A Short Treatise on Intelligence, Will, and Sensibility

Our discussion of the various modes of contact with reality reminded of an old post. However, I searched with various words and phrases for this so-called post, and nothing came up. Therefore, your luck has run out, and we'll have to redo it from scratch. 

By way of compromise, we'll just summarize it rather than going full ad nauseam. In any event, it's worth a revisit, since you and I are different people than we were back then (trolls excepted).

Recall that the three essential prerogatives constituting the human state are intelligence, sentiment, and will; or truth, virtue, and beauty. 

Each of these in turn has its own formal object, but as with the immanent Trinity, these are distinctions within a single substance, which is simply to say that the True, Good, and Beautiful converge at the toppermost of the poppermost, where, you might say, there is only O and the beatific vision of it. 

One hopes, anyway.

In the essay Prerogatives of the Human State, Schuon traces all the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of this human trinity -- entailments, prolongations, and Sphinx-like antinomies -- and comes up with this nifty formulation:

Intelligence and will when taken together constitute what we might call the "capability" of the individual, whatever his moral and aesthetic sensibility might be.

That's pretty abstract, so perhaps we should pause right there and think of a concrete example. On a scale of one to ten, can we think of someone whose intelligence and will are... we won't say ten, for reasons alluded to above -- that since the modes converge at the top, it isn't actually possible to have a great intelligence and no taste whatsoever. 

So, let's say a fellow has an above average intelligence and a will of iron. The first examples that spring to mind are all those 20th century dictators such as Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. None were stupid, but they sure had poor taste. 

I'm reminded of the The Infernal Library: On Dictators, the Books They Wrote, and Other Catastrophes of Literacy (https://www.amazon.com/Infernal-Library-Dictators-Catastrophes-Literacy/dp/1250181607/ref=sr_1_1?crid=OP9R73F5RIGG&keywords=Infernal+library&qid=1680196653&s=books&sprefix=infernal%2520library%2Cstripbooks%2C156&sr=1-1):

With all this power and unique knowledge, the dictator of even a small and geopolitically insignificant country should be in a position to write at least a moderately interesting book, even if by accident. And yet to a man, they almost always produce mind-numbing drivel.

Lookin' at you, Barry.

Or how about tech-tyrant doofusi such as Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg? From my experience, a lot of successful businessmen are like this: smart and persistent, but vulgar to the core -- the sort of person who boasts of spending thousands of dollars for front row seats to a Billy Joel concert. No amount of material wealth compensates for such aesthetic poverty.

Next up,

sensibility and will when taken together constitute the "character" of the individual, whatever his intelligence might be.

A great warrior comes to mind. But also ridiculous ones such as Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin, who are willful but stupid and tasteless. How else to explain this:

Third,

intelligence and sensibility when taken together constitute the "scope" of the individual, whatever the strength of will may be.

So, good taste and high intelligence but lacking in the will department. This reminds me of the Aphorist, whose intelligence is ten and sensibility eleven, but gave zero fucks as to whether anyone knew it.

The short morning strikes again. To be continued...

Facts Care About Your Feelings

We mentioned yesterday that Ben Shapiro is wrong, and that facts actually do care about our feelings. We reached out to the Aphorist for a comment, and he said

Things do not have feeling, but there are feelings in many things.

Nor are they "mute," rather,   

They merely select their listeners. 

Congratulations! You are selected, elected, and about to be subjected to this valuable post.

If we heard correctly, it's not just a question of what knowledge is and how we can know it -- i.e., of garden variety epistemology -- rather, of the multitude of ways we can know it. 

For if we can know reality in diverse ways and modalities, it means that the world... What did Shakespeare say?

That there are tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, sermons in stones.  

Exactly. From babbling brooks to kibbitzing canyons to gossiping gr--

We get it. The wind that speaks to the leaves, telling stories that no one believes, to redeem a snippet of Jobim.

What I want to say is that "intelligibility" has many modes, which is more or less where we left off yesterday with the idea that mother nature gives us too much information. What say you, Nicolás?

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

Yes, like seeing an invisible Bigfoot or a vertical UFO. 

Transcendent objects are invisible by nature. 

True enough, but the Light shines through them, no? Metaphysical transparency, to purcoin a phrase.

Or translucency. 

Precisely. The exact formula for this translucency is transcendence-in-immanence. It's why reality is never boring. For

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

And if you really want to get a little woowoo, this must be the very formula of the Incarnation, quite literally so vis-a-vis the Transfiguration. Let those with ears see!

Thaaaat's right Petey, because the seeing is predicated on the hearing, AKA faith. 

To put it conversely, no one sees except through the eyes of faith. Peering through the lens of scientism -- a "lesser faith," so to speak -- one sees only solid surfaces, cold quantities, and dry--

We get it.

A tapestry woven of geometry and music, always and everywhere. Come to think of it, it is in this modality that nominalism becomes valid, if you catch my meaning. If you don't, allow Nicolás to explain:

The plethora of objects in the midst of which we live has made us insensible to the quality, to the texture, and to the individuality of the object.

So, there is a sense in which everything is unique, or at least was before faceless factories and fast food, the facile and frozen--

We get it.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

It can by no means 

give recipes, because there are no methods for making miracles. 

Secular grace and everyday miracles, such that

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

Which brings us back to faith, which is, properly speaking,

not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities.

"Perception." What a concept! For it can no more be defined than can "experience" or "consciousness." In a way, these are all but adjectives for the undefinable Presence pervading everything.

I'm having one of those unnamable feelings alluded to in yesterday's post.

The intelligent idea produces sensual pleasure.

That's the one. What a pleasurable aphorism! 

Appearance is not the veil, but the vehicle, of reality.

The meanings are the reality; their material vehicles are the appearance. 

