Man is the Dice with which God Plays

Don't expect much new product around here for awhile. Next week I have jury duty! Here's another post from the wayback machine, but which has some continuity with yesterday's soiled bobservations:

In our discussion of divine and human freedom, we left off with the orthoparadoxical idea that we live in a world which is good in the sense that it manifests the Divine and its reflected qualities. Nevertheless, the creation "involves a partial and contingent aspect of badness because, not being God while existing nonetheless, it sets itself against God or tends to be the equal of God" (Schuon).

This correlates with the vertical distinction between Being and Beyond-Being, which is the basis of theodicy, through which the problem of evil is explained and God's goodness is vindicated.

In case you've forgotten, this whole discussion started last week, with a post about fate, luck, and free will. Human freedom is derived from the Divine freedom. Again, our free will could never be explained from the bottom up. Nor without it could we know good and evil, truth and illusion, beauty and ugliness, and choose between them. If we didn't have free will, we could never know it -- just as, if we couldn't know truth, we wouldn't be able to know it.

Having said that, although there are analogies between divine and human freedom, the differences must be even greater. Human beings live their lives along this ambiguous vertical bridge, with God at the top and biology, physics, and other principalities down below (sort of like the electric lines and sewer pipes under the city).

As Schuon writes, "creation implies imperfection by metaphysical necessity." And the fact that human beings necessarily have the freedom to choose badly makes matters even worse.

One problem we encounter right away is that freedom implies change, whereas we are told that God is immutable. Perhaps we need to distinguish between the freedom that applies to Beyond-Being, vs. that which applies to Being.

In Beyond-Being, freedom is in a way meaningless, because there is nothing from which to be free. Freedom only comes into play in the context of restraint, of other, of world -- of subject over and against object.

And the highest purpose of freedom is "the possibility of choosing between the Substance and accident, or between the Real and the illusory" (Schuon). Since there can be no accident within the Godhead, our freedom is obviously quite different, being that our world is a tapestry of chance and necessity.

Speaking of which, the chance aspect of the world is insufficiently appreciated, both by the tenured and the wider population. I'm currently reading an interesting book, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, and would like to work some of Taleb's contrarian and counter-intuitive ideas into the mix.

It seems that people are instinctively repelled at the idea of pure luck holding so much sway over their lives, which is why both the tenured and the religious invent various ex post facto mythological narratives to explain the past. In this regard, Darwinism is no better than certain other forms of fundamentalism.

I should hasten to add that Taleb shows no signs of being in any way religious (I'm only halfway through the book), such that he seems to be trapped in his own narrative that chance is all -- and more importantly, that chance is only chance and not, say, a teleological breakthrough out of a determined system, an escape from the Machine.

Indeed, in my view, the cosmic purpose of chance is to create a non-deterministic space in which the higher can operate on the lower -- or through which final causes can influence souls and events.

If the world were a deterministic machine that functions only from the bottom up, there would be no freedom and no chance. But being wholly determined from the top would make us no more free than being determined from the bottom.

Thus, freedom and chance go together like liberty and order. It is largely because of freedom that the future is completely unpredictable. But because we are aware of the past, we superimpose narratives on it that make it seem as if the future will be similar. Thus, we are always surprised by the "black swans" that no one predicted, and yet, have the most impact on history.

For example, to the very eve of World War I, no one saw it coming. But in hindsight, historians invent narratives that make it appear inevitable. Likewise other large-scale and highly impactful events such as 9-11, the recent real estate bubble, or the Great Depression. All were foreseeable from the future.

One thing that eludes historians -- by definition -- is all of the evidence of things that didn't happen. Obviously, we cannot know what we don't know (the unknown unknown), which no doubt represents majority of (potential) knowledge.

It seems that history is always on a knife-edge, and can easily be tipped one way or the other by sometimes trivial causes. This is true of any complex system with an infinite number of variables.

We'll get back to black swans later. I just wanted to introduce the idea that randomness is both our friend and our enemy, like water or electricity. Without it we couldn't be free, but with it we're always in for an adventure.

There is no accident in Beyond-Being. But the creation, in order to be separate from God, must involve relativity and therefore contingency.

Thus, one of the purposes of a spiritual practice is to distinguish between those things that must be versus those things that may be. As Schuon describes it, being that we are the "handiwork" and not "the Principle which alone is good," man "is a good inasmuch as he manifests the Principle, but he is not good inasmuch as he is separated from it."

Again, the world is a tapestry of vertical and horizontal causes, of the real and the contingent, so we always see the one reflected in the other. This is why, for example, matter, which is otherwise so "distant" from God, has the metaphysical transparency through which beauty and truth nevertheless radiate.

And it is certainly why man may use his freedom to turn toward truth or illusion, atma or maya, O or Ø. The ego is a bipolar, janus-faced sumbitch, which it must be if we are to be free. It is why the left will always be with us, and why Bernie Sanders will never quit, both literally and figuratively.

Evil and falsehood remind us both that the world is not God (and therefore that God Is) and that there is no one good but the One.

Where God Begins and Ends

A hectic day today, plus not much inspiration anyway, so rather than force the issue, I give you a post from six years ago. As usual, the only criterion for inflicting it upon readers is that, hey, it kept my attention. Plus, it is occasionally helpful to consult the past to see if I have changed any fundamental views, or if I am still on the same page with myself. Originally titled Within and Without the Godhead -- a reference to Beatle George's Within You and Without You.

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In recent days, we have been discussing the principial distinction between Being and Beyond-Being, as a prelude to mapping the vertical reality in which man has his being.

Why does any of this matter, you might ask? First of all, we've only just begun lifting and deveiloping our pneumagraphy of the vertical.

But the short answer is that it is the only metaphysic that not only makes sense, but makes total sense. Not only is it true, but all truth -- both religious and scientific -- is grounded in it. If you have a better one, I'd be happy to hear about it. But most alternatives are ridiculously shallow, inconsistent, or incomplete, at least when they aren't refuting themselves (e.g., scientism, Darwinian fundamentalism, or any other purely horizontal metaphysic).

As nine out of ten whollymen agree, only the Good is ontologically real, while evil is a deprivation; the same can be said of truth and falsehood, beauty and ugliness, freedom and slavery, liberty and leftism, capitalism and socialism. In each case, the latter term is only a cosmic possibility because it is parasitic on the former.

Schuon reminds us of Aristotle's dictum that it is in the nature of the Good to communicate or radiate itself. Here we touch on an aspect of the Trinitarian Godhead, for what is the Trinity but eternal communion?

But at this point we would like to discuss this in more general and universal terms. Plus, we are talking about the "descent" of the Good, so to speak, as opposed to the Good that abides within the Absolute. In other words, it is one thing to say that "God is good." But how does so much good end up down here, of all places?

For unlike some of our competitors, we don't spend a lot of time wondering how all the evil got here. Rather, we wonder about how all the love, truth, beauty, creativity, and freedom got here.

In speaking of "God's will," Schuon suggests that it matters whether we are talking about Being or Beyond-Being. One might say that Beyond-Being "wills" Being, and that Being wills creation. In short -- and this may unsettle Christians, but we'll find a way to make it work -- it is as if there are two levels in God, even though God of course remains one (similar to how he can be three and one).

A key point, in the words of Schuon, is that this creation or "manifestation by definition implies remoteness from its Source, so that in 'willing' manifestation, the Essence wills implicitly and indirectly that ransom which we call evil, on pain of not wishing to radiate or 'diffuse' Itself, precisely."

Again, if creation is to be -- a creation that is truly semi-autonomous and not just an extension of God -- then evil must be, even while being "impermissible." Thus, there is a reason why even in paradise there is a serpent -- who symbolizes the whole possibility of "falling vertically" further and further from the Source, even into the blind nothingness of pure evil and falsehood, i.e., hell. Here again: one might say that because God is, hell must be (since he is Justice, among other attributes).

Schuon raises a subtle but nevertheless critical point; not everyone will be comfortable with it, but I see no way around it: "[T]he Divine Will which wills moral good and for this reason forbids sin, is not the same as that which wills the world: the Will of Beyond-Being... wills the world itself, whereas the Will of Being... presupposes the world and exerts itself only within the world."

For me, this elegantly resolves the whole problem of theodicy. Sophists throughout the ages have tried to disprove the existence of God by saying that he is either omnipotent or good, but that he cannot be both, for if he can eliminate evil but doesn't, then he isn't good, and if he cannot eliminate evil, then he isn't omnipotent.

But if Schuon is correct, then this is an illusory problem rooted in a false metaphysic, in which there is only God and World, which is then covertly reduced to just God. In short, it presupposes a kind of single-level pantheism, so that God is personally responsible for everything that happens.

But that is not how the cosmos works. And it is especially not how man works, since he has free will and is able to make the conscious choice between good and evil. Our free will is a legitimate gift, not some illusory side effect of God's iron will. Rather, we may obviously go against God's will, which is the only reason why we may align ourselves with it.

The cosmos is shot through with degrees of freedom which are the residue of the Divine freedom, so to speak. Thus, we can follow its traces to the very periphery of creation, for example, in the quantum indeterminacy, or in the upward thrust of the genome.

