we know going in that any attempt to reduce things to one world just won't cut it. We can try, but the resultant world will either be incomplete or inconsistent. We can only pretend otherwise.

The bottom line is that any world we can come up with must be looked at ironically. It must be presented with a wink, in full knowledge that it is a just-so story. There is and never will be a Theory of Everything. Only theories of "everything."

What if we could actually enclose ourselves in our own little theories? What a nightmare that would be! In fact, as we've discussed in the past, this is one of the things that made me leave psychology behind (or below, rather), because it was frankly depressing to be confined to one of its models, no matter how expansive.

Now I would say that the other world is God; or better, it is a vertical spectrum that is always at a right angle to our horizontal existence. We live at the intersection, the crossroads of the two. Once we understand this, then we can make finer gradations and distinctions within these worlds.

For example, in the horizontal world we can study history, or biology, or anthropology, you name it. And in the vertical world we can explore ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, theology, mysticism, etc. But don't think you can explore just one world and ignore the other. Imagine, for example, studying "art," but on a purely horizontal basis. Doing so is reduced to decorating your prison walls -- with a lot of kitsch or worse, e.g., infrahuman doodling.

Or, imagine studying politics with no reference to the vertical. There are purblind worldlings who insist that politics is about "power" and nothing more. Is this statement true? If so, then it obviously transcends power, because power is neither true nor false; it just is.

Thankfully, America's founders began with truth, in particular, self-evident truths about our natural rights, which it was the purpose of power to protect. In short, we grant the state powers that are both specific and limited, for the ultimate purpose of protecting our intrinsic rights. The point is, the founders explicitly went about trying to harmonize the two worlds. We grant limited horizontal power in order to protect and promote the vertical.

Which is why the left has been bitching about it ever since. The secular left begins with the principle that there is only one world -- which means that the second world will simply reappear in a disguised form.

But this also explains their conspicuous lack of irony: they posit their simplistic one world, oblivious to Gödel's Irony Theorem that renders their little world so laughable. Which is why their naive appeals to "science" never fail to elicit a chuckle.

As Theodore Dalrymple observes, "A sense of irony is the first victim of utopian dreams." This occurred to me when I saw this tendentious checklist of TRUMPIAN FASCISM! I forget where I found it, but the author claimed that Trump had already fulfilled numbers 1, 4, 7, and 10, so we're about a week away from death camps.

1. Taking sides with a foreign power against domestic opposition. 2. Detention of journalists.

3. Loss of press access to the White House.

4. Made-up charges against those who disagree with the government.

5. Use of governmental power to target individual citizens for retribution.

6. Use of a terrorist incident or an international incident to take away civil liberties.

7. Persecution of an ethnic or religious minority, either by the Administration or its supporters.

8. Removal of civil service employees for insufficient loyalty or membership in a suspect group (e.g. LGBT, Muslim, and other groups).

9. Use of the Presidency to incite popular violence against individuals or organizations.

10. Defying the orders of courts, including the Supreme Court.

But we could use the same list to prove Obama was a fascist, for example, taking sides with Iran, declaring war on Fox news and other non-leftist outfits, repeatedly being overruled by the Supreme Court, persecuting Catholics, inciting violence against police, etc.

The (abrupt) end, because we're out of time.

Two Worlds are Better than One

"Facts are fantasies." That sounds like something a postmodernist might say, but Chesterton was no such animal. Nor was he a premodern animist. Rather, like us, he was post-postmodern; or really, just operating outside and above the whole linear scheme of premodern-modern-postmodern.

For the last few days we've heard Democrats ridicule Sean Spicer's use of the phrase "alternative facts," but the situation is far more grave than these naive liberals realize. For not only are there alternative facts -- depending upon one's "narrative" -- but there is simply no such thing as a brute fact. Facts cannot be recognized -- and are certainly not relevant -- outside the framework that both selects and makes sense of them.

For example, we characterize oil as a natural resource. But until the 19th century, it was no such thing. Rather, it was either worthless or a nuisance. So the "fact" that oil is a natural resource presupposes an entire civilizational paradigm that is able to put it to use.

Similarly, it makes no sense to say we "stole" land from native Americans, when these Stone Age peoples were millennia away from any conception of private property. We certainly seized it, but we never stole it.

Likewise global warming. It is a fact that the earth is warming. But that fact looks very different if situated in the last 200 years or the last 12,000, during which time we've been coming out of an ice age.

What is a fetus, in fact? Science says a human being. Ideology says it a worthless part of a woman's body -- or, even more absurdly, that it is whatever the mother feels like it is.

Similarly, biology says it is impossible for homosexuals to have "sex," sex obviously revolving around reproductive capacity. Call it what you want, but it is not sex they are having. That's a fact.

Last night we were discussing the boy's religious education (we are homeschooling him). One thing I would obviously like to do is avoid the sort of religious education I had, which resulted in my rejection of religion on the basis of its apparent absence of factuality and general silliness.

I now realize that religion opens up a whole dimension of existence that cannot be seen and experienced in any other way. It is analogous to, say, music. There are people who have no relationship to music, for example, Sigmund Freud. It did nothing for him.

In reality, music discloses an inconceivably rich world, but it is possible to live one's entire life without knowing anything about it. One could say the same of poetry and painting. The world of aesthetics is real. And one can penetrate it as deeply as one wishes. There is no end to it; it is infinite and inexhaustible.

The dimension disclosed by religion is quintessentially infinite and inexhaustible. It is filled with facts. But obviously they will not be recognized as facts outside the paradigm that recognizes them as such.

"Outside" the Christian paradigm, for example, Jesus was just a rabble-rouser who was executed for his extremist views. That's a fact. It is also a fact that the founding fathers were "terrorists" -- just like the Puerto Rican terrorist Obama pardoned before slinking out of the White House.

I saw a Democrat spokestard defend Obama with that latter claim on FNC. It proved only that he has no idea who the founders were or what they fought for. Same facts. Entirely different meaning.

Anyway, back to Chesterton's mysticism, which is clearly a way to view the same facts as everyone else in a different light, but also a means of bringing facts into view that will otherwise be dismissed or simply invisible.

"If we believed that each color was the choice of a Great Artist, we would see everything with new eyes of wonder, as if we were looking at pictures in an exhibition." I've noticed that just by "thinking photographically," it brings out all sorts of latent beauty just waiting to be witnessed. Indeed, the witnessing completes its passage from virtuality to existence. So much orphaned beauty waiting to be adopted!

One important point is that we always live in no fewer than two worlds. For this reason, any monadic, one-storey metaphysic will result in the denied world reappearing in disguise. Along these lines, Chesterton remarked that when natural selection was discovered, "some feared that it would encourage mere animality. It did worse: it encouraged mere spirituality."

This is because Christianity uniquely situates our animality and spirituality -- word and flesh, man and God -- in the same being. This is the correct view. Pretend one dimension doesn't exist, and it will return in naive and usually uncritical ways.

I'm thinking of evolutionary psychologists who reduce this or that complex human behavior to genetics. If they are going to be intellectually consistent, then they would have to affirm that evolutionary psychologists are genetically programmed to reduce complex human behaviors to genetic programming.

Similarly, metaphysical Darwinists insist their minds are the outcome of random mutations, so they are therefore not to be trusted. If what they say is true, then it is false.

But "the dilemma is how to live in the seen and unseen worlds without despising one or overemphasizing the other." I believe in natural selection. But I also believe in supernatural election. There is no conflict.

And "The truth about Christ that emerges from Chesterton's presentation is that Christ lived effortlessly in the two worlds of the earthly and the heavenly." He does not, like Darwin or Buddha, teach us to leave one for the other. Rather, "Acceptance of the Incarnation brings together the two worlds in which the mystic ought to live."

And two worlds are better than one. That's a fact.

A Short Post About Nothing

I've always felt that people take elaborate vacations not so much for a change of scenery as a change of self. The novelty proceeds in both directions, outwardly and inwardly.

I'm not saying I'm correct about this -- everyone is different, and to each his own -- only that it seems I'm built this way. Ever since I was in my early 20s, I've worked at the problem from the other end: to paraphrase someone, don't change circumstances, change yourself.