 I wish I'd said that. 

In order to speak of the eternal, it is sufficient to speak with talent of the things of the day.

One tries one's best.

The Satellite Dish in My Mansion Has Many Stations

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

Now, "prerogative" is not a word found or even conceptualizable in science. Animals don't have them, let alone planets, forces, quantities, etc. 

From a purely scientific standpoint a prerogative would have to be just a social arrangement, purely contingent upon more real things (post-rogatives?). Nevertheless.

PREROGATIVE: preference, privilege; a right attached to an office or rank to exercise a special privilege or function; a special right or privilege belonging to a person, group, or class of individuals; a special quality that gives one superiority.

The bottom line is that mother was right: I am special.

Pretty perceptive of her to recognize that you're a person. How long did it take?

I see your point. The specialness attaches to the species, or better, to persons. And an office or rank only exist in a hierarchy. 

And you're only at the top of the terrestrial hierarchy. Above that are nonlocal vertical powers, principalities, and immaterial beings with privileges of their own. 

For example it is my awesome privilege to advise and protect you -- mostly from yourself. At least until such a time that I earn my wings and get kicked upstairs. 

Right. The Petey Principle. 

Very funny. But it doesn't work like that. Within terrestrial hierarchies, it is true that people tend to rise to the level of their own incompetence.

And much higher if Brandon and K-Har are any indication. 

In the angelic hierarchy it's different. Here an angel descends to the level of his own malice. Thus, if Joe Biden were an angel he'd already be in hell. 

No doubt with the rest of the Biden clan. 

Yes, there's always plenty of company. Up here we have a saying: truly truly, depravity loves company. It's why they keep adding letters to LGBTQ ad nauseam.

I'm a little surprised they have a Democrat party up there. 

Down there. It can only recognized from above. From within the party it looks like it's "above."

I get it. That would explain the obnoxious superiority and condescension of the left -- the nauseating spectacle of being ruled by our intellectual and moral inferiors.

That's a bingo.   

A corrupt and stupid man who showers with his daughter and raises an utterly depraved crackhead son lecturing us about the "soul of the nation." 

There's no nausea up here, otherwise we'd never stop throwing up.

Eternal nausea -- like The View on an endless loop.

You're talking about hell. The Buddhists say it is populated by beings with ravenous hunger but pinhole mouths. But it's also a place of unending nausea with no ability to vomit. 

That happened to me in February of 2005. I remember it because it was a couple months before my son was born. I was nauseous all day from food poisoning, but suppressed the urge to throw up. Eventually I did and felt much better. I now have a 17 year streak with no vomiting.

Up here we have another saying, Too much information. Think about it.   

Oh c'mon. Where were you when someone should have warned me about the Kung Pao chicken?

Let's get back on track: intelligence, will, and sentiment, and all the interesting relationships between them. For starters we could express it schematically with the following:

Intelligence <---> Knowledge and Truth

Will <---> Freedom and Virtue

Sentiment <---> Love and Beauty

This seems to cover all the important privileges, as well as the corresponding (and anterior) responsibilities. 

For example, if we have the right to knowledge -- to think -- we have the responsibility to know truth; if we have freedom to act, it is in order to choose the good (and avoid the evil); if we have the right to creativity, we have a responsibility to beauty.  

Another way of looking at it is to say that each of our privileges has a telos. Which makes sense, because the whole hierarchy in which we are situated has its telos in the Absolute Principle-Person.

You know the new saying: facts don't care about your feelings. Actually, they do. Very much so. 

We are not advocating for a Spock-like detachment, if only because so much of reality is only accessible to emotion and sentiment, or better, to "sensibility." Progressives have only their crude and unformed oceanic feelings. We have sensibility. Taste. Discretion. Good breeding, as mother used to say.

Like last night, my son was channel surfing and landed on a hellish spectacle called the I Heart Music Awards or something. For a sensitive soul like me who truly hearts music, it was vulgar beyond belief. A soundtrack to hell, or worse, to The View. 

Now that I think about it, it caused a kind of very real pain, a pain that I suppose has no name, but is nevertheless distinct and familiar. 

The young siegneur then flipped over to another program where the host was speaking with such truth and lucidity that it provoked the "opposite" sensation of intense "pleasure," but that's not the right adjective. You know what I'm talking about. If there's existential nausea, there's also existential something-or-other.

For example, the tone of Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar is at once impossible to describe and yet pretty obvious to these ears, especially in contrast to, say, Lennie Kravitz's tone, which nearly drove me from the room. I was about to get up and leave before my son flipped over to the other channel.

My house has many channels.

Damn. Every once in a while you do say something useful. But you should have said it at the start, because that's the subject of a whole post that will have to be written tomorrow. 

What Is Mind that We Should Be Mindful of It?

In keeping with our theme that everything is stupid, we could substitute "political party" for religion in the following observation by Schuon vis-a-vis big box (or exoteric) religion:

[Politics] addresses itself a priori to what is capable of "stirring" to action the will of the average man; it could not address the intelligence in an immediate manner, for, precisely, it is not the intelligence that gives impetus... to the average or ordinary man, thus to the majority.

Credit where it is due: making college accessible to every "intelligence" has not only nullified intelligence but elevated unintelligence to the point that the state recognizes stupidity is an officially protected class. And stupid people may be stupid, but they are smart enough to realize they need the state -- Big Mother -- to take care of them.

Z Man has the receipts, does the math, and shows his work:  

The main reason there is no solution at the ballot box is demographics. The people in charge are quickly replacing the old white population with a new, vibrant and diverse population that naturally prefers managerialism. The tens of millions of new Americans love their managers more than they love life itself. In elections, they look for the candidates and the party that promises to take care of them. This institutional lock on the system will be clear in the coming election (https://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=29590).