But the higher up the vertical scale, the more freedom. This, of course, presupposes that there is a virtually infinite range of freedom within the human being as well. Being that the human being is the microcosm -- a cosmos within the Cosmos -- he may be as enslaved to an extrinsic program as an ant, or as free as the saint or sage who has conquered illusion and aligned himself with the Real.

Schuon expresses the same point in another way: "Beyond-Being desires good as radiation, manifestation or world, whereas Being desires good as the participation of things in the Divine Good."

Yes, God is good, but in different ways, depending on one's perspective. Note that after the creation, God blesses it as good. This refers to Being itself, which is essentially good, in spite of all the mischief that will ensue as the result of a quasi-autonomous creation that is relatively separate from God. It is surely a core truth that the mischief is ineveateapple.

Elsewhere I read of a good analogy. That is, I willed my son into existence. But I do not will the badness he does, even while knowing full well that he will inevitably do naughty things. To extend the analogy, willing him to exist is Beyond-Being, whereas willing him to be good is in the realm of Being.

This also speaks to the distinction between guilt and innocence. Civilization cannot exist in the absence of a system of justice, even though it can never be absolutely just (rather, only God can). There are always going to be "extenuating circumstances" if we look hard enough, especially with the development of modern pseudo-psychology, which can provide an alibi for anything.

Which is why the Christian is enjoined to love the sinner but not the sin. In other words, he is to judge acts and not souls.

You will note the cultural mayhem that ensues (and that did ensue) when this principle is ignored, and we engage in the impossible task of trying to judge souls, as the left has been doing for the past fifty years or more. We must understand criminals (except white collar or skinned criminals), empathize with them, get to the "root causes" of their sociopathy and criminality.

Or, we must understand why the Palestinians and Islamists behave like such monsters. No, actually we mustn't. Rather, we must kill them, insofar as they insist on behaving like monsters -- just it was necessary to kill Nazi and Japanese supremacists.

The left would like us to displace God and judge souls, which is strictly impossible for man. It is well above our praygrade, which is why it is preferable to stick with acts that we know to be wrong.

So, there are different levels "within" God. Or are there? That is the question. Or, the question is whether there is any support for this view in the Bible or in tradition.

There would appear to be, in the distinction between God and Godhead, the former corresponding to Being, the latter to Beyond-Being. Or, perhaps one could say that God is cataphatic, whereas Godhead is apophatic.

And Meister Eckhart often makes this distinction, without which his theology doesn't make sense. For example,

When I dwelt in the ground, in the bottom, in the stream, and in the source of the Godhead, no one asked me where I was going or what I was doing. Back in the womb from which I came, I had no God and was merely myself. And no one misses me in the place where God ceases to become.

Or

God acts but the Godhead does not act. The mystery of the darkness of the eternal Godhead is unknown and never was known and never will be known.

So, this would also resolve the question of how God can change and yet not change....

Jokers & Dark Knights of the Soul

I lost the post I was working on, so by way of compensation, an old post from eight years ago which I found mildly innertaining, even if its takeaway, if it has one, is somewhat obscure. It will be edited as necessary.

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What is intelligibly diverse must be unified and whole, and only what is whole and unified can be intelligibly diverse. At the same time, only what is diversified can be intelligibly one. This is because change requires continuity if it is to be change of anything at all, and the parts of what is continuous must be distinguishable or else it congeals to a dimensionless point (or instant).... Although a whole is a single unity, it is at the same time a unified diversity. The reality of time, therefore, establishes concurrently the reality of a whole which is nontemporal. --Errol Harris

Atheistic types like to accuse religious folks of being naively uncritical about scripture, and no doubt many are. But the same can be said for radical secularists who adopt a naive and credulous stance toward the natural sciences, as if they require no metaphysical foundation and simply "speak for themselves."

But there is no meaningful scientific observation that isn't theory-laden, and as soon as one examines the implicit theories with which science is laden, one is led back into the realm of pure metaphysics. And once that happens, you soon discover that the naive religionists are not so naive after all.

As Errol Harris writes, "all the stock arguments against metaphysics, from Kant to Wittgenstein, have long been exposed as self-refuting, so that far from being impossible, metaphysics is indispensable and unavoidable, always inescapably presupposed in whatever philosophical position is adopted -- even one that repudiates it."

Now, metaphysics aims at the comprehension of the cosmos in its totality, both in its vertical and horizontal aspects. Any scientistic metaphysic which aims only at an explanation of the horizontal world eliminates in a stroke the very realm where metaphysical truth abides. This is the principial realm of which the horizontal is a prolongation -- which is why it is said, for example, that the Torah is prior to the world, or why Jesus could say that "Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away." Likewise, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God..."

Of metaphysical certitude, Schuon writes that it results from the "coincidence between truth and our being; a coincidence that no ratiocination could invalidate. Contingent things are proven by factors situated within their order of contingency, whereas things deriving from the Absolute become clear by their participation in the Absolute, hence by a 'superabundance of light'... which amounts to saying that they are proven by themselves. In other words, universal truths draw their evidence not from our contingent thought, but from our transpersonal being, which constitutes the substance of our spirit and guarantees the adequacy of intellection."

I suppose there is one way to avoid metaphysics, and that is to be genuinely psychotic, and to truly live in a world without a priori meaning, sense, and coherence. I am told that the Joker in the new Batman film is such a person. Of him, commenter Dusty writes that he is

"a perfect personification of transcendent evil. That is, the act of rejecting transcendence a priori at the same time downwardly transforms that person into an inverted reflection of the saving grace from above. True transcendent evil is a faceless force until given a temporary one by an earthly personality.

"Notice that the joker in Dark Knight is in truth a faceless terror all throughout. He really has no personal history: no name; his clothes are self-made; the past that he does reveal turns out to be contradiction and lies; and even the face that we do see is painted in the style of the Jungian archetype of the mad clown. There's nothing there but a trail of violence and disaster. Whence did he come? Where did he go?"

You see? A diversified chaos, with no wholeness or unity. You might say that the Joker is deconstruction incarnate, or the archetype of Tenured Man:

"He is chaos personified, and the only connection that he does have with grace is a masochistic-like dependency on the archetypal hero who opposes his will. Even the darkest of nights, night within night, evil for the sake of evil, must necessarily maintain contact with the light, or else there would exist an absolute hell, which is strictly impossible unless God chose to suffer it himself. But if God is Good, he would choose eternal delight, and not an eternal dark night."

That comment is loaded with insights that need to be unpacked. For example, notice how our scientistic troll [we were being pestered by an irritating troll at the time] is indeed dependent upon us, not vice versa. We do not seek him out, and do our best to ignore his irrelevance. But he "must necessarily maintain contact with the light," hence his desire to associate with us rather than with his own kind, which would indeed be a kind of cold and dry hell. Just imagine those scintillating conversations between blind atheists sharing stories of what they cannot see!

Let's discuss the idea of "a perfect personification of transcendent evil." Now, evil cannot actually be transcendent. Rather, it can only mimic and mock transcendence by escaping the obligations of our humanness from below.

This is one of the things that creeped me out about the opening ceremony of the Peking Olympics a few nights ago. I only caught the first 20 minutes or so before turning if off. Yes, I could see that there was a kind of bombastic majesty taking place, but toward what end? Toward man as ant, or the elimination of man as such. It was like a leftist mass, I suppose.

2000 drummers playing in lockstep? Give me one immortal jazz drummer playing around with the beat, adding his own flavor, throwing in his own unpredictable syncopations, being an individual. For that is what America is all about: not the ant as ant, nor the ant in opposition to the hive, but rising above -- i.e., transcending -- it.

Man can "get around" the ego from above or from below. In the case of a great jazz musician, while he "stands out," it can never be in a selfish way, or it won't be jazz anymore. Rather, the whole point is that in real jazz, each of the parts is subordinate to an emergent, higher unity that is being spontaneously created in the moment, in an organismic manner.

I don't think it's any coincidence that jazz was invented in America, as it is our quintessential art form, combining as it does a maximum of freedom (which is to say, individuality) and discipline, for it obviously requires much more discipline to be a great jazz musician than it does to be in a glorified marching band. Likewise, anyone with a mediocre intellect can understand science. But not everyone can understand Aquinas or Schuon or so many other true theologians.

Now, the cosmos is ordered (as we all know, cosmos is from the Greek word for order). Everywhere we look, order. There is incredible mathematical order in the equations of physics, in chemistry, in the genome, everywhere. There is also order in the human psyche and in the human spirit, two distinct categories that people have tended to conflate over the past 300 years or so. But the psyche is more or less the area addressed by psychology, while the spirit is the domain of religion (although there is admittedly much overlap, as there must be, just as there is overlap between physics and chemistry, or chemistry and biology).

Toward the end of the 19th century, when reductionistic materialism was at its zenith, there was an attempt to reduce the psyche to a purely material or "energic" phenomenon (and to eliminate the spirit altogether). One sees this in the theories of Freud, which absurdly reduce the mind to a kind of pressure cooker seeking to let off the steam of primitive instincts and impulses; or in the behaviorists, who imagined that there was no such thing as a psyche, only behavior.