It is axiomatic that if you're bored, it is because you are boring. I am never bored, certainly not bored enough to, say, jump from a plane or go big game hunting in Africa. I'm not even bored enough to go to a movie.

It seems not only that Chesterton was built this same way, but that it was one of his dominant messages: he was a mystic of the every day, such that "even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting. Anything was magnificent as compared with nothing" (emphasis mine).

That things are is of course prior to what they are. You might say Chesterton was sufficiently astonished at the That. The What was just icing on the cake.

Not only is everything interesting, so too is nothing, or at leas nothing in particular. The esteemed Dr. Dalrymple is of the same mind:

"Being a scholar of nothing, I allow my intellectual interest to wander hither and yon. Or perhaps it is because I allow my intellectual interest to wander hither and yon that I am a scholar of nothing." He is thankful, as am I, for single-minded scholars who do the drudge work for us. To paraphrase Bo Diddley, I don't need to do those things 'cause I got them doin' it for me.

Indeed, "Whenever it is imperatively necessary for me to read a book pursuant to something that I am currently writing about, I immediately lose interest in it.... I want to read something else entirely."

That is why it is always a mistake for me to promise to write about this or that. When I do, it becomes an obligation and I get bored and oppositional. Don't tell me what to do, Bob!

As alluded to in paragraph one, I don't want to pretend my attitude is normative. If it were, nothing important would ever get done. Or, if you like, you can turn it around and say: if not for everyone else being productive and doing important stuff, I wouldn't have the time and resources to do the one thing needful!

You could summarize by saying I have Napoleon Dynamite Syndrome. So, what are you going to do today, Bob?

As Dalrymple says, there is only one thing to know: "that there is not only one big thing to know." And that thing, in my opinion, is God (Dalrymple is more or less agnostic).

There is deep orthoparadox at work here, because for practical purposes it means that God is the sum of everything we don't know. He is utter emptiness, even inside his very being. How is that? Because he is self-giving love, truth, and beauty. Which is why graces abound so long as you immediately give them away!

Gosh! I am flat out of time this morning. Busy week.

Unlearning to Crawl

Today's post will consist of Whatever Thoughts Occur To Me as I flip through The Tumbler of God: Chesterton as Mystic. Here is Prof. Backflap's description of the book:

"We need a new kind of mystic," writes Fr. Robert Wild; and in The Tumbler of God, he presents a spiritual portrait of G.K. Chesterton that convincingly shows why he is precisely the new kind of mystic we need. Chesterton's mysticism was grounded in an experiential knowledge that existence is a gift from God, and that the only response is a spirituality of gratitude and praise for the unveiled beauty of creation.

Franz Kafka said of Chesterton, "He is so happy one might almost think he had discovered God." And Fr. Wild adds that "indeed he had, and he was doing his best to live in the light of that discovery. What was his 'secret'? It was to love the splendor of the real, and to live in adulthood the innocence and wonder of the child who sees everything for the first time. The Gospel tells us we must become again like little children in order to enter the kingdom. Chesterton shows us how."

I like Kafka's ironic comment. It's especially pointed in light of his own relentlessly pessimistic oeuvre; indeed, he was so unhappy one might almost think he had been turned into a horrible insect or something.

One could scarcely conceive of two more divergent writers; Prof. Wiki accurately characterizes Kafka's work as typically featuring "isolated protagonists faced by bizarre or surrealistic predicaments and incomprehensible social-bureaucratic powers," and "exploring themes of alienation, existential anxiety, guilt, and absurdity."

I wonder how their paths ever even crossed? Wiki adds that Kafka was "tortured by sexual desire," and "feared that people would find him mentally and physically repulsive."

There's more, but he seems to have been a thoroughly unhappy person, whereas Chesterton was relentlessly cheerful. Is it just a matter of character, or did Chesterton possess the cure for what ailed Kafka? The latter "was at times alienated from Judaism and Jewish life" and in his adolescence "declared himself an atheist." Could it be that he simply drew out the implications of his own godforsakeness in a completely unflinching way?

There's no doubt that outside certain Christian circles, Kafka is considered by far the greater writer. I'm guessing that most literary types would dismiss Chesterton as a kind of lightweight. I've never read any of Chesterton's fiction, but have read most of Kafka's. This was back when I regarded myself as more or less of an existentialist atheist. Thus, I immersed myself in the depressing canon of 20th century existentialist literature -- all these guys, including Sartre, Camus, Rilke, et al.

But I was existentially unfit to be an existentialist. As Leonard Cohen remarked in another context, "cheerfulness kept breaking through."

Transfiguration. Transmogrification. The former is the "place" where "human nature meets God: the meeting place of the temporal and the eternal, with Jesus himself as the connecting point, acting as the bridge between heaven and earth."

As to transmogrification, one could hardly do better than this: "One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a monstrous verminous insect." I hate when that happens.

God or insect. Difficult to conceive of a wider abyss. So who's right?

We can't really know, can we? We can live in the faith that we are nothing more than randomly evolved insects crawling around the planet; or we can live with the idea that we are created in the image and likeness of the God who created us. Since we can't know, why not choose the fun path? You have nothing to lose except not being taken seriously by unemployed lit majors and clinically depressed existentialists.

Men who think they are too modern to understand this are in fact too mean to understand it. --GKC

The question is, who is looking at the world right-side up, Chesterton or Kafka? And again, there really is no alternative if you're going to be intellectually consistent: if things are bad, then they are really, really bad. And if they're good, then they're... well they can't be perfect, since that is reserved for paradise. But as good as existence can be and still be an existence distinct from God.

Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised (GKC). The other evening I was trying to explain to a young lady -- the daughter of a friend -- why this was the optimistic attitude, but she seemed to regard it as an existential downer. But that's not the point at all. Rather, if you expect life to be perfect, then you are bound to be disappointed.

I am reminded of something Bailie says, to the effect that fallen man's perpetual hope is of Resurrection without Cross.

"Until we realize that things might not be, we cannot recognize that things are. Until we see the background of darkness we cannot admire the light as a single and created thing" (GKC).

"[T]here are two principal sides to everything, a practical and a mystical..." (McLuhan, ibid.). This thought has been rattling around in my brain for the last several days, but it is really just another way of saying what we always say about the nature of complementarity and orthoparadox. So yes, you are an insect or a god, depending upon how you look at it. But ultimately, our common sense empirico-rationalism must be complemented by the uncommon nonsense of mystico-phenomenology.

"Basically, [Chesterton] was trying to define an attitude of mind which preserves the sense of mystery about life and does not try to reconcile or explain rationally the paradoxical nature of reality."

So we are insect and god; I just googled it to try and find an arresting image, but we already have a perfectly suitable one at hand: the butterfly.

Let's say you're in the chrysalis, living in the ambiguous state between ugly caterpillar and beautiful butterfly. With which will you identify?

Limiting yourself to personal experience, you will no doubt choose the insect. Indeed, you probably couldn't even conceive of, much less hope for, the butterfly. Yes, you've seen butterflies, but they must have just been born that way.

"The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand" (GKC).

I can top the transformation of caterpillar into butterfly. How about the transformation of nothing into everything, "the dynamic power of God constantly creating, drawing the created reality into existence, from nothingness into being"? Chesterton was constantly aware "of the passage from non-being to being, as if every moment was the moment of Creation in the Garden."

Interestingly, both insect and man are created on the 6th day, when God has the earth bring forth creeping things before it occurs to him to create a being "in our image and likeness," who shall -- ironically -- have dominion "over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."

But this is always happening now: "Creation is not only the beginning, but is always the beginning" (Wild). So, "Most probably we are in Eden still. It is only our eyes that have changed" (GKC, ibid.).

"Open" Thread ("Updated")

I expect normal blogging to resume tomorrow. Meanwhile, an open thread. Feel free to toss out ideas for topics and directions.

As things stand, we still have to finish our review of God's Gamble. Then there are some things in Chesterton as Mystic I'd like to discuss, in particular, some things that remind me of me.

Not that I remind myself of Chesterton, only that I'm always trying to figure out exactly what we're doing here, and the author provides some clues, for example, "I've seen something of Chesterton's personal library. I believe he read books on every conceivable subject.... One gets the impression he was precisely reading everything in order to harmonize everything of human culture into his faith vision."

