How is Atheism Possible?

Might as well ask how possibility is possible. But is it necessary?

I suppose atheism is not possible unless we have free will, or in other words, unless human beings are somehow liberated from necessity. 

The intellect must also be immaterial, since belief of any kind is a spiritual act. But if it's a spiritual act, then... well, it doesn't necessarily prove the existence of God, only of spirit. 

But what is that, and how does it get here? What is its sufficient reason, since matter cannot be the cause of the immaterial. Put conversely, how is it possible for spirit to disprove the existence of spirit? We'll wait. 

I'm not arguing -- yet -- I'm just sayin'. But let's think this through. According to White, human beings have the capacity or potential for atheism

not because they are physical things but only because they themselves have immaterial capacities for intellectual and voluntary autonomy by which they can insulate themselves spiritually from within by a kind of rationalist immanentism...

Which essentially repeats what was said at the top, which comes down to the freedom to know truth, knowledge and freedom being quintessentially immaterial. Therefore,

However sincerely intended, the autonomy and intellectual error that atheism represents is a spiritual phenomenon that is distinctively human in kind, something that other animals are incapable of, due to the absence in them of any spiritual soul or immaterial faculties. 

Can atheism be saved, or is it a non-starter? For it seems that there is no way around the conclusion that only a human being is capable of atheism, and that "Other animals lack the intelligence to be capable of atheism."

Therefore, it seems that belief in atheism requires a little intelligence, but not too much, otherwise it will recognize the performative contradiction it entails. 

But that's not entirely fair, since there are plenty of highly intelligent atheists with IQs that dwarf mine, for example, Stephen Hawking, who comes in at 160. On the other hand, Einstein's IQ is estimated to have been as high as 190, and he was not an atheist (although not a conventional believer). 

So, if intelligence neither supports nor refutes atheism, what does? White hints at it above with his remark about "autonomy" and insulation from spirit, which amounts to a self-sufficient vertical closure. Some things, it seems, are hidden from the wise. For example, wisdom.

Just as animals cannot be atheists, nor can angels; the latter have "too high and enlightened a form of intellect to be capable of atheism." Interestingly, White mentions in passing that humans "alone can appreciate ironical ideas in an imaginative way," a capacity which is not possible "for angels or non-rational animals."

Ha!

I can see why angels would be incapable of atheism, but why would they be incapable of irony? Whatever the case, based on what was said above, it seems that there something deeply ironic about atheism. In other words, I get being an "atheist," but an atheist without the scare quotes? A little self-awareness please!

Back to vertical closure, White suggests that "the quest for autonomy is the principal driving factor in the atheistic cast of mind." Such self-enclosed persons "reach no terminus beyond themselves."

But what if there is a terminus -- a transcendent telos -- beyond ourselves? I say, how could there not be? It's just that the atheist 

represses his or her own native aspiration to transcendence, which is the deepest and most vital inheritance of the intellect, apart from which the human being's true vocation as an intellectual remains indecipherable.

Thanks to Freud, we know all about repression. But in the past I have spoken of vertical repression, and why not? Let me google myself (that tickles!) and find out what I meant; this one has an extended rant by Petey, which I will edit down to something more manageable and maybe even amusing:

Yes, there are higher and lower worlds. I guess this isn't obvious to a leftist, but if any of you saw those Occupy Wall Street [or more recently, pro-Hamas] encampments, you know all about people who inhabit a lower world. Their language, their music, their feelings, their hygiene, their childish understanding -- all emanate from a lower world. Ironically, most of them aren't even from the earth plane, but a notch or two below that....

This is why the flatlanders can become so enclosed in their absurcular delusions. In a way, their worldview is complete (on its own level), and yet, it is radically incomplete (with regard to the whole)....

As Steinsaltz describes it, 'the sinner is punished by the closing of the circle, by being brought into contact with the domain of evil he creates.... as long as man chooses evil, he supports and nurtures whole worlds and mansions of evil, all of them drawing upon the same human sickness of the soul.... as the evil flourishes and spreads over the world because of the deeds of men, these destructive angels become increasingly independent existences, making up a whole realm that feeds on and fattens on evil.'

This is why you and I play such different roles in the cosmic economy. You actually have the tougher job, which is to say, because of your 'many-sidedness' and your 'capacity to to contain contradictions,' this makes it possible for you to 'rise to great heights,' but also to fuck up big time, neither of which is true for me. Rather, the angel is 'eternally the same; it is static, an unchanging existence,' 'fixed within rigid limits.'

So, atheism is like a dysfunctional angelic intelligence? That's ironic.

UPDATE: For fun, I've been putting my posts into Google Gemini, and here's what it says about this one:

Counterpoints to Consider:

• This is a theological view, not necessarily shared by all atheists.
• Many atheists lack belief in God due to a lack of convincing evidence, not a rejection of spirituality.
• The existence of an "immaterial soul" is highly debatable and lacks scientific backing.
• The idea of a hierarchy with "higher" and "lower" beings is a religious concept, not universally accepted.
• Atheists can be moral and have meaning in their lives without believing in a higher power.

Additional Points:

• The passage uses Stephen Hawking as an example of an intelligent atheist, contradicting the claim that high intelligence leads away from atheism.
• The comparison of atheism to a "dysfunctional angelic intelligence" is a metaphor specific to this religious perspective.

Overall, this passage offers a thought-provoking viewpoint on atheism, but it's important to remember it's just one perspective among many. Atheism can have various reasons, and it doesn't have to be a rejection of spirituality.

The Science of God and the God of Science

Light is light, whether physical or metaphysical:

All who seek light are fellow travelers, pilgrims across the narrow bridge of time, staring above the abyss of eternity, seeking to discern the inscape of the heavens (White).

Concur: man is man and truth is truth, and the former has access to the latter or to hell with it. 

In the book we're discussing (On the Rational Credibility of Christianity), White reviews the Famous Five Ways to God, but I don't think we need to re-review them. Based on pure reason, the existence of something like "God" is actually more certain than anything else that reason can prove, especially considering their combined force.

After all, how many ways do you need? For the stubborn atheoholic, one is too many and a thousand is not enough. 

Have we achieved scientific enlightenment only to discover that we are a mere cosmic accident that exists in vain?

That's a binary question, but saying Yes is the only intellectual option, while saying No is the height of ant-intellectualism, for the intellect seeks reasons, while the atheist says there is no ultimate reason for anything, whether existence, intelligence, intelligibility, truth, beauty, unity, order, self-awareness, free will, etc. 

The human being is inevitably distinct from all the other animals because it is the truth-seeking animal.

He is also the truth-finding animal -- even the atheist who has found the One Truth that there is no truth. 

True, "the materialistic hypothesis does exhibit a certain degree of metaphysical parsimony," but truly truly, nothing is that simple, let alone everything. 

Remember, one of the characteristics of a good explanation is that it doesn't unexplain more than it explains, and atheism can't even explain the unexplainer. 

Chance? No chance: it doesn't work as an ultimate principle, because it is always parasitic on the order it necessarily presupposes:

Paradoxically, the more atheistic visionaries appeal to chance to explain the current state of our existing universe, the more they rely implicitly on an appeal to natural order.

How does life emerge from the inanimate, and mind from the mindless? Surely you must be a bit curious? No?

So the godless universe is potentially capable of becoming aware of itself for no particular reason at all. 

This is a surpassingly curious state of affairs, and it makes me curious:

where does this residual potency in the physical world come from in the first place, such that it can give rise eventually to living beings and agents of knowledge and volitional love?

Inquiring primates want to know. Uninquiring primates put the sap in homo sapiens.  

