Progressive Usurpations of Divine Prerogatives

Continuing with the theme of the previous post, David Solway -- whose posts I always enjoy -- gets to the root of the matter in an essay called Why Socialism Is Doomed To Fail. The title may sound polemical, but it's not; rather, it identifies the principle that explains why socialism never works because it cannot work. And yet, it also explains the ineradicable appeal of socialism, and why it will always be with us.

Solway hints at the principle in the first paragraph, with Boethius' observation that "comparisons can be drawn between finite things, but not between finite and infinite."

Precisely. This is one of those things we cannot not know, at least if we understand the nature and limits of thought. Thus, the principle "is perennially valid, whether with respect to philosophical and theological speculation, mathematical equations involving infinities, or ideological aspects of political thought" (Solway).

So, the inevitable failure of socialism has something to do with the dialectic between finite and infinite; we might also say absolute and relative, one and many, Creator and creation (this latter providing a hint as to the anti-religious religious appeal of socialism, more on which below).

Socialism's "adventures in social perfectibility flow from the refusal to ground a vision of the future in historical and political reality." True, but I would go beyond this, and situate the refusal in metaphysical reality, i.e., the reality than which there can be no realer (on this side of the veil).

"In order to achieve the possible, it is necessary to acknowledge the real, that is, the limits set by the actual parameters of historical existence and the constraints of human nature" (emphases mine). To you this may sound obvious, but it is actually a revolutionary idea, with socialism embodying an atavistic, counter-revolutionary regression to what amounts to Primordial Error -- indeed, all the way down and back to Genesis 3 All Over Again.

You will forgive me if this post takes a while to settle in. The principles we're discussing have so many implications that it's difficult to render them in linear form. Rather, each one is a vertical depth charge with delayed explosions. Also, it's not as if I've thought this through ahead of time. No, this is being worked out as I write and you read. Otherwise it wouldn't be fun.

Humans think. It's what we do. Many if not most experts believe human thinking must resemble "animal thinking," but that's just stupid. No animal -- obviously -- can conceive of the absolute or infinite, and human thinking is rooted in this conception, whether explicitly or (more likely) implicitly.

I first realized this in, oh, around the turn of the millennium, before I even read Schuon (who later confirmed the principle for me in metaphysical granite). Thanks to amazon, I stumbled upon an apparently obscure philosopher named Errol Harris. For example, in his book Revelation through Reason, he writes that "The divine totality is, like its analogue the biological organism, implicit in every one of its parts and phases.... Because of this implicit presence in every finite being, every finite being proclaims the existence of God."

In short, finitude proclaims infinitude. But the converse is also true (and ontologically prior): infinitude proclaims finitude, via none other than the Logos. Creation, you might say, is the proclamation of finitude (by infinitude).

Now, what happens if we remove one of these terms, or collapse one into the other? Well, socialism for one. It is rooted in a complete cosmic inversion whereby the Infinite is denied up front but sneaks back in via its utopian pretensions which could only manifest in a non-finite world, AKA heaven. This really goes back to Voegelin's gag about immanentizing the eschaton. Just stop doing it, okay?

For Voegelin, the "gnostic personality" "seeks to end history in some everlasting realm here on earth in an attempt to perfect man. Whether the gnostic achieves that goal is of no consequence." Rather, "it is the effort and the intention alone to achieve a worthy outcome that is of importance to the gnostic."

Thus, what looks like classic self-defeating behavior on the part of the socialist is actually the whole point -- identical in form to the jihadist who has no realistic hope of destroying western civilization (we're quite capable of achieving that on our own, thank you) but who is nevertheless nourished by the dream of doing so. It is theological hope turned upside down and inside out, thus rendered pathological.

For Voegelin, the immamentization of transcendent hope is a cognitive fallacy: "any attempt to create a utopian heaven on earth through the instrument of some politician and/or political means is an effort in futility." Its very impossibly evokes the totalitarian regime, since total power is required in order to make the impossible possible. Which is of course impossible nonetheless, but they never stop trying.

Back to Solway:

One cannot validly compare the imperfect social and political structures of the past and present with a utopian construction that has never come to pass and which exists only in myth, dream and mere desire.... To strive, for example, to build an ideal society in which “equality of results” or “outcomes” -- what is called “social justice” -- is guaranteed can only produce a levelled-down caricature of human struggle and accomplishment.

Now, all of this reverts back to our original subject, i.e., the Prerogatives of the Human State. For the left, these prerogatives are never enough. Rather, presumptuous progressives prefer the prerogatives of the divine state, which is to say, they wish to be as gods.

Unlike animals, humans can know the Absolute. They just can't be the Absolute. It's like what we frequently hear of the left: all they have to do is not be crazy, and they can't manage that. Likewise, all they have to do is not pretend to be God. But then they wouldn't be socialists.

Aphorisms:

“The Kingdom of God” is not the Christian name for a futuristic paradise.

Even if he managed to make his most audacious utopias a reality, man would continue to yearn for otherworldly destinies.

An “ideal society” would be the graveyard of human greatness.

In every utopian sleeps a police sergeant (Dávila).

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Lie

Continuing with yesterday's post, it's not just a matter of positing vertical reality, nor even interacting with it in an outward way -- e.g., through ritual, dogma, and rules of morality -- but of maintaining an open system.

It's no different than, say, biology. You might correctly posit a theory of how biological organisms are far from equilibrium systems that exchange energy and information with the environment in order to maintain their dynamic wholeness.

But put one of these organisms on the moon -- or even at the north pole -- and the words mean nothing. Rather, the reality is what counts; no matter how many words one uses, the reality exceeds the description. Human language cannot create life, but is already a prolongation of the divine life.

It's the same with man. It's fine to posit God, but if you're not in an open relationship with the divine reality -- O -- then you are "dying inside," so to speak. Vertically speaking you're on the moon or some other uninhabitable place. At the very least you are drying up, or asphyxiating, or starving, or shrinking. This is why scripture has so many analogies to shining light, flowing water, eating food, and breathing air.

Indeed, upon completing the horizontal creation, God provides the finishing touch by breathing the breath of life into man, thus making him a living being.

To be precise, he is already biologically -- or horizontally -- alive, but now he is a vertically living being. And as with the lungs, it is not as if we can just inhale once and be done with it. Rather, respiration is ongoing until we breathe our last. Not for nothing are pneuma and spirit cognate.

Likewise, man doesn't live on bread alone -- i.e., bio-horizontally -- but on every word that comes from the mouth of God -- pneuma-vertically. Vertical nourishment is real. In fact, no one -- regardless of what they say -- can live without it. Even the atheist will simply call it by another name, e.g., art, or culture, or truth, or compassion. Again, to deny these things is to live on the moon. Where no man can live.

Having said that, if you place an organism on the moon, it will decompose into its component parts. The parts themselves don't disappear. Likewise, place the spiritual being in, say, the Soviet Union or the New York Times, and the biological organism remains. This is the ambiguous world of zombies, of the living dead, of spiritually vacated pod-people -- MSM journalists, political activists, the tenured, etc.

Of such pseudo-peoploids, it is written:

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

Why does the left believe such foolish things? This is why: God is a rather largish thing to try to replace. You're gonna need a bigger lie.

Not to pick on the hapless and vapid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but her enthusiasts certainly don't see her as hapless and vapid. Rather, it is as if they nourish themselves on her nonsense. And when I say "nonsense," I mean a certain specialized kind of nonsense that is essentially "God talk" without God, or spirituality without being ordered to the spiritual object, or O.

Example. Okay, I'll just check her Twitter feed. Heh: feed.

--What we have built is permanent. No. Matter. What.

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

--I have touched the hands of people who have felt ignored and invisible for a long, long time. And they felt seen.

She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.

--We will fight, we will vote, and we will run until hate is dismantled.

I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

Remember such cosmic BS next time you hear a liberal ridicule Jesus.

More aphorisms that apply to our zombie friends:

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.

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

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

But Only the honest prophets are lynched. So Cortez is quite safe inside her basilica of imbecilic lies.

The Real Intersectionality (of Vertical and Horizontal)

What does the subject under discussion -- prerogatives of the human state -- have to do with the news of the day? In a way, we are always asking this question, because there are principles and there is the world, and our life -- or "historical time" -- consists of their intersection, i.e., inner and outer, vertical and horizontal, absolute and relative, music and geometry.

Vis-a-vis our political system, there are horizontal aspects such as democracy and rule of law, and vertical aspects such as freedom of thought and speech, the sanctity of human life, and the spiritual telos of human actualization (AKA "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness").

Now, the ultimate purpose of the horizontal aspects is to preserve the vertical; the horizontal must converge upon the vertical, or it is neutral at best. And neutrality inevitably sinks beneath itself, as we see in the EU, where a purely enclosed horizontality has successfully eliminated all verticality. Which is what makes the Muslim conquest so easy. They cannot be bribed with horizontal promises, but will gladly use horizontal means for their own (lower) vertical ends.