Above Schuon alludes to what it is that stirs a person to action, i.e., tickles the will. Again, to say that for the majority it is not "intellect" is.... 

Well, it's obvious to you and me, but here again, thanks to Satan's effective ground game in the media-academia complex, we are ruled by a managerial class that is utterly convinced of its intellectual superiority, and that lives under the mass delusion that the fashionable nonsense of the hivemind is somehow "knowledge."

In reality it is not merely false, since it is anti-knowledge, i.e., not just contrary but contradictory. As we said a few posts back about negative IQ, to affirm that a man can be a woman, or that climate change is an "existential crisis," or that children should be exposed to perverts, or that Brandon is in possession of his marbles, is not just "un-" but  "anti-" reality.

Now, what is man and what is knowledge, anyway? Man, of course, is the doublewise trailer trash, the Being Who Knows (Homo sapiens sapiens), but that's not only circular but more than a bit self-flattering, no? And presumptuous, because who said this glorified primate knows the first thing about reality?

I believe I can say without fear of contradiction that man's essence may be reduced to three modalities, and that these three may be situated on the vertical axis, meaning that each is capable of transcendence, but let's not get ahead of ourselves. First the three modes, which are 1) intelligence, 2) will, and 3) sentiment.

Each of these corresponds to its own proper object, which is to say, the true, good, and beautiful, respectively, and the three taken together constitute the Real. Therefore, for example, a good intellect and a bad will can't really go together -- in other words "intellectual dishonesty" is intellectual sin, properly speaking.  

Ah, but there are loopholes. For in order to be guilty, one must have full knowledge and deliberate consent of the will, in other words, the matter must involve a voluntary choice (not compelled or coerced in any way) and not be a consequence of bad information or invincible ignorance. 

Must we really forgive them for they know not what they do? Or is there a loophole in the loophole? Remind me to answer that tomorrow, because the clock is running out.

As we said, each of our three modes may be situated vertically, hence our transcendence and objectivity. For example, an intelligence incapable of objectivity would no longer be intelligent, likewise a morality incapable of seeing the other fellow's point of view. Therefore, knowledge and morality are either adequations or they are nothing. Same with beauty.

"So how," you might ask, "does the left get away with it?" In other words, how do they manage to combine the absurdity of an absolute relativism with the tyranny of absolute conformity and compliance? I guess because the velvet glove of relativism always evokes and hides the iron fist of totalitarianism.

Shmendriks to the Left of Me, Golems to the Far Left

There are quite a few words for "fool" in Yiddish, but I guess shmendrik is my favorite. If Dávila had been Jewish, perhaps he would have said

The shmendrik is not impressed except by what is recent. For the intelligent man, nothing depends on its date.

 Or

The doctrines that explain the higher by the means of the lower are so much bupkis.

Men are divided into two camps: those who believe in original sin and those who are schmucks.

The yutz, to be perfect, needs to be somewhat educated.

If the yutz is very educated, then he's a shmendrik. Or maybe vice versa. It depends on the amount of dreck they've published. 

Speaking of insults, Schuon gets off some good ones in an essay I read yesterday called Orthodoxy and Intellectuality. In a footnote he characterizes modern shmendriks as "pseudo-intellectual mollusks." (A backward mollusk -- a mollusk, let us say, which had been dropped on its head when baby?)

"In fact,"

it requires a prodigious lack of spiritual sensibility and of a sense of proportion to take any contemporary thinking, even the best possible, for one of the great providential "crystallizations" of the philosophia perennis (Schuon).

I rate that statement 100% true. If Catholicism didn't exist, I'd be Orthodox. If that didn't exist, then Vedantin or Buddhist or Taoist. Or Sufi or Kabbalistic Jew. Any of these surpass the best possible modern mishegoss, let alone postmodern intersectional kvetching.   

Logic? You speak of logic?! It

can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything.

Literally, for it is written: garbage in, tenure out -- existentialism, for example, 

in which logic is no more than a blind, unreal activity, and which can rightly be described as an "esoterism of stupidity."

Why stupid? Because it places human experience at the center and top of the cosmos, which, in the absence of the Absolute, degenerates to the periphery and bottom. 

Only in such an inside-out and upside-down cosmos can bottom-dwellers such as Sartre or Foucault be regarded as philosophers instead of commie putz and sado-masochistic faygeleh, respectively. 

When unintelligence -- and what we mean by this is in no way incompatible with "worldly" intelligence -- joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth (ibid.).

Strong words, but are they strong enough? Perhaps you didn't know it, but "golem" is a Yiddish word for a manmade monster, and therein lies a whole post, for Karl Marx is a real Dr. Frankenstein, and then some, for his monsters are still very much with us.

Speaking of which, I wonder if it's a coincidence that great-great aunt Mary Godwin not only wrote Frankenstein -- AKA The Modern Prometheus -- at the very same time socialism was all the ragicide among avant-garde intellectual nudniks, but that she was the daughter of radical progressive bull goose loony William Godwin?  

"Frankenstein" apparently wasn't a reference to the Franks or their monstrous revolution or anything.  

And speaking of great-great-great uncle William, 

Avant-garde philosophy is properly an acephalous ["headless"] logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as "prejudice"; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious (ibid.).

True story: I first encountered William Godwin via my Uncle Jerry, who was a man of the left. He foisted on me a copy of Godwin's political novel Caleb Williams. This must have been in the early '80s, when I was but a progressive boychik. I might have read a page or two and then flipped through the rest. Let's see if I can find it in the closet of doom.

According to the introduction, he "disbelieved in the freedom of man's will," rather, that "environment was all-compelling." At the same time, he "believed in progress toward some sort of extra-religious millennium." 