Chesterton's wife "once asked him why he didn't write more about God." He replied, "I am always writing about God." So, yeah. Me too.

Also, Chesterton once remarked that "two worlds are better than one." Which points to another avenue we'll be exploring, which is to say, irony, which we will be trying to "harmonize" with our "faith vision," such that we might be able to integrate "God" and God.

******

Change in schedule -- early appointment. Blogging resumes tomorrow. Meanwhile, by overwhelming popular demand, a tableau from Saturday's march of the trite brigade:

Homo-Drama and the Broad Way of History

We are discussing the importance of Frames. Without a frame of some sort -- a container -- you can't see much of anything. Arguably you can't see anything at all. Science, for example, is a frame. Metaphysical scientism is the belief that science provides the only legitimate frames for looking at the world. But what is the frame for that meta-scientific belief? That's a philosophical frame, not a scientific one.

One may look at human life through the frame of Darwinism. Nothing wrong with that. But only through the frame of Darwinism? That would be insane.

Which I mean literally. No Darwinian lives his life as a rigorously consistent Darwinian. For example, think of, say, Richard Dawkins, who argues passionately on behalf of metaphysical Darwinism. What's that all about? Doesn't he ever wonder how random mutations have resulted in his passion for "truth," of all things? Selfish genes not only don't care about truth, but could never know it to begin with.

Science provides one frame for viewing the world. Religion provides another. Nor can you just say "science," and leave it at that. For example, in order to practice psychology, you need to look at the patient through numerous frames: neurobiology, endocrinology, attachment theory, anthropology, group dynamics, religion, etc.

Indeed, this is what is so interesting about the human being: man is the intersection of all frames, from matter on up and God on down. Some people say man is homo sapiens (the wise guy), others homo ludens, highlighting our capacity for fooling around.

One could equally focus on language, art, humor, freedom, transcendence, love; we are the "political animal" but also the one consigned to an unbridgeable loneliness and solitude. Ultimately we are god and animal in the same package. Which makes for some *interesting* conflicts.

Speaking of which, we might say that God is framed for us by Jesus; and that Man is framed for God by Jesus. But Jesus cannot be reduced to a three-dimensional object, since his life -- like any other life -- takes place in time. He is framed by his own development, from embryo to infant to adolescent and on. "Incarnation" is not a kind of one-off lightning flash that occurs with the Annunciation. Rather, in the beginning is the Word, and the Word is a verb.

The point is, this divine-human frame is not like a static painting, but rather, as Balthasar discussed over five volumes and 2,631 pages (yeah, I just counted), a Theo-Drama. In being the Theo-Drama, it is also the Cosmo-Drama, the Homo-Drama, and the Everything In Between-Drama.

When did we spend that year discussing Balthasar and the Theo-Drama? 2009? I can't say I remember many details. Let's consult some old posts, which are probably old enough that none of you remember them either.

When Christianity is reduced to a creed or formula -- like the folks who hold up those John 3:16 signs at every football game -- it can lose its distinctly dramatic character. For unlike other religions, it cannot become a mere doctrine without betraying itself. After all, if a doctrine were sufficient, then God would have presumably dictated a memo and sent it down to a prophet without having to personally get involved in this messy business of history.

One of the reasons Muslims reject Christianity is that they cannot imagine God as man, since it is so beneath his station. It's unthinkable, like, say, Cary Grant playing a sewer worker or MSNBC host (yes, a distinction without a difference).

The point is that for the Christian, God's revelation fundamentally appears as historical action, as doing. His doing is anterior to our knowing. This is why no one could understand the teaching until the action -- the drama -- had been fulfilled. And even then, it took years of collective reflection upon the drama to understand its nature and significance. Indeed, we're still trying to divine the divine plot, and always will be, until history has darkened its last page.

It seems that many people try to focus on something Jesus said, or even the totality of what he said, in the absence of the underlying drama that ties it all together. But Jesus is unlike any other religious figure, about whom the facts of their lives are inconsequential to the teaching -- any more than the facts of science are determined by the personal biography of the researcher. You can study math or physics without getting into Einstein's childhood or Newton's manner of death. Likewise Buddha or Mohammed.

What this suggests is that God's truth -- or the truth he is trying to convey to us -- is again not at all analogous to scientific truth, which can be handed from mind to mind in an unproblematic way. What is the truth he is trying to convey? And why must it be presented in this way, as historical drama?

.... Here is the dilemma for God: "how to elicit the Yes of his free partner from the latter's innermost freedom" (HvB). Again, for Balthasar, the essence of the Theo-Drama is this encounter between infinite and finite freedom. How can man surrender to infinite freedom without undermining his own?

.... Jesus is God's word, and that word is primarily Yes: yes to existence, yes to life, yes to freedom, yes to love. But remember, Jesus is also man, so he is simultaneously man's ultimate Yes to God. So there is the essence of your Theo-Drama, this mutual dialogue between free partners. Again, the drama is taking place "within" God, i.e., the Trinity, but it is also happening in history, allowing us to take part in the drama -- to say Yes to it, jump on the stage, and accept our role.

Please note that when this Yes happens, it is only the beginning, not the end, of your own little theo-drama. Isn't this what Jesus promised the apostles? Not, "follow me and your problems are over," but "follow me and your problems have only just begun." "For they will hate you as they hate me."

As to how this all relates to our subject, in the following passage, just replace boundaries with frame:

Living in the higher light of this drama, everything becomes more intense with meaning. I believe that this is because the closer one draws to ontological realities, the more vivid life becomes, whether it is death, or birth, or marriage, whatever; it is near these boundaries of existence that we live most intensely, and the boundary of mundane existence necessarily shades off into the celestial. Heaven is conjoined to earth, but only by virtue of being separate from it. Thus, heaven's distance is the possibility of its proximity. Insert drama here.

The Theo-Drama is the secret history of the world. It is both written and unwritten, closed and open, again, in respect for man's freedom. I would conceptualize it as I would a work of art, in which things are conditioned from top to bottom, e.g., theme --> plot --> character --> action --> dialogue. At each level down, there is more apparent freedom, and yet, everything is ultimately conditioned and lured from above.

Got a late start this morning, so that's about it.

God was Framed

This thought first occurred to me in reading Michael Polanyi's Meaning, back in the 1980s. In it there is a chapter on how art of any kind always involves a frame, without which it can have no meaning.

While the frame around a painting is obvious -- setting it apart from its surroundings -- there are other types of frame. A book's covers are a kind of frame. Likewise, poetic structure and musical form.

Polanyi cites the critic I.A. Richards, who writes of how, "Through its very appearance of artificiality metre produces in the highest degree the 'frame' effect, isolating the poetic experience from the accidents and irrelevancies of everyday existence."

Rhythms are frames, both in poetry and in music (and in good prose as well). Thus, there are temporal frames (rhythm) as well as spatial frames, as in a painting. In a play or motion picture there are both spatial frames (the stage or screen) and temporal frames (the script or screenplay).

Life is framed, isn't it? In the most obvious sense it is framed by birth and death. There are also recurrent rhythms such as the seasons, holidays, birthdays, and rituals. Morning-Noon-Evening-Night is another rhythm, as are weeks and months. The liturgical year is an obvious temporal frame that confers meaning on what is otherwise a kind of one-way dissipation.

In one sense life is framed at the extremes by birth and death. However, in another sense birth and death constitute a kind of intra-life rhythm. And when you come right down to it, the birth-death rhythm is perpetual. A line from Joni Mitchell's Clouds just popped into my head: well something's lost, but something's gained / in living every day.

Watching my son grow is constant loss/gain. In a year or two I'll lose the boy but gain an adolescent, just as I lost the infant and toddler before that. A long time ago I came to the realization that all loss is a dress rehearsal for death. Or prehearsal, rather (emphasis on the hearse).

People don't normally speak in poetry, which sets it apart from regular speech. "Thus, the formal structure of a poem... forms a blockage, insulating the poem from everyday affairs" (Polanyi). As such, a frame is also a kind of wall (as is dogma, as we shall see).

Similarly, "the recital of a myth is an experience that is detached from the day-to-day concerns of the reciting person," and "raises us to a timeless moment." Therefore, it is a kind of temporal window(frame) into (and "around") the timeless. It cannot be approached or understood in any other way.