I remember when then defense secretary Rumsfeld was condemned by the usual suspects for the banal observation (about the rebuilding of Iraq) that democracy was overrated, and not nearly as important as civil rights and the rule of law -- i.e., a stable liberal order.

It should be obvious to any properly catechized American that (for example) a monarchy with robust civil rights would be far preferable to a democracy in which our rights may come and go, depending upon the whim of the majority. After all, Venezuela is a democracy, just as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her election fair and square.

It would be nice if Cortez came packaged with the following consumer warning: In democratic elections it is decided who it is licit to legally oppress (Dávila).

Speaking of solid gold irony clad aphorisms, the following is so simple that even a journalist or political scientist might be able understand it: Either the man has rights, or the people are sovereign.

Either man has certain vertical prerogatives, or the hominid hive is sovereign. Man or antman.

And what is a socialist but someone who will use the vertical to destroy the vertical with vague and seductive appeals such as "the dignity of man," or "justice for working families," or "helping our neighbors"? In short, the progressive will use freedom to deny freedom, when the whole point of the system (in its horizontal aspect) is to preserve human prerogatives such as liberty.

What really disappoints me is that a bartender could be so stupid, but maybe standards have fallen since the days I frequented such establishments. But anyone whose livelihood depends on exploiting drunks should know that When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited.

How did Bernie Sanders go from living in a tree to being a multi-millionaire, with no actual job in between? Why, the same way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will go from bartender to baron in a few short years if not weeks (book deal in 3-2-1). Never mind that

The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach. But don't wait for Bernie or Alexandria to discontinue the ire and brimstone sermons on wealth and power. They're too damn lucrative. Liberals have principles, but no leftist allows these to interfere with making a living off the rubes and exploiting envy for cash and other valuable prizes.

Before returning the Prerogatives, a few more Aphorisms, because they're just too good, even though we've mentioned many of them before:

“Social justice” is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

Here again, it is a faux-vertical appeal that permits one to steal in good conscience. Indeed, what is socialism but the philosophy of the guilt of others? Once someone's guilt is established, then it's only a matter of determining the punishment. For example, progressive racists proclaim us guilty of White Privilege. We sit here in limbo, awaiting our sentence.

Perez is what, 28 years old? I remember when I was 28. It might be the last time I was stupid enough to know how to solve the nation's problems, although some symptoms persisted for a number of years thereafter. But certainty in the service of ignorance isn't just a Real Thing, but the usual thing. Who is humble enough to proudly proclaim his ignorance? Therefore,

Each day I less expect to meet someone who does not nurse the certainty of knowing how the world’s ills could be cured. You will have noticed that such individuals are barred from ever appearing on television, where only certitude is permitted.

And yet As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject. For example, the absolute apex of my knowledge of human psychology was when I was handed my Ph.D. in 1988. No hesitation at all! But now I scarcely know where to begin.

There's a picture of Maxine Waters next to this aphorism:

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence.

And this one goes precisely to the left's collective meltdown about the Supreme Court:

For the left the constitution is a shameful attack on the sovereignty of the people.

In other words, it is a vertical constraint on blind horizontality.

By the way, how is a progressive idea like suicide? Both are permanent solutions to temporary problems.

I was about to say "back to our prerogatives" but we're out of time. We'll leave off with this observation by Schuon, that man "possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open onto others and unto Heaven." This is the "religious instinct," or you could just call it vertical openness. And again, Job One of the left is to shut this down, barricade the roads, and enclose us in horizontality.

The Secret of Existence is Just Under the...

Continuing with our discussion of the Prerogatives of the Human State, I should say first of all that I am decades past the point of wondering whether there are any such prerogatives.

Rather, humanness entails certain rights and privileges, and that's all there is to it. Moreover, once you acknowledge these, then God is their necessary corollary: in short, no God, no conceivable privileges (except those man usurps for himself by the exercise of superior strength).

The Founders clearly recognized this entailment, for which reason they explicitly anchored our rights in Nature (i.e., in the nature of things, not in mere physics or biology) and Nature's God. For as the blind squirrel Jean Paul Sartre once remarked, if there is no God, then there is no human nature. And if there is no human nature, then there are no conceivable prerogatives.

Which -- you will have noticed -- is the main reason why the left ceaselessly attacks God, because God is the biggest impediment to their tyrannical follies. Eliminate Nature's God and they can do whatever they want to us, from mere theft and oppression to genocide. God is the barrier between the roiling id of the left and civilization.

Exaggeration? Again, once you have determined that someone is a Nazi, then it becomes a question of how to stop him. If he won't stop his Nazi-ing, then he has to be stopped by force. Call Maxine Waters what you want, but she is logical enough to make the correct deduction. Yes, the premise is insane, but this only reveals the limits of logic, since there is no logical operation to ensure true premises.

Prerogative: an exclusive right or privilege held by a person or group, especially a hereditary or official right.

In this case it is held by a group, or better, a nature, i.e., human nature. These prerogatives inhere in human nature, flowing from there to the individual. Note that for the materialist, there is no vocabulary to even describe this reality. He doesn't have to account for it, because he makes it disappear via linguistic deception or auto-woolpullery.

But as we have said on many occasions, you can split off and deny a portion of reality, but it always returns, usually with a vengeance. This has so much practical application that it could easily send us down a rabbit hole of a sidepost, but suffice it to say that human nature will have the last word(s) -- including those prerogatives alluded to above.

How so? Okay, this is an obvious example: if you are a strict Darwinian, then there is no reason to take seriously the radically contingent thoughts of a randomly evolved primate. And yet, you affirm the theory just as if truth exists and man can know it -- in other words, as if truth about his origins is one of the prerogatives of the human state!

Which it is. On that we agree. Only my metaphysic explains how this is possible, whereas yours renders it strictly impossible, in principle and in fact. Notice how you denied this principle up front, but how it snuck up from behind and bit you right in your assumption.

Now, having said all this, "the effects of the 'the Fall' weaken the prerogatives of human nature, but they cannot abolish them without abolishing man himself" (Schuon).

And this "Fall" is whatnow? Well, unfortunately, part of being fallen involves a degree of obscurity and ambiguity surrounding this question. As it so happens, just last night I was reading the very book Thomas Aquinas was working on when he left this world, Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology. Yes, he died in mid-sentence, or mid-thought anyway:

"Secondly, an evident example shows that attainment of the kingdom is possible."

D'oh! "The treasure is buried right under the..."

Anyway, he sheds some interesting light on the question of the Fall. I'll paraphrase, but he essentially says it is a consequence of a kind of breaking of the vertical link that unifies all of creation.

Imagine an organismic hierarchy, say, the human person. You can sever something at the "bottom" or periphery, say, a kidney or toe, without affecting the hierarchy or damaging the essence. But perform a lobotomy or sever the spinal cord, and everything below is affected.

It's a matter of telos, since an organismic system is organized and governed from the top down. Eliminate the top -- in this case, God -- and what happens to the whole?

Prior to the Fall, man "referred all things to God as to his last end, and in this his justice and innocence consisted." The resultant harmony "came from a higher power, the power of God." Reason was subservient to God -- which goes to the question raised above about one's premises holding water (or Waters, as the case may be). Remove God, and one can prove anything. Put another way, if you are credulous enough to believe God doesn't exist, then what won't you believe?

So, "The state enjoyed by man" -- that of primordial slack -- "depended on the submission of the human will to God." Yes, Adam had one job. Now we have Ten Commandments, but once upin a timeless there was only one. The precise opposite of this one commandment is: Ye shall be as gods. The rest is history, over and over and over again until you want to vomit.

The harmonious integrity of the original state depended entirely on the submission of man's will to God. Consequently, as soon as the human will threw off the yoke of subjection to God, the perfect subjection of the lower powers to reason and of the body to the soul likewise disintegrated.

As in dis-integrated. And we've been searching for the missing integration ever since. Every ideology is nothing more than a faux integration, from Marxism to feminism to environmentalism to queer theory to scientism and on and on. In each case, you can't get there from here, for "when a cause is removed, the effect cannot follow." God is both first and last cause. Remove him and there is no beginning, no source, no ground; and no end, i.e., no meaning, no purpose, no reason for existence.

That's the bad news. The good news ("gospel") is that there is a way to re-integrate, to reconnect with the source. Yes, attainment of the kingdom is possible...

To be continued. Unlike Aquinas.

The Infrahuman Left

The first essay in Schuon's The Play of Masks, Prerogatives of the Human State, is one of his most dense and concentrated, essentially summarizing the whole existentialada.

This was his penultimate book, appearing in 1992, which was followed by the equally short and dense Transfiguration of Man in 1995. Then it was all poems until his death a few years later at age 90.

This first essay is packed with so much essential truth that it's worthy of a line-by-line exegesis. Not only is the book a fractal of the cosmic interior, but so too is each essay, right down to the last sentence. What? Okay, here's the last sentence:

Without objectivity and transcendence there cannot be man, there is only the human animal; to find man, one must aspire to God.