What else is new with me... Let's see, yesterday evening while deidreaming during a schmaltzy homily by the substitute priest, a thought floated in: that if the Father is absolute-absolute, then the Son is relative absolute and the Spirit is absolute relative. I think it adds up, but if it does, it will have to be in another post. This one's kaput. 

And God Considered Everything He Did, And Indeed It Was... Not Inappropriate

Apparently, most people aren't motivated by intelligence, even the intelligent. This isn't difficult to prove, so I won't bother. If you can read this, then you have only to supplement your intelligence with a bit of rudimentary self-awareness. 

For example, the seven deadlies afflict both idiot and non-idiot alike. Indeed, if intelligence alone were the ultimate solution to anything, then history would be the story of paradise. Instead, it's the story of intelligent primates just flinging poo. On a good day.

But if it were only the story of intelligent primates, then the anthroposphere would be no more gruesome than the biosphere. Nature is simultaneously cruel and innocent. But man is cruel and guilty guilty guilty. Mea maxima culpa, anda youa too!

The question for God is how to reach these people. Meditation? LOL. Education? LOL out loud. A lot of rules? Yes, and the OT is a chronicle of how rules are made to be broken. 

Which is not to single out Jews. The whole Judeo-Christian narrative is a story of man's endless disobedience to God, culminating in outright deicide. They say when you strike at the king, you'd better not miss. Well, this was a direct hit.

But unsuccessful. Now what?

These are all preluminary halfbakeds while waiting for the steaming b. to work its thing on the adrenals. But there may be the seed of a post in there, which is to say, what would you do if you were God? What would you do? And what would you do?  

Yesterday I was reading a book about the Summa, and it points out that Thomas never asks these questions. Rather, for him it's a matter of what God did do. We can inquire into why he may have done it the way he did, but bestwecando is say it was "fitting," or appropriate. Or at least not inappropriate. 

Can we do better than Thomas?

Careful there, Bob. Pride goeth, and all that. Not to mention presumption, arrogance, grandiosity, pomposity, megalomania, hubris, nar-

I get it! 

Narcissism, egomania, chutz-

Okay, okay. You sound like my old psychoanalyst. 

Now, this whole business of fittingness. Jews, for example, would say the Incarnation is pretty much the last word in unfitting and even anti-fittingness. Not kosher. Muslims would say the same, whereas a Hindu might say Cool! The more the merrier.  

What does Thomas mean by "appropriateness"?

He simply wants to bring to the fore the connections that bind together the truths that we do hold and to show how all of this is explained as coming from God.

But he has a larger scheme in mind, since the Incarnation is a sort of fractal of the Great Cosmic Circle I'm always going on about:

This, ultimately, is the meaning of the overall schema of "going out from" and "returning to." 

So, the circle of the Incarnation is situated in the Circle as such. And Aquinas divides the circle of Christ's life into four, beginning with the "entrance" into the world, necessarily -- or at least appropriately --  commencing back with the Immaculate Conception and then Annunciation and ending with Christ's baptism.

Next is "the unfolding of Christ's life," followed by "his leaving the world, which includes his passion"; and "Lastly, his exaltation," which is to say, resurrection, ascension, and the rest of the ongrowing story (especially our "ascending" participation in the sacraments). 

And again, this is very much like a fractal of the whole existentialada -- or like a Summa within the Summa:

This schema is that of the Summa as a whole; only the vocabulary changes slightly. The path followed by Jesus is in fact that of all creation and is, therefore, the path that we must take to be with him in paradise.

The other day we spoke of the Trinity as a circular perichoresis. For us it is situated vertically "above," but in itself it is "horizontal," in that the Father is not "higher" than the Son. 

And the Incarnation-Resurrection-Exaltation schema is simply a vertical descent and re-ascent of this primordial pattern, except that we get to hang on to Christ's very long coattails and zoom up with him.

Appropriate? 

Well, if Ultimate Reality is what we think it is, then it is pretty darn appropriate, and certainly not inappropriate, looking at it from every angle. If God becomes man that man might become God, this rides piggyback on "Father engenders Son that the Son might return to the Father via the Spirit," or something.

I guess that's enough for today.

100% of Everything is Stupid

I suppose it comes back to Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of everything is crap.

Including Sturgeon's Law.

Oh? 

Yes, because closer to 98% of everything is crap. 

Go on.

Strictly speaking, the figure -- the percentage of stupid -- is relative. 

For example, for a person with an IQ of 100, only half of everything is stupid. But just two standard deviations above the norm (130) renders 97.8% everything stupid. This is one reason why it is so easy for an intelligent person to be an atheist, because most everything, including religion, will seem stupid to him.

But atheism is stupid.

Correct. And only an imbecile would say that IQ is everything. Just as reason unaware of its limitations becomes irrational, intelligence unaware of other critical variables, modes, dimensions, and degrees of consciousness renders itself unintelligent.  

Moreover, "crap" is just worthless. What about an intelligence turned toward the diabolical?

I see what you mean. It's as if we need to supplement the standard Bell Curve with another one in a negative space, so to speak. 

Take an evil-doer with an above average IQ of, say, 130. Turned toward the diabolical end of things, we would say it is negative 130. Clearly, most of the real trouble in the world isn't caused by low IQ hordes but by high negative-IQ types. 

That is correct. Low IQ is self limiting. Unless those with greater intelligence decide to unleash it upon us. Not that the people who run the Democrat party are geniuses, but they are certainly more intelligent than the street criminals they are foisting on us. 

Say what you want about George Soros, he's clearly more intelligent than George Floyd or Alvin Bragg or Kim Foxx. Antifa only exists because more (negative) intelligent people want it to.

With this in mind, let's get back to yesterday's subject: why religion is so stupid. Thanks to Petey's unusually voluble insights, we see that it is no longer a mystery: any intelligent idiot can see it. 