How could God, who is by definition infinite, ever be framed? Well, that is precisely the function of any religion. And just as there are good and bad poems, paintings, and melodies, religions are more or less adequate to the task.

Now, God cannot be framed by man. If he could be, then we would be God. Think of O as the container of any and all conceivable content. Thus, O is a symbol for that which can never be symbolized -- a container of what can never be contained. In the ultimate sense, religion says what cannot be said.

Is there any other religion that frames all of history in the manner of Christianity? All religions posit a beginning, but Christianity also posits its own temporal end (as opposed to a circular rhythm or endless line).

Furthermore, one of its most provocative orthoparadoxes is that the end has appeared in the middle -- which is a bit like the frame appearing within the painting. I'll bet if I look it up, there is some dadaist whose paintings consist of the frame that frames it. If not, then this one will do until the surreal thing comes along:

How did we get here? By two routes, one of which will be the topic of tomorrow's post. The other route was by way of Chesterton, who remarked that "All my life I have loved frames and limits; and I will maintain that the largest wilderness looks larger seen through a window" (in Reardon).

What an excellent orthoparadox. I've noticed the same phenomenon with respect to movies. Probably explains how movie stars are seen as gods by the vulgar.

Reardon writes of how "only a measured form -- and every form imposes a limit -- can produce freedom." Branford Marsalis (in Reardon) makes the point that in jazz "There's only freedom in structure, my man. There's no freedom in freedom" (emphasis mine).

There is no freedom in freedom. What a brilliantly concise way to put it. Nor, for that matter, is there any equality in equality, but that is the subject of a different post.

In any event, Marsalis's quip could morph into a whole post, but I think you can see where I'm going with this. However, it will have to wait until tomorrow, since I'm up against a temporal frame.

Lord Save Us From the Bullshit

Over the last several days a thought has repeatedly popped into my melon, usually in the wake of some random idiocy. It is what it is, so you'll just have to pardon the French: Wasn't Jesus supposed to save us from this bullshit?

I claim no responsibility for the thought. Rather, it is just the spontaneous fruit of forgotten meditations, as the Aphorist might put it. But since the thought kept recurring, I decided to look at it, and lo and behold, it meant something.

We are all familiar with the idea that "Jesus saves." But from what, exactly? Most people would say "from sin," but that was not my point of entry into the whole mystery. Then again, I suppose it was, since lying is a sin, and inhabiting a Lie (such as secular leftism) must be even worse.

What I want to say is that Jesus (by which I mean the whole tradition that flows from him) saved my mind. From what? Well, for starters, from mountains of bullshit. Before the transition, my mind was a vast and fertile field for the cultivation of bullshit.

Matters were only made worse by an extensive education, for The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly, and He who understands the least is he who insists on understanding more than what can be understood (NGD).

"Christ," writes Bailie, "went to the Cross to ram a stick in the spokes of the ritual for transforming sin into the delusion of righteousness."

But you could also say he does the same to the ritual of transforming utter bullshit into the delusion of righteous truth. We see this ad nauseam in the left's ritual of transforming self-styled victims into paragons of virtue, most recently, John Lewis.

Fifty years ago Lewis was knocked upside the head by some Democrat racist (but I repeat myself), which transformed him into a Civil Rights Icon. Ever since then he has been able to conceal his grotesque political hackery behind the meretricious penumbra of civil righteousness.

Oh please. Didn't Jesus save us from this bullshit?

What is the Ultimate Bullshit? It would have to consist of the Devil appropriating the Cross for his own purposes. Is this even possible? Stupid question. Rather, is there anything we can do to prevent it?

Yesterday Instapundit linked to an editorial by a leftist minister. Here's his take on American history:

I’ll let Ta-Nehisi Coates boil it down for you. White society was not achieved through “wine tastings and ice cream socials, but rather through the pillaging of life, liberty, labor and land.” In short, through three centuries of kidnapping, torture, murder and rape. Broken teeth, broken bones and broken spirits. Families ripped apart. Children taken from their parents. Men humiliated in front of their wives. Women brutalized within earshot of their husbands. Lash after bloody lash on bare backs. Then, sleep on a bare wooden floor. No doctor, no dentist, no nothing. Just non-stop misery with a few hymns on Sunday.

Okay then. The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot (NGD).

If we begin with the principle that man is fallen, then nothing he does should surprise us. We certainly would not attribute to "whiteness" what is universal in all men at all times. But once blacks are elevated to righteous victims, it is (apparently) easy for the leftist to forget that they too are subject to the law of ontological gravity, AKA the fall. If they weren't, then Africa would be a paradise instead of a place no black American would choose to live.

Roger Kimball writes of a campus group called Teach! Organize! Resist!, which "intends to stage a number of on-campus protests and consciousness-raising events between Martin Luther King Jr. Day tomorrow and Mr. Trump’s inauguration Friday":

“We intend to organize,” their web site informs the world, “against the proposed expansion of state violence targeting people of color, undocumented people, queer communities, women, Muslims, and many others.” What “state violence” would that be? While you wonder about that, note too that the organizers “intend to resist the institutionalization of ideologies of separation and subordination, including white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, Islamophobia, and virulent nationalism.” Oh, I see.

I don't. Didn't Jesus save us from this bullshit?

Technically, yes. "[W]e live downstream from the atoning Event and in cultures profoundly shaped by it," and "live buoyed by consolations that first washed over the world at the Resurrection, consolations that were the first fruit of unconsoled suffering."

A touching story of Suffering, Death, and Resurrection:

In the spring of 2013, my worst nightmare came true. Everything that I and my closest friends had spent the previous three decades building came crashing down around us. The entire international body of students and centers, 27 years of tireless work and commitment, disappeared almost overnight.

Sounds bad! What happened?

The truth is, as crazy as it sounds, I believed I was infallible. And for a very long time, the majority of my students believed it too. In the end, I lost everything and caused untold suffering to many people only because of an irrational refusal to admit the simple truth: like most human beings I am deeply flawed.

Oh please. Didn't Jesus save us from this bullshit?

Maybe, but for only 404 Euros you can join this deeply flawed man as he "continues his ongoing exploration of the role of both student and guru in a post-mythic context."

Did he say post mythic?

Lord save us from the bullshit.

It's Your World. God's Just Living In It.

To review: the mature form of a thing discloses its reason for being, and for man this consists of theosis or deification or sanctification.

Indeed, this is axiomatic, for what could possibly be higher than these? It is probably for this reason that Leon Bloy made that crack about how “The only real sadness, the only real failure, the only great tragedy in life, is not to become a saint.”

Sure, it may be impossible for most people, but that's the point. Anything within reach won't really satisfy. What? Of course there's an Aphorism for that. More than one:

Any goal different from God dishonors us.

Christianity contradicts the trivial demands of man’s reason in order to better fulfill his essence’s deep desires.

Conversely, Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized.

Hell was not invented by God. Rather, by man. It is simply a consequence of the gift of freedom misused.

The bottom line is that "Man is a finite being for whom God plans an infinite destiny. Consequently, man's existence was incomplete -- even in creation -- inasmuch as God intended for man a sharing in His own nature" (Reardon). Therefore, in order for human beings to share in this nature, God assumes "human nature and historical existence" (ibid.).

Note that God doesn't just assume a man, but human nature; and not just a personal history, but history as such: "The final transfiguration of the human race begins with the enfleshing of the Word," which is the only thing I can think of that could break through the walls erected by sin, by death, and even by existence itself.

Jesus is like man's window into God and God's window into man. Which is the purpose of an icon. Indeed, we could say that Jesus is the Icon of icons, a kind of two-way lens for the transmission of divine energies.

Somewhere in the distant past I wrote of These Things.

For example,

Among other things, Christianity "divinizes" both time and history. Indeed, it wouldn't be going too far to say that Christianity transforms mere time into real history, the latter of which is a movement toward something instead of just duration or decay. If time is not moving toward its own fulfillment, then it really is just a tale told by a tenured idiot, full of sound and fury but signifying a lifetime gig and adoring coeds.

Darwinians unconsciously convert science into an exciting drama of "progress," when progress is precisely what Darwinism excludes. Rather, there is only change, and change is not drama. Imagine going to a movie in which the characters and action merely change, but for no reason. You know, like one of those foreign films.