That sentence is very abstract -- i.e., universal -- and yet applicable in a fully concrete way. For example, one can readily apply it to the leftist hysteria of the week, i.e., THE CHILDREN!!! Is there a single MSM journalist who is being objective about this? Of course not. If they were, then they couldn't indulge in the virtuous pleasure of crying in front of the camera, or calling us Nazis, or hounding law-abiding officials from restaurants.

One wishes they were only human animals, but they are something much worse, for a man who fails to transcend himself sinks beneath himself, and that is what we are witnessing this week.

One could cite hundreds of examples, but consider just Peter Fonda. Imagine how lacking in insight one must be in order for him to call someone else a Nazi while wishing to "rip Barron Trump from his mother's arms and put him in a cage with pedophiles" and see Kristjen Nielsen "stripped naked and publicly whipped."

The field of psychology, like everything else the left touches, has been ruined. However, this should not detract from the importance of its genuine discoveries, such as the defense mechanism of projection. Fonda shows us exactly how this works, as he projects his own inner Nazi into others and attacks them for it.

But this is simply what the left does, in all times and in all places.

Put conversely, remove projection from the human repertoire and the left would have little to talk about. They would be deprived of the bulk of their obsessions; or, they would have to hate themselves instead of us, which is precisely what they wish to avoid, hence the massive projection. I mean, imagine being morally instructed by the likes of Sean Penn, or Robert DeNiro, or Harvey Weinstein!

Let's get back to our exegesis: again, no objectivity and transcendence, no humanness. What was the error of our first parents? Clearly it was a plunge into subjectivity, i.e., the rejection of an objectivity that can only be rooted in God. What else is new? As the only thing new in the world is the history you don't know, you might say that the only new behavior is the archetypal fall that's about to be replayed.

Let's circle back to the very first sentence:

Total intelligence, free will, sentiment capable of disinterestedness: these are the prerogatives that place man at the summit of terrestrial creatures.

Now, that is a mythfull! It cuts through reams of lies, sophistry, indoctrination, and tenure. First of all, it affirms that there is a summit of intelligence, which is in stark contrast to the first principle of the left, which collapses the cosmic hierarchy in favor of a barbarous leveling. An immortal aphorism comes to mind:

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

bʘʘm.

Back to our human trinity: Intelligence. Free will. Disinterested sentiment. Many people manage one or two, but we need all three. Think, for example, how any intelligence in the psychic world of the left is totally undermined by their unhinged passion. Or, think of scientism, which flames out when it must account for free will.

Next sentence or two:

Being total, the intelligence takes cognizance of all that is, in the world of principles as well as in phenomena [i.e., vertical and horizontal]; being free, the will may choose even that which is contrary to immediate interest or to what is agreeable; being disinterested, sentiment is capable of looking at itself from without, just as it can put itself in another's place. Every man can do so in principle, whereas animals cannot...

These observations are at once deeply obvious and endlessly profound. Think of how man uniquely transcends the bounds of his neurology, and instead "opens out" to everything. Science -- either science as such, or such-and-such a science -- can in principle never account for this. It is an a priori principle that animates science, not one that is "discovered" by science.

The very purpose of free will is to choose between good and evil. The left, of course, either denies this distinction or affirms that it is simply a matter of opinion. Once again, the plunge into subjectivity and away from God.

Sentiment capable of looking at itself from without and putting itself in another's place. The left cannot possibly be more lacking in insight and self-awareness than it is today. Really, the next step is violence. Not that it isn't already occurring, only that the violent acting out will have to become more pervasive. The left is about to go full Palestinian on us.

By the way, when I call the left "infrahuman," does this mean I want to kill or torture them, like Peter Fonda? Of course not. I am not a leftist. It means I want to elevate and liberate them from their own self-imposed shackles of unhinged passion enclosed in horizontality.

To be continued....

The How and the Why of this Haunted Cosmos

I want to briefly follow up on the idea that something analogous to Multiple Personality Disorder "happens at a universal level" and that "the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may all be alters -- dissociated personalities -- of universal consciousness."

Now, as Stanley Jaki reminds us, "'exact science' deals only with numbers and measurements of material change," whereas "theology measures nothing." Quantities and qualities. Horizontal and vertical. Object and subject. Exterior and interior. Reason and intellection. Effect and cause. Many and One.

Any comprehensive account of reality requires both sides of these related complementarities; ultimately they may be reduced to Creator and creation; or, if you're not ready to make that leap, to Principle and Manifestation, Absolute and relative, Ground/Source and echo/prolongation.

These also relate to the How and the Why, science going to the former, theology to the latter. Along these lines, I've mentioned this story in the past, of the young scientist

who gave a factory tour to Lord Kelvin, arguably one of the greatest scientists of his time. The factory created equipment that measured the effects of electricity and was built by Lord Kelvin himself. Unfortunately, the young man giving the tour was not aware of this fact.

After the young man spoke in great detail of all the equipment the factory made and how these gadgets measured electricity, Lord Kelvin complemented him on the tour, but wanted to ask one last question to his tour guide, "What is electricity?" When the young man was unable to answer this question, Lord Kelvin consoled him by explaining that both he and Lord Kelvin were equally ignorant of the answer to this question.

The moral of the story is that it is one thing to measure how electricity behaves, but it's a completely different thing to understand what electricity actually is at its essence. Fr. Jaki would use this story to argue that science and theology should not be combined, but rather they should stay within the parameters that each naturally adhere to.

In short, science can tell us pretty much everything about electricity except what it is. Which equally applies to everything, or to every conceivable thing.

Including the mystery of diversified human subjectivity. The idea that it is reducible to a vast case of Multiple Personality Disorder comes straight out of Scientific American, but there is nothing remotely scientific about this. And yet, it is nevertheless able to conceal this fact by hiding behind the prestige of Science, which is one of our two most successful and influential religions in our time. In order for one's idiocy to be truly comprehensive, one needs both scientism and progressivism, which are analogous to (faux) doctrine and (perverse) method.

Was that last sentence a little over-the-top? Well, think of the global warming racket: it is pure scientism, but it animates thousands of practitioner-activists to do what they do, AKA practice their faith in the real world. Likewise, transgenderism is just pseudo- or anti-science. And yet...

There is no physics without a metaphysics. Physicists don't like this idea, which results in a naive collapse of the two, or an elevation of former into the latter. A physicist imagines he is qualified to discourse on metaphysics by virtue of being a physicist, but it is obviously not so: physics is about quantities, metaphysics about qualities or principles.

Yesterday a thought floated into my head: A Principle is worth a thousand facts. And as Dávila says, Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Therefore, Ha Ha.

Now, what would be one of the four or five invulnerable p's that allow us to make fun of our Scientistic American and his MPD theory? In reaching for a principle to account for the mystery of subjectivity, he latches onto MPD. But what is the real principle?

Most people will say "God" and let it go. But this is just a shorthand way to convey essential metaphysics to a large and diverse collective, few members of which will have the time, inclination, or ability to study metaphysics. They are by no means wrong, but some people are built in such a way that they keep asking Why? (And recall that Why? is to theology/metaphysics as How? is to science.)

Consider just that last parenthetical remark: science -- or scientism -- would quite literally have us believe that the Why? may be fully reduced to the How? In this (anti-)metaphysic, knowledge of how something works is sufficient to explain why it exists. But this doesn't even suffice with mechanical objects. For example, I can know how a watch works, but that doesn't explain why someone wants to know the time, let alone what time is, and why it is. Why time?

An alliterative way of posing the problem is to say that for scientism, semantics may be reduced to syntax; in other words, meaning may be reduced to grammar, message to means. Which means that no meaning is possible, since the meaning of any statement about the world would be reducible to its arrangement of words.

Which is literally like trying to understand a melody by examining its notes. In fact, just yesterday I heard a haunting melody -- Autumn Leaves, performed by Cannonball Adderley and Miles Davis. You can pause the video and examine the melody note by note, but none of these notes conveys the haunt. Indeed, the haunt just disappears. Does this solve the problem? Does it satisfy your curiosity about the haunter and the haunted?

Speaking of which, we clearly live in a haunted universe, no? Everything speaks to us, just as if it's haunted by subjectivity, intelligibility, and muffled cries for help. Cries for help? Sure. Objects want to be understood, and we desperately want to understand them. And certainly people want to be understood. But why? Because of some quantitative formula accessible to the physicist?

Please. Let's get back to the question of invulnerable principles, which really go to the Why? of things. Here, try this on for size: "The question of the 'why' of creation has given rise to many speculations. We have more than once answered them in the course of our expositions" (Schuon).

Were you not listening?

the cosmogonic projection has as its ultimate cause the infinitude proper to the Absolute. Now, to say infinitude is to say All-Possibility and consequently the overflowing of the divine potentialities, in conformity with the principle that the Good wills to communicate itself.

