Combatting Demons and Journalists

While watching President Trump joyfully stick it to the media yesterday, it occurred to me that he is literally fighting with demons -- or at least jousting with nonlocal powers and principalities represented by the media. Recall what was said a couple of posts back about Satan; it works just as well if you replace "Satan" with "liberal media":

"Satan The liberal media is real. That's the first thing. The second thing should be obvious: Satan the liberal media is horrible. But the third thing may not be obvious: Satan the liberal media is also ridiculous. But it is the only ridiculous thing that must be taken seriously."

Well, not the only thing. But certainly in the top two or three, along with the state indoctrination establishment and popular culture. One scholar attempted to quantify the electoral boost given Democrats by the mass media, and I believe it was on the order of at least fifteen percentage points. So, with a fair and impartial media Trump wins roughly 65% to 35%; as does Romney and even the double-dealing McCain.

Who can watch the liberal media and not see that they are ridiculous? Remarkably, the vast majority of Americans see these clowns for what they are, being that trust in them is at historic lows. Which is why it is even more ridiculous for, say, Chuck Todd to suggest that "Press bashing may feel good to folks but when it's done by people in power, it's corrosive. Take off your partisan hats for a second."

The absence of self-awareness is just astonishing, such that it transcends anything mere psychology can explain. The reality is that "Conservative bashing may feel good to your fellow activists but when it's done by powerful media corporations, it's corrosive. Take your partisan head out of your ass for a second."

But this is precisely what the liberal media cannot do. When absence of self-awareness is this deep, this pervasive, and this universal, it makes me suspect something else is going on. How can they all be so blind?

Denial is like a psychic force field around that which is denied. Attempts to look at it are "repelled," so to speak. If you prematurely encourage the patient to look at it, they often "fragment" and spew a lot of disconnected nonsense. It's as if the closer one gets to the denied material, the more it gives off an energy that disrupts psychic continuity and dis-organizes the narrative.

I'm not sure I'm explaining it that well, but imagine flying over enemy territory and being strafed by anti-aircraft fire. It's like that.

I'm trying to find a better explanation. Siegel writes that "integration is the fundamental mechanism of health and well-being," involving "the linkage of differentiated parts of a system" such that "subsets interact with one another."

That being the case, "When we examine various mental disorders, what is revealed is that virtually all of them can be described as clusters of chaotic and/or rigid symptoms that we would say are examples of impaired integration."

Now, someone who is a liberal activist but doesn't know it is rather severely dis-integrated. I'm trying to put myself in their shoes, but it is impossible, for it would be equivalent to me absolutely denying that I am a conservative who writes from that perspective. How crazy, or lacking in insight, or demon-possessed would I have to be to believe that?

Tomberg suggests that there is another kind of integration that occurs in demon formation, that is, an unholy alliance of will and imagination:

"A desire that is perverse or contrary to nature, followed by the corresponding imagination, together constitute the act of generation of a demon." Again, this is the demon that goes on to enslave the parents (Mr. Will and Ms. Imagination) who conceived it.

Tomberg goes on to say that Marxism is the the most consequential modern demon, but he was writing in the early 1960s. Today we would say it is the degenerate neo-Marxism of political correctness, multiculturalism, identity politics, et al.

In any event, "We the people of the twentieth century know that the 'great pests' of our time" are the manmade ideological demons "which have cost humanity more life and suffering than the great epidemics of the Middle Ages."

You could say that the demon is born of a kind of drunken sex between will and imagination: "[I]t is always excess owing to intoxication of the will and imagination which engenders demons."

For the left, it is "a matter of excess -- a going beyond the limits of competence and sober and honest knowledge," by "a fever of the will and imagination to change everything utterly at a single stroke," in turn giving rise "to the demon of class hatred, atheism, disdain for the past, and material interest being placed above all else..."

Certainly there is nothing wrong with wishing to help the poor! But you cannot do so by vilifying the one system that has lifted more people out of poverty than all others combined. That's just stupid demonic.

So, "once artificial demons are generated, how does one combat them, and how does one protect and rid oneself of them?"

Pretty much by what Trump did yesterday, that is, naming and ridiculing them: "Light drives out darkness. This simple truth is the practical key to the problem of how to combat demons. A demon perceived, i.e. on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent." And "a demon rendered impotent is a deflated balloon."

Which reminds me of the old joke about the man who, after being diagnosed with erectile dysfunction, decided to wear a tuxedo. Why? Because "if I'm gonna be impo'tant, I wants to look impo'tant." Few developments would be healthier for our nation than for the ridiculously self-important media to be rendered impotent.