In this regard, you can see that nihilism is a kind of "reverse mysticism." A Darwinian is not permitted to say that a man has more objective value than an amoeba. The "journey" from amoeba to man is just one inconceivably long string of accidents. Therefore, it is not really a journey at all. Rather, that's just a phony narrative we superimpose on the facts, because deep down -- and even on the surface -- we would all like for reality to mean something instead of nothing.

But from a naturalistic perspective it means nothing, which makes us wonder why Darwinians were so excited the other day about the discovery of a new fossil. Why joy? I don't get it. Who cares if there are eight wonders if the eighth wonder proves that wonder is completely pointless? Let's grant Darwinians their fantasy, and suppose that this fossil finally proves that human existence is meaningless. Why would that be a cause for glee instead of sadness?

Unless -- unless we are again dealing with an unconscious narrative that is an inversion of the Christian narrative. Could it be that metaphysical Darwinians are parasites on the history they wish to deny? Yes, of course.

Right. That was all very amusing, Bob, but here is what I was actually looking for. Read it in light of how the Incarnation ingeniously deals with each of these infirmities:

As we have discussed in the past, man is always limited by what Schuon calls four "infirmities." First, we are creatures and not Creator, which is to say, "manifestation and not Principle or Being." Or, just say we are contingent and not necessary or absolute. We might not have been, but here we are.

Second, we are men, and all this implies, situated somewhere between absolute and relative, God and animal -- somewhat like a terrestrial angel or a celestial ape.

Third, we are all different, which is to say, individuals, and there can be no science of the utterly unique and unrepeatable. (Which is why, by the way, there can be no science of the cosmos itself, since there's only one; for that you need to shift cognitive gears into metaphysics and theology.)

This is a critical point, because as far as science is concerned, our essential differences must be entirely contingent, just a result of nature tossing the genetic dice. Suffice it to say that this is not a sufficient reason to account for the miracle of individuality. Well, individual jerks, maybe. But not anyone you'd want to hang out with.

Lastly, there are human differences that are indeed contingent and not essential or providential. These include negative things such as mind parasites that result from the exigencies of childhood, but also the accidental aspects of culture, language, and history. In order to exist at all, we must surely exist in a particular time and a particular place.

Elsewhere Schuon summarizes the accidents of existence as world, life, body, and soul; or more abstractly, "space, time, matter, desire."

The purpose of metaphysics is to get beneath these accidents, precisely, and hence to a realm of true objectivity and therefore perennial truth (even though, at the same time, existence, life, and intelligence especially represent a continuous reminder, or breakthrough, of the miraculous).

So, Incarnation solves all of these "problems." In short, the Creator, via Incarnation, takes on world, life, body, and soul; or space, time, matter, and desire.

"The truth is that God is drawn to us by love, that He has forcefully thrown in His lot with us, to the point of becoming one of us.... Human theotropism and divine anthropotropism are both fulfilled" (ibid.).

The moment of the Incarnation was not static.... [for] to be a living human being is not a static thing. A human being -- any human being -- is a work in progress.... Strictly speaking, therefore, the doctrine of the Incarnation does not refer simply to a human state, but to a full human life.... [God makes] himself a subjective participant in human history, someone whose existence and experience were circumscribed by the limiting conditions of time and space. --Reardon

Why Are We Here?

How can any conscious person not wonder about that? And how can he not realize there are only two possible reasons, one of which reduces to no reason at all. God or nihilism. The rest is distraction.

In a book called Reclaiming the Atonement, the author outlines the following reason, which sounds about right to me:

"Man was created to be joined with God in an intimate union, whereby he would be incorporated -- in the elevated measure divine grace makes possible to a human being -- into the very life of God. Man was created in order to be 'at-one' with God. Man was created for theosis. Theosis, then, is the true and proper ordo rerun [order of things]."

And "order of things" is correct, because it isn't just that man is ordered to God, but that the cosmos itself must be ordered to man if man is to be ordered to God. In a very real sense, man is the reason for the cosmos. This is why, for example, it is intelligible to us. But we can't just leave it at that; rather, we must ask why it is intelligible, and for what reason. Which goes back to the divine purpose.

As to the latter, Reardon further points out that we couldn't "share in the divine nature unless the Word shared a human nature," which is precisely why man's theosis requires God's Incarnation.

In the absence of the latter, we can still know that the cosmos is preternaturally ordered to us, but we couldn't know that we in turn are reciprocally ordered to its very creator.

Of the four causes -- material, efficient, formal, and final -- it is final cause that answers the question of why something exists. Eyes are for seeing; a car is for driving; hands are for grasping.

If you ask why cars exist, you can point to the materials of which it is composed, the people who built it, and its design, but none of these make sense without final cause: it was built in order to take us somewhere. Duh!

Note that the final cause is the last to be realized in time but the first to be contemplated in thought. I don't know how long it takes to realize a car from conception to fulfillment.

But it takes about 10 million years for solar-type stars to form, and about 10 billion for habitable planets. After that, life appears pretty quickly, but it takes another 3.5 billion years or so for self-conscious persons to arrive on the scene. It then took about 50 to 100,000 years to prepare man for the God-man.

And we've only had 2,000 years to assimilate him. As discussed in yesterday's post, the assimilation is ongrowing. As Kerouac said, walking on water wasn't built in a day.

So, when we come right down to it, everything exists for the sake of theosis. This makes perfect sense, because the purpose of something resides in its mature state. We all -- secular and religious alike - believe man "matures," the question being "how high?" -- does maturity extend all the way up, or end at some arbitrary point?

The latter makes no metaphysical sense, because a hierarchy is conditioned from the top down, i.e., it exhibits final causation.

Which helps to make sense of fallenness and sin, or at least looks at it from a slightly different angle.

By way of analogy, think of the concept of "pathology," which can only apply to living things. There cannot be a sick rock, although Al Franken comes close. The purpose of the heart, for example, is to pump blood. Anything that interferes with that -- clogged arteries, arrhythmias, valvular damage -- is pathological. Pathology only makes sense in light of final causation.

It has always been a pet peeve of mine that psychology attempts to speak of pathology in the absence of purpose. In reality it cannot be done. Rather, there will simply be an implicit and unarticulated purpose.

But ultimately, if theosis is man's purpose, then anything interfering with it will be pathological. On the spiritual plane, this is sin, precisely. Sin can only be understood in the context of what man is for. Sin, you might say, is "spiritual illness."

I'm thinking of a couple of Aphorisms:

The radical error — the deification of man — does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of committing the error.

And Radical sin relegates the sinner to a silent, gray universe, in which he drifts on the surface of the water, an inert castaway, toward inexorable insignificance.

Note that the deification of man goes to what was said above in paragraph three: it is to believe that the cosmos is mysteriously ordered to man, but to leave it at that -- to not realize that this is because man is ordered to God.

As to being relegated to that gray and silent universe, this is simply the logical consequence of denying God and hierarchy: it is as if the cosmos is ordered to man, but man is nothing. Therefore, everything is nothing.

Reardon notes that the early fathers were more aware of this than we seem to be. "The more traditional approach begins, not with fallen man, but with man in his Christian fulfillment: union with God."

So, our ultimate purpose explains sin better than sin explains the need for a sacrificial atonement.

Christ Mind, Beginner's Mind

Back in the day, there was a popular book called Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind. If Zen is counted as a religion, I suppose I never qualified as an unmitigated atheist. Zen is advertised as a godless religion, which isn't necessarily oxymoronic. Schuon felt, for example, that Buddhism in general has the signified (the reality), just not the signifier (the name).

Zen appeals to western intellectuals because it seems to offer the advantages of religion with none of the scandals: no dogma, no miracles, no Bearded Old Man in the Sky.

The amazon description says the author "always returns to the idea of beginner's mind, a recognition that our original nature is our true nature. With beginner's mind, we dedicate ourselves to sincere practice, without the thought of gaining anything special. Day to day life becomes our Zen training, and we discover that 'to study Buddhism is to study ourselves.' And to know our true selves is to be enlightened."

It's quite experimental, even empirical: do this, discover that. Indeed, the ultimate discovery is that this is already that, and vice versa. It sounds annoyingly paradoxical, because it seems like a long process of trying to give up trying, or a long road forward to back where you started.