But the same idiot cannot see, let alone comprehend, Aquinas, or Schuon, or Garrigou-Lagrange, or any number of similar luminaries.

It's very much as if the person who sees that 97.8% of everything is stupid, doesn't see the 2.2% that surpasses him. (And please don't take any of these numbers literally -- we're only using them for purposes of illustration & giggles.)

Now, God is not only infinitely intelligent, he is the very ground and possibility of both intelligence as such and of intelligibility. Therefore, if you're God -- assuming my math is correct -- then 100% of everything is stupid.

Recall Jesus' question, Why do you call me good? No one is good but One, that is, God. One could equally ask, Why do you call me intelligent? No one is intelligent but God. Same vis-a-vis beauty and any other transcendental.

Why do you call me evil? No one is evil but...

I see where you're going there, but Satan can't literally be "one," since he is the very anti-principle of division, scattering, entropy, and chaos. 

And if your other insights are correct, then Satan must have the highest negative IQ conceivable, even if one is silly enough to believe he doesn't literally exist. Principles are principles. We only dwell in them.

Now we're in a better position to revisit yesterday's subject of why exoteric religion can at times appear so stupid. The question is no longer, How can that be?, but How could it not be?  

And as I've said previously on many occasions, one of the surprises of my life has been that the intellectual depth is right there on the surface, hiding in plain sight.

In the past I've used the analogy of a hybrid SACD, in which the CD layer is on the surface, but the SACD layer is deeper. In order to access the latter -- which encodes exponentially more information -- you need an SACD player to shine the laser light another micron or so beneath the surface. 

Same with scripture. Obviously. For example, I just finished reading Dennis Prager's line-by-line exegesis of Deuteronomy, which follows his previous stabs at Genesis and Exodus. And he's just one person. Imagine all the previous brilliant interpreters.

Three thousand years of beautiful tradition, from Moses to Sandy Koufax -- YOU'RE GODDAMN RIGHT I'M LIVING IN THE FUCKING PAST!  

Speaking of which, I am told that the average IQ of Ashkenazi Jews is 115, which is to say, a standard deviation above the norm. 

I took statistics back in the 1980s, but if I remember correctly, this would mean that 84% of these Jews have above average intelligence, and that if I were one of them I could figure out exactly what percentage of them has an IQ >130, but it's a lot.

Why then are so many of them Democrats? 

Prager actually addresses this in the book, but suffice it to say that they're as Jewish as fucking Tevye, only displacing certain religious categories and impulses to the secular dimension.  

So, what are you saying? When you turn progressive you turn in your library card? You get a new license? You stop being Jewish?

Don't ask me, I'm out of my depth. But maybe the higher IQ goes from positive to negative? 

Much of modern Jewish history is a history of Jews abandoning God, the Torah, and the covenant and replacing them with other gods, beliefs, and other "torahs." Whenever Jews did this... they created or joined new substitute religions: secular ones. 

Virtually every "-ism" of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries was a substitute for biblical religion. And nearly every one of them -- Marxism, communism, secular humanism, socialism, among others -- was founded and/or disproportionately led by secular Jews or non-Jewish descendents of Jews who abandoned Judaism (Prager).

For example, remember that secular Jewish uncle of mine, the eminent University of Chicago historian? The brilliant relativist? Not only was he literally a red-diaper baby, but he never stopped being one.

Different Planets, Diverse Modes, and Alternate Universes

We ended yesterday's post back at the beginning, with Schuon's observation that "to change one's religion is to change planets." 

While he doesn't say so, I believe he would have meant going from, say, Earth to Mars or Venus -- in other words, different planets but same solar system, let alone universe. 

For example, I very much enjoyed my recent trip to Planet Jew. But on the other hand, nothing increases one's faith so much as contact with the faithless, such as my secular Jewish in-laws, speaking of different planets.

One of Schuon's central teachings is that the orthodox religions all orbit, as it were, around the same central sun. God is one by definition, and ultimately mankind is one as a consequence. 

However, on each planet the variables will have a different emphasis or ratio, e.g., heat, light, gravity, etc., and so too with religion. (I might add that in this analogy, some planets are by definition closer than others to the Sun.)

What are some of the important religious variables? Let's see, off the top of my head, God, heaven, grace, scripture, wisdom, avatar, sacred, profane, sin, sacrifice, salvation, judgment, atonement, union... Even fictional religions such as Scientology or Mormonism partake of these in some form or fashion. (Different subject, but this goes to why even a made up religion can produce good people.)

Now, leftism isn't so much fictional as inverted. For this reason, it isn't so much a different planet as an alternate universe. To the extent that it shares the variables, the variables are upside down and inside out. 

For example, there are still avatars, but the vicious and petty kind, like an Obama or Carter (just wait until the latter croaks, and you will cringe at the nauseating paeans to this nasty specimen). 

Which is why it is becoming more of a struggle for a good person to exist on the left (assuming awareness of what the left is; many folks such as my mother-in-law have no earthly idea that this is not the party of JFK or even Bill Clinton, rather, of Reverend Sharpton and Saint George Floyd).

But this is a boring subject, and besides, I'm preaching to the coonverted. Consider our trolls. Despite their superficial differences, they share one main characteristic: they are impervious to even low-level truth and fact, let alone the stuff Bob dishes out on a daily basis. In this regard, I almost feel sorry for them, because they will never get the yoke, despite how easy it is.

At any rate, I'm going to change subjects to another essay that punched me right in the nous and made me see stars (mostly in this universe), called Deficiencies in the World of Faith. Lot's of fine religious insultainment. Assuming he's not talking about us. 