Really, creation -- including the cosmos -- is God's overflowing from his own center -- which is everywhere -- to the periphery, right down to matter, which is like a crystalized echo of His intelligence (hence its intelligibility). God is at once transcendent and therefore immanent, which is why He is farther than we can imagine and yet closer than our own heart, via His prolongation into the soul and intellect.

The Crazy Must Be Gods

Apropos of our recent musings, Instapundit links to a piece at Scientistic American called Could Multiple Personality Disorder Explain Life, the Universe and Everything? Pretty silly, but it shows the lengths to which reductionites and neuromaniacs will go to deny the obvious, AKA God. Here's the bottom line:

We know empirically [sic] from DID [AKA Split or Multiple Personality Disorder] that consciousness [whatever that is] can give rise [whatever that means] to many operationally distinct centers [sic] of concurrent experience [?], each with its own [?] personality and sense of identity. Therefore, if something analogous to DID happens at a universal level, the one universal consciousness could, as a result, give rise to many alters with private inner lives like yours and ours. As such, we may [science!] all be alters -- dissociated personalities -- of universal consciousness.

Moreover, as we’ve seen earlier, there is something dissociative processes look like in the brain of a patient with DID. So, if some form of universal-level DID happens, the alters of universal consciousness must also have an extrinsic appearance. We posit that this appearance is life itself: metabolizing organisms are simply [simply?] what universal-level dissociative processes look like.

Of course, if this were the case, then no one would be able to see or know anything outside his particular dissociative process, AKA split personality. Everyone would essentially be crazy, so no one would have access to the "universal consciousness." As such, the theory is hoisted on its own retardedness.

Genuine Multiple Personality Disorder [I prefer the older and more evocative term] also happens to be exceedingly rare. Certainly I've never seen a case. Having said that, I do believe it is simply an extreme form of something much more common and indeed present in most everyone, i.e., semi-autonomous subselves with varying degrees of independence. The situation is only pathological per se when there is little-to-no integration between these centers of subjectivity.

The most common form of this lack of integration is Borderline Personality Disorder, which you might say is situated between full-blown Multiple Personality and garden variety neurosis, AKA Here Comes Everybody. Who is fully integrated and harmonious with himself all the time? A saint, maybe. Or a complete idiot.

A borderline person easily switches from one sub-personality to another (usually in the context of stress, or lack of empathy, or abandonment depression, or separation anxiety), except there is a degree of insight -- or at least potential insight -- into the switch. Typically they don't understand it while it's happening, but they can gain insight the morning after the night before. That's usually why they seek treatment: because the subselves are beyond their control and ruining their lives.

Here's a charming example plucked from thin air -- or from a combination of idle clicking and morbid curiosity: Heather Locklear is hospitalized for threatening to shoot herself 'after flying into jealous rage over suspicion her fiance was cheating, then choking her mom and hitting her dad as they tried to help her'.

I know we're not supposed to diagnose from afar, but some things can be seen from a mile away, and that right there is a borderline personality. Yes, drugs and/or alcohol may be involved, but they are both cause and consequence, in that borderlines are always impulsive and often attempt to self-medicate in self-defeating ways. The reason they self-medicate is that it confers a degree of integration or pseudo-wholeness, at least while the illusion lasts.

Come to think of it, I recently read the autobiography of Waylon Jennings, in which he's quite candid about his addiction to amphetamine and then cocaine for some 21 years, during the main part of his career. He didn't put it exactly this way, but it is clear that the bullet-proof stud we call Waylon Jennings was a product of speed. When he stopped using it, this larger-than-life character vanished with it. He could no longer storm the stage with total confidence and take over a room, no matter how large. He was just a regular guy -- who, from the perspective of Big Ol' Waymore, was almost a nonentity.

There must be a similar dynamic fueling the addictions of other celebrities, no? What struck me about Jennings is that it went on for so long that it affected a kind of relatively stable transmutation, such that the drug-fueled self became the real self, while the real self withered on the vine.

Not too long ago I evaluated the ex-wife of another prominent drug-addicted celebrity. He too had been on drugs for most of his adult life, such that when he attempted -- one of many failed attempts -- sobriety, it was as if he were beginning all over as an awkward teen.

What have we learned today? Not much yet. I want to go back to the passage about how DID may Reveal the Secret Of Everything. There are so many angles from which to approach its stupidity. For example, it certainly appeals to our gnostic sense, which we all possess, either in a healthy or a pathological way. There are of course "secrets," but they are mostly hiding in plain sight. Religion is always esoteric in a certain sense, or at least you need recourse to esoterism in order to eliminate its inevitable absurdities, infertile paradoxes, and ad hockeries posing as mysteries.

In fact, you could reframe everything the author says in straight-up religious metaphysics, such that it as if the headline is ripped straight from the Upanishads, written several thousand years ago.

Example.

Okay, There are two selves, the apparent self and the real Self. Of these it is the real Self, and he alone, who must be felt as truly existing. Or, The universe is a tree eternally existing, its root aloft, its branches spread below. This could easily be trancelighted to Christian terms, e.g., Creator-source and image-likeness.

One difference is that we do not have to resort to extreme psychopathology in order to make sense of this. After all, Multiple and Borderline Personality Disorders are associated with prolonged childhood trauma. In my experience, you might regard borderline personality as a case of chronic Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Is that what we are? A bunch of PTSD victims?

Well, before you answer... There is an ontological trauma or rupture at the foundation of things, isn't there? Adam and Eve are presumably "whole" and integrated until they take the plunge into fragmentation, contingency, impermanence, relativity, disequilibrium, et al. Life is tough. Much tougher if you pretend that severe mental illness is a kind of norm that explains everything.

Father, Son, and the Holy Post

This post is all over the place. Welcome to my mind!

As often happens with the blog, the subject under discussion is provoking an acute case of Baader-Meinhof syndrome, in that I'm seeing it everywhere, thus making it difficult to reduce to order. It reminds me of when I run into one of those apparent cosmic dead ends, but then bump into an author who opens up so many potential avenues that I have to read his entire output.

The same thing happens with music. I no sooner discover a new artist than I need to hear everything. This just happened a couple days ago, as a result of reading the Leonard Cohen bio. He is by no means a new discovery, but until now I thought a "best of" collection was sufficient. The book prompted me to order the complete works (although he fooled the record company and recorded three more after this came out). $21 for eleven CDs is an offer I couldn't refuse. "My only weakness is that I'm weak" (H. Simpson).

The problem is, everything about Schuon mirrors everything else. He even alludes to this in the foreword of another collection I'm re-re-reading, The Play of Masks. In it he points out that the book consists of "small independent treatises" that nevertheless "often summarize the whole doctrine." Boy and how. Fractal is what it is: each thread unravels the whole area rug.

I was actually trying to divert myself into a new subject while blogging about the present one, but this book is only aggravating the Baader-Meinhof. Turns out that "the play of masks" is just another way of looking at "little big self." In other words, little self -- the ego -- is of course a mask, but it turns out that God himself is a master of disguise, if I may put it that way. I'll explain as we proceed.

No, maybe I'll jump ahead to the explanation right now. I'll paraphrase, but Schuon maintains that the "reality-appearance" dialectic or reciprocity or complementarity may be followed all the way up and into God; it is "in divinas" before it is down amongus, and it is only amongus because it is first in Him. Without question -- in my opinion -- this is a mystery at which the doctrine of the Trinity is trying to hint.

Wait. Are you saying there is "appearance" or "illusion" or "contingency" in God? Well, yes and no. Let's just say "in a manner of speaking." But if you speak in this manner, it explains a lot; it clears up a great deal of pneumababbling yada yada that tends to deepak over the chopra just when you need more light.

The next paragraph of the foreword repeats what I just said in plain Schuonese:

Without a doubt, metaphysics aims in the first place at the comprehension of the whole Universe, which extends from the Divine Order to the terrestrial contingencies -- this is the reciprocity between Atma and Maya -- yet it offers in addition intellectually less demanding but humanly crucial openings; which is all the more important in that we live in a world wherein the abuse of intelligence replaces wisdom.

Metaphysics is like a map of the sky which includes holes so as to escape the limitations of the map. Light streams into the cosmos from above -- like pure light through a prism. The prism is metaphysics, spreading out into the spectrum of colors we perceive herebelow. A color is an "appearance," but nevertheless not other than the primordial light.

With that image in mind, compare with this passage by Schuon from a book we were plagiarizing with yesterday: "it is equally true that pure Intelligence exists and that its nature is to tend toward its own source." Maybe you don't see it that way, but here is some aphoristic backup:

Thought can avoid the idea of God as long as it limits itself to meditating on minor problems.

Meditating on minor problems is one way to remain locked into vertically closed Little Self. It's one of the main reasons I can no longer relate to my profession, in that so much of psychotherapy involves nothing more than exchanging one mask for another -- perhaps less painful, but a mask nonetheless.