White reviews the answers given by other traditions, for example, Buddhism and Vedanta, which are pretty, pretty good. They take reason as far as it can reasonably go, which is to say, to Nirvana or Brahman, a radical but impersonal emptiness or fullness which amount to the same thing. To paraphrase Walter Neff, 

I never knock the other fellow's religion, Mrs. Dietrichson, but I can do just as well for you. I have a very attractive metaphysic here. It wouldn't take me two minutes to put it in front of your husband.

Or anybody else. We call it transcendent personalism, and let me explain how it works. "This book will argue that this vision of things is reasonable and true," more reasonable and more true than any other vision on offer. 

I have to take the wife to the airport, so we're just about out of time. We'll leave off with a preview of the next episode:

To the extent that the modern sciences are presumed to yield realistic knowledge of the world (which of course they do), they presuppose metaphysical knowledge of the world of just the sort that inevitably also facilitates and invites demonstrative knowledge of the existence of God.

Moreover, "To the extent that the modern sciences flourish" they

always inevitably presuppose and implicitly promote the necessary conditions for the kind of metaphysical realism that leads to the acknowledgement of the existence of God.

Between Philosophy and Theology

Philosophy endeavors to know what is knowable under the light of natural reason. However, if -- or since, rather -- Gödel is correct about the inherent limits of reason, where does this leave us if not sealed in tautology, and is there any way out of this closed circle?

There are clues. For example, Schuon writes that

Existence is a reality in some respects comparable to a living organism; it cannot with impunity be reduced, in man’s consciousness and in his modes of action, to proportions that do violence to its nature; pulsations of the “extra-rational” pass through it from every quarter (emphasis mine).

Now religion and all forms of supra-rational wisdom belong to this extra-rational order, the presence of which we observe around us, unless we are blinded by a mathematician’s prejudice; to attempt to treat existence as a purely arithmetical and physical reality is to falsify it in relation to ourselves and within ourselves, and in the end it is to blow it to pieces. 

And Gödel himself said that "sooner or later my proof will be made useful for religion, since that is doubtless justified in a certain sense." 

He was not religious in any conventional way, but he was a Platonist "committed to the possibility" of reaching the great "out yonder" which is "beyond physical space-time." This latter "is a reality of pure abstraction, of universal and necessary truths" -- the "extreme reality" of which we may gain "at least partial glimpses" (Goldstein). 

According to Gödel's own Platonist understanding of his proof, it shows us that our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality (ibid.).

Likewise, for Schuon, Plato's speculations "converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things." Conversely,

all rationalism – whether direct or indirect – is false from the sole fact that it limits the intelligence to reason or intellection to logic, or in other words cause to effect. 

Moreover,

A rationalist is a person who upholds the primacy, or rather the exclusive worth, of reason as compared with Intellection on the one hand and Revelation on the other, both of which he accuses of being “irrational.”

So, unlimited reason places thoroughly irrational limits on intelligence as such, which is in principle unlimited, and has access (a la Gödel) to what transcends mere reason.

Which brings us to the book I'm reading, On the Rational Credibility of Christianity, which is mostly review, but then again, we are in the season of final exams, so a little repetition can't hurt our chances of a passing grade. The book's description asks whether the philosopher can "defend the rational warrant for belief in Christianity?"

Is it reasonable to be religious? Is it philosophically responsible to be a Christian who believes in the mystery of the Trinity?

Why not hold that modern atheistic naturalism provides the best explanation of reality? Or, if there is a transcendent first principle that explains all of reality, is it impersonal rather than personal? Contrastingly, if monotheism constitutes the best explanation for created being, how can we reasonably believe in any particular revelation concerning God? What are the criteria for rational belief in revelation?

You know my answer: if Christianity isn't true, then why believe it? Schuon often said something to the effect that there is no privilege higher than truth, all others being number two, or lower. Moreover, if truth exists, then it is our obligation to know it. You might say that truth is the moral telos of the intellect: it is what we ought to believe.

But Christianity? Really?

Can one prefer one religious vision of reality over another reasonably, and should one take revelation seriously as a potential source for knowledge about reality? Does doing so lead necessarily to the compromise of one's intellectual integrity as a reasonable person (White)?

Don't be religulous!

We'll try not to be. For Schuon -- who is to Bill Maher as is an adult to a child, 

Revelation is none other than the objective and symbolic manifestation of the Light which man carries in himself, in the depths of his being; it reminds him of what he is, and of what he should be since he has forgotten what he is. 

It is "the objectivation of the transcendent Intellect and to one degree or another awakens the latent knowledge -- or elements of knowledge -- we bear within ourselves." On the other hand, the

prejudice of scientism, or the fault in its method if one wishes, is to deny any mode of knowledge that is suprasensorial and suprarational, and in consequence to deny the planes of reality to which these modes refer and that precisely constitute the sources both of revelation and of intellection. 

In other words, it reveals to us what is going on outside the cave. It is both the light streaming in and the light of which the intellect is composed, and why not? If this isn't the case, then neither theology nor philosophy are even possible. 

There will still be imitations of philosophy, but they will reduce to describing and dissecting the shadows with ever increasing accuracy, while never inquiring into their source, let alone how we can know them. 

Rather, it's shadows all the way down and up, as if there could be appearances without reality, when these two are always complementary -- I would venture to say even in God, for who is the Son but the "appearance" of the Father, and the Father but the source of the Son? 

To be continued...

Truth Arises in the Space Between Object and Subject

"Reality," says Pieper, "is the basis for the good." Which implies that those who are systematically out of touch with reality can only achieve the good accidentally, if at all, like the Democrat party.  

[T]ruth is the revelation of reality. Truth is the proclamation of being, says Hilary, and Augustine says, Truth is that which manifests what is.... All laws and moral principles may be reduced to reality. 

Which of course presupposes we can know reality, which is precisely what postmodern progressives pretend we cannot do (speak for yourself!). Which is why their entire ideology may be reduced to unreality and therefore the bad, accidents notwithstanding.

I'm old enough to remember when the parties had disagreements over reality instead of whether reality exists, but unreality -- which slides into anti-reality -- is the very principle of multiculturalism, moral relativism, transgenderism, CRT, "my truth," et al. 

Why is reality the basis of the good? Because if you don't know what is, you don't know what to do about it: action follows being, in that order, and "the good is that which is in accord with objective reality." 

In my professional lifetime the American Psychological Association descended into the Anti-American Progressive Activists, and they declare that 

A psychological state is considered a mental disorder only if it causes significant distress or disability. 

Well, good. It causes me no distress, significant or otherwise, to say that people who imagine they are members of the opposite sex are objectively mentally ill. 

Not so fast!

Many transgender people do not experience their gender as distressing or disabling, which implies that identifying as transgender does not constitute a mental disorder.

True, transgender people "suffer with anxiety, depression or related disorders at higher rates than nontransgender persons," but that's our fault, i.e., those of us who believe they are mentally ill. If not for us, they'd be as normal as us. But wait -- we're not normal, since we believe they're abnormal. So confusing!

Confusing, and inevitably so, once we eliminate objective reality as the gold standard of truth. For truly truly, there is no other standard, and once the bridge to reality is burned, there's no getting back to it:

He who wishes to to know and do the good must turn his gaze upon the objective world of being. Not upon his own "ideas," not upon his "conscience," not upon "values," not upon arbitrarily established "ideals" and "models." He must turn away from his own act and fix his eyes upon reality (Pieper).

Anything less is necessarily misinformation, disinformation, or, in a word, false, which is a denial of what is the case, precisely. 

Okay, but what is the case? 

Just taking a wild guess here, but how about what is, period?  