And I'll be honest: I never quite know if I'm in on the joke or if he's snickering at me. It reminds me of the old problem of Protestantism (or of predestination, to be precise), of having no way of knowing whether or not one is among the saved. So one is always looking for clues in order to ameliorate the spiritual insecurity and ontological anxiety.

Are we among the Spiritual Elite? The trouble is, even if this were true, I certainly wouldn't say it out loud, but I can't even think it, knowing myself as I do. But are there spiritual elites? Of course: saints, doctors, mystics, and sundry wise guys. We don't confuse them with the central sun -- that would be cultism -- but they're closer to the sun than I am, thank God.

Having said that, take this out for a spin:

One may be astonished and even scandalized at the frequency, in religious climates, of more or less unintelligent opinions and attitudes, let it be said without euphemism.

Now, this is just true. The stupidity of exoteric religion is what kept me out of it for most of my life, and it is no less stupid today than it has ever been.  

In its favor, it is far less stupid than secular leftism, and let's not even revisit the ugliness and depravity of the latter. 

But why must exoteric religiosity be so unintelligent?

Because people are unintelligent. 

Bingo, apparently, albeit with many qualifications that we'll specify as we proceed, since there is a more or less infinite distance between the "unintelligent Intelligence" (so to speak) of tradition, and the stupid unintelligence of the left. The former are on my team, the latter warriors from a different universe.

The goal of any big-box religion "is to save the largest possible number of souls and not to satisfy the need for causal explanations of an intellectual elite." You have only to sit through a homily or sermon to know that they don't really try to address intelligence as such:

In conformity with its end and with the capacity of the majority, the religious message is basically addressed to intuition, sentiment and imagination, and then to the will and to reason to the extent that the human condition requires it... 

The message still hits on all the important variables alluded to above, e.g., "the reality of God, the immortality of the soul and of [the] ensuing consequences for man, and... offers man the means of saving himself." 

This can't help sounding more than a bit condescending, but again, you know it's true, he whispered creepily. For this and other reasons (e.g., poorly developed sense of humor) I never recommend the blog to everyday believers who are intellectually satisfied, let alone to the typical nonbeliever who is so intellectually negligible as to actually be satisfied by progressivism or scientism or secularism and all those other universes.

Has this gone on long enough already? Speaking only for myself, I would put it this way: yes, it's inevitably a bit cringeworthy what passes for religion. 

But it is even more cringeworthy to imagine that I am superior to the average believer. It's just that the majority is always going to be either disinterested in metaphysics or incapable of it, and while intelligence is far from everything, it has its rights. Nor do we need to look far to see that, for example,

In the Scriptures, intelligence -- or what appeals to it -- is found primarily in the symbolism, which offers all that the loftiest minds could need...

Moreover, if metaphysics is your thing, it's right there as well: for it is "necessarily found in the dogmas themselves inasmuch as they are universal symbols." 

I would never say that there exist "two truths," but I have become increasingly comfortable practicing my religion one way, and practicing the blog in another way, while knowing full well that both (to say nothing of one's prayer life) all circle the same sun. 

Put it this way: exoterism and esoterism are complementary, not opposites, let alone different universes. And 

God does not ask for the submission of intelligence, but rather an intelligent submission.

Ultimate Reality is a Fractally Organized Motion Picture or Something

The following passing comment by Schuon caught my eye. It is in the context of a discussion of how the Pure Absolute necessarily takes on this or that form in a particular religion. 

I say "necessarily" because I don't see a loophole here, as comforting as it might be to believe one's own religion is the Pure Absolute. But even St. Thomas cautioned against this, what with his radical apophaticism. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but he did say this:

This is the final human knowledge of God: to know that we do not know God.

Having said that, I don't think such an esoteric doctrine is appropriate for all and sundry. Rather, only for the pneumatic weirdo type discussed in yesterday's post, the "man-center" who is "determined by the intellect" as opposed to the "man-periphery, who is more or less accident." 

And by no means is Schuon trying to downgrade the practice of religion. I myself only practice an orthodox one because Schuon says I must. And no, this doesn't mean that I only do so based on his authority. Not at all. Rather, it is because I see and understand his point entirely, that you can't play music without learning an instrument, so to speak. I'm not a cultist. 

Ultimately it has to do with that distinction between the Pure Absolute, AKA Beyond-Being, and Being. Again, this is the First Line, and once seen it cannot be unseen, at least by me. For me it literally makes perfect nonsense, except now it is up to me to situate the "perfect sense" of religion into this necessary context. 

In practical terms it means I must situate Catholicism in this "deeper" context, which is bound to clash with anyone who thinks that Catholicism is already literally the deepest context. 

Well, the latter is also correct, so long as we're talking about the Being side of things. I've mentioned before that the deepest structure of deep structures must be a kind of eternally dynamic perichoresis between Beyond-Being and Being.  

I've also said that I suspect the Trinity is revealed to us precisely in order to help us get a handle on this deeeeep structure. I don't recall ever devoting an entire post to this subject, because I don't know that I've ever thought it through completely, nor if it is even entirely thinkable; surely not, although we can try, can we not?

For Christians the Trinity is revealed to us in the form of "Father," "Son," and "Holy Spirit." At the same time, however, there is nothing about any Trinity per se in scripture, rather, it is something the early fathers had to piece together and infer from various clues left to us. 

The bottom and/or top line for us is that Ultimate Reality is at once radically one and more than one -- not quantitatively, of course, but qualitatively. 

I like to pull back and open the aperture of our lens as wide as humanly possible, to an f-stop of, say, plus or minus 1/∞, in order to allow for the maximum light. But apparently there are tradeoffs, because we also want the sharpest possible image and the greatest depth of field. Where is Robin Starfish when you need him?

Maybe the photography analogy is no good. Obviously it's a motion picture.

Is it obvious?