In fact, there are people who still believe this. I remember during my internship, getting into a heated debate with a fellow intern who was a behaviorist. At the time, I didn't yet realize that the discussion would be as pointless as trying to bring light to our scientistic troll. After all, how does one impart truth to someone who believes only in behavior? I suppose by physically striking him on the head with a book.

Anyway, this is an example of a man who voluntarily cashed in his humanness for a kind of faux liberation, in which nothing means anything. Thus, he succeeded in escaping the pain of the human state from below.

Isn't this what the Joker would say? He's just a behaviorist with the courage of his absence of convictions. He's just a mindless man thinking. Or, in behaviorist terms, just a dead man walking, a living death.

Existence is unavoidably tied up with language -- with the Word -- because to have existence is synonymous with having a definition, even if we cannot put it into purely logical words. For example, Just Thomism writes that

"The idea of soul arises when we notice that some bodies are alive and others are not. Our judgment of what is alive and what is not is far from infallible, but it remains that among the physical things we know, some are alive and others are not. Words like 'soul' were first imposed from primitive theories of what made a living thing alive: early words for soul simply meant 'breath'; although it is unclear if they thought that breath was really soul or if it was more the clearest sign of whatever soul was. Theories about the soul quickly became more precise. The Greeks had a vast multitude of opinions about what makes something living -- the best of which was that the soul was some kind of organization in a body which involved the mixture of various elements in the right proportion."

Thus, for someone who is alienated from his own soul, it will simply be a kind of nonsense word that corresponds to nothing real, like "unicorn." This is one of the crude arguments that bonehead atheists commonly make, all the while imagining themselves to be sophisticated, courageous, or clear thinking. But the joke is on them, for

"Our modern scientists who deny the spiritual existence of the soul because they can account for human life without it are no different than a bookbinder who denies the existence of writing style or syntax because he can account for the whole book without mentioning them at all. In a sense he is right. He can completely account for the book without once invoking syntax or grammar. For that matter, the marketer, bookseller, and distributor needn't speak of syntax and grammar in order to give their own complete account of a book. Their way of analyzing a book into its relevant parts doesn't need to include this" (Just Thomism).

So our troll is correct, in that he does adequately convey the universal truths of the undead.

Look What I Found

Just a short post. Not much time this morning. Feel free to add to my anemic exegesis.

The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up; then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

The first thing that occurs to us is that the treasure is completely unmerited, or at least not tied in with any.

Rather, the man apparently stumbles upon this valuable find. It's as if he has won the lottery, except he didn't even know he had a ticket. This is unlike the pearl of great price, which the merchant was actively seeking.

All of salvation history, says Rutler, can be seen as "an account of how the bumbling and stumbling human race won the Great Lottery," for "grace is gratuitous."

This is something I was trying to impart to my son the other day. He is prone to moods in which he questions the existence of God, or proclaims the whole business to be stupid or made-up. I remind him that thus far he has grown up in a Christian context, both at school and at home (and socially), such that the graces that have come to him as a consequence may well be invisible to him.

I tell him to imagine different circumstances in which there would be no channels for these graces. As Rutler puts it, if we could see behind the veil, we would likely "be astonished at how many times holy grace dropped into our laps without recognizing it." We would see how entitled and how spoiled we had been.

There is the grace and the response to it. In the parable, the man responds to the unexpected grace by selling everything and buying the field. He presumably sells everything because in light of what he has discovered, everything amounts to nothing.

I give this claim No Pinocchios, because a de-spiritualized life is hardly worth living, especially after one has tasted the alternative. If one has never experienced the grace -- if one has shut it out, rather -- then the treasure won't even be recognized as valuable.

No doubt this is why God withdraws the grace from time to time, so we don't lose our perspective. If it were always there, we wouldn't notice it -- like my son.

"What is granted can easily be taken for granted, without the faintest amen."

Christians who have not lost their perspective do not pretend to be better than non-Christians. Rather, they just stumbled upon the treasure. And "once this sacred deposit of faith is discovered by the gift of grace, the stumbler buys the field."

Wise Men From the Yeast

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.

Jesus told the the crowds all these things in parables; without a parable he told them nothing. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet:

'I will open my mouth in parables; I will proclaim what has been hidden from the foundation of the world.'

The original prophecy occurs in Psalm 78: I shall open my mouth in parables; I shall speak of hidden things from of old.

Hidden since the foundation of the world. Three thoughts occur immediately: what is the foundation of the world?; what is hiding in it?; and how does Jesus know these two things?

As to the latter, either he was there or someone in a position to know told him. The Psalm goes on to say that What things we heard, these we also knew. And our fathers described them to us. It was not hidden from their children in a different generation, and will someday be known by children yet born.

So the Psalm is adverting to a lost spiritual heritage, but Jesus seems to speaking of an unknown knowledge that surpasses even this, and that no man has ever known. Rather, it has been hidden since the foundation of things.

The kingdom of heaven is like yeast. It seems that this yeast has been here since the foundation; it was mixed with the flour of creation, such that there is something in the cosmos -- something in the (supernatural) nature of things -- that causes it to "rise," so to speak.

What could it be? Now interestingly, there is no science that can function without reference to this yeast, although of course it is never acknowledged. Let us assign the variable y to this yeastly factor that pervades science, from physics to biology to interpersonal neurobiology and beyond.

Now, what do I mean that y pervades science? Well, let's begin at the bottom, with physics. For votaries of a scientistic metaphysic, physics is "the foundation of the world." There are surely things hidden there, but nothing mysterious (?!), rather, just mathematical equations and such.

For example, when Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, he discovered something that had presumably been there all along, hidden in plain sight, ever since the cosmos came into being.

The other day I was reading the original humanist manifesto, which also presumes to speak of things hidden since the dawn of existence, and to correct various misconceptions to which man is heir.

In its prelude it assures us that "The importance of the document is that more than thirty men" -- thirty men! -- "have come to general agreement on matters of final concern and that these men are undoubtedly representative of a large number who are forging a new philosophy out of the materials of the modern world."

So it's pretty important. Self-important, anyway.

Note that they are claiming to "forge a new philosophy out of the materials of the modern world," whereas Jesus claims to explicate an ancient wisdom that has been here forever. But the humanists assure us that religion has lost its significance and is "powerless to solve the problem of humans living in the Twentieth Century."

That's a bold statement. Let's examine their first point: "Religious humanists regard the universe as self-existing and not created."

Hmmm, how'd that work out? Turns out the universe is not self-existing; rather, it not only came into existence at a specific time, but time itself paradoxically came into existence with it. Furthermore, the universe is implicate with all sorts of mathematical codes, and no code can encode itself. Just ask Gödel.

"Humanism believes that man is a part of nature and that he has emerged as a result of a continuous process." Well, yes. But the statement you just made -- that man is a part of nature -- transcends nature. If it doesn't, then no true statements are possible and you are speaking from faith, not knowledge.

I don't think I want to spend this post fisking the Humanist Manifesto, deserving though it might be. But to say that man emerges as a result of a continuous process is to acknowledge that he is somehow baked into the cosmic cake. A humanist can only pretend to understand how this is possible.

We say it is possible because of the y-factor. The latter is precisely what causes -- or better, permits -- life to emerge from matter, humanness to emerge from biology, and spirit to emerge from man. The invisible yeast is always at work, otherwise the process we call "evolution" could never occur, not on any plane of existence.

The parable, says Rutler, tells us how the Kingdom of Heaven develops: "the process is slow, but it is a procession with a purpose. Through the persuasive influence of personalities transformed by love, Christians will be the yeast that raises the culture through them" -- the Resurrection being the last Word in yeastly rising.

This implies that the Resurrection itself was and is not only hidden from the foundation, but is the foundation.

"Without the yeast of grace, the human race us stale and dying.... Christ alone can save culture. There will be dark ages and golden ages, but Christ is the Light through them all."

Or the yeast. Which is to say, y.

To quote MotT,

"In order to be a religious scientist or a scientific believer honestly..., it is necessary to add to the definite horizontal aspiration the definite vertical aspiration, i.e., to live under the sign of the cross...." You might say that the horizontal axis is the flour of matter and energy, while the vertical axis is the yeast of ascent.

Arboreal Deity Cerebration

The parable of the mustard seed is the briefest of parables, but when explicated grows into a sprawling post, so that Raccoons of the world can find slack in it...

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed which a man took and planted in his field; it is the smallest of all seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that birds of the air come and nest in its branches.

A footnote in my Study Bible says that the mustard seed symbolizes the disciples who "began as just a few men, but soon 'encompassed the whole earth'" -- almost like Jesus knew this would eventually happen or something.

The seed also symbolizes "faith entering a person's soul, which causes an inward growth of virtue," such that he becomes increasingly godlike (AKA theosis).

And on the opposite page, I see that there is a whole section on parables, which are "stories in word-pictures, revealing spiritual truth." In Hebrew and Aramaic, the word is also related to allegory, proverb, and riddle.

With apologies to our godless friends, parables can function a bit like koans, which, according to the google machine, are paradoxical anecdotes or riddles used in Zen to demonstrate the inadequacy of logical reasoning and to provoke enlightenment.