Christianity does not deny the splendor of the world but encourages us to seek its origin, to ascend to its pure snow.

"Splendor" is really none other than the divine light alluded to above, shining through phenomena.

Only God and the central point of my consciousness are not adventitious to me.

For the Rio Linda contingent, "adventitious" means continent, or relative, or extrinsic. We could say also that it is Maya, or appearance. Thus, in the whole wide world, only two things are not Maya, which is to say, God and Big Self, the latter a prolongation of the former. So really, it comes down to the eternal dance of O and ʘ, or player, playmate, and holy game.

Or just say man is in the image of the Creator and have a nice weekend.

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality. --Dávila

The Lazy Man's Way to God

Speaking of Little Big Self, a coincidence -- in the Leonard Cohen bio, his Zen teacher, Roshi, summarizes the doctrine in six words: "Destroy particular self and absolute appears."

Well yes, I suppose. I don't want to knock another fellow's merchandise, but is there a less... austere way? It reminds me of an aphorism:

I do not want to conquer serenity, like a Stoic, but to welcome serenity in, like a Christian. --Dávila

I might have said "like a lazy man," but I like the way Dávila puts it. It elevates my indolence to a virtue. Besides, I don't know if it's really laziness per se, more like an appreciation of the magnitude of the enterprise. How many birds on fire for Zen actually cross the phoenix line?

Analogously, if I don't become a nuclear physicist, it's not just because I'm a slackcentric gentleman loafer. There are also questions of aptitude, passion, and sustained will. It's hard to pretend to be interested in something that disinterests us, even if it's in our interest to be interested.

Now I'm reminded of the whole question of self-power vs. other power. Zen might be the quintessential case of the former. This is from a previous post on the subject:

The “power of oneself" is "that of intelligence and of will seen from the point of view of the salvific capacity which they possess in principle," such that "man is freed thanks to his intelligence and by his own efforts..."

Conversely, "other power" "does not belong to us in any way," but "belongs to the 'Other' as its name indicates... in this context, man is saved by Grace, which does not however mean that he need not collaborate with this salvation by his receptivity and according to the modes that human nature allows or imposes on him" (Schuon).

So, even the lazy man must cooperate with the Other, which, ironically, is more difficult for a certain type of person. Some people just don't like to submit or surrender to or even acknowledge a higher power. Others can't help it. Yokes and folks. Vines and branches.

I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.

Me? I gave up long ago. Of his own, Lil' Bob can do nothing. I wouldn't give him the slightest attention.

Getting sidetracked. I suppose this whole line of thought was triggered by a passage in an essay called The Two Paradises:

[T]here are in man two subjects -- or subjectivities -- with no common measure and with the opposite tendencies, though there is also, in some respect, coincidence between the two.

On the one hand there is the anima or empirical ego, woven out of objective as well as subjective contingencies, such as memories and desires; on the other hand there is the spiritus or pure Intelligence, whose subjectivity is rooted in the Absolute, so that it sees the empirical ego as being no more than a husk, that is, something outward and foreign to the true "my-self," or rather "One-self," at once transcendent and immanent.

This mirrors the primordial distinction between Creator and creation, or Absolute and relative, in that man has a subject (or subjectivity) corresponding to each. In the book, I symbolize these two subjectivities as (¶) and (•); the former relates to -- and is ultimately a prolongation of -- O, while the latter takes "the world" as its object.

Thus, in a broad sense, we can say that the dialectic between (•) and world is the realm of science, while that between (¶) and O is religion. The image of the first is concentric circles around a point, while the latter is the domain of continuous radii from the same central point.

So yes, Roshi is correct: destroy (•) and O appears. In other words, eliminate the concentric circles -- via self-power -- and only the Absolute is left. But there is always the other path of simultaneously radiant and attractive grace drawing us upward and inward, toward Celestial Central.

Along these lines, in another book Schuon says that "humility" is "awareness of our metaphysical nothingness," and that "to have a sense of the sacred is to be aware that all qualities or values not only proceed from the Infinite but also attract towards It (emphasis mine).

Back to The Two Paradises. Schuon notes that "pure Intelligence exists," and "its nature is to tend toward its own source."

Indeed, what is the alternative? Either the intellect is a prolongation, or radiation, from and to that central point, or it can do no more than chase its tail in one of those concentric circles. This latter is a vertically closed system from which the purpose of religion is to save us.

To be continued...

Little Big Self

The subject of this post strikes me as absolutely fundamental, bound to appear or reappear in some fashion, whether explicitly or implicitly, in any analysis of our existence, whether secular or religious.

Our subject is the "two selves" or subjectivities of every person; to be perfectly accurate, I should say "no fewer than two," but the multiple subselves that populate the psyche are generally on the same plane, and this post is more concerned with the dialectic of planes as opposed to the content of the fragmented selves of a single plane, i.e., with verticality rather than horizontality.

As alluded to in the first paragraph, everyone knows they are more than one self, because they experience the different selves from day to day and moment to moment. For example, our professional self is different from our family self, and this is different from our private self. There is no one to whom we say everything we are thinking, any more than civilization could exist if everyone walked around naked.

Speaking of which, I remember an essay by Schuon that describes our different subjectivities in terms of bodily location; here it is, in an essay called The Message of the Human Body. In it he describes various forms of our subjectivity, such as masculine and feminine, or adult and child. More generally,

The human body comprises three fundamental regions: the body properly so-called, the head, the sexual parts; these are almost three different subjectivities.

Indeed, think of how a good deal of "maturity" involves learning how to get these three on the same page and interacting harmoniously, both vertically and horizontally. As said in the bʘʘK, the vector of maturity is always toward actualization and integration. What's the alternative, regression and fragmentation? Sure. But this post is not about the left.

Note that you need both: actualization without integration leads to a kind of protean expressiveness with no center (a great many artists fall into this superficially open-ended but ultimately blind alley), while the converse would be a kind of static and repressive sclerosis. The first is all wet, the latter all dried up. You need both fire and earth. Not to mention wind.

Regarding the sexual center, Schuon makes the point that it manifests, "quite paradoxically, a dynamic subjectivity at once animal and divine, if one may express it thus." Yes you may, because it certainly helps explain the deep pain and confusion -- to oneself and others -- that can result.

As it so happens, I'm reading a biography of Leonard Cohen, and this is certainly one of the central themes of his life. I'm only about halfway through, and he's not close to sorting it out, i.e., integrating the two. You can't say he didn't try, as he later spent many years (when he was in his 60s) in a Zen monastery. That is a way of detachment from various subjective centers in favor of identification with the One Center, i.e., the Big Self (which for Zen is No Self).

I'm not sure if this is the best way, but we'll return to the question as we proceed.

At any rate, an essential ambiguity is introduced into the subject because all selves are in relation, and to a certain extent determined by the relation. Who would you be if you had had a different mother and father? Or a different spouse? Or a different culture, i.e., different cultural objects available to discover and express oneself?

Impossible to say, but you would certainly be different, and yet, somehow the same. We are always woven of chance and necessity, or music and geometry, or freedom and determinism, and that's just the way it is down here. It's why the future is always different from the past, and yet the same old same old.

Who am I now?

Well, when I blog, I am definitely interacting with Big Self, however you wish to conceptualize it. I like to call it O, since we can posit its existence without necessarily knowing a thing about it until it manifests through us, which is to say Lil' Self.

What we're really attemting is a kind of open, dynamic, and flowing Center-to-center communication. But isn't that just another name for "religion" -- or better, religiosity? I think it is what we're doing when we do religion. I'm just doing it in a certain way with the blogging.

As usual, Schuon describes what's going on with adamantine clarity and precision:

[H]uman nature is made of centrality and totality, and hence of objectivity; objectivity being the capacity to step outside oneself, while centrality and totality are the capacity to conceive the Absolute.

As far as the blog is concerned, "totality" is the integration of the One Cosmos, interior and exterior, subject and object, vertical and horizontal. The Absolute is O, while objectivity is detachment from Lil' Bob. "Centrality" is the ongoing process of metabolism and assimilation of O, in the dialectical space between it and (¶). (This latter might go by the name of Intermediate Bob.)

This was just the first blast at the subject, so don't expect any final integration. We'll continue blasting tomorrow. For now I have to revert to Lil' Bob and get on with the day.

Deus-continuity Amidst Discontinuity

Yesterday's post didn't quite achieve Total Clarity on the subject of radiance and reverberation, no doubt because I'm not quite clear myself. Let's give it one more shot. One problem is that Schuon doesn't say all that much about these principles -- leaving them unsaturated -- so it's up to us to fill them with meaning.

First of all, Creation doesn't just occur 13.8 billion years ago (or whenever you posit the "beginning") but absolutely continuously. This is indeed orthodoxy -- not just for Christianity, but for thought. Put conversely, if your doctrine doesn't allow for continuous creation, then it's wrong at best.