Good point. Is God -- or the Ultimate Real, AKA O -- really immutable? Or does O change? Or both -- even though that would seem to violate the law of noncontradiction?

In my opinion we have to say "both." Moreover, I believe this must be one of points of the revelation of the Trinity, since... there are many ways to put it, but the Son is always returning to the Father via the Spirit, and the number 3 itself implies the return to Unity... if I can find the reference... something to the effect that if 1 is Unity and Principle, 2 is duality and Manifestation, so 3 is the return to the Principle.

My blood sugar is a tad low at the moment, but I do vaguely recall an old post touching on the idea of considering the Father as a way of talking about "Beyond-Being" and the Son as "Being." By no means is this a perfect analogy, nor can it be perfectly harmonized with Christian metaphysics... unless we consider Beyond-Being and Being not as a duality, but indeed an always dynamic tri-complementarity. Then I think it works, at least if your blood sugar is low enough.  

Let's consider the following passage by Schuon, and see if we can't tweak it a bit: 

The “Father” is God as such, that is as metacosm; the “Son” is God insofar as He manifests Himself in the world, hence in the macrocosm; and the “Holy Spirit” is God insofar as He manifests Himself in the soul, hence in the microcosm.

That is a fruitful way of looking at it, but I doubt Schuon ever thought or even knew about fractals, and I believe that if we think of the Trinity as a single substance fractally organized, this helps us to grasp the idea that Being is always dialectically related to Beyond-Being, and vice versa. But it's not a dualistic photograph, rather, a trialistic motion picture.  

Elsewhere Schuon writes that  

The vertical perspective -- Beyond-Being, Being, Existence -- envisages the hypostases as “descending” from Unity or from the Absolute -- or from the Essence it could be said -- which means that it envisages the degrees of Reality. 

Except that Christianity specifically rules out such an emanationist metaphysic. Rather, it would horizontalize this scheme and say that all three are always involved as coequal branches of divine government.

I'm just about out of time, and I never even got to the passage mentioned in the first paragraph, which was that "to change one's religion is to change planets." 

Moreover, I had intended to write of how this applies to contemporary politics, i.e., what planet the left is from, and what kind of barbaric religion they practice there. It'll have to wait...

Surrounded by Accidental Humans

Life can be a tricksy business when you're not like the Others, because it's difficult to know whether one is better or worse, superior or inferior, sane or crazy. 

There's always a vertical scale, even -- or especially -- for those who deny it, for example, woke relativists who are the fastest to cancel those who differ from them. They never explain why My Truth can't be that men aren't women, or that two men playing house is not the same as "marriage," or that perverts who like to talk about sex to children is called a red flag.

I don't even like to use the word "superior," because it contradicts the very humility that is a prerequisite and marker of superiority. Claims to superiority are also often the result of reaction formation, the latter but a defense mechanism that transforms inferiority to superiority via projection. 

For example, think of the countless journalists and other Democrats who maintain a rigid denial of the Biden Lumber Company and project it into Trump, transforming his splinters into beams.  

To say that no one is better or worse than anyone else is among the Greatest Lies Ever Told, but thinking otherwise is also among the greatest temptations, so in judging others one must exercise the strictest objectivity and self-awareness.

When I was younger I used to assume my own inferiority. Later in life I covered this with an obnoxious mask of superiority. But this frankly adolescent phase only lasted until I was in my 40s.   

Speaking of masks, Schuon devotes an essay to just this subject in The Play of Masks. In fact, skimming the first paragraph is what prompted the above reflections. Let's reread it and consider it a little more closely.

By way of preface, when we look at man, we have to do so at the intersection of vertical and horizontal. If one man is superior to another, we mean in the sense of objective values, not, say, in wealth or physical strength. Nor can the former have only to do with intelligence, for we are surrounded and ruled by intelligent cretins (notwithstanding the multitude of merely cretinous cretins).

Here's how Schuon puts it: it is necessary for us 

to distinguish a priori between the man-center, who is determined by the intellect and is therefore rooted in the Immutable, and the man-periphery, who is more or less an accident.

You've no doubt never thought of it this way, but we all know Accidental and Necessary humans, and there are many more of the former than the latter. Moreover, one of the points of life -- if not the point -- is to transition from Accidental to Necessary. 

I don't known if "Necessary" is the best word.

Essential?

That's good.

Substantial?

Also good. I'm thinking too of how Washington is called the "indispensable man," because he is the Man Without Whom. But he couldn't have been the Man Without Whom in the absence of certain immutable traits that made him the Man With Whom, or Through Which.  

I keep this imposing photo of Schuon on my desk. I just now glanced at his eyes, and he communicated in so many words that I am correct in suspecting that he might be one of those necessary men of whom he speaks. He has certainly been necessary for me -- a Man Without Whom -- but let's stay on track.

Who are the Necessary Men of history? There aren't that many; or, on the other hand, perhaps there are many who fly under the radar of history. 

For that matter, the majority of men who make history are the peripheral type, for example Karl Marx: no substance whatsoever, since falsehood is not a substance, nor is envy. But not only did he regard himself as superior, but superior to every previous philosopher, especially those who were superior to him.  

Schuon almost never writes in the first person, but here and there he will present something that I suspect refers to himself. The following is an example: he speaks of the "pneumatic" or "central" man, who

is detached because he does not identify with the accidents; and he is good-willed because, for that very reason, he could be neither egoistic nor petty.

Superior humility. Just like me!

LOL.

Okay, humble brag. In any event,

his very superiority poses for him problems of adaptation, for on the one hand he must form part of the human ambiance, and on the other he cannot grasp immediately all its absurdity.

That's me in the spotlight, losing my irreligion, and it's been me for as long as I can remember. I've always thought the world is absurd, which, now that I think about it, is why I couldn't be seduced by the accidents. Everything was so stupid beyond belief that I just couldn't care less about it.