It seems to me that Buddhism is essentially backward -- or downward, at any rate, i.e., to the Ground -- looking, while Christianity is unavoidably forward looking. Is this just a semantic difference -- different names for the same thing?

Back when I rejected Christianity, it was because I didn't understand it. Indeed, it can be argued that it is strictly impossible to understand Christianity without practicing it, i.e., through faith.

The above preluminaries were provoked by something Bailie says: that, as we know, Jesus promised "a Spirit would come to lead those trying to be faithful to Christ into ever greater understanding of the truth" revealed in and by him.

Thus, from the perspective of Total Truth -- of the revelation fully revealed -- we must all count ourselves "early Christians." Although "the revelation of Christ is full and complete, we are far from having surveyed its vast scope and meaning." Indeed, "the understanding that comes by faith embraces more truth than it can comprehend" (Balthasar, ibid.). We are all beginners, and every day is a new beginning.

For practical purposes -- i.e., from our side -- revelation is very much timebound; it can only reveal itself "in the fullness of time," analogous to an organic process of growth. You can't command the seed to become a mature tree; time takes time.

Thus, where Zen seems ineluctably "reductive," Christianity is necessarily "expansive," so to speak. "It is part of the mystery of the Christian revelation that it functions like a time-release medication." Conversely, we might say that Zen involves a release from time, into the eternal moment (or the moment of eternity).

Both approaches have their potential drawbacks. Bailie notes that for Christianity, the temptation always exists of forgetting "the danger of being bewitched by the spirit of the age" and separating "its healthy potential from its poisoned fruit..."

Regarding Zen, Schuon says it may "become easily mingled with anti-intellectual" sensibilities, "for it is one thing to place oneself beyond the thinking faculty and it is another to remain below that faculty's highest possibilities, even while imagining one has 'transcended' things of which one does not comprehend the first word." This is to deepak all over the chopra.

For "He who truly transcends verbal formulations will be the first to respect the ones which have given direction to his thinking in the first place and to venerate 'every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God'" (ibid.).

Schuon alludes to an old gag to the effect that "only the pig overturns its trough after emptying it," which is like kicking the religious ladder out from under onesoph, the very ladder by which one ascends.

There is another kind of pig who steals from the trough before kicking it over: "We live in a world whose strategies for expelling the Christian truth draw on underlying forms of Christian thought for their legitimacy" (Bailie).

The left is filled with such pigs -- for example, a Meryl Streep, who bullies and slanders under the guise of being opposed to bullying and slandering. Likewise, the left embraces racial discrimination in the name of equality, coercion in the name of freedom, theft in the name of charity, entitlements in the name of rights, etc.

This morning I have one ear on the senate hearing for Jeff Sessions, in which Democrats are shamelessly engaging in all of the above. If this post is a little lame, that's why: I am slightly distracted and out of my beginner's mind.

Cure For Death Announced

A provocative point: "In the ancient world, death is fungible" (Bailie).

Which means that in the modern world death is fungible, human nature being what it is.

"Fungible" means "of such nature as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable," "the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are capable of mutual substitution." It is "the property of essences or goods which are capable of being substituted in place of one another."

Therefore, death is just like money, only worse. You can quite literally use it to purchase life, at least in theory. It doesn't actually work, but that has never stopped people from trying. How else to understand human sacrifice, which is again the "attempt to evade death by foisting it onto another"?

Bailie makes a subtle point about how death "entered the world" as a result of the fall. As discussed in a previous post, it is not biological death that resulted, but rather, something much worse -- a total destruction of personal being, such that human life becomes haunted by death. Let's call it Death as opposed to the mere biological cessation of death.

Theologian Adrian Walker (in Bailie) suggests that "had man not fallen, he would still have to undergo an earthly end, though he would have known it as a purely joyous transition to the eschatological state, without any stain of constraint, privation, or corruption."

I wonder. Recall what was said about prelapsarian "innocence" only being known retrospectively. If true, it equally implies that the idea of a "joyous transition" can only be posited retrospectively. Nevertheless, a powerful lesson is conveyed having to do with how we regard Death: as absolute end or as some kind of new beginning.

"[I]t is in the specifically human realm that we find a strategy for evading [D]eath that consists of redirecting it toward another."

Imagine we are in a death camp. Which of course we are. Every day we observe that Death will pluck some individuals out of the camp. Can Death be bribed? Can we toss someone else into its jaws in order to appease its appetite, even if only for one day?

Sure. The Aztec certainly thought so, and they are hardly alone. But again, there must be lingering traces of this pattern in the modern world, human nature being what it is. In short: whom shall we sacrifice today?

Much of the news of the day comes down not only to locating the victim, but creating the victim. For example, each time a black person is killed by a police officer, no matter how justified, the left turns the officer into a sacrificial victim. His life is effectively over. He must disappear into the underworld and live incognito.

Bailie suggests that Death doesn't so much follow from sin as vice versa: "because of [D]eath all men have sinned." It is precisely Death that "corrupts our nature" and prompts us to do the worst things to evade it, e.g., "turning death into a cure for [D]eath, eluding [D]eath by exploiting its mystique and becoming its unwitting accomplices..."

Clearly, there is no human cure for Death. If there is a cure, it can only come from God. Which is precisely what Christianity -- or Christ -- communicates: that "at the Resurrection, the 'power of [D]eath' was broken, but not the fact of death."

"Christ came to rob [D]eath of its sting, not primarily by providing us with consolations or promises of future happiness, but rather by drawing our suffering and [D]eath into his and thus assimilating our suffering and [D]eath into the redemptive economy in ways that we simply cannot fathom."

As you all know, I flunked out of business school, so I never fathomed economics anyway. But it seems that participation in the divine economy provides a way to avoid flunking out of isness school, AKA Life.

[T]he Resurrection relieves those on whom the Easter Sun has shone of the desperate project of trying to achieve in history what can be fulfilled only eschatologically -- a fool's errand that has turned the late-modern period into a crematoria like no other in history. --Bailie

Who Gets To Be Jesus?

"A solicitude for victims and those who might remotely be seen as scapegoats is one of the most distinctive features of societies that have fallen under Christian influence" (Bailie). However, Bailie adds the important caveat that "Moral improvement operates on the individual level, where each moral agent faces particular dilemmas."

Consider how the left is struggling with how to deal with the recent brutalization of a Trump supporter by four African Americans in Chicago. They are not accustomed to interpreting victimhood on an individual basis, but rather, a collective one.

Indeed, the left is essentially a coalition of self-designated victim groups, which, in a perversion of Christianity, confers an air of sinlessness upon the victim group. Therefore it is unnecessary to actually cultivate the ability to think morally, for morality is known a priori: blacks, women, Muslims, homosexuals, and illegal immigrants are intrinsically innocent.

Even if they film themselves torturing a white person. The Washington Post conceded the attack looked bad, but couldn't help equating the torturers with the Trump supporters who will no doubt exploit the incident to misappropriate holy victim status: the "gist of the article is this: Kidnapping and torture is bad, but it's also bad that Trump supporters are using the attack to reaffirm their false notions about violence in Chicago, media bias and persecution of white people."

Here are some similar sentiments: "Calm down my white friends… your white privilege is showing." "You’re acting like white folks haven’t been doing this to [People of Color] throughout history, but now a Caucasian man gets attacked and it’s suddenly wahala (sic)." "[W]hite people cannot suffer racism, it’s an actual impossibility if you understand WTF racism is.” “I’m sick of these white men crying 'racist' when crimes are committed against whites. “[B]lack people die at the hands of white terrorists everyday." Etc.

Countless additional examples could be found. What's really at stake here is Who Gets To Be Jesus? These leftists can't help imagining that we think the way they do: that if this white person in Chicago is a victim, then all white people are victims. Which only an idiot would think.

A morally normal person doesn't think this way. Rather, we judge each case on the merits. This is precisely what the moral perverts of Black Lives Matter cannot do, in that their founding myth is the victimhood of the psychopathic thug Michael Brown. Or at least he is the exemplar and symbol of the deeper and more pervasive myth of victimhood.