Yes, reality must be "the whole of being which is independent of thought," the objectivity of which is "antecedent to all cognition," in contrast to "that which is merely thought." 

Works for me.  

Both evil and the falsehood on which it depends represent an "'ontic' contradiction, a contradiction of being, something that opposes reality, that does not correspond to 'the thing.'" In short, it "does not reach the object," again, because the bridge to reality has been burned by journalistic and tenured arsonists. Only objectivity, which is to say, "fidelity to being," represents "the proper attitude of man."

For us, objectivity and subjectivity are complementary, but as is the case with all primal complementarities one must be prior, in this case objectivity. 

We are always situated between the two -- or between immanence and transcendence -- but to deny the link between them plunges us into mere bonehead scientism at one end and aggravated subjectivism at the other. 

This vertical space we inhabit is "both an abyss and a bridge," which is what makes crossing it such an adventure. Separating the two obliterates the luminous mystery of cognition and instead plunges us into mere absurdity. "It is this very relation of the intellect and the reality which constitutes the conceptual content of 'truth.'" 

Truth is nothing else than the relation of identity between the mind and reality, a relation consisting in and accomplished in knowledge... 

Our dynamic cognition "advances toward the essence of the thing" whereby it "reaches the object" and "attains the truth of real things." Otherwise to hell with it, because we cannot know the real truth or accomplish the objective good, for "The good is essentially dependent upon and interiorly penetrated by knowledge." Conversely,

all evil rests in some way upon an error, upon a supposed knowledge. He is good "who does the truth." "The good, then, presupposes the true."

That's about the size of it.

Revelation, Revolution, and Relation

It's good to have a little metaphysical back-up from a heavy hitter, in this case, Robert Barron. I'm reading a book about his theology that highlights areas of convergence with my own metaphysical preoccupations and theological tics, for example, relationality as an absolutely primal and irreducible term that is woven into our Cosmos and ourselves. 

As far as I know, nothing he says is unorthodox or controversial, but how come -- despite going to Sunday school and more generally being immersed in Christian civilization -- I didn't get the memo until encountering the works of Norris Clarke in 2012? It's like a metaphysical revolution happened right under my nous. 

Speaking of back-up and revolutions, Ratzinger, in his Introduction (!) to Christianity, wrote of how

In the relational notion of person developed within the theology of the Trinity lies concealed a revolution in man's view of the world: the undivided sway of thinking in terms of substance is ended; relation is discovered as an equally valid primordial mode of reality

 Moreover, "person must be understood as relation":

the three persons that exist in God are in their nature relations. They are, therefore, not substances that stand next to each other, but they are real existing relations, and nothing besides. In God, person means relation. Relation, being related, is not something superadded to the person, but it is the person itself. In its nature, the person exists only as relation.

Similarly if not identically,  

Barron describes a twofold revolution in theology brought about by the doctrine of the Trinity. First, relationality gains a much stronger place in the doctrine of God. 

He states, "Whereas the classical philosophers tended to make self-subsistence the quality of ultimate reality, and relationality a quality of created being, the doctrine of the Trinity compels us to say that ultimate reality is itself characterized by relationship.... Something like 'being toward another' belongs to the very essence of God."

Which is a big deal, and while it's not something we could have arrived at by unaided natural reason, once given to us by revelation, it sure enough makes more sense than any other metaphysic on offer. 

Ultimately it is why we can do metaphysics at all, which is to say, why being speaks to us and we can understand it. In short, the intellect is intrinsically related to intelligible being, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Except to just crudely deny it and pretend we are absolutely sealed in ignorance and tenure.

A second consequence of this revolution is that "the division between unity (God) and plurality (creatures) is radically reworked" (which reminds me that the first book I read by Norris Clarke is called The One and the Many). This (the one and many, unity and plurality)) is one of the fundamental and enduring Problems of philosophy. Well, problem solved:

The Trinitarian God has room for plurality without in any way negating divine unity.... the revelation of the Trinity shows that "something like plurality obtains within absolute being. The creative ground of all existence is, in its innermost nature, a looking toward, a being toward another."

[I]n the living (Trinitarian) God, "something like speaking to, communicating with, belongs to the ground of reality."

Which solves the mystery of language, while not making it any less mysterious. For

It follows that divine communication or communication with creatures is not the beginning of divine communion and communication.

Rather, the yada yada has been going on forever: God himselves never stops partaking in the joy of communication. It explains why we ourselves enjoy communicating and being understood.  

Now, it is possible to think of relation in exterior terms only, like billiard balls bouncing off one another. 

But with the Trinitarian God we're talking about interior relations -- about irreducible intersubjectivity and co-inherence. And -- surprise surprise -- the co-inherence goes all the way down, at least with the Incarnation, "the coming together in one Person, without confusion but inseparably, of God and man."

So now, with our metaphysical revolution, the problem of persons is also solved, but again, without being any less mysterious. I mean, I remain a mystery to myself, but now I at least know why: because I co-inhere with the Absolute and Infinite Person. Indeed,

In his utter transcendence, God can be and is more intimately present than any creature could be even to itself.

And again, it explains all this endless intelligibility packed into being and just waiting to be understood by us:

"Because all things are made through the Logos, which is itself nothing but a subsistent relation to the other, coinherence, and not substance or individuality, must be the basic truth of things." 

Because intellect and being are not externally related, but rather, coinhere, we have the great privilege of potentially understanding all there is to know about all there is. The bottom line is that "For Christians, ontology is not ultimately monadic but rather involves relationality at its core," and why not? Viva la revelation!

Living With a Whole in Your Head or Functioning Without One

That first part is misleading, in that mind and body together constitute the irreducible whole of the human person, and that's just the way it is. Once you separate them -- as does, for example, Descartes -- there's no forcing them back together. It reminds me of a wise crack by Thomas I read yesterday, that

strictly speaking, it is not the senses that perceive, but man perceives through them.

We can of course distinguish between sense and intellect, but never separate them without separating man from himself, i.e., dividing his holistic personhood.

You could say we are a "part" of the Cosmos, but then again, man as such is uniquely intertwined with the totality of being in such a way that it is given to us in the evolving space we inhabit between intellect and intelligibility. 

It is these two -- intellect and intelligibility -- that uniquely mirror one another in man, such that to separate them is to deny what man is, precisely. And again, once separated they can never be reunited in an organic way. 

The Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel said that "there are no more difficult problems to solve than those that do not exist" (Tyson), the so-called "mind-body" problem being a quintessential example. Why separate what God -- or whatever -- has joined together in wholly patrimony? 

To the extent that man is a "part," it is only in the context of a deeper complementarity between part and whole, both horizontally and vertically. 

Analogously, our individual organs are in one sense "wholes," but parts of an organism that displays a deeper kind of wholeness. Likewise, the individual person is a whole, but always a part of a deeper and more comprehensive wholeness. 

What and where is this latter wholeness? It cannot be found "below," in the (merely) material cosmos, even though it too reveals an irreducible wholeness as described by modern physics. Whitehead, for example,  writes of how

We habitually speak of stones, and planets, and animals, as though each individual thing could exist, even for a passing moment, in separation from an environment which is in truth a necessary factor in its own nature.

Now, what is the human environment? That's a tricksy one, because other animals are adapted to, and enclosed in, specific circumstances which they can by no means transcend; rather, the world is as big -- or as small -- as their perceptions of it. 

My dog surely exists in the Cosmos, but she doesn't know that. The biggest her world gets is when she goes for a walk and is exposed to novelty.