Perhaps if you had been more talented...

That's actually a good point. Given my mediocre gifts, I was never marked out for Most Likely to Succeed. It's not as if I had to narrow down my choices between neurosurgeon and Supreme Court justice. Rather, it came down to the choice between days or graveyard shift in the supermarket.    

This is not to say I ever fit into that ambiance either, because that is when my brain (or whatever it was) suddenly activated after about 23 years of slumber, which initially prompted the defensive superiority referenced above. It took a number of years to sort that out and try to figure out where I do fit in.

Based upon the number of comments, it would seem that I still don't fit in anywhere. Either that, or the world is so filled with members of the Man-Periphery that there's just no audience to or from Man Central:

The man-center is necessarily situated in an isolation from which he cannot but suffer "externally": feeling that every man is in a certain way like himself, he sincerely puts himself in their place, but it is far from the case that others put themselves in his. 

Well boo hoo.

You misunderstand. I'm not complaining. I like being weird, and I like to think that the blog helps other weirdos feel good about not being peripheral humans. 

Divine Relative and Absolute Relativism

The first and most consequential line is that between Absolute and Relative. We capitalize the latter in order to distinguish it from its prolongation herebelow, or in other words, to situate it solidly within Divinity itself, or within Celestial Central.

Why does this matter?   

Mainly because any other metaphysical conceptualization of the total Universe -- the Universe of which this universe is a more or less distant reflection -- annoys me to no end. I simply cannot pretend that illogic is logical or inconsistency is consistent, nor do I appreciate being told it is a Mystery -- whether a religious or scientistic one -- just when things start to get interesting. 

The very existence of the Intellect implies a right to know. And a responsibility to know it. 

Know what?

EVERYTHING.

Don't be an ass. No one can know everything, not even me.

Yes, but even you can know that in knowing this, you have touched the Absolute Mystery, and transcended the little annoying ones they try to throw in our path to mollify our curiosity. Of course Ultimate Reality is a Mystery -- an infinitely intelligible one. 

Now, what do you call a Mystery that never stops pouring out clues to itself?

Beats me. I don't think there is a name.

I do. I think it's called the Trinity, for who is the Father but the eternal self-giving self-revelation to the eternally receptive Son? True, it is a Mystery: the Mystery of the Eternal Radiance of Truth, Love, and Beauty from one Person to another and back. In this eternal spiral is the gorounding of Big Relativity. 

Not only is the Godhead Relative, there can be none more relative. All others are number four or higher.

With this in mind, let us return to Schuon's essay on the Prerogatives of the Human State, and reframe what he says in light of what we just threw out there above.

Human intelligence is, virtually and vocationally, certitude of the Absolute.

Again, this is where we begin and must begin. Or end. 

Literally. This is either the first line (i.e., distinction), or there are no lines, and we are thereby plunged into the eternal darkness and primordial slime of Prog World -- the very world from which God rescues us on page 1 of his bestselling mystery thriller, the Bible.

As it so happens, I'm just now reading Dennis Prager's thoroughly exoteric line-by-line exejewsis of Deuteronomy, and although he and I work in different vertical neighborhoods, we agree on the following: that in creating, the Creator's first creation is order itself:

The second verse of [Genesis] describes the world as being chaotic ("null and void"). God then brought [I would say brings] order through separations and distinctions in Genesis and throughout the Torah:

Night and day.

Land and water,

God and man.

God and nature.

Good and evil.

Human and animal.

Man and woman.

Holy and profane.

We have in the past characterized the left as the institutionalization of man's fall, but it is also the denial of every God-given distinction, or in other words, the reassertion of primordial Chaos.

Now, this Chaos is at once absolute relativism, but an inverse and perverse reflection of the Divine Relative, since it is detached from the Absolute pole which would render it meaningful. 

This is precisely how we end up living in a former civilization where it is considered the height of progressive sophistication to not only deny the distinction between man and woman, but to then assault the innocence of children by forcing them to endure Pervert Story Time. 

The deeper point is that relativism (like any other idolatrous ideological -ism) is a systematic denial of the Divine Relative:

The idea of the Absolute implies on the one hand that of the relative and on the other that of the relationships between the two, namely the prefiguration of the relative in the Absolute and the projection of the Absolute in the relative (Schuon).

Here is where I respectfully disagree with Schuon, but this is related to a more general question of Controlling Paradigm, his being Vedanta, mine being Trinitarian. The question is, which system is relative to which? 

Yesterday I mentioned to a reader that I had recently had a Meta-Cosmic brainwave that "perhaps each major religion outside Christianity expresses this or that person of the Trinity." He emailed back that 

I think there is a sense in which the spiritual raison d’être of the Trinity is captured by other faiths, albeit in diverse modes that are particular to their providentially unique perspectives. 

This can only be true, though, if different religions are, in fact, "willed" by God as the Pope has said (notwithstanding all the other difficulties with that man!). 

The question then remains as to whether the metaphysical (and salvific) "function" of the three persons is fully embodied in the Trinity alone, and thus only imperfectly reflected in non-Christian traditions (which, in other respects however, may have their own strengths).

Of course, my brainwave was just that -- a wave and not yet particulate. In order for it to become the latter, I need to write about it and see if it holds water molecules.

Let's start with Prager's commentary on Deuteronomy, since it is literally close at hand, and I am a lazy man. Supposing we start with our Trinitarian brainwave alluded to above, which aspect of it is reflected in Judaism, and how exactly, in that the whole point of Judaism -- like Islam -- is to preserve a radical monotheism seemingly at odds with any such distinctions in God?

This is a rather big subject to throw out at the end of a post. I think we can deal with the challenge, but we'll do so tomorrow.