In like fashion, parables "give us glimpses of Him whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways." The point is to vault us out of our habitual manner of thinking.

Which is why they require a bit of "work" on our end: the meaning "is not evident to all who hear them. The listener must have spiritual ears to hear, and even then not all have the same degree of understanding."

Parables are layered, as it were; or rather, we are layered, and therefore understand the parable according to our own depth.

The Study Bible cooncurs: the parables demonstrate that "people are responsible for their own lack of receptivity: having grown dull and insensitive," they are unwilling or unable to hear or accept the message.

Importantly, insight into them "does not come simply through an intellectual understanding"; rather, they are, as it were, relatively unsaturated containers into which a kind of higher understanding -- AKA faith -- may pour itself.

Rutler adverts to the intricacy -- and mystery -- of any seed. Jesus's "earthly contemporaries would have been confounded by the system that encodes in the first inkling of a life all that the organism will become.... A seed is alive, even if it looks like little more than lint," just as "the first cell of human life is alive" even if we call it a "blastocyst."

For Rutler, the seed represents the Church, "nascent and fragile" yet destined to reach over mountains, across oceans, and even through cultures, baptizing and transforming what is worthy and leaving the rest behind.

This despite the fact that "The little seedling did not seem to have much promise, and it seemed to die when it sprouted into a cross."

It seems that the seed is simultaneously incarnation, cross, and church, i.e., Body of Christ. Or, the sprawling Body of Christ is the mature plant that has grown from its tiny seedling.

Dávila has an arboreal aphorism that relates somewhat to the above: We cannot find shelter in the Gospel alone, as we also cannot take refuge in the seed of an oak tree, but rather next to the twisted trunk and under the disorder of the branches.

Which is why to fell sacred groves is to erase divine footprints.

Having said that, Souls that Christianity does not prune never mature.

Those three aphorisms add up to the idea that the seed is planted in time, which is why it is entirely bound up with history, which is to say tradition. History is the twisted trunk and tradition the unruly branches. Some Protestants would cut down the tree of tradition to try to get back to the seed, but that is to erase footprints the divine has left in history.

Nevertheless, prudent pruning is always advised. A couple of years ago a massive tree in my side yard split in two, because a huge branch had grown too large and too remote from the central trunk.

There's a parable in there somewhere....

Tares & Snares: Give Me Liberty or Give Me Stuff

Once upin a timeless...

The kingdom of heaven may be compared to a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away, cloaked in his darkness.

So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared also. And the servants of the householder came to him and said, 'Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then has it weeds?'

'An enemy has done this,' he replied. The servants asked him, 'Do you want us to go and pull them up?' 'No,' he answered, 'lest in gathering the weeds, you root up the wheat along with them. Let both grow together until the harvest. At that time I will tell the reapers: Gather the weeds first and tie them in bundles to be burned; then gather the wheat into my barn.

Once again Jesus furnishes his own exegesis -- or at least decodes the symbols -- equating the field with the world, the farmer with himself, the sower of weeds with the evil one, the good seed with "the sons of heaven," the lousy seed with "sons of the evil one," the harvest with the end of time, and the reapers with his angels.

Exactly what is a tare, anyway? Sources inform me that it is a naughty weed that not only resembles wheat when young, but is indistinguishable from it. You won't be able to tell the difference until harvest time, when both have matured.

Plus their roots may become entangled below ground, so you won't be able to pull the tare without risking the wheat. Nor do you want to confuse the one with the other and eat the tare, for it apparently causes dizziness and nausea. It's bad food.

The moral of the story? This world is Messed. Up. Until the end of time.

Note how grace falls from heaven in the form of the good seed. But it is as if, on the way down, there are cross currents from another source, which contaminate what God has poured out.

Interestingly, the bad seed is specifically a counterfeit version of the good. It is as if God throws down sound money, but before it hits the ground the Evil One tosses out millions in counterfeit bills. He must have studied the genuine bills closely in order to produce the phony ones.

The parable, according to Rutler, calls us "to exercise patience with the human will as it exercises its God-given freedom," for freedom itself is neither good nor bad. Rather, it depends entirely upon what one does with it. Or, to be perfectly accurate, it depends upon the vector of the freedom, i.e., where it is aimed.

As it so happens, this is one of the biggest differences between left and right. There is a chapter devoted to this in The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree. Let's check it out and see if it has anything to say about wheat and tare.

Ah, yes. Our real freedom is a natural right that does not (could not) come from the state. But modern liberalism creates and confers new freedoms that it inevitably (necessarily) sows with tares of coercion and control. In author words,

"[O]ur" -- which is to say, the left's -- "most recent ideal of freedom is a rather paradoxical one. We want a radical combination of personal rights and freedoms, but also a broad range of goods and services provided to all by the state."

One of these is not like the other!

"[T]his historically novel combination of enemy opposites" may be characterized as "libertarian [liberTAREan ho ho] socialism, under which citizens have all the personal, bodily, and especially sexual freedoms imaginable, while their former political, economic, social, and expressive freedoms are increasingly either eliminated altogether or heavily regulated by the state, its courts, and tribunals."

Ripped from the headlines, as it were.

So the state always sows tares into its bogus promises of wheat. It's another way of saying that the government that does anything for you can do anything to you.

Look at the promises of ObamaCare, or Social Security, or Medicare, whatever. There are tares enough in state subsidized college, but just wait until it's free! We are still recovering from the economic catastrophe caused by the state sowing its tares into the mortgage industry.

And here is an especially distressing story: California is sowing tares of statism into all its textbooks (as if they aren't far enough left as it is). This is to ensure that children grow up to be worthless tares fit only for hell. Which they will proceed to reproduce on earth, like good little statists.

As to the demons who sow the tares into the textbooks of innocent children? Necks & millstones, says the sower of good seed.

There is horizontal freedom and there is vertical freedom, and unless the former is informed by the latter, it reduces to nothing more than... nothing, really, because it is utterly meaningless.

In fact, to separate the vertical from the horizontal is perhaps the most efficient way to turn God's joyous wheat of freedom into tares of ontological dread and existential mischief.

Back to Rutler. He says that the parable opposes the idea of man's total depravity, "for the bad seed comes after the good seed in Christ's telling. In the beginning, the field was good, and the first seed was good. Nature is not originally evil..."

Note also that the evil one waits until good men are sleeping before he does his nefarious business, i.e., sowing the bad seed. He doesn't do it in broad daylight, being that sunlight is always the best disinfuckedup.

"The enemy obscures lucidity with euphemisms and cloaks with pride the consciences of bright minds." You might day that he focuses an intense beam of darkness so as to turn their mindfields insight-out.

Libruls are tarists, no doubt about it.

Seed & Soil, Word & Womb

I'm reading an interesting book -- Hints of Heaven -- that analyzes each of Jesus' parables. "Analyzes" is probably the wrong word; there's some of that, but it's more of a meditation on their meaning. I will try to add to Rutler's exegeses if I can, but there are no guarantees, the spirit blowing where it will and all.

Now, if this is God speaking, these parables should be of concern to us all -- not just the content but the form as well, for why should a co-creator of the cosmos specifically choose this idiosyncratic manner of expression? There must be something about the parabolic form itself that is conducive to transmitting what he wants us to know, and in the way he wants us to know it.

But in any event, as foretold in Psalms, I will open my mouth in parables, I will utter what has been hidden since the foundation of the world. That's a bold statement!

Let's get some preluminaries out of the way -- like, exactly what is a parable? It is "a similitude employing a brief narrative in order to teach a spiritual lesson" (Rutler). All told there are 24 of them in the synoptic gospels, but for whatever reason, none in John. They are "hints of heaven," or "delicate and veiled indications of our true homeland." Thus they are what we annoyingly call reveilation, revealing and veiling at the same time.

Jesus even gives us one reason why he communicates in parables: because some people hear without understanding and see without perceiving. Thus, it seems that the parable requires a bit of mental work on our end in order to make the penny drop. It reminds me of psychotherapy, the trick of which is to guide the patient to a realization, as opposed to just providing the answer.

The first parable is The Sower and the Seed. It goes a little like this (I just grabbed the first translation that came up; it's not necessarily the same one Rutler uses):

A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path and was trodden under foot, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil and grew, and yielded hundredfold.

In this case, Jesus even explains the parable to the slow-on-the-uptake disciples:

The seed is the word of God. The ones along the path are those who have heard; then the devil comes and snatches away what was sown in their heart. The seed falling on rocky ground refers to someone who hears the word and at once receives it with joy. But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. The seed falling among the thorns refers to someone who hears the word, but the worries of this life and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the word, making it unfruitful. But the seed falling on good soil refers to someone who hears the word and understands it. This is the one who produces a crop...

This parable, according to Rutler, is about our receptivity to grace; it is "more about the soils than the Sower." The seed is the Word, but herebelow the Word falls into more or less fertile soil. Jesus names four kinds of soil with differing degrees of receptiveness and therefore fertility.

Rutler identifies the first -- the seed which falls by the wayside -- with "the path of the proud, who consider the seed, the word of God, out of place or irrelevant."