So, how are we to think of the creation of this world? And when we refer to this world, we don't mean just earth, or the galaxy, or even the cosmos, but existence as such. In other words, how does existence exist? What is its source?

Again, religious doctrine -- just like any other map -- provides "points of reference" to approach this problem in a fruitful manner. For example, the Bible lets us know on the first page that existence is not self-sufficient, but dependent upon a higher principle. This dependency is perpetual, not a one-time event.

According to González, the doctrine of creation "stands at the root of the Christian understanding of the relationship between God and the world." The Creator, according to the creed, is the maker of all things, both visible and invisible. Perhaps you've noticed that no secular creation myth can even begin to account for the latter. Rather, they always try to swallow the invisible into the visible.

Think, for example, of Marxism and all its ghastly progeny, from feminism to climate hysteria. It rightly (from its own standpoint) sees religion not just as wrong, but as a kind of disease, wholly parasitic on matter. Religion is the opiate of the masses, when in reality Marxism is the pacifier of the tenured; the latter provides a kind of pseudo-heart in a heartless cosmos, or an archimedean vertical perspective in a world devoid of verticality. It is a view from nowhere by a bunch of nobodies.

Often a Christian doctrine is not just to posit a truth but to counter falsehoods. In order to understand certain doctrines, you need to appreciate them in the context of what they are arguing against.

In this case, González points out that the doctrine of creation "rejects two views that have repeatedly challenged it through the centuries: dualism and monism," the former positing two ultimate principles of creation, the latter denying the distinction between Creator and creation.

Both of these alternatives -- dualism and monism -- are heretical, not just for Christianity but for religion as such. In short, they are intrinsic as opposed to extrinsic heresies, the latter going to doctrines that only apply to this or that religion.

This heretical confusion persists to this day, in both religious and irreligious circles. Scientism, for example, begins with the inexplicable dualism of mind and matter, but then makes the dualism go away by reducing it to an absurd monism. I'm not sure if the pilgrimage from inexplicable to absurd represents progress, but there you go.

As for religious heresies, "creationism" comes to mind. Creationism is most definitely not synonymous with the venerable doctrine of creation, but rather, a kind of vulgar substitute that borrows from and tries to imitate scientism. You could say that it horizontalizes and temporalizes what is properly vertical and atemporal.

Interestingly, the doctrine of creation also set itself against another ancient idea (embraced by Neo- and Paleo-Platonists alike), emanationism -- the notion that

All things are derived from the first reality or perfect God by steps of degradation to lesser degrees of the first reality or God, and at every step the emanating beings are less pure, less perfect, less divine.

In other words, the doctrine of creation opposes the idea that the world is simply a kind of necessary side-effect of the One. Rather, it wants to emphasize and preserve God's freedom and autonomy in creating this world.

However, in emphasizing this one side, the doctrine of creation tends to obscure important truths conveyed by emanationism. In my opinion, the most fruitful approach is to see the two principles -- creation and emanation -- as complementary, not opposed.

For ultimately, creation goes to the discontinuity between Creator and creation, man and God; while emanation goes to the equally important continuity. Indeed, the principle -- or fact, rather -- of Incarnation seems to me to harmonize the two, i.e., Christ as simultaneously all God and all man. Come to think of it, there is a kind of discontinuity-amidst-continuity within the Trinity itself.

Note how different denominations tend to emphasize one side over the other. For example, Augustine highlights the discontinuity, what with our fallen depravity, whereas in the Orthodox east they have always emphasized the continuity with the doctrine of theosis (itself a reflection of the idea that man is a reflection of God).

We're almost out of time here, but Schuon relates this to the distinction between substance, which goes more to emanation and continuity, and essence, which would go more to creation and discontinuity:

The notion of essence denotes an excellence which is, so to say, discontinuous with respect to accidents, whereas the notion of substance implies on the contrary a kind of continuity...

Hmm. I'll bet radiance has to do with substance, reverberation with essence, but we'll have to wait until next week.

Just heard about Charles Krauthammer. Damn. That one hurts. There is a man.

An Intense Beam of Darkness, AKA This Post

Yesterday's post ended before it was about to get underway, or at least left alert readers in a quandary as to what is so special about the principles Radiance and Reverberation.

To review, Schuon's metaphysic begins with the Absolute. However, the Absolute is not a featureless blob, but has certain implications or translogical entailments, among them Infinitude:

To speak of the Absolute, is to speak of the Infinite; Infinitude is an intrinsic aspect of the Absolute. It is from this "dimension" of Infinitude that the world springs forth; the world exists because the Absolute, being such, implies Infinitude.

Can't get clearer than that, although we are playing rather high above the terrestrial rim, near the summit of abstraction, before God swallows himself in his own Beyond-Being. On a clear day you can see forever up here. Nevertheless, it is not possible to contain the Absolute in language, only to point to -- or perhaps better, from -- it.

Along these lines, Schuon adds that the Absolute is not any mere "possible Reality," but rather necessary Reality. I suppose you could say that if we eliminate all contingency, possibility, and appearance from the world, what we are left with is the Absolute -- which is the changeless ground out of which the contingency and possibility flow.

Ultimately, absoluteness is what distinguishes a thing from nonexistence. In other words, to even exist is to partake of absoluteness; as such, our existence is contingent, whereas God's is necessary: God is that reality which cannot not be.

We could also say that he is the person who who cannot not be, but that would take us away from the main thread. Suffice it to say, no Him, no you or I. Remove God from the equation and we are not even nothing.

Possibility and Necessity. Don't leave home without them. Or at least don't try to think seriously about existence without them, for you can't. You can try to eliminate one, but it will always return in unanticipated whys.

Now, if the Absolute is necessary reality, the Infinite is -- you guessed it -- possible reality. However, bear in mind that this possibility is necessary; possibility as such must be, even though this or that possibility may or may not be. Creators gonna create, and that's all there is to it. But no one knows what they might come up with next.

There are further implications. The Infinite, for example, "appears as modes of expanse or extension, such as space, time, form or diversity, number or multiplicity, matter or substance."

Looked at this way, space is the "conserving mode" of infinitude, while time is its "transforming mode" (for both good and ill, i.e., progress and decay). Likewise, there is a qualitative mode (form), a quantitative mode (number), and a substantial mode (matter). Taken together, these "are the very pillars of universal existence": space, time, form, number, (prime) matter.

These pillars of the cosmic community are always at play in all phenomena. They are simultaneously beyond and in the world, for example, in the practice of art. Indeed, I would say that in practicing art -- or indulging in creativity -- we are reflecting the Divine play-nature. It's probably why we tend to idealize great artists.

The point is, because of the structure of existence, you might say that there are things (quantities) and perfections (qualities). If you manage create a perfect thing, you qualify as an Artist. I know I qualify because of my son. Not unlike God.

Now, back to our words of the day, radiance and reverberation. Recall from yesterpost that

Absolute Substance extends Itself, through relativization, under the aspects of Radiance and Reverberation; that is to say, It [substance] is accompanied -- at a lesser degree of reality -- by two forms of emanation, one that is dynamic, continuous, and radiating; and the other static, discontinuous, and formative....

Expressed in geometric terms, the Substance is the center; Radiance is the cluster of the radii, and Reverberation, or the Image, is the circle. [Existence] is the surface which enables this unfolding.

Now we see that Infinitude redounds to possible reality which redounds to relativization, this under the auspices of two modes: radiance, which is dynamic and continuous, like radii extending from the cosmic center; and reverberation, which is static and discontinuous, like concentric circles around a central point.

Okay, but what does any of this have to do with just living your life? Well, let me think...

I know! We are situated at the periphery, which is full of change, dynamism, progress, and decay; but nevertheless partake of the center, which is transtemporal contemplation, prayer, serenity, and peace. Lines radiate from the nonlocal center, and this is grace or "divine attraction." We reverberate at the periphery, and these are degrees of being.

Re-verberations in the Logosphere

I'm always struck by how Schuon can use such ordinary words to disclose the most profound profundities: no mathematical equations, no specialized vocabulary, no idiosyncratic neologisms, and certainly no tenured flimflammery.

Example.

I can think of many, for example, center and periphery, radii and circumference, absolute and infinite, horizontal and vertical, inward and outward, possibility and necessity, geometry and music, or (as we've been discussing lately) form and substance.

Incidentally, you will notice that with each of these antinomies, one side goes with all the others. Thus, center, radii, absolute, vertical, inward, necessity, geometry, substance; and periphery, circumference, infinite, horizontal, outward, possibility, music, form.

And in my opinion, this is because each of these antinomies must be grounded in an (or the) ultimate Antinomy. Each is a reflection or fractal of the one Antinomy.

Which itself is (ortho)paradoxical, since "one" and "antinomy" would appear to be antinomic. In other words, One is one; or as they say in Islam, "there is no Allah but Allah." But if there is an ultimate antinomy, doesn't this imply a vicious dualism, as in Manichaeism?