Novelty. That was a big one for Whitehead, an irreducible category of being. He suggested that life itself is  "an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe." As I wrote in an old post,

everything participates in everything else in ways that are far beyond the ken of 19th century atomistic science. Furthermore, in a post-relativistic cosmos, both space and time are nonlocal, so things are also temporally connected in ways that materialistic science cannot disclose.

Back to man's proper environment. Turns out that 

man's world is not merely and neatly the rather abstract "totality" of all there is, but an intermingling of specific "surroundings" and universal "world" (Pieper). 

There is a kind of endless dialectic between the two, in that we live in our immediate surroundings, and yet, have a "universal openness" that frees us "from the specifics of a habitat." Man is 

"a being surpassing himself and the world," really not bound anymore to profess, "I am part of the world. I am embedded in the world." 

No, we always surpass ourselves and our environment:

it insults the dignity of man's spirit to lead a life so much confined and imprisoned within narrow considerations of immediate usefulness that his own small environment utterly ceases to be a window on the larger "world." 

To be thus totally absorbed in a mere fragment of reality, to "function" rather than live, is not human; yet to be so tempted is indeed all too human (Pieper).

Tempting, but I'll pass.

The Society of God

Let's review: because ultimate reality is personal substance-in-relation, it is also the "absolute relative." 

This latter appears to be a contradiction, because the Absolute is precisely what is not relative. How then can relativity be absolute? In response to which we say: how could it not be?  

In the Bible, the first clue of this absolute relativity is in Genesis 1, where God creates man "in Our image, according to Our likeness." Some say this is a misreading of the passage, but I say, if the clue fits, wear it. 

This is followed immediately by "male and female He created them," which implies (in my opinion) that the intrinsic relationality of God is at once mirrored in the irreducible relationality of male and female. 

Just as God is not a solitary monad, nor are human beings exteriorly related, atomistic units. Rather, like God, we are a deeper and dynamic unity of interpersonal intersubjectivity.

Alternatively, we could begin at our end, in that we know that a solitary and isolated human being could never attain to humanness. Supposing then that we are in the image of the ultimate principle, then the latter must share this primordial and irreducible characteristic.

I'm just flipping through a book by Charles Hartshorne called The Divine Relativity, and while I have problems with his theology as a whole, on this we agree, for example, that 

A personal God is one who has social relations, really has them, and thus is constituted by relationships and hence is relative -- in a sense not provided for by the traditional doctrine of a divine Substance wholly nonrelative toward the world, though allegedly containing loving relations between the "persons" of the Trinity.

As we've said on many occasions, I don't see why God would go to all the trouble of revealing the Trinity to us unless it truly revolutionizes our default metaphysical setting of God as absolute and unrelated Oneness, and instead reveals something totally unexpected and counter-intuitive about the nature of ultimate reality.

Just my hunch. 

What is a person if not a being qualified and conditioned by social relations, relations to other persons? And what is God if not the supreme case of personality? 

What if "sociality" becomes more intense as we ascend the vertical hierarchy? Then "God, if social, is eminently and supremely so," the last (and first) word in social relations. If this be the case, then God's immutability is transposed to a different and higher key, to the immutable mutability (so to speak) of eternal substance-in-relation. Which again seems paradoxical, but let's try anyway.

For Hartshorne, the Absolute is not something more than God, rather, something less. This is in contrast to, say, Schuon's view that the Absolute is prior, and that the diverse revelations symbolically express this Absoluteness a posteriori. But for Harshorne,

The Absolute is God with something left out of account. God is more than his absolute character.... I am arguing that the absolute is, rather, an abstract feature of the inclusive and supreme reality which is precisely the personal God.

Here again, Schuon would say that the personal God is but the "confessional face" of what is ultimately impersonal and "beyond-being." It is a way for us to relate to God, even though, in the ultimate sense, it is more for our convenience than going to God's ultimate nature, which is supra-personal.

Eh, I don't buy it. What if we turn things around and see the relative as inclusive of the absolute, rather than vice versa? Is this possible? Harthorne thinks so: "Maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as supreme person." Conversely, 

If God be in all aspects absolute, then literally it is "all the same" to him, a matter of utter indifference, whether we do this or do that, whether we live or die, whether we joy or suffer. This is precisely not to be personal in any sense relevant to religion or ethics (emphasis mine).

Here again, "it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa," for "God merely as absolute is nonactual; God as personal is at least actual." 

A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity.... A wholly absolute God is totally beyond human tragedy, and his power operates uninfluenced by human freedom...

"A wholly absolute supreme being is a contradiction in terms," since it would imply that "relativity is as truly good as nonrelativity," but we say relativity and responsiveness are perfections, and eminently so in God. Likewise, a closed and unrelated human being is as inconceivable as a closed and unrelated God, and for the same reason. 

Again, just my opinion. But you will notice a comment by Robert Barron in the sidebar:

No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity and at the same time a stable rock.

A fine example of orthoparadox.

The World is Rated X

Let's think this through: man is an animal, but then again, the meta-animal, or animal + (x). Alternatively, we could say that the animal is human - (x). Now, what is (x)? 

In our age of stupidity there is no (x). Rather, Darwinian orthodoxy maintains that there is an absolute continuity between animal and man, but even Darwin had his doubts:

with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy.

Good news/bad news for Chuck: the good news is that the convictions of man's mind are of indeed of value and trustworthy (at least in potential). The bad news is that this trustworthiness invalidates his theory, which can in no way account for the new properties -- (x) -- intrinsic to human nature. 

It's still a good theory as far as it goes, but it doesn't go to (x), which requires an altogether different theory or principle to account for it. This principle is expressed by the Aphorist with his usual astringency:

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.

This being the case, Darwin is a magician, albeit one who has horrid doubts about the existence of magic. 

But he's really like an other stage magician who knows his magic isn't real, rather, a sleight of hand enabled by distracting the audience. In order for Darwinian magic to succeed, the magician must essentially trick the audience from looking at (x). 

Conversely, to debunk the trick, we merely have to show that (x) was there all along: that the card was up his sleeve or the rabbit already in the hat.  

So, what is (x)? Whatever else it is, it includes the innate ability to know essences: by knowing essences man gains access to both universals and the universe. After all, no one has or will ever perceive the universe; rather, it is the ultimate -- or penultimate -- abstraction, i.e., the interiorly ordered totality of the Cosmos.  

An animal's perception is incapable of reaching the universal essence of things, and precisely for this reason is the animal bound and limited to a small and specific sector of reality (Pieper). 

But our mysterious (not magical!)

ability to recognize the intrinsic nature of things provides a perspective from which the all-including totality of the world as a whole becomes accessible and discernible (Pieper). 

In the words of Thomas, "Because the spiritual soul can grasp universal essences, it possesses a potential unto infinity." 

This being the case, then (x) must be an immaterial soul ordered to immaterial essences, which is to say, the truth of being, which in turn extends to infinity. And we're back to Schuon's unavoidable conclusion:

One of the keys to understanding our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence. Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing

In the same book (Echoes of Perennial Wisdom) he utters many similar pithy wisecracks, for example, 

The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute.

Man is made for what he is able to conceive; the very ideas of absoluteness and transcendence prove both his spiritual nature and the supra-terrestrial character of his destiny. 

So, another aspect of (x) is consciousness of the transcendent Absolute. Which I say is the very ground of the ability to think. This consciousness is either explicit or implicit (i.e., subconscious), but truly truly, in its absence we can't say a damn thing about reality, nor can we know of the Cosmos. 

We just have to accept the reality of (x), irrespective of how pleasant the implications, for example, that "All things are true" and that "they are known and knowable to the human mind."

this is a statement not only about the essential structure of all things but about their "intrinsic openness..., which causes all things to be and to be translucent, making them real and therefore knowable (Pieper).