This, it seems to me, speaks of the quintessential infertile egghead who prefers his own barren path to the fruitful fields of God -- like an ugly asphalt street running through an orchard. Think of academia. Because it has to do with "knowledge," some divine seeds inevitably fall there. But what happens to them? They are carelessly trampled underfoot, and if noticed at all, will be regarded as weeds instead of the very nourishment that sustains truth.

The rocky ground goes to those people who, deep down, are as shallow as can be. "This soil is superficiality, the seductive cosmetic of obtuseness." It is "the senselessness of those who channel-surf through life, addicted to shallow entertainment and insubstantial celebrities..." They are distracted by distraction and addicted to addiction. As Homer Simpson says of himself, "I've discovered my one weakness -- it's that I'm weak!

What about the thorny ground? "The seed that falls here is choked by illusions." It is a mixture of good and bad -- including good and bad religion. (I could say more, but I'm out of time; but think of all the chopra-esque religious parasites, or parasites on religion!)

Finally there is the good soil, which "makes a hybrid of heaven and earth." Pneumaticonically speaking, it is (↓↑), "the indescribable conversation between man and God"; it is the seed that "takes root in the earth [↓] and flourishes, growing upward [↑] toward paradise." I suppose the Archetype of archetypes here would be Word & Womb.

But more generally, it is a "blast of objective grace" plunged into "the soil of human subjectivity." Whatever else the mind is, it is womb and soil for the ends of birth and harvest.

Absolutism, True and False

When asked about his philosophy, Schuon would say that he was an absolutist -- which, in our relativist and totolerantarian world, is intolerable.

But everyone is an absolutist, either explicitly or implicitly, overtly or secretly (especially to oneself). Look at how the left wing tech giants vow to rid the internet of "hate speech" before the sun sets tomorrow. They absolutely won't tolerate it!

Some absolutists are frankly intolerable -- Islamists, social justice warriors, Black Lives Matter, campus crybullies, etc. So, how do we determine the difference between a healthy and functional absolutism vs. a fascistic and dysfunctional one? How do we know that my Absolute is worthy of reverence and respect, while yours deserves to be kicked in the balls?

In the previous post I mentioned Gairdner's excellent Book of Absolutes, which I don't believe I've ever playgiarized with at length. He notes that "for more than a century, the citizens of the Western world have been uncritically subjected in the media, the public square, and the classroom to the disturbing idea that there is no permanent truth in human life or in the material world and that the meaning of something can therefore be found only relative to something else."

Thus, "for most of us" -- and this would include me during my academic years of peak indoctrination -- "this has become the only indisputable truth of modern times..."

"We are told that time and space are relative" -- which is of course true; which is to say they are relative to one another and to the absolute speed of light -- but also that "Cultures are relative. Moral values are relative. Laws are relative. Even biological distinctions such as gender are said to be relative (or 'constructed') at will."

Here we see how mental and spiritual toxins that once polluted only the mountain peaks of academia have flowed down into the valleys and oozed up into the plains of politics, media, lower education, and popular culture.

Thus, for the first time in history we have a president who actually believes this shit. And I think that even Hillary Clinton is surprised that more than half of her base also fervently believes this lunacy -- not as a cynical strategy to gain power (which a Clinton always understands), but in terms of non-negotiable, absolute ideals. Hence the success of the Sanders campaign.

Let's get one thing out of the way: yes, everything is relative, the question being relative to what? For the proper Absolutist, everything is relative to the Absolute, AKA God. Indeed, we don't even believe it is possible to have the word "relative" without reference to the Absolute, for they mutually define one another.

But for the absolute relativist, everything is relative to everything else. This can make no logical sense, for it means that one is truly trapped in language, and cannot make any meta-statements from outside the system, i.e., from the perspective of the Absolute.

So in reality, everything is either ordered to the Absolute in a hierarchical way, or else we are reduced to a kind of absolute disorder about which we can make no true statements at all. Which is why to be a genuine Absolutist is to be a Truthist as well.

One reason why multiculturalism is such an abomination is that culture itself presupposes certain absolutes upon which everyone agrees. Widespread agreement on these absolutes is precisely what creates the conditions for a high-trust society.

In Gairdner's more recent The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree, he writes of how, when he was younger, "it was common at a dinner party with family and friends to find ourselves drawn into discussion and debate over the political and moral topics of the day."

Two observations, which I too well remember: first, no one was fearful of expressing their views, as this was prior to the oppressive regime of political correctness. Second, "I cannot remember any violent personal attacks, tears, or outrage over someone else's point of view, however wacky it may have seemed..."

But nowadays I can't even imagine volunteering my views in public unless I pick up clues from my interlocutor that I am in a Safe Space (I live in one of the most hermetically sealed liberal bubbles in the country). There is no doubt whatsoever that the Trump phenomenon is rooted in this experience -- which is why it doesn't matter what he says, so long as it disturbs liberal idiots.

And when I say "idiot," that's not an insult, rather, literal, for "the ancient Greeks actually used the word idiotes... to describe anyone who insisted on seeing the world in a purely personal and private way."

"Certainly, no young person in the past would have expected to impress a teacher by arguing that all truths are relative," for to do so is a confession of absolute ignorance and/or stupidity. If everything is relative, then truly, everyone deserves an A -- or F, which literally amounts to the same thing.

Hitler was an Absolutist. As was Stalin. And Mao. And the Islamists. How then is our Absolutism different from theirs?

Simple: our Absolutism means openness to the Absolute. In other words, it is a vertically open system in which we are always relative to the Absolute. What we call "general" or "natural" grace is the downward flow of energies from this nonlocal source (to be distinguished from the special grace of Christianity).

But the false Absolutism of the left always involves the superimposition of a manmode, faux absolute on the world, thus foreclosing the open vertical flow. Then, in a perverse caricature of reality, a kind of counterfeit grace flows "freely" from the state. Thus, thanks to Obama, more Americans are dependent upon this unbought material grace than ever before in our history.

At the same time, there is a relentless attack on the competing form of vertical grace, i,e., religion. The left must attack Christianity, because if Christianity is true, then leftism is both false and demonic.

Leaps of Faith Above and Below

I'm reading a book called The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree, by William Gairdner. I bought it because I really enjoyed his previous Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defense of Universals.

In fact, I had pulled the latter down from the shelf because I thought it might have something useful to say about King Barry's embarrassing sexual neurosis, which he wishes to force upon the rest of us via federal power. How weird is that?! Talk about violating the separation between crotch and state.

Obviously, one thing -- perhaps the one thing -- that divides liberals and conservatives is the existence and status of absolutes: we believe they exist and place constraints around our existence, while liberals insist -- absolutely! -- they don't.

In a logical world this would end the debate, with liberals hanging their heads in shame over their rudimentary but catastrophic error in reasoning. Fat chance! When your logic is this defective, it cannot be remedied by mere logic.

It's like mental AIDS: when your immune system is that compromised, you cannot expect it to save you from the consequences of a compromised immune system.

Analogously, reason functions very much like a cognitive immune system. It cannot actually bring us to truth as such -- for that always requires a leap -- but it can certainly kill a lot of bad and dysfunctional ideas along the way.

To be only capable of reason would be analogous to suffering from an autoimmune disease whereby the immune system ends up attacking healthy tissue along with the unhealthy. Mere rationalism is always circular and therefore tautologous.

What I find is that liberals are oblivious to this constraint, thinking that their faux absolutes are supported by logic, when they actually result from a leap of faith. Thus, they are the mirror image of religious folk, except their leap is unconscious and not reflected upon. (One definition of theology is conscious reflection upon revealed absolutes.)

Adam's fall repeats itself in the fallen personality. What this essentially means is that man is situated along a vertical axis, such that the fall is not just in the past but very much in our future. But so too is the possibility of ascent. Both the ascent and descent will require leaps of faith.

That is, man cannot go beyond the limits of agnostic rationalism; he is as it were enclosed in a circle, and cannot know what lies beyond this absurcularity without that leap of faith. This goes to Augustine's gag about believing so as to know (credo ut intelligam). Guffaw ha!

You can (implicitly) know a lot without (explicit) understanding, but you can't understand without implicit knowledge.

Which is precisely what the world's greatest logician, Gödel, proved with his ironyclad theorems: not that we can't know the absolutes that lie outside the circle of logic, but that we routinely know them in a translogical way. Frankly, we can't even think without the support of these implicit absolutes. They support everything we do, brainwise.

Thank God for atheists, because these negative agents of humanity perform a vital catabolic function of tearing down bad ideas -- like the logical immune system alluded to above. Being that they are catabolic, they release energy for the purposes of metabolism (i.e., the breaking-down is for the purpose of building-up).

But unalloyed catabolism equates to diabolism, because again, it reduces to an attack on healthy and unhealthy tissue alike. This is how garden-variety village atheism transitions to outright cosmic assoulery.

There are many "sexual absolutes" that are hardwired into man. These are things we don't have to think about or defend -- or at least didn't have to think about and defend until the left began attacking and undermining them.

Many of these absolutes were never thought about consciously, but rather, were settled by thousands of years of natural (and later, cultural) selection. So much for the left believing in Darwinism! For what is Bathroom Barry's peculiar attitude toward sexuality but a war on biology (and above)?