The "quintessential function of primitive sacrifice" is the "attempt to evade death by foisting it onto another" (Bailie). What is so intriguing about the left is that they manage to indulge in the sacrifice while imagining that the sacrificers are the victims. Not to invoke Godwin's law, but this is precisely how the Nazis justified their genocide: to the end, they insisted they were victims of the Jews.

In Hitler's last known statement he spoke of his great "love and loyalty to my people in all my thoughts, acts, and life," and of how he was only thwarted by International Jewry, "the real criminal of this murderous struggle." He even killed himself in order to avoid being a human sacrifice by the Jews: "I do not wish to fall into the hands of an enemy who requires a new spectacle organized by the Jews for the amusement of their hysterical masses."

He makes another appeal to the sacrificial motif: "From the sacrifice of our soldiers and from my own unity with them unto death, will in any case spring up in the history of Germany, the seed of a radiant renaissance of the National Socialist movement and thus of the realization of a true community of nations. Many of the most courageous men and women have decided to unite their lives with mine until the very last." Martyrs, Vine, and Resurrection.

I've mentioned before that one can learn a great deal about mental illness by seeing it in its more extreme versions. Similarly, Hitler lays bare the sacrificial mechanism in a completely transparent way -- as did, for example, the Aztec. Their psychic economy was similar to the Third Reich, except it lasted for a couple hundred years instead of just twelve. Carroll places the number of human sacrifices at 50,000 a year, possibly more. What were they thinking?

Interestingly, Carroll writes that "While the lords and common people of the Aztec empire were rigorously conditioned to think and act collectively rather than individually" (emphasis mine) their Christian "counterparts in Spain were exactly the opposite..." For them, God himself had "been a Victim of the dark powers which ruled Tlacaellel's Mexico."

In all of history this was perhaps the most sudden and shocking confluence of the two streams of history, the sacrificial and the post-sacrificial. But that divide nevertheless persists in the human heart.

Again, so long as the creatures of the left can sustain their victim status, then their a priori innocence shields them from moral condemnation. They can rob, murder, riot, and burn down their cities, but if you hold them accountable, then you are blaming the victim. This provokes a "Christian outrage," minus the Christianity.

Once there was a world within the world, self-contained, complete within itself. On its every side were impassable barriers made by the gods... --Warren Carroll

The leftist screams that freedom is dying when his victims refuse to finance their own murders. --Nicolás Gómez Dávila

Remystify what You Have and Demystify what You Want

Not only do we want, but we want to want. Yes, that's a bit of a cliché, but let's see if we can scratch beneath the sophist.

I'm thinking in particular of collecting. Do you collect anything? For me it is music. I've been collecting since I was about 11 or so, but if I had kept everything I've collected since then, it would probably fill my house. This hasn't happened because I mainly patronize used record stores, and trade things I no longer want for the things I do. It's a never-ending process.

It seems that you can't Want what you already have, or at least in the same way. We need a different word for the relationship: wanting a CD I don't have is phenomenologically very different from wanting one I already have. Something is demystified the moment I have it. Or perhaps "wanting" the object imbues it with mystery. But once you have it, poof. Mystery solved -- if "solved" is the right word, which it isn't. Rather, the mystery is just displaced to a new object.

No doubt "womanizing" partakes of the same process. Some men go through supermodels the way I go through CDs.

Back when I was in graduate school and pondering dissertation topics, one idea that came to mind was The Remystification of the Mind. I see that my auto-spell quickly corrected me and insisted upon Demystification. I can see why: probably nothing demystifies as quickly as a computer, particularly one connected to the internet. With it, one needn't even take the time to cultivate a robust Want. Think about what's going on when you find yourself -- and you know you do -- mindlessly clicking from site to site, looking for... what, exactly?

"Much that passes for desire today is so ephemeral and evanescent that it must be acted upon posthaste before it dissipates or is replaced by yet another mimetic enticement. Such feeble desires are quickly recycled, each giving rise, phoenix-like, to yet another effervescent faux-desire" (Bailie).

Quick! Fulfill me before the sensation passes! What's the old line? Instant gratification is too slow, or something.

Our liberal unintelligentsia speak of "micro-aggression," which comes down to a perversely cultivated ability to discover victimhood in any context. But there really is something like "micro-desire," isn't there? At the far end of wanting to want, "the halfhearted impulses that pass for desire are likely to grow more fickle, more impatient, and more in need of external stimulants and pharmacological enhancements."

Soon enough, now! isn't fast enough, and micro-desire shades off into quantum desire. This has the effect of dismembering the human now, which is all we ever have in this life.

I'm not sure if we're succeeding in getting beneath the surface. So far, just a lot of pneumababble.

Another more subtle aspect of collecting is the creation of what I would call a "micro-world." It is as if the collection stands in for some completed dream-ideal. If you can just acquire that last missing piece, the world will be complete! Which of course it never is.

By the way, I don't want to imply that I still fall for such obvious tricks of the devil. Rather, I am very much aware of the phenomenology of it all, and see it as a way to indulge my futile desires in a low-cost way. It is not as if I am throwing my money away on Porsches or fine Italian shoes or supermodels or whatever.

It seems that Jesus tries to tackle this whole desiring business head on. We know that the Buddha did too, in his own way. Come to think of it, religion is in many ways a means for properly structuring and directing desire, isn't it?

Bailie notes that in Jesus' case, he famously claims that "Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life."

Such a bold statement can only be made by someone who has long meditated on the nature of desire. What he's implying is that we don't actually want what we think we want, with the result that we can never get enough of what we don't really need. That is the endless cycle of desire, and he is offering a way out of it.

So many the Aphorist's truth grenades go to this.

But before getting to them, a thoughtlet just occurred to me vis-a-vis politics. What is the left but the ideology of wanting? Everything about it comes down to compelling the state to convert desires into rights and wishes into entitlements. Your wanting becomes the state's taking.

The act of despoiling an individual of his goods is called robbery, when another individual does the despoiling. And social justice, when an entire collective entity robs him.

A proper conservatism is a much tougher sell, because it revolves around who we are as a people rather than what we want. Just make America great again, and we'll take care of the rest. Indeed, America's greatness consisted in just that: a system through which we could actualize our latent potential and rise or fall based upon our own merits.

Having said that, beware: for The gods do not punish the pursuit of happiness but the ambition to forge it with our own hands. The only licit desire is for something gratuitous, for something that does not depend on us at all.

Oh really?

That's right: Desire thinks that it desires what it desires, but it only desires God.

Indeed, One single being can be enough for you. But Man can never be enough for you.

Nevertheless, Man does not feel free as long as his passions do not enslave him -- so long as he isn't lost in the evanescent satisfaction of fleeting micro-desires.

That is a perversion of our God-given freedom. What is its real purpose?

Freedom is not indispensable because man knows what he wants and who he is, but in order for him to know who he is and what he wants.

Perhaps we could summarize by saying that we should start by remystifying what we have and demystifying what we think we want.

Everything that makes man feel that mystery envelops him makes him more intelligent (all aphorism by Nicolás Gómez Dávila).

I Don't Know What I Want, But I Want it Now

Very little time this morning...

Continuing with yesterday's theme, or themes rather: why the Incarnation, and what do you want? If Bailie is correct, the questions are linked, in that we want the Incarnation and all it implies.

"We spend much or all of our lives wanting, punctuated only momentarily by fleeting moments of satisfaction, rarely pondering the implications of this gigantic fact of our existence or realizing that it is what defines our species" (Bailie).

Actually, I do ponder the implications of this gigantic fact, and have done so for most of my conscious life. Not that I ever fully resolved the question, but I did notice -- certainly by adolescence -- that fulfillment of a desire didn't fill one very full, or at least for very long. Rather, it was like trying to fill a hole on the beach with water.

At the same time, I also noticed that fleeting satisfactions are all we are given in this life; and that satisfaction is satisfaction is satisfaction. You could be hugely ambitious in the hope that the fulfilled ambition would lead to some permanent satisfaction, but it doesn't work that way. I never imagined that, say, if I became a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief or whatever, that it would resolve anything fundamental.

At any rate, that was my rationale for being utterly devoid of ambition. And for awhile it was my rationale for a headlong hedonism that lasted from, oh, about 17 and a-half to 25. After that I distinctly remember the Light coming on and becoming increasingly more luminous, or at least illuminating more area.