Surprisingly, the Cosmos is open at both ends -- in the things that constitute reality, and the intellect's ability to know them. This is a supremely strange situation, but there it is: "the human mind, by its very nature, is ordered toward the totality of all that exists."

If not, to hell with it, for we are indeed enclosed in animality and worse, i.e., in the tenebrous bowels of tenure. To be "subhuman" is not to be a mere animal, rather, something far worse: it is to sink beneath humanness into a kind of unnatural and totally avoidable darkness. Nevertheless, here we are.

I want to say that (x) is also a kind of light that gives access to the light that lights up the Cosmos from the inside-out. In other words, it radiates from the interior of things to our interior. Pieper agrees:

the mind's inborn ability to "reach the whole" is actuated already in each single instance of cognition; for the light that makes any individual object intelligible is the same light that permeates the universe. 

 CONCLUSION:

Never will man be able to comprehend fully -- that is, know totally and perfectly -- the inner nature of things.

This is to say, we can know a great deal about anything and everything, but we can never know everything about a single thing, because we are not angels, much less God: in the words of Thomas,

Our cognitive power is so imperfect that not even the nature of one single gnat was ever entirely understood by any philosopher [or scientist].

But this does not imply that our knowledge is nothing. Rather, it's a pretty big deal, for "any cognitive effort will indeed always be a positive advance" -- ironically, a progressive evolution -- "but only like a step on a longer journey."

Man, therefore, is by nature someone who always, and ever anew, can reach for higher perfection, someone endowed with limitless potentials.... Yet those potentials, the moment they become real, already point to to new horizons that point beyond (Pieper).   

With apologies to Marvin Gaye:

Nor are we "lonely lovers," philosophically speaking -- because otherness and relationality are built in -- but that's a different song.

Open for Isness

Man is the great exception to animal nature, being that he is not limited to the senses and enclosed in instinct. Now, how to account for this aberration, and does it make him superior to the beasts, or in a way more pathetic?

As we have been saying in recent posts, man is -- somehow -- open to the world, to the whole of being, but is this openness a purely negative thing, like freedom in the absence of a telos or intelligence in the absence of truth? 

If so, then the existentialists are correct -- just as freedom equates to nothingness, so too does our "openness" reduce to a cosmic fluke with no sufficient reason. 

Pieper touches on this possibility in Living the Truth, citing a certain philosopher who

misinterprets man's openness to the world as an expression, even a consequence, of man's organic imperfection and a "lack of specific natural means" and so as a "basically negative reality."

This is something I touched on in my own way in the Book. Supposing there is a natural explanation for our freedom and openness, why should it be that the resultant "space" isn't empty, but rather, is full of objective values -- of truth, beauty, goodness, language, creativity, ideals, etc.?

Why do we discover things in this space, and not simply imagine them? 

Well, I suppose that's a question for those sub-philosophers who insist that the open intellect is not ordered to objective realities, but rather, enclosed in its own structures and categories. Such thinking essentially deploys transcendence in order to deny transcendence. 

Rather than being a mistake or a fluke, Thomas maintains that "The spiritual soul is the most perfect soul of all," and that, "being able to know the essences of things, [it] possesses a potency unto the infinite." 

Other animals are constrained by "specific instinctive attitudes or with specific endowments for defense or protection," which may make man look comparatively bereft. But in place of the specific, we specialize in  generality, so to speak, for

man is naturally endowed with reason and furnished with hands, which together are the ultimate tools of all tools, allowing man to fashion instruments of any kind and for an infinity of purposes.

Again, the point is that this human space isn't empty but filled with interesting stuff -- essences, universals, transcendentals, logic, mathematics, beauty, science, history, necessary metaphysical truths, et al. What a place, and what a privilege!

Nor does it ever run short of interesting stuff, which is another feature of this space. Rather than just wanting to know what we need in order to survive and reproduce, we want to know it all. We have an unlimited desire to know everything there is to know about everything there is, or in other words, are ordered to the infinite object, O.

We all know there is a "biosphere," and underneath this a subatomic field of energy vibrations. But what is above these two? Teilhard de Chardin called it the "noosphere," which is again not "invented" by man but discovered. Or better yet, a kind of "co-creation" that takes place between immanence and transcendence, a la Voegelin or Polanyi.

Other animals live in an "environment" to which they are adapted. What is man's environment? Reduced to an animal environment the human being would scarcely be human, because there would be no way to actualize his infinite potential. For

It is not merely the "totality of all things" but equally the "nature of things" that constitutes the realm of the mind. We are able to reach -- which does not mean comprehend -- the essence of things, and because of this we find ourselves empowered to attain the totality of things as well (Pieper).

Otherwise, truly truly, to hell with it.

One of the keys to understanding our true nature and our ultimate destiny is the fact that the things of this world are never proportionate to the actual range of our intelligence. Our intelligence is made for the Absolute, or else it is nothing (Schuon).

So, pick one: God or radical absurdity.

The Tension Goes All the Way Up

Objects don't relate to subjects in the same way as do subjects to objects, but this is not to say that objects don't relate to subjects at all, otherwise they would be unintelligible. Between knower and known there is a relationship -- of truth -- and

the spirit-based self, the highest form of being..., must have the most comprehensive domain of relatedness: the universe of all existing things (Pieper).

We are related to everything, which is to say to being itself. Existing things are related to us in terms of their intelligibility, whether potential or actual: "the human mind is ordered toward the totality of all that exists" (Pieper), and according to Thomas,

Spirit-endowed beings possess a higher affinity to the whole of reality than other beings. Every spiritual substance namely, in a certain sense, is all in all, insofar as it is able, through its cognitive power, to comprehend all there is.

Well, good. At the very least this gives us something to do: to comprehend all there is to know about all there is. It is in the soul's nature to be 

directed toward universal knowledge. In this manner is it possible for the perfection of the entire world to be present in one single being.

Nobody's perfect, but  

the highest perfection attainable for the soul would be reached when the soul comprehends the entire order of the universe and its principles...

This is "the ultimate end of man." Bob is a man. Therefore, this is the ultimate end of Bob. 

D'oh! There's a catch: this "will be realized in the beatific vision," which is apparently unavailable this side of the grave.  

Then again, "beings endowed with cognitive ability somehow resemble God himself," which I suppose is why it's so easy to pretend to godhood. It seems that we are forever situated in Voegelin's tension between immanence and transcendence, but this is by no means a static situation, rather, it constitutes nothing less then the dynamism -- the very life -- of the mind.

And now that I'm thinking about it, any dissipative (i.e., process) structure requires a polarized tension in order to go on being. 

An ancient thought (from grad school) pops into my noggin, about how our brains contain billions of electrochemical neurons that -- help me out here Professor Wiki -- "have intrinsic electroresponsive properties like intrinsic transmembrane voltage oscillator patterns," meaning that they ceaselessly charge and discharge electrical energy.

This is one of those things that I simultaneously understand and don't understand at all, like how computers work. I mean, I understand the words, but WTF? The point is that life itself is tension and release, while death is release from the tension. And the TENSION isn't just present horizontally but vertically, as characterized by Voegelin:

A condition of tending toward a goal. Voegelin uses the term especially to refer to what he calls the "tension of existence," the fundamental experience of longing for transcendental fulfillment, the Beyond, the summum bonum (Webb).

This latter for Thomas being the beatific vision. But whatever we call this ultimate telos, it accounts for the TENSION which proceeds all the way up. Unless you just give up and disembark at some provincial bus stop along the way. 