To be continued...

Love and Progress

You can't help noticing that music is very important to people and that most songs are about Luuuvvvv. But what is love about?

"Fundamentally," writes Schuon, "every love is a search for the Essence or the lost Paradise." Thus, it's sort of a category error to believe that this or that man or woman will somehow restore paradise for you. I mean, they might for a week, or a month, or six months, but beyond that, you're pushing your luck. Nostalgia can only sustain you for so long.

So, idealized, romantic love "bears witness to to this nostalgia for a far-off Paradise." Not that there's anything wrong with it, but we need to be prepared for what comes next, which is a kind of psychic inversion, through which... well, Schuon expresses it better than I can:

"To be at peace with God is to seek and find our happiness in Him; the creature that he has joined to us [in marriage] may and must help us to reach this with greater facility or with less difficulty," which again goes to precisely why and how marriage is a sacrament, i.e., a special channel of grace. It is an "outwardness with a view to inwardness," or a "form with a view to essence." It's why even atheists get married, although they have forgotten why. Or in other words, they do so for the unconscious nostalgia, not for the supraconscious hope.

The only other person I know of who speaks of marriage in this curious manner is the "esoteric orthodox" writer Boris Mouravieff. I haven't looked at it in a long time, but I remember it being pretty fruity. Let's see if we can find any useful nuggets!

Mouravieff cites a gag from some esoteric tome called The Golden Book that goes like this: To live means to love; / He who loves not, hardly lives. / He leads a mournful existence / Whose only meaning lies in the hope of loving.

And the same sentiment "had already been pronounced by St Paul nearly two thousand years ago. He said: the aim of life is to attain Love" (e.g. I Corinthians 14:1). "Better still," writes Mouravieff, "Love is the Aim of life on the whole cosmic scale, right down to the most primitive organisms."

"Love, like the personality, is also a Divine talent which is loaned to man..." And "anyone who does not develop his talent loses it." Regarding this divine loan, "The result is that one cannot command love any more than one can forbid love."

But "Even if the couple is composed of truly polar beings, if the lovers do not adhere to the supreme conditions demanded by Love, once their credit is exhausted, Love disappears" and "one finds oneself left with the broken pieces."

To me, this means that the polar relation must be infused with an energy from outside and above, or end up exhausting itself through sheer entropy. For which reason a long and happy marriage is a true miracle -- i.e., it is renewed and revivified by the miracle of grace. Or in the cryptic words of Petey, No body crosses the phoenix line lest it be repossessed and amortized.

Here is another crack from The Golden Book referred to above: Every man is born bearing within him the image of his polar being. / As he grows, this image grows within him... / Man is not conscious of it. Yet it is his Alter Ego... / In quest of her he must eternally go... / For in their union, the limit between the I and the Thou is obliterated... / And silence will then be the depository of the fullness of their Love.

A few more observations, these from volume 3: "The main danger for women, and above all young girls, lies in the frequently observed attitude of copying men, for then woman loses all the specific assets that give her her charm, so that she betrays her mission without any reason or benefit."

Re the Gender Wars, "let us try to imagine a child who... is born with a left arm ending in a right hand.... Can we think, even for a moment, that this malformation will not have an effect on the whole life of this unfortunate child? It is the same for young girls who cultivate a masculine spirit in a feminine body: by deforming themselves psychically, they also lose their charm [and how!], so that they fall into a third, psycho-pathological sex: the neuter sex."

And if this dreadful trend "is not stopped in time, this tendency to copy the other sex -- which can be found in men as well as women -- excludes both from any possibility of esoteric evolution."

What I would say is that sexual polarity is the (or a) basis of the (re)generative ingression of vertical energies through which we ultimately transcend this polarity. Or in other words, progressivism inevitably puts the kibosh on cosmo-pneumatic vertical progress.

On all planes, the objective sign of Love's participation is the creative spirit which animates the subjects for whom it has become an aim. Conversely, if we think we are in Love but do not notice an increase in creativity on any plane, either in ourselves or our partner, we can be sure that the relationship is based on anything but Love. --Mouravieff

Ascending and Descending Along the Male-Female Axis

Continuing with our theme, Schuon has an essay called The Problem of Sexuality, which I will simultaneously read and comment upon in order to ensure maximum incoherence and superficiality. He begins with the observation that "It would be impossible for the spiritual life in itself to exclude a domain as fundamental, humanly speaking, as sexuality; sex is an aspect of man."

Every culture regards sexuality as important, which is why they all regulate it in some form or fashion. Indeed, we can see what the left's sexual deregulation over the past 50 years has wrought: abortion, divorce, perversion, sexual conflict and confusion, and unhappy women in particular (probably because the deregulation is more congenial to the male's primitive nature than to the female's; indeed, most of the regulations were there to protect women and children from the predation and selfishness of men).

People like to blame Augustine for the West's ambivalent attitude toward sexuality, but it seems to me that Augustine simply latched on to and accentuated an ambivalence that is already there. But as Schuon says, "nothing that is human is bestial by its nature," although "it is necessary that our attitudes should be integrally human, in accordance with the norm imposed upon us by our deiformity." So, man can surely become bestial, but the bestiality is accidental and not essential.

Which raises an interesting question: is our fall accidental or essential? In other words, does it deform only the surface, or reach all the way to the core? For Schuon it is ultimately the former, even if all men are nevertheless fallen: "the human body, male or female, is a theophany, and remains so in spite of the fall." And "by loving one another, the spouses legitimately love a divine manifestation, each one according to a different aspect and a different respect."

In fact, the first thing that occurred to me upon familiarizing myself with Pope John Paul II's theology of the body, is that he was essentially explicating a kind of Christian tantric yoga, the point of which is to perceive the other as a divine manifestation. At the very least, marriage, being a sacrament, is a formal relationship that invites the ingression of vertical energies -- all the way into the body and down to its most intimate physical expression. In this regard, it is completely orthodox to view divine and sexual love as having the identical source and telos: "Fundamentally, every love is a search for the Essence or the lost Paradise."

It seems that Eve is the archtypal expression of an ambivalent attitude toward female sexuality, and why not? Eve is a message, as it were, to both men and women, albeit in different ways. For man is weak when it comes to being seduced, and woman is weak (although it masquerades as power) when it comes to seducing.

Dennis Prager often points out that from an early age, men are taught to deal with their innate weaknesses and faults, which revolve around violence and sexual predation. But it is politically incorrect to discuss the intrinsic weaknesses of women. If we could talk about them, we would certainly highlight how the gender gap in voting inevitably results in the election of feminized liberals and the growth of the swaddling state -- of the proliferation of wimps and bullies, often in the same person. Thus, so many of our societal problems are a direct consequence of unchecked and untutored female instinct.

It is as if man and woman must compensate for the reciprocal weaknesses of the other. Or, to put it conversely, there is a kind of "reciprocal superiority" on the spiritual plane, each assuming a "divine function" for the other.

Man stabilizes woman, woman vivifies man; furthermore, and quite obviously, man contains woman within himself, and vice versa.... Man, in his lunar and receptive aspect, 'withers away' without the woman-sun what infuses into the virile genius what it needs in order to blossom; inversely, man-sun confers on woman the light that permits her to realize her identity by prolonging the function of the sun. --Schuon

God and Gender

Let's continue with last Friday's post on the cosmic implications of human sexuality. I suppose we have to start with the cosmic implications of humanness as such, and then go from there. Again, human beings are in the image of the Creator, such that there are traces of our origin even in our physical form.

How so? Let's answer that in the form of an aphorism or two:

The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face (Dávila).

For that matter, the feminine body is far too perfect and spiritually too eloquent to be nothing more than a transitory accident (Schuon). Can I get a witness?

Thus, Christianity does not deny the splendor of the world, but rather invites us to search for its origin, to climb towards its pure snow (Dávila).

The journey is more aesthetic than epistemological; or, to be perfectly accurate, it is epistemology via aesthetics, or knowledge through beauty:

Approaching religion through art is not the caprice of an aesthete: aesthetic experience spontaneously tends to expand into a presentiment of religious experience (ibid.).

For which reason, When religion and aesthetics are divorced from each other, it is not known which is corrupted sooner (ibid.).

So, the human form is an aesthetic object, which in turn draws us toward its nonlocal spiritual source.

Recall Schuon's gag about the human station being both the summit of and exit from terrestrial conditions. The former goes to immanence, while the latter goes to transcendence; equally, the former goes to man's splendor, while the latter goes to his humility: man is a kind of everything/nothing, depending upon how we look, i.e., with two eyes or three.

Now, God is either beyond gender or the synthesis of both. Thus there is an aspect of man that is beyond gender, but in this regard, the left commits what Wilber calls a pre/trans fallacy, in that God is beyond gender, not before it. Insofar as man is concerned, he may transcend gender, but only after he is one. This is why the left is committing a systemic cruelty to children in trying to deny them, or confuse them about, this primordial identity.

As Schuon says, "the liberating Way may be either 'virile' or 'feminine,' although it is not possible to have a strict line of demarcation between the two modes" -- partly because each is always in a dynamic rapport with its projected complement. In Jungian terms, for the male, the animus relates to the projected anima, while for the female it is the other way around. We are all searching for the archetypal other who completes us on this plane.