Antinomy: a contradiction between two apparently equally valid principles or between inferences correctly drawn from such principles; a fundamental and apparently unresolvable conflict or contradiction.

I believe the doctrine of the Trinity is here to rescue us from what is otherwise an insoluble metaphysical nul de slack. The problem is, if All is One, then all this many-ness is just an illusion and the world is reduced to insignificance, AKA mayaplicity. In my opinion, the antinomies in which we are plunged can only be resolved with recourse to an eternally dynamic threeness.

At any rate, I am no longer able to see how one could possibly understand the world without these ordinary words which clothe such weighty concepts. Indeed, how can one understand anything of consequence in the absence of just verticality alone? It's not as if one can rid the world of verticality, or reduce it to horizontality with no remainder.

Time out for aphorisms, for Dávila too discloses the deepest of truths with the plainest of words. I have taken the liberty of arranging them hierarchically in order to reveal the final (!):

The lesser truths tend to eclipse the highest truths.

Often the simpler a truth is the more difficult it is to understand.

Every truth is a tension between contradictory evidences that claim our simultaneous allegiance.

The man does not escape from his prison of paradoxes except by means of a vertical act of faith.

There was never any conflict between reason and faith, but between two faiths.

Truths do not contradict each other except when they get out of order.

The two poles are the individual and God; the two antagonists are God and man.

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

If it is not of God that we are speaking, it is not sensible to speak of anything seriously.

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest.

Therefore,

We've gotten far afield, because I wanted to discuss two of those ordinary words, "reverberation" and "resonance." According to Schuon,

Absolute Substance extends Itself, through relativization, under the aspects of Radiance and Reverberation; that is to say, It is accompanied -- at a lesser degree of reality -- by two forms of emanation, one that is dynamic, continuous, and radiating; and the other static, discontinuous, and formative.

If this were not the case, then quite frankly, "the world would not be."

Bold statement!

Later in the same chapter he says, "Expressed in geometric terms, the Substance is the center; Radiance is the cluster of the radii, and Reverberation, or the Image, is the circle." What we perceive as Existence "is the surface which enables this unfolding."

We'll continue to unfold this tomorrow, as we're out of time.

Condolences to Ted for the loss of his feline friend. All loss is the image -- or reverberation -- of Loss.

The Deadly Consequences of Relativism

In the previous post we discussed form and substance. Knowledge is a form, and either it is a form of the substance or just a form of appearance, in which case it is severed from substance and therefore nothing.

Do you see the problem? Either knowledge is actually knowledge, or it is that arbitrary dream about the impenetrable cloud, in which case epistemology (knowledge) floats free of any ontology (being).

And that is what we call the Cosmic Divorce. One is either a relativist or an absolutist, but each position entails immediate and irrevocable consequences. You can only pick one, but you have to pick, either implicitly or explicitly.

One problem with the left -- maybe the source of their problems -- is the wish to have it both ways. Everyone knows the left is "unprincipled," hence what appears to be a steaming pile of contradictory policies. But they do have a principle: the principle of relativism.

Think of some of the many ways the left is at cross purposes with itself: it wants more immigration to America, even though this will (according to their theories) result in catastrophic global warming; females have an absolute right to abortion, and therefore no right to live to exercise the right; racial discrimination is wrong, and the state should do more of it; don't judge people by their immutable racial characteristics, but White Privilege!

We could go on past the ad of nauseam, so I won't regurgitate myself. The credo of the left is always: There is no Truth and We are its Messengers.

The immediate consequence of relativism is a kind of faux freedom. At first this freedom is intoxicating, and indeed I remember it well. Wheeeeeeeee! Oof.

The problem is, a freedom with no ground or telos is like an unstable element: ultimately radioactive. What would happen if all elements were unstable? Don't ask me, I got a gentleman's D in high school chemistry. But surely not life or anything else more complex than unstable elements.

Now, what are the consequences of absolutism? People -- or at least Americans -- instinctively recoil from that word, as if it implies a black-and-white authoritarianism. It can imply that, but only from the left, i.e., "absolute relativism." When relativism usurps absoluteness, violence and oppression are sure to follow. Relativism redounds to the exercise of absolute power, since there is no appeal to truth.

But there is nothing to fear from a proper absolutism. For example, our Fathers tell us that we are absolutely created equal, and that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness absolutely flow from this happy fact. What's to fear?

Well, obviously, many people fear the consequences of freedom, but only about half the nation and maybe 90% of the world.

At any rate, if there is by definition only one Absolute, how do we end up with "absolute rights" down here in the terrestrial world? Isn't that a contradiction? No, not at all. Rather, a necessity. Again, absoluteness has certain necessary consequences.

Schuon explains it more lucidly than I can:

To speak of the Divine Substance is necessarily to speak of its ontological prolongation, since we, who speak, derive from this prolongation which is Existence -- Relativity in its manifested mode...

To put it conversely, if we begin with the principle of relativism -- of the many -- then there is no way to get back to the Absolute, or to the One.

However, if we begin with the principle of oneness, then we are necessarily its prolongation. At once this resolves the knowledge problem, for there is no longer any real division between the One and many.

As Schuon says, even -- or especially -- we are its prolongation. This allows us to fruitfully cope with a whole lotta static paradoxes, bad infinities, infertile mysteries, and cosmic nul de slacks.

Yes, we are inevitably form, not substance. But again, forms of the substance, and therefore substance (or better, not not-substance, to keep things on the apophatic side).

This is a quintessential orthoparadox, the very same one expressed in the mytho-metaphysical gnotion that man is created in the image and likeness of his Creator. I mean, either he is or isn't, but please be consistent and accept the consequences. Don't....

Here, the Aphorist, as always, says it best with his linguistic shivs to the ribcage; each conveys a necessary truth:

Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.

If the soul is a myth, genocide is a simple problem of effective anesthetics (Dávila).

If you're a garden-variety Democrat, maybe you're not clever enough to understand that sequence. Don't worry. Marx gets it, and there's always another one of his acolytes waiting in the wings to seize absolute power. In which case count yourself lucky if you get the anesthetics.

Appearance and Reality, Mother and Father

The marriage of appearance and reality is always present in the exercise of human intelligence, irrespective of the discipline. Not only is discernment between them the function of intelligence, but it is human intelligence that brings the distinction into being. No other animal knows of it.

You might be thinking to yourself, "thanks, Captain Obvious," but as we know, the consensus of the tenured is that we cannot know "reality," only appearances. This has been the case since Kant's division of the world into phenomena (our forms of perception or concepts of understanding) and noumena (the thing itself independent of our big ideas).

However, this is just a trick, because he's still dividing the world into appearance and reality, just calling them by different names. What he really did was divorce appearances from reality, such that instead of being appearances of reality, the appearances float before us untethered to any ground of which they are the outward expression. Properly speaking, they are no longer appearances; rather, more like inescapable illusions. Whitehead expressed it well with his gag about the bifurcation of the world into a cloud at one end and a dream at the other.

This is the proximate source of any nonsense that claims "my truth," or "perception is reality," or "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." In other words, it is the "principle" -- whether explicit or implicit -- behind any and all forms of relativism.

But again, the very purpose of intelligence -- its sufficient reason -- is to distinguish appearances from reality; therefore, relativism is a kind of counter-revolution that endeavors to abolish intelligence and return man to the condition of total stupidity. It is the first and last (anti-) word in cosmic inversion.

With this context in mind, we are in a position to understand what Schuon means when he claims that "The substance of knowledge is Knowledge of the Substance." Again, there is form and there is substance, and the latter is prior and "possesses every right." An appearance is always a form -- as Kant says -- except that it is a form of the substance, not just a futile dream about the impenetrable cloud.

In agreement with what was said above,

The fundamental nature of our intelligence... is discernment between what is substantial and what is accidental, and not the exclusive perception of the accidental; when intelligence perceives the accident it does so, as it were, in relation to the substance that corresponds to it.

Reminiscent of Helen Keller's breakthrough as depicted in The Miracle Worker, "who sees the drop sees the water." Or, in Helen's case, to feel the water is to plunge into the ocean. The rest is herstory.

How and where do we root this unavoidable union of form-substance and appearance-reality? Clearly it cannot be anchored in form, or appearance, or contingency, because if it is, there is no exit: again, one is sealed in permanent ignorance and tenure.

Maybe you don't like the word "God." Fair enough. Let's just call it "O." O is not something you can ever avoid and remain human. Rather, the essence of the human station involves the ceaseless dialectic between O and what we will call Ø. Now, Ø is not the opposite of O -- that way lies Manichaeism and other cosmic nul-de-slacks -- but its complement, or consort, if you will.

And certain mytho-metaphysics do indeed see her as consort, most notably Vedanta, in which there is the complementarity of Purusha and Prakriti. Purusha

is a complex concept whose meaning evolved in Vedic and Upanishadic times. Depending on source and historical timeline, it means the cosmic man or Self, Consciousness, and Universal principle.