What is the ground of this tension? Must be in the Trinity, i.e., in the tensional energy (so to speak) between the Persons. They say this energy is none other than the LOVE which "powers" it (so to speak), but this is above my praygrade. Still, it makes sense to me, or at least I can't think of anything that makes more sense of our exceedingly strange cosmic situation.

We can express it via our annoying pneumaticons, what with the vertical tension between O and (¶), the space between them being where intellection (n) occurs.

The animal is adapted to a specific environment and so also limited by it; man's environment, in contrast, is the totality of all that exists, so that man, by his nature, is... oriented to "the world" (Pieper).

Or, in the words of Thomas, "The spiritual soul, being able to know the essences of things, possesses a potency unto the infinite." And this potency is none other than the TENSION between finitude and Infinitude, the many and the One, time and Eternity, the relative and the Absolute, etc.

I Can Relate, or There's a Little Interiority in Everything

So, to lift off from where we left off: 

All reality is actually or potentially mind-related, inasmuch as its intrinsic essence is actually or potentially incorporated into the knowing mind (Pieper).

If reality is mind-related, then the mind is reality-related, in a kind of inspiraling mutual indwelling. There's a little bit of mind in everything, or as Thomas says, "The essence even of a lifeless thing has life in God's mind."  

All that exists, because it exists, is ordered to a knowing mind.... This means: not only is the eye sun-related, the sun as well is eye-related; all that has being is mind-related in its most intrinsic core. Mind and being are interconnected (Pieper).

Weird, but what's the alternative? An intellect that doesn't know being, or that "knows" only non-being? Doesn't work for me. "Rather, it is part of a thing's essence to be intelligible; that is, to be ordered... toward a knowing mind"-- as in how speech is ordered to the ear, or message to recipient.  

Things are not mute. They merely select their listeners.  

Moreover,

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

Reminds me of what Schuon calls the "metaphysical transparency" of being, but perhaps translucency might be closer to the mark, for as Thomas says, "The reality of a thing, in a way, is itself its light."

Does this mean reality is a giant vertical murmurandom? "Reality in itself is oriented toward man's perceiving mind," and "moreover, the human mind in turn is ordered toward the realm of existing things." 

This "intrinsic correlation between mind and reality always precedes any actual cognition." It is an explicit or implicit axiom of the very possibility of thought, am I wrong?!  

If our mind were not by its nature already in touch with reality, it would never be able to reach reality at all.

As proven by all post-Kantian philosophy, for anyone can sever the mind from reality, but no one can reunite them if they aren't united to begin with. I can think I am all day long, but the solipsistic subject can never cross the bridge back to It Is unless the bridge is already there in the thinking. 

Or in other words, thinking is the very link between I Am and It Is, for "truth is the conformity of an object to its idea," and "conformity of being and knowledge is called 'true.'" 

But I want to get back to this whole question of relatedness, of a relational cosmos, because that's the key. It's a tricksy concept, because it's not something you can ever know from the outside, rather, only from the inside. Therefore, there is an intimate... relationship between interiority and relationality. 

the concept of transcendental truth affirms the relatedness of every being to the inner core of another being, the knowing mind... 

And 

It is essential for any genuine relationship to originate from an inside and extend toward an outside. The pebble in a brook, in itself, does not "relate" to its surroundings... 

Rather, we relate to it because we have an interior that can know the attenuated interiority of the pebble, which is its knowability -- its intelligibility -- precisely. Thus,  

The higher the form of intrinsic existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness with reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness: namely, the world.

So, I can relate to every it:

The world of the spirit-endowed self, a person's "I," spans the totality of all that is; the world of the spirit is the universe of being.

I'll say it only once: the cosmos has an interiority complex, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it but endlessly relate to it, interior to interior, intelligence to intelligibility.

The Truth of Being and the Dream of Existence

That's what it comes down to: a binary choice, except in choosing the latter, it immediately fragments into 8.1 billion opinionated dreamers competing for top dogma. 

I'm just flipping through a book by Josef Pieper called Living the Truth, which is -- in my opinion -- about nothing less than waking from the modern dream and the postmodern nightmare:

With the expression, "All that exists is true," Western philosophy for almost two millennia intended to make a statement not only about reality as such but no less about the nature of man.

The statement is this: that being is intelligible to the intellect, and that truth is the conformity of the latter to the former. This is the "principle of the truth of all things." 

It was once uncontroversial to affirm that "all that is real, is true." It meant that we started with the reality of being rather than with the content of the mind.

But Enlightenment thinkers "despised and eliminated the principle of ontological truth, together with metaphysical ontology as such," making them "among the first to reject the principle of the truth of all things" and to "even deny that it expresses anything meaningful at all."

Which means that there is no truth in things, and that supposing there were, we could never know it. Rather, we are sealed off from the thing itself, and therefore enclosed in our opinions and dreams about what's going on with them, i.e., with reality.

Pieper quotes Spinoza to the effect that "Altogether in the wrong are those who consider truth to be a property of being," but here again, to say that truth is not a property of being is to say that there is no truth. 

Likewise, "Kant explicitly denies truth to be a property of reality as such." He sought to "discredit once and for all the basic concepts of traditional ontology," and boy did he succeed. 

Except to say that there's no failure like success, in that it has successfully redounded to an "abyss separating the intellectual giants of the High Middle Ages from the pedantic philosophical systematists of the Enlightenment," and here we are.

With the jettisoning of ontology came the rejection of the very principles of thought, among which are non-contradiction, sufficient reason, and of rationality itself: "The opposite of transcendental truth would be a dream mistaken for reality. A string of dreams would be a fairy tale world." 

And what is the contemporary multiversity but a fairy tale world of academic division, fragmentation, and disunity, detached in principle from the one thing that could integrate them, AKA being? Pieper quotes the philosopher Christian Wolff, who speaks for me:

The truth that is called "transcendental" and is conceived as inherent in reality as such... is the ordered structure governing existing things.... a dream, in contrast, means inconsistency in the transformation of things. The truth implies order, the dream disorder.

Reject the truth of being, and the world dissolves "into a fairy tale, the equivalent of a dream." Now, I have nothing against dreams, I just don't want to be ruled by them, which is to say, enclosed in the dream of dreamers with more power than I have, i.e., people with the power to impose their kooky dreams on the restavus. 

We've mentioned before that one of the primordial divisions between contemporary leftism and conservative liberalism is this question of contact with reality -- the transcendental reality of Permanent Things. 

Russell Kirk, for example, writes that "conservatives generally believe that there exists a transcendent moral order, to which we ought to try to conform the ways of society." But this presupposes a nonlocal order -- the order of being -- in which the good, true, and beautiful converge.

It's never too late to admit that we took the wrong fork in the road, and to make a u-turn back to the reality from which we diverged, as articulated by Thomas:

All existing things, namely, all real objects outside the soul, possess something intrinsic that allows us to call them true.

I personally made the u-turn a couple of decades ago, and I highly commend it, because it gives us the best of both worlds:

In created things there is truth on two levels: in the things themselves, and in the perceiving mind. 

In other words, we get to save reality, with the salvation of our minds tossed in for free: again, an infinitely intelligible world of being, intelligible to an equally infinite intellect, and how convenient is that!  

"'All things are true' means that they are oriented toward a knowing self." Thus "every being, as being, stands in relation to a knowing mind." This is fundamentally a relational cosmos, such that

"To be," therefore, means the same as "to be oriented toward a knowing mind."

"No existing being is without such relational orientation," and "this relationship is actualized in the process of mental perception or intellection." Otherwise you're just dreaming a dream detached from being, and you can't argue with a dreamer, rather, you can only try to wake them up. 