Schuon points out that our deiformity must be a feminine attribute, in that we are the passive partner vis-a-vis God, who is active. Here, Mary represents the archetype of archetypes, i.e., of human receptivity to the Divine energy.

For which reason female has an ambiguous relationship to male. I don't want to trigger anyone, but Schuon suggests that "there are two ways of situating the sexes, either in a horizontal or in a vertical sense." According to the horizontal, "man is on the right and woman on the left," whereas considered vertically, "man is above and woman below" (as reflected in the God-Mary relation).

Anyone who uses this as a pretext for domination or oppression has thoroughly misunderstood the cosmic lesson. I would suggest that, to the extent that women are oppressed -- most conspicuously, in the Islamic world -- it is because of a pathological perversion of the vertical relationship, or an infection of that relationship by horizontal mind parasites.

Which I think Genesis 3 goes to. Consider the verticality of its metaphysic: Adam comes from God, and then Eve from Adam. The relationship is inverted when Eve listens to the serpent (a quintessential archetype of horizontality), who then pulls Adam away from God. This is not to blame woman per se, because Adam is still ultimately responsible for his ontological reverse metanoia, such that he turns from the above to the below. Eve only tempts, she does not compel.

And again, Mary represents the reversal of this reversal. Thus, the Eve/Mary axis is the same as the Nothing/Everything axis alluded to above. You might say that the serpent promises man everything and delivers nothing.

Like the left.

Cosmic Sex Education

The liberal fraud of sex education involves the bait and switch of telling children they are nothing more than biological beings -- thus excising sexuality from transcendence -- and then insisting that sexual identity is anything we want it to be, thus isolating it from biology altogether (so much for the left being "scientific").

The upshot is a denial of both transcendence (spirit) and immanence (biology), while introducing a counterfeit version of each. Counterfeit immanence redounds to infrahuman animality, while counterfeit transcendence is an omnipotent attitude toward one's own sexual nature -- as if one chooses it rather than vice versa.

But as Pieper writes, "The more necessary something is, the more the order of reason must be preserved in it." Thus, because "sexual power is so noble and necessary a good, it needs the preserving and defending order of reason." The virtue of chastity simply "realizes the order of reason in the province of sexuality." One wants to say that this virtue is precisely what renders sexuality human sexuality.

As such, unchastity "is in its essence the transgression and violation of the rational order in the province of sexuality," such that "in intemperance man sinks to the level of a beast" (although a specifically human beastling, not an innocent animal).

There is so much deliberate sexual confusion propagated by the left -- it is one of their prime directives -- that a review of our Cosmic Sexuality is in order. Perhaps the best place to start is an essay by Schuon called The Message of the Human Body, the sexual polarity -- or complementarity -- of which is not accidental but essential.

For to say that we are in the image of the Creator is to affirm that man -- including the body -- "manifests something absolute and for that very reason something unlimited and perfect."

This is not to reduce spirit to matter or form to substance, but only to say that the former are prolonged all the way into the latter, such that the body will reveal traces of its source. We are not Manichaeans. We do not deny the body, but rather, situate it in its proper context.

Time out for some aphorisms courtesy Nicolás Gómez Dávila:

'Sexual liberation' allows modern man to pretend to be ignorant of the multiple taboos of another kind that govern him.

The sensual is the presence of a value in the sensible.

Monotonous, like obscenity.

Sex does not solve even sexual problems.

It is impossible to convince the fool that that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals

Eroticism, sensuality, and love, when they do not converge in the same person, are nothing more, in isolation, than a disease, a vice, and foolishness.

Back to Schuon. Even our vertical posture is "a direct reference to absoluteness," such that man is "not only the summit of earthly creatures, but also, for this very reason, the exit from their condition." Thus, our verticality is not capped at the top, but rather, more like an open-ended arrow pointing to a perpetual transcendence.

Herebelow the Supreme Principle bifurcates into Absolute and Infinite: "the masculine body accentuates the first aspect, and the feminine body the second."

Let's pause here for a moment and consider what Schuon has just said. Perhaps you've never heard this expressed before. For me, it is a quintessential example of vertical recollection -- of anamnesis -- because as soon as you hear it, you say to yoursoph, "of course! How stupid of me not to have realized that." But it's why we have beauty contests for women and strength contests for men.

The converse would be perverse, i.e., strength contests for women (women are of course free to play sports, but it is not essential that they do so) and beauty pageants for men. We all know this in our bones, such that one must undergo years of liberal indoctrination to subvert these deep cosmic values. It doesn't mean we reduce a man to his strength or a woman to her beauty; again, these are simply archetypal prolongations from the source.

"Now, each of the bodies, the masculine and the feminine, manifests modes of perfection which their respective gender evokes by definition; all cosmic qualities are divided in fact into two complementary groups: the rigorous and the gentle, the active and the passive, the contractive and the expansive."

Aaaaaand we're outta time.

The Common Good and Other Illusions

Pieper has some good thoughts that go to our recent excursions into the parallels between man's original sin and his fatal conceit.

By way of background, note how the sufficient reason of our constitution is to safeguard our pursuit of happiness. This pursuit is an individual matter (or at least not governmental), and for good reason(s) -- one reason being that the government could not possibly define the common good except vis-a-vis its enumerated powers, e.g., law enforcement, justice (the legal kind), and military defense.

But to otherwise pretend to know what's good for us -- well, that is quintessentially Fatal Conceit territory. Besides, if you ask the state to define the common good, it will always and everywhere do so in a way that is good for the state.

It's just like the market. All of its millions of transactions occur because a person on one end wants the item or service more than the money it costs, while the person on the other end wants the money more than the item or service. In short, they have to agree, and this agreement yields a subjective sense of satisfaction.

Imagine some governmental entity presuming to understand those millions upon millions of experiences of satisfaction. Madness! If anyone is "satisfied" with ObamaCare, it is pure coincidence, because it specifically abolishes the nexus of satisfaction. You can be resigned to it, but not satisfied in the true sense.

It is as impossible to define the common good "as it is to define the 'essence' of the human person." In short, no one can do it but the person in question. Unless he is a child -- which is precisely why the left necessarily treats us as schoolchildren who are never permitted to graduate.

Here "we are able to identify once again an essential element of totalitarian regimes." That is, "the political powers claim the right to define in complete detail the specifics of the [common good]."

Remember the good old days when a liberal was just someone who wanted to reach into your shower and adjust the temperature? Now he's someone who wants to reach into your pants and adjust your biology.

"What is so ruinous here is the fact that the 'plan' becomes the exclusive standard that dictates not only the production of material goods but equally the pursuits of universities, the creations of artists, even the leisure activities of the individual -- so that anything not totally conforming to the standard is suppressed as... 'undesirable.'"

Amazingly, these liberal drones submit "voluntarily," or at least with no resistance, via the instinct to conform backed by the soft tyranny of political correctness.

It requires courage to stand up to the tyranny; in fact, "Courage is a testimony to the existence and power of evil in the world."

In short, "because justice and goodness do not automatically prevail on their own," courage is required to bring them about. "It is a liberal illusion to assume that you can consistently act justly without ever incurring risks" -- which reminds us of the old gag about liberals always dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good -- which is to say, courageous.

"To be courageous means: to oppose injustice in the face of overwhelming external power and to accept willingly any resulting disadvantage, be it only public ridicule or social isolation."

What is a bad man but a good man's teacher? And what is political correctness but the coward's inadvertant lesson in courage?

If a pornographic novel is advertised as 'risqué,' then in truth nothing at all is being risked. It would be much more risqué to declare publicly that chastity is part of what makes a person whole; this would be much more dangerous. --Josef Pieper

Garbage In, Liberalism Out

In my lifetime the left has been wrong on every major issue. That’s quite a record, and it leads one to wonder about the source of their preternatural consistency. What is it in them that causes such awful decision-making?

Whatever else it is, it involves an absence of the virtue of prudence. Prudence, writes, Pieper, is "highest in rank among the four cardinal virtues."

Recall the other three, justice, courage, and temperance. Why would they be subordinate to prudence? Because, for example, courage without prudence is just rashness or recklessness. Justice without it is -- well, anything from tyranny to social justice, which amount to the same thing in the end. And temperance without prudence reduces to a lukewarm relativism.

So prudence "is the mother of the other three virtues" and "precondition for all that is ethically good." But why, exactly?

Because prudence first and foremost implies contact with reality. Obviously, if we don't know what reality is, then we cannot make prudent decisions about it.

For example, if I fool myself into believing that socialism is actually possible, untold destruction follows from that single error.

As Hayek and von Mises teach us, the evils of socialism don't occur because it is possible but just poorly executed, but because it is strictly impossible. It pretends to know what no human being can possibly know, so its judgments are poisoned at the source.

Clearly, "to do what in reality is right and good presupposes some knowledge about reality; if you do not know how it is with things and how they stand, you are [practically, concretely] unable to choose what is ethically good." Not only do good intentions mean nothing in this context, but an intention detached from reality can't actually be good.