Oh, and one more important thing I noticed was that there was no necessary relationship between desire and fulfillment. Maybe because I was given to moodiness, but I couldn't help noticing that I was often in an elevated and expansive mood for no reason at all; and that I could feel down when everything was going well. This gave me the idea that it was all up to me -- that fulfillment was some sort of interior process or state, independent of exterior circumstances.

All of these factors naturally pushed me toward eastern religions, Buddhism in particular. When the Buddha said that desire is the source of human suffering, that sounded good to me. The trouble was, my desire had merely been displaced to a deeper level: a desire to feel good all the time!

It was a classic catch 22: "desire is the source of suffering, and I desire an absence of suffering." D'oh!

Anyway, "Other creatures don't want as humans do." They want, but they don't let things get out of hand and begin desiring. Simple body-bound appetites have an appropriate object.

But again, Desire is infinite. Indeed, if you can't get someone to go along with the Absolute, you can certainly acquaint them with its first fruit, the Infinite. In truth you cannot be human and be unaware of either, but the Absolute often takes an implicit form while the Infinite is obviously very experience-near: we don't ask for much, only everything.

A human being who doesn't want is hardly worth the name. One of the most painful aspects of clinical depression is anhedonia, or the inability to experience pleasure.

Without even being consciously aware of it, "pleasure" in one form or another is our guidance system through life. It works automatically, making all sorts of micro decisions and steering us this way or that. Remove it and man is paralyzed. A deeply depressed person can do this or that, but neither one matters. Life becomes drained of all meaning.

So, desire is obviously important. It is analogous to our ability to experience pain. No one likes it, but imagine how quickly life would be over if we couldn't sense it. Pain has its place, as does desire.

But desire is not physical; it is quite literally meta-physical, in that nothing merely physical can satisfy it. We all have our animal pleasures. But "Desires, more than pleasures, define and sum up your personal identity." You know the crack: Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

Back in my hedonic days, the Raspberries were one of my favorite groups. They were never very popular, because they specialized in three minute power pop gems when the times called for bloated, meandering, and self-indulgent twenty minute jams with inscrutable lyrics. They had a reunion about ten years ago. Here they are, expressing an unseemly sentiment for grown men, but one that once made sense to me: I don't know what I want, but I want it NOW!

What Do You Want?

This is the subject of the next chapter of God's Gamble, the book with which we have been gamboling for the last month.

The Incarnation is ultimately for the purpose of salvation. But from what, exactly? What if one is unaware of any need for salvation? Well, Christ said he came not for the righteous but for the sinner, not for the healthy but for the sick. So, you are probably either a saint or just too sick to notice how sick you've become.

Which happens. The latter, I mean (there are not too many spontaneous saints, but plenty of clueless sinners).

It is analogous to how the most mentally ill people are the last to know they are mentally ill. These people are especially irritating, because they force everyone around them to adapt to their illness. There is an element of bullying to it, even if unconscious (which it usually is, again, because they aren't aware of their pathology).

I should amend what I said about people who are mentally ill being the last to know. This is generally not true of what are called "axis I" disorders, e.g., a typical anxiety or depressive condition. These are (usually) time-limited illnesses that afflict an individual -- as when one catches a cold or flu.

Axis II disorders are of a very different nature. Instead of a person with an illness, the person is the illness. These are the personality disorders, e.g., paranoid, schizoid, narcissistic, borderline, etc. Whereas neurosis is more of a surface phenomenon, the personality disorder affects the very structure of the person, all the way to the foundation -- which is why it is difficult for the person to "see" it, for it is that with which they see.

I wonder if there is something analogous on the spiritual plane, i.e., spiritual neuroses and spiritual personality disorders? If so, a neurosis will be relatively easy to "cure." Expose the person to the truth and he will be conflicted about it; although he may reflexively reject it, something inside will nevertheless ring a bell, so to speak.

But a spiritual personality disorder will be much more intense than this. Here you might see an overt war on God instead of a conflicted or ambivalent rejection. The Aphorist has quite a few that go to this, for example, The atheist devotes himself less to proving that God does not exist than to forbidding Him to exist. And Militant irreligion gradually transforms the one possessed into a simple imbecile convulsed by hatred. He incarnates his godlessness, you might say.

I'm trying to think back to what motivated me during my atheistic phase. Hmm. A mixture of things: superiority, to be sure. Although "annoyed" by believers, there was a kind of perverse joy involved in skewering them with atheistic arguments to which they had no answer.

Then again, my rationalistic arguments rarely gained any real traction in my interlocutor, so it reverted back to my own annoyance. If you think you can talk people out of their faith with mere rationalistic arguments, you are going to be very frustrated.

Allied with superiority and rationalism (i.e., pseudo-reason) is an utterly fraudulent self-sufficiency. In order to maintain the illusion, one must remain completely oblivious to one's own assumptions. The person who imagines he can think in the absence of metaphysics simply has a primitive and unexamined metaphysic. Such persons are often the toughest nuts to crack, since they are educated to the height of stupidity. Most of our tenured fall into this category: for them, Instruction does not cure foolishness; it equips it (NGD).

Obama, is our most educated -- which is to say, indoctrinated -- president. A man who refuses to bow before what is superior to him is a worthless man: rebellion or obedience. Man establishes there his godlike pride or his creaturely humility (NGD).

He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself (NGD). I mean, not having faith in God is understandable. But having faith in oneself is preposterous. Unless one is utterly without self-reflection. Do you not know with whom you are dealing?

He avoids announcing to man his divinity, but proposes goals that only a god could reach, or rather proclaims that the essence of man has rights that assume he is divine. To even speak of freedom, or truth, or beauty, or love, without reference to God, is a crass usurpation, no matter how "intelligent." For As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock (ibid.).

Or rather, to drill down to the rock is to discover God. Authentic atheism is a blank page (ibid.). Nothing can be affirmed or denied -- not even nothing. It is to be sealed in absolute stupidity.

The truth does not need the adherence of man in order to be certain (ibid.). Truth is necessary. People are contingent. But -- speaking of the Incarnation -- the truth becomes contingent so that the contingent might become true.

Gosh. We haven't even scratched God's Gamble, which is what this post is supposed to be about. Bailie begins the chapter with a poem that gets "inside" the Fall, which is, among other things, a fall into multiplicity.

Now, there is nothing intrinsically wrong with multiplicity, so long as one never forgets that it is the consequence of a prior unity. But eliminating the unity necessarily renders the multiplicity absurd: Like a child / at a barbaric fairgrounds -- / noise, lights, the violent odors -- / Adam fragments himself. The whirling rides!

The poem speaks of his confused attention to everything, / impassioned by multiplicity, his despair. Thus Fragmented, / he is not present to himself. God / suffers the void that is his absence.

We can foolishly forget God, but it seems God never forgets our farce.

Next he quotes Pope Francis, who affirms that "Once man has lost the fundamental orientation which unifies his existence, he breaks down into the multiplicity of his desires." You might say that desire becomes intrinsically dis-ordered, being that it is no longer ordered to its proper object -- the only object that can possibly satisfy a desire that is literally infinite.

For as mentioned in a previous post, one aspect of the Hominization Event involves the liberation of desire from instinct. If the newly liberated desire is not rooted in unity, then it bursts into a million fragments.

The rest is history -- at least its underside. If desire isn't ordered to the Infinite, then it redounds to absurdity and frustration, "kaleidoscopic refractions of the single desire to which [our] teeming desiderata of longings must be ordered if [we] are to flourish and find fulfillment" (Bailie).

Life "disintegrates into a myriad of unconnected instants. Idolatry, then, is always polytheism, an aimless passing from one lord to another." It is not a journey, just an aimless wandering with no conceivable end.

And God must incarnate in just this collideorescape world! His rescue mission has many facets, but surely one of them is to reorder desire to its proper object. "Jesus was himself the message he came to deliver" (Bailie).

Bailie makes a provocative observation, that the very first words uttered by Jesus (in the book of John) are What do you want? (1:38; my translation reads What do you seek?, but the meaning is the same, for we seek what we want.)

"It would not be too much to say that Jesus came into the world to help humanity come to grips with that question" (Bailie).