Anti-Academia and its Bitter Mutants

I'm old enough to remember when college was useless but fun instead of noxious and soul-deadening. Pieper is old enough to remember when -- try not to laugh -- academia could be defined as a "zone of truth"

deliberately set aside in the midst of society, a hedged-in space to house the autonomous engagement with reality, in which people can inquire into, discuss, and assert the truth of things without let or hindrance...

This ought to be 

a domain expressly shielded from any conceivable attempts to use it as a means to achieve certain ends, and in which all concerns irrelevant to its true purpose, whether collective or personal, whether of political, economic or ideological import, must keep silent.

How's that working out? And what happened? How is it that we've landed in a total inversion of Pieper's normative description, such that our elite universities stubbornly inhabit and inculcate a (in my words) zone of illusion, 

a hedged-in space to nurture the disengagement from reality, or engagement with unreality, in which people can affirm their truth, and celebrate their intersectional victimhood without let or hindrance; a domain expressly deployed to achieve certain collective, personal, political, economic, and ideological ends, in fact, any end short of the disinterested pursuit of truth.

And here we are, with normal people asking: Remind me, what is a university education good for? Detached from its proper telos -- which is to say, truth -- it cannot be good for anything but mischief. 

man's chief nourishment is truth.... anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must feed on truth. Society too lives on the public availability, the public manifestation of truth (Pieper). 

So, if the mind is not metabolizing truth it must metabolize something less, and in so doing become something other than it is. 

It's why these students don't just have "different beliefs," but rather -- as one look at them reveals -- are different, full stop, for they are like a subspecies that has devolved and veered away from proper humanness. They are missing something, with something else in its place. 

This being the case, we have a real problem, since it only takes a couple generations of these warped deviants and bitter mutants to displace the restavus. How do we de-Stalinize a whole generation that we've systematically Stalinized? 

I can't decide whether these people require cult deprogramming or exorcism, but why take chances?

The Divorce of Mind from Being

Change my mind:

The disease afflicting the modern world is in the first place a disease of the mind; it began in the mind, it has now attacked the roots of the mind (Jacques Maritain).

So, it is an autoimmune disorder, i.e., the mind attacking its own substance, or, in a word, college.

There are many ways to conceptualize the disease, and numerous historical epochs where we could situate its outbreak, but it really comes down to Genesis 3 All Over Again, i.e. to the rupture of human intelligence from the source of intelligence. The modern divorce of mind from being -- filed by Descartes and granted by Kant -- is just the most influential version.

Thus the mind is no longer docile -- AKA open -- to reality:

Indocile to the object, to God, to being, the mind becomes also and to the same extent indocile to all human authority, a rebel against all tradition and spiritual continuity.

Vertical closure is followed by horizontal closure, and the result is idiocy in its original meaning, a "private person" cut off from rational discourse. The inevitable consequence on the vertical plane is

that by losing its docility to human teaching and its docility also to the object, the mind in our time has proceeded in the direction of an absolutely brutal hardening and a progressive weakening of reason...

On the horizontal plane, the consequence is  

that the most profound and at the same time most human bonds of social life must have simultaneously become by an unavoidable consequence gradually loosened and undone. 

I call that a pretty good guess for 1931. 

I like what he says about the simultaneous hardening and weakening of reason, which again has to do with a self-enclosed rationality detached from its proper object. It is at once a hardened fortress against transcendent realities, but then dissolves "every object of speculation in a great fluid jelly called Becoming or Evolution." Modern thought is indeed pillar of gelatin.  

Now, "If the mind is not saved, nothing will be saved," and "nothing below the level of the mind can remedy this disease." 

Can reason save us? No, not if it is not conscious of its intrinsic limits: it cannot "look for its standard in itself and in the face of the mysteries below," rather, must be ordered to the free-flowing transcendent mystery above.

Play us out, Nicolás:

Philosophy has as its object above all to prevent the follies of the day from blocking the windows and walling up the doors.

The honest philosophy does not pretend to explain but to circumscribe the mystery.

When the authentic mystery is eclipsed, humanity becomes drunk on imbecilic mysteries. 

Humility is the epistemological condition of specific perceptions. 

The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.  

The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician's rule book.

Workin' for the Cosmos

Just flipping through a book by Maritain on St. Thomas called The Angelic Doctor, and found many timelessly timely passages, for example,

The unity of a culture is determined in the first place and above all by a certain common philosophical structure, a certain metaphysical and moral attitude, a certain scale of values, in a word, a certain common conception of the universe, of man and human life, of which social, linguistic and juridical structures are, so to speak, the embodiment. 

Ultimately, the disunity we are seeing on our streets and college campuses is a result of inhabiting different and irreconcilable universes. Nor is there a "two universe solution," since there is by definition only one. Problem is,

The drama of Western culture consists in the fact that its stock of common metaphysics has been reduced to an utterly inadequate minimum...

That was written in 1931. We have since sunk beneath the minimum. And yet, there is always further to sink. But for Maritain, our task is to think "of the world and the present moment in light of eternal truths," which was one of the guiding purposes of the blog back in 2005 -- to interpret the "news" in light of the "eternals," or the transient under the aspect of the permanent. 

The good news is,

The greater grow the powers of illusion, the more lovers of truth will feel drawn towards the vast light of that wisdom... 

Thomism

does not want to destroy but to purify modern speculation and to integrate all the truth that has been discovered since the time of St. Thomas. It is an essentially synthetic and assimilative philosophy...

Same here, because a man needs a hobby. As for Thomas, he pretty much had one hobby and "a single ambition: to discern and to demonstrate primary Truth." "He had only one thing to do and he did it well."  

Maritain asks, "What are the conditions on which this lost unity can be recovered, not as it once was, for time is irreversible, but reconstituted once more in new forms?" Problem is, we live in an age of crude materialism, and matter is the very principle of separation. Nor can man

find his unity in himself; he finds it outside himself, above himself. It was his determination to be self-sufficient which ruined him. He will find himself again only by becoming attached to his first principle and to the order transcending it. Pure subjectivity, like pure materiality, disperses.

Which checks out. Oddly, contemporary culture is simultaneously materialist and subjectivist, which is a true triumph of stupidity, since matter is incapable of subjectivity and subjectivity is immaterial. Oh well.

There is no greater delusion than to seek in immanentism the reconciliation of man with himself.  

It's a vertical zombie culture, that's what it is. What is a vertical zombie? I don't know, but this is close enough: 

that pitiful product which goes by the name of modern man, a being cut off from all his ontological roots and transcendental objects, who, because he sought to find his centre in himself, has become... merely a wolf howling in despair towards eternity.... 

Their cosmically pathological ideas  

are dead: though they may still encumber us for a long time, like cadaverous products, they are finished.  

In a flatland cosmos, in which transcendence has been immanentized, the zombie wolves are reduced to howling at race, class, gender, and Jews.

Western civilization "can now save itself only by working for the whole universe." Which is an interesting way of putting it: "Whom do you work for, Bob?" "Nobody in particular, just the cosmos." It says as much at the top of the blog:

THE COSMOS IS OUR SCHOOL, THE INTELLECT OUR FACULTY, TRUTH THE FIRST PRINCIPAL

In case it's not obvious, "principal" has a double meaning, since the first principle is the meta-cosmic Person. 

Secondhand Inspiration

While waiting around for inspiration and coherence to return, I thought I might yoink some fresh aphorisms I don't recall having previously purloined.

Lately I've been experiencing a lot of regret:

When we read a writer who has no talent, simply because he deals with an interesting subject, we always regret it.

Three aphorisms that are implicitly Gödelian: 

Rationalism is reason that forgets its assumptions.

Reason is an act of the spirit that analyzes a previous spiritual act. 