The sharp ideological differences in the country are a direct consequence of differing ideas about reality. Or, one side believes reality exists, while the other maintains it is both relative and a consequence of perception; which is to say they don't believe in reality at all. So really, the debate reduces to people who believe reality exists vs. people who don't.

Thus, from our side of the fence, this insane debate about school bathrooms is... I was going to say "surreal," but it's really subreal. There is no reality to it, and yet, we are forced to pretend there is. As such, to even concede that the other side has a point is to have validated a reality that does not and cannot exist (like "homosexual marriage").

Hey, I'm a psychologist. So back off, man. I try to heal delusions, not patronize or aggravate them. Otherwise the patient will end up healing me of my contact with reality.

"The precondition for every ethical decision is the perception and examination of reality." And "prudence is the art of making the right decision based on the corresponding reality..." So there are really always two steps: 1) contact with and receptiveness to reality, and 2) deciding rightly.

But reality is messy. Just because we have contact with it, it doesn't mean the correct decision will be obvious. We are not logic machines.

Rather, organisms that metabolize living truth: prudence is "the power of our minds which transforms knowledge of reality into realization of the good."

Little Big Mankind

Picking up where we set down yesterday, it is as if God -- better, the Godhead -- breaks his Coin of Infinity in two, such that he keeps the positive infinity for himsoph but gifts us with its negative image, which is actually an infinite capacity for him. After all, nothing short of the biggest vault will hold the largest coin.

Thus, God's infinity is "imprinted within us." It sets up a dynamism, because our infinity is on a perpetual search for the object that matches it. Nothing short of God satisfies the longing. This is because only two things are beyond all possible finites: God and man, in complementary ways.

Note that this automatically renders man superior to any finite object. It is why no finite object can float our boat in any permanent way.

However, in the absence of God, our own infinitude will be experienced as a kind of persecutory defect. Instead of engendering a fruitful dynamism, it will sponsor a restless compulsion for sensations and experiences that leads nowhere in the end.

You could say that the immanent God is a kind of infinite abyss, while the transcendent God is an infinite horizon. And one can sail after him in either direction and wind up in the same harbor. As Clarke writes, "the inner spiritual ascent of the soul to the One and the outer metaphysical ascent through the cosmos reveal themselves as two sides of the same coin." They "mirror each other in different orders."

Clarke says that Augustine is typically regarded as the quintessential exemplar of the inner ascent of the soul, while Thomas is the seen as our tour guide extraordinaire for the metaphysical ascent through the cosmos.

However, looked at more deeply, Thomas' carefully constructed ladder can be repurposed as a "springboard for [the soul's] final metaphysical-mystical leap to the Infinite Fontal Source of the whole, hidden in mystery from our direct gaze but pointed to by every finite image..."

So we got that going for us.

We are always face-to-face with the Ultimate. No wonder we feel so small! And yet, no other being is aware of this confrontation. No wonder we feel so big!

You'll often hear scientistic types talk about how small man is compared to the infinite spaces of the vast starry heavens blah blah blah. Well. Lots of rocks are bigger than man, too. So what? Does it make the rock superior to man? Obviously, no matter how big the rock, it's still just a rock.

Well, the same principle applies to the cosmos. I really couldn't care less how big it is. I mean, I care, but not really. Just as an intellectual curiosity, but not as any kind of ultimate statement about anything. Man always has the infinitude discussed above, so he transcends every object, up to and including the cosmos.

Pieper writes that "whenever we speak of the ultimate, of the ultimate and last, we have already implicitly thought of a penultimate and first. And with that, something has already been said about the human being: namely that his everyday life is situated between these different states of realization, disposed toward his ultimate potential but not necessarily reaching it..."

Thus, "By the act of creating him, God sets the human being upon a path whose goal is that 'ultimate' which can be called 'virtue' in its true sense: the realization of the divine design incorporated in the creature."

When we get this principle through our thick skulls, we are in a position to understand Jesus' shockingly orthoparadoxical statement that No one is good but One, that is, God.

And no one but man is small or large enough to get the gag.

Hey Buddy, Do You Have Change for an Infinity?

This post started off one way, but ended up another. It was supposed to be a pretend interview with Josef Pieper, as in me asking questions and he supplying answers. But I got carried away with the first question, so the answer(s) are thoroughly intermangled with my own bobservations, so it's really a case of aggravated playgiarism.

Let's start with the difference between science and philosophy, and why the former can never take the place of the latter.

A: The specialized sciences abstract from the meaning of Being as a whole, and must be satisfied with that. Conversely, the object of philosophy is 'the holy and manifest mystery of Being.'

Now, science is only possible because truth emanates from Being; when we conform to Being, truth is the result. So the method of this or that science is correct only when it allows itself to be determined and molded by its object.

The problem with postmodernism is that not only does it not submit to the object, it doesn't believe it is possible to do so. This is precisely how we end up with the perverse educational adventures of Bathroom Barry, who refuses to consider the biological object in order to determine the truth of its sex. It is literally no different than refusing to open one's eyes and distinguish a wall from a door or window.

In short, to accept the given as it gives itself is the precondition for learning anything about any thing. The only alternative is to project one's own psychic content onto the object, i.e., to be trapped in Kantworld or worse. And yet, this is the world to which we are forced to adapt, in which "perception is reality."

Note the demonic switcheroo, in that the essence of political correctness is forced submission to a reality which is only perceived. It is a secondary reality superimposed upon the first, say, "women earn 60 cents to the dollar," or blacks are disproportionately imprisoned. The left is all about replacing first reality with second reality, and then forbidding curiosity about the former.

This is why the left's answers are always so dreadfully simplistic. Reality is never as simple as the left's policies, or, more to the point, the left manages reality via a crude simplification. For reality always gives more than can be grasped by man; it is an inexhaustible 'light that can never be drunk up.'

The other day we were talking about original sin and the fatal conceit. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek talks about why the left is always totalitarian at its core:

"The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends.... it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends. It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends."

Which is why philosophy -- in the sense described above -- is forbidden by the left. Hey, it's why the state murdered Socrates, right? 400 years later the state tried to murder God. You'd think humans would get the message. The state certainly hasn't forgotten:

"So long as dissent is not suppressed, there will always be some [subversive Socrates or revolutionary Jesus] who query the ideas ruling their contemporaries" and put them to the test. Our new climate of intellectual fascism isn't new at all. The spirit of Obama was there in ancient Greece, preparing the hemlock.

As philosophy is adequation to Being, theology is adequation to God. Being is one of the names of God, so theology is obviously higher up the ontological food chain than is philosophy.

One reason why the left can never engage in philosophy is that philosophy -- obviously -- operates at the threshold of theology, and the left doesn't permit God. Analogously, it would be like attempting to study human biology without human psychology. There is a flow of intelligibility from the unitary human subject-object, and it is we who direct the flow into this or that sub-discipline.

But man, who is the mirror of the totality, is precisely the terrestrial analogue of the 'holy manifest mystery' of being. If we are ordered to the totality, we must in some sense be the totality in an implicit way.

Clarke touches on this in his The Philosophical Approach to God. He posits a kind of dialectic between two infinities, a "negative" and "positive" one. In reality there can be only the one infinite, but it is as if the infinite bifurcates into positive and negative images of itself, so to speak.

It's orthoparadoxical is what it is. Here is how Clarke describes it: man does not have the "positive infinite plenitude" which "is proper to God alone."

"But there can be an image of the divine infinity in silhouette -- in reverse, so to speak -- within man, precisely in his possession of an infinite capacity for God, or, more accurately, a capacity for the Infinite, which can be satisfied by nothing less. This negative image points unerringly towards the positive infinity of its original, and is intrinsically constituted by this relation of tendential (sic) capacity."

That's too much light. Can you dim it down a little?

Okay, it is as if "God had broken the coin of His infinity in two, holding on to the positive side Himself and giving us the negative side, then launching us into the world of finites with the mission to search until we have matched our half-coin with His."

But there's no such thing as a free launch. Rather, if you want the whole coin you have to pay with your ego.

A Quick Cure for News

Still a bit under the weather. Being that a head cold causes me to lose 20 IQ points, I don't want to risk posting, what with so many lives at stake.

However, it doesn't mean I can't exploit someone else's intelligence, in this case, Nicolás Gómez Dávila's.

I was thinking, wouldn't it be nice if we could replace our worthless news media with a guy who simply reads a few astringent aphorisms into the camera?

Todays top stories, via Don Colacho's Aphorisms:

With a picture of campus crybullies in the background:

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

Over a stat showing broad support for Bernie Sanders among young adults:

Civilization is what old men manage to salvage from the onslaught of young idealists.

The gender perversion and bathroom confusion of the left?

Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

Bernie Sanders' free stuff?

Compassion is the best excuse for envy.

Farcebook's anti-conservative news aggregation?

The journalist collects the previous day's garbage in order to feed it to us for breakfast.

Hillary's six figure speaking fees (not to mention the somehow wealthy community organizer occupying the White House)?

The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach.

Multiculturalism?

The man who says he is respectful of all ideas is admitting that he is ready to give in.

Progressivism?

The cost of progress is calculated in fools.

Social justice?

"Social justice" is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right