Conversely, Prakriti

refers to 'the material world, nature, matter, physical and psychological character, constitution, temper, disposition.' Purusha is the principle of pure consciousness, while Prakriti is the principle of matter.... where Purusha is the masculine in every living being as consciousness, Prakriti is the feminine and substrate which accepts the Purusha.

Is there an equivalent in Christian doctrine? I don't know if there is a direct one, but allusions, hints, and clues are tucked away and scattered everywhere. To take the most obvious example, God and Mary. Or, prior to this, in Proverbs we have numerous references to wisdom as divine consort, and she is conspicuously female.

The Church too is regarded as the female consort (in a manner of speaking) of Jesus, or how about going all the way back to the beginning, in Genesis 1, where God is "hovering over the face of the waters." Suffice it to say that water is quintessentially feminine. We'll leave off with an illuminating passage from Joseph Campbell's Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake:

Earwicker has a wife, the psyche of the book -- bewitching, ever-changing, animating, all-pervading. She appears typically under the name of Anna Livia Plurabelle [ALP]. Just as Earwicker is metamorphosed into Adam, Noah, Lord Nelson, a mountain or a tree, so ALP becomes by subtle transposition Eve, Isis, Iseult, a passing cloud, a flowing stream. She is the eternally fructive and love-bearing principle in the world.... the entire book, in fact, is but a dreamlike emanation of this "untitled mamafesta memorializing the Mosthighest."

.... But above all, Anna is a river, always changing yet ever the same, the Heraclitean flux which bears all life in its current.

Why a World?

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality. --Dávila

This seems important, which is to say, fundamental and universal: that "every religion," according to Schuon, "has a form and a substance." Traditional religious forms are local vestments of this nonlocal substance, and although the two are complementary, obviously substance must be prior.

Is there a substance without form? Apparently yes, in that "beyond-being" transcends all limitation, and a form is a limit. However, I suspect that being and beyond-being go together like Creator and creature.

Nevertheless, "Substance possesses every right," being that "it derives from the Absolute"; whereas "form is relative," so "its rights are therefore limited."

I remember studying Carl Jung back in the day. His one Big Idea was psychological archetypes, which he called forms without substance, or psychic patterns awaiting experience. They are analogous to animal instincts, only on the human plane.

If the archetypes are the forms, what's the substance? That's a problem, for it seems to me that Jung subordinates substance to the forms, which is precisely what we are not supposed to do, according to Schuon. This must be why Jungianism devolves to a kind of pseudo-religion.

I actually applied to the Jung Institute in Los Angeles for post-doctoral indoctrination. Anyone can complete a PhD, but that hardly means you are complete! I knew I wanted to go on to some form of psychoanalytic training, and Jung's school of thought appealed to me because it is the weirdest. In other words, it seemed the most "open-ended," so to speak.

But upon going through a couple of preliminary interviews with experienced clinicians, it dawned upon me that any real weirdness had been contained -- that I was confronting a new orthodoxy, and that I would have to shave off my rough edges in order to fit into it.

This is an ongoing problem. Or issue. I can't seem to find a form adequate to the substance of Bob. As we've mentioned before, the Sons of Toots have no place to lay their heads! For as Schuon says, "The Spirit can be manifested, but It cannot be enclosed."

Compare this to beauty: it too can be manifested but not enclosed. What we call "art" is none other than the manifestation of beauty. It is also the attempt to "enclose" or "contain" beauty, but you could say that a genuine work of art can be identified by its failure at containment.

In other words, in a masterpiece -- say, Michaelangelo's Pieta -- the divine beauty completely overflows the form, despite -- or because of -- the perfection of the form.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

Aesthetics cannot give recipes, because there are no methods for making miracles.

Strictly speaking, the beauty of the work is in what exceeds any definition of the critic.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says (Dávila).

This quintessential orthoparadox also apples to music and language. As the form approaches perfection, it becomes more transparent and translucent. It makes you wonder if the perfect form would simply disappear. Which suggests that Nothing is the perfect expression of Everything.

Again, the Transfiguration is another example of the phenomenon. What was -- is -- that?! It seems to be the manifestation or revelation of the ultimate substance beneath or beyond the form.

All of this goes to the very function of intelligence, which is to discern the essence beneath the accident, the reality beneath the appearance, the absolute beneath the relative. In each case the former takes precedence over the latter, even though we never see the two apart. It's almost like we need the world in order to...

Yes, why must we have a world? It seems like a nuisance. Why not just create pure spirits?

The world is quintessentially a form -- or a hierarchy of forms. What's a hierarchy for? For climbing, I suppose. (Unless you are on the left, in which case it is for abolishing.)

Help us out here, Don Colacho.

I do not belong to a world that perishes. I extend and transmit a truth that does not die.

Christianity does not deny the splendor of the world but encourages us to seek its origin, to ascend to its pure snow.

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

Ah, a counterworld to the world. You could say the world descends from God. The counterworld ascends to God. But these are not-two.

Something Stupid This Way Comes

In the previous post we explained why it is that evil is simultaneously necessary and forbidden, rooted in the ontological distance between the Principle and the Manifestation, or Creator and Creation. For the very same reason, we would say that stupidities must proliferate. Like disease, we can never eradicate these mind parasites, only try to identify and control some of their main types and vectors.

On the one hand we have the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which seems to work pretty well. You will note the modesty of the name: control and prevention as opposed to elimination or eradication.

Conversely, thanks to Jimmy Carter we have the federal Department of Education, when it would be preferable to imitate the CDC model and simply try our best to prevent the most common stupidities on a pandemic scale. Instead, the DoED -- like all leftist projects -- ends up spreading the pathologies it presumes to cure. Democrats have for decades been living off the messes they make, whether the question is race, poverty, crime, energy, education, gender, whatever.

Why must wackiness this way come? Because, as Schuon explains, "there is inevitably a separation between the thing to be expressed and its expression, that is to say, between reality and a doctrine."

Nor does it matter one whit whether we are speaking of a scientific doctrine or a religious one: in the final analysis -- assuming one wishes to be intellectually honest -- both necessarily fall short of the mark, since "no doctrine can be identified with what it intends to express" (emphasis mine). No matter how accurate the map, the map can never be the territory. If it is the territory, then it is no longer a map.

Most religious folk intuitively understand this. It's those naive devotees of scientism we have to keep an eye on. Hayek in his way and Gödel in his are two of the main inoculations against scientistic presumption and stupidity. For example, thanks to Hayek, we know that rational planning is impossible under socialism, for the information is infinite while the minds of the planners are finite.

In short, finite minds do not possess infinite knowledge. Ah, but they can always force the issue, which is why on the left power is substituted for knowledge:

Hayek argued that all forms of collectivism could only be maintained by a central authority of some kind..., and that such planning in turn leads towards totalitarianism.... a central planning authority would have to be endowed with powers that would impact and ultimately control social life, because the knowledge required for centrally planning an economy is inherently decentralised, and would need to be brought under control.

It's the same with science more generally: scientism reduces a complex reality to a linear equation, for example, vis-a-vis climate change models that pretend CO2 can be turned like a knob on a thermostat to control temperature. But we know full well that CO2 levels have been much higher in the past, with no corresponding increase in temperature.

This post is veering and even careening into the Great Unintended. Focus!

So, how do we preserve truth while minimizing stupidity? Back to what Schuon was saying: "If the expression of a thing could be adequate or exhaustive in an absolute sense or from every point of view," then "there would no longer be any difference between the image and its prototype," with the result being that "it would be pointless to speak of thought or even simply of language."

It sounds obvious, and yet, this is another one of those Keys to Everything. Moreover, every inadequate doctrine gets this wrong, which in turn causes our necessary and inevitable stupidity to become "crystalized," so to speak; instead of a way to truth, it becomes an infirmity, a stumbling block.

Hovering over the whole thing is the principle of creation. Tweaking what Schuon says above, if our expression could be adequate or exhaustive in an absolute sense or from every point of view, then we would be the Creator, not the creature. Rather, there is an absolutely necessary gap between Creator and creature, and it is precisely this gap that simultaneously facilitates both our quasi-divine knowledge and our ineradicable ignorance.

Thus, our knowledge always faces in two directions. Scientism, of course, faces only down, and thereby negates itself. Likewise, there are stupid form of religiosity that face only up, thereby negating the world, or at least rendering it completely unintelligible.

No one has expressed this orthoparadox more clearly than Josef Pieper. In a passage called Things Are Unfathomable Because They Are Created, he writes that

it becomes evident that being true and being unfathomable go together, and that the comprehensibility of a thing can never be fully exhausted by any finite mind -- for all things are created, which means that the reason they are knowable is also the reason they are unfathomable....

For this reason our questing mind in its search for the essence of things, even of the humblest and simplest things, finds itself perforce on a path without an attainable destination. This is so because all things are created; it is so because the inner lucidity of all things flows from their original in the infinitely radiant fullness of the Divine Mind.