Reason does not beget, but educates what was begotten.

The color of victimhood:

The Marxist historian throws a uniform-colored coat of varnish on the polychrome tints of history.

Why dialogue is impossible:

Between the cultured man and the progressive any dialogue is soon extinguished. The first is silent in the face of such vulgarity, the second in the face of such “obscurantism.”

 Indifference? How about hostility:

Violence is not enough to destroy a civilization. Each civilization dies from indifference to the particular values that founded it.

Identity politics:

The individual ego believes itself absolved when it is compressed into a collective ego. 

The individual declares himself a member of some collective entity, with the aim of demanding in its name what he is ashamed to claim in his own name.

Used to be

Civilization is all that the university cannot teach.

Nowadays barbarism is all it can teach. 

The Aphorist says that

Mathematics is the poetry of the identity principle.

Which makes me think that revelation is poetry of metaphysics.

What happens when left brain ideology suppresses right brain contact with reality?

He who adopts a system stops perceiving the truths that are within his reach.

Biden and Pelosi:

For the leftist Catholic, Catholicism is the great sin of the Catholic.

I can't help it if I'm built this way:

Even our favorite ideas soon bore us if we do not hear them expressed with irony, with grace and with beauty.

And with brevity.

True:

In clumsy hands theology becomes the art of making mystery ridiculous.

 As ridiculous as atheism. 

WHO Cut the Light

Yesterday's post asked Who cut the light?! Today we shall identify WHO took the light out of the Enlightenment, and it wasn't just Enlightenment thinkers. 

Rather, the roots extend back to certain medieval philosophical trends, especially nominalism. The whole catastrophe is described in the book Returning to Reality: Christian Platonism for Our Times, which we will be plagiarizing with this morning.

In many ways it mirrors the thesis of Richard Weaver's Ideas Have Consequences -- nominalism being one of the most consequential ideas ever, since it drives a wedge between reality and our ideas of reality, the latter reduced to mere names, such that reality is no longer intelligible. You can trace a straight line from this to postmodern nihilism.

In a certain sense, Platonism is simply what philosophy is, i.e., the effort to apprehend the enduring reality beneath, behind, or above the flux of contingency and change. As Schuon puts it, "all the speculations of Plato or Socrates converge upon a vision which transcends the perception of appearances and which opens on to the Essence of things." 

For Plato, "philosophy is the knowledge of the Immutable and of the Ideas" (ibid.), and what's the Big Idea? The Good, which diffuses its light into the world of appearances. If not, then to hell with it, because philosophy is doomed from the start. Truly truly, it reduces to anti-philosophy -- to misosophy or philodoxy (love of opinion) -- masquerading as philosophy:

This stance does not think that Meaning and Reason are there in Reality; rather, it holds that all meaning and reasoning and all reality beliefs are human constructions..., rather than defensible claims concerning how things ultimately are (Tyson).

In contrast, the Christian Platonist "holds that the unseen God really is the present source and ongoing ground of all created reality," and that "the qualities of beauty, goodness, and truth, wherever they are in some measure discovered, are divine revelations of real meaning that give the world in which we live its value and purpose."

To this outlook intangible qualities are more basic than any temporal expression of truth, and true meaning... is reflected partially in the human mind rather then generated there. To this outlook there is more to reality than simply what meets the eye. Here reality exceeds that which can be discretely quantified, mathematically modeled, or logically demonstrated. 

And why not? Gödel himself was a "committed Platonist," and

According to Gödel's own Platonist understanding of his proof, it shows us that our minds, in knowing mathematics, are escaping the limitations of man-made systems, grasping the independent truths of abstract reality (Goldstein). 

You know what? I'm feeling a bit scattered this morning, plus we've been down this path so many times before that there's no need to do so again. Rather, I'll just pull some excerpts from past posts that pretty much summarize the argument:

Exactly what was this "nominalist revolution"? To make a long story short, it simply has to do with the question of the reality of transcendentals, or universals. For realists such as Aquinas, universals were ultimately real, while for the nominalist insurgency, they were considered mere names (immediately you see the seeds of deconstruction, which attacks universals -- and therefore Truth -- with a neo-barbaric vengeance).

Seems like a mundane enough academic squabble, doesn't it? Well, no. This is the wedge that plunges right down the center of Christendom, and cleaves Western man to this day.

Now, the God of the scholastics could be approached with reason. This being the case, the divine realm was ordered, hierarchical, and subject to man's comprehension (up to a point). But the nominalists swept this entire order aside, which had the perhaps unintended consequence of radically changing the character of God.

For one of the implications of nominalism is that God cannot be approached rationally, since this is to compromise his divine omnipotence. God can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, to such an extent that he actually becomes far more distant and fearsome -- an object of pure awe instead of understanding.

*****

Secular humanists follow in the wake of the late medieval nominalists who convinced themselves that the principial realm of transcendental truth was words only, and that only concrete material things were ultimately real. This ousted them from the transcendent and created the split that continues to this day between realists and materialists. 

In turn, this split is very much at the basis of mundane politics, as conservatism may be defined as that philosophy which sees the world as the instantiation of "permanent things," or archetypal ideas that are not subject to change. We do not judge or measure them, because they judge and take the measure of us. We are either evolving toward, or away, from what we are in our deepest nature.

But because the left has exiled itself from human reality, it can never understand the simple truth that the world is disordered because souls are. And then in its ontic backasswardness, it tries to order souls by changing the world, and is always surprised when disordered souls re-exert themselves and spoil their beautiful plans. To paraphrase Eliot, they are always dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, which is to say, a rightly ordered soul (since souls don't exist for them anyway).

*****

As to when it all started, Richard Weaver, in his consequential Ideas Have Consequences, blames the triumph of nominalism over realism, or Occam over Thomas, way back in the 14th century. According to Prof. Wiki, Occam is considered "the father of modern epistemology" by many modern idiots

because of his strongly argued position that only individuals exist, rather than supra-individual universals, essences, or forms, and that universals are the products of abstraction from individuals by the human mind and have no extra-mental existence.

So lacking in self-awareness was this Occam fellow that he didn't even realize that the philosophy of nominalism is itself an abstraction.

Imagine a fish who denies the existence of water becoming the most important thinker among fish. That's what happened to man: despite being founded on an overt denial of reality, this denial became the new foundation of western thought (or anti-thought, if you want to be literal).

Occam was also "a theological voluntarist who believed that if God had wanted to, he could have become incarnate as a donkey or an ox, or even as both a donkey and a man at the same time."

He is closer to Islamic than Christian metaphysics, because he is one of those folks who would say that God doesn't command certain things because they are right and good, but that they are right and good because God commands them. If God commanded abortion, or theft, or Gender Affirming Care, then these would be good instead of immoral. There is no natural law written on our hearts, because abstract universals can't exist, and besides, we're so wrecked by original sin that we can't think straight anyway.

Oddly enough, just two days ago I ran across the same analysis in Barron's The Priority of Christ, except he's much more polite about it. He writes of how Occam's kooky voluntarism renders both God and man "self-contained, capricious, absolute, and finally irrational."

 Barron writes of how the turn away from realism redounds to

a not very convincing form of Christianity and the opponent to whom it naturally gave rise. Modernity and decadent Christianity are enemies in one sense, but in another sense, they are deeply connected to one another and mirror one another. In most of the disputes between Christianity and modernity, we have advocates of the prerogative of the voluntarist God facing down advocates of the voluntarist self (emphasis mine).

In short, the human world is reduced to will vs. will, and may the most ruthless win. The infinitely wider, deeper, and richer world of human intelligence and divine intelligibility is reduced to will and to the power to enforce it.