The journalist arrogates to himself the importance of what he reports on. --NGD

How to Create and Maintain Your Own Psychic Imprisonment

The Devil Card, writes Tomberg, shows how "beings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it."

Which is precisely why leftists have degenerated into the demons they have created: they fear fascism but they are the fascists; they detest racism while being race-obsessed; they hate intolerance while being absolutely intolerant of dissent; they attack misogyny while devaluing womanhood; they clamor for unity while sowing division; etc.

The lesson of the card revolves around "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them." It is a kind of inverse analogy of the Creator who is sovereign over his creation, such that the creator of artificial beings becomes "a slave of his own creation."

You might say that the higher man rises (in his own estimation) the farther he falls. Isn't this just Genesis 3 all over again? You have to pay the cost to be the boss, and the cost is measured in our depth of fallenness.

Show me a leftist and I will show you a slave. The black who is persecuted by "white privilege" is simply forging the chains of his own imaginary enslavement. Likewise women who fancy themselves victims of the "patriarchy," or an "LGBTQ community" that imagines we think about them at all, unless they are doing distasteful things in public or in front of the children.

Anyone can be free, but there is a cost. One of the costs is personal responsibility, which is too high a price for most people, certainly on the left. There you find people for whom merely purchasing birth control -- "controlling your own body" -- is too much of a burden, or school choice an intolerable imposition.

Tomberg properly characterizes these demons as semi-autonomous "parasitic entities" that "are to the psychic organism what, for example, cancer is to the physical organism." What is cancer? It is an autonomous, runaway order within one's own order, so to speak. The body can have only one order. Introduce a second order, and chaos is generated.

It is the same with the mind. I am reminded of a crack by Schuon to the effect that "The noble man is one who dominates himself; the holy man is one who transcends himself. Nobility and holiness are the imperatives of the human state." I ask you: when is the last time you saw a leftist who dominates, much less transcends, himself? Rather, we see (as discussed in yesterday's post) intoxicated counter-inspiration.

It really comes down to what the mind is for, doesn't it? Which is really another way of asking what man is for. Which is what? I would suggest that the purpose of man is to think, for if he can't properly do that, then he's not good for much else. But thinking presupposes a great deal, including freedom, responsibility, and a love of truth. Eliminate truth, then thinking is pointless; eliminate freedom and it is impossible; eliminate responsibility and it becomes passionately egotistical.

While looking up that Schuon quote I found some others that go to our subject: "The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute." Leftists are, of course, moral relativists and multiculturalists. Which means they are worthless men, precisely -- not because I say so, but because this is the verdict they have rendered upon themselves. "Absolute relativism" equates to total stupidity and redounds to unfettered depravity.

"The paradox of the human condition is that nothing could be more contrary to us than the requirement to transcend ourselves, and yet nothing could be more essentially ourselves than the core of this requirement or the fruit of this self-overcoming."

Self-overcoming. This goes to one of the essential divides between left and right: the conservative blames himself for his failures, while the leftist blames "the system" or "white privilege" or some other imaginary construct. The whole purpose of leftism is to externalize agency, in such a way that one's own freedom is projected into malevolent others. For the left, the only truly "free" people are the ones controlling, dominating, and oppressing them in their imaginations, the "one percent," or "corporate America," or whatever.

Last night I heard a bit of a talk by Dennis Prager and Adam Corolla. As we know, for the left, all people of pallor are racist. Corolla equated this to saying that "all people are arsonists." Well, that may be true, but what we care about are people who actually set fires, not people who might theoretically want to set them.

The latter drains the term of all meaning -- as does the left's absurd definition of racism. If everyone is a racist then no one is a racist. As such, Corolla pointed out that there has never been a better time to be an actual racist (or Nazi), since the real racists are lumped in with some of the finest and most decent people in the world.

What essentially happens with the fall? Well, one thing is that the will dominates the intelligence. We "know better," but our willfulness hijacks the intellect and down we go. In the properly ordered soul, the will is "a prolongation or complement of the intelligence." And the intellect must be oriented to, and grounded in, the Absolute, without which it is just a planet with no sun (which is no planet at all, just a wandering fragment of space junk).

Thus, "The way towards God always involves an inversion" (of the willful plunge alluded to above): "from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity."

Basically this means that we operate from the center-out rather than vice versa (and our center is a vertical reflection of the Center). "The greatest calamity is the loss of the center and the abandonment of the soul to the caprices of the periphery." But -- to get back to our main subject -- this is precisely the meaning of Diabolos, which is to divide and scatter; and then accuse and slander.

The Leftist's Prayer: Give Me Freedom From My Demons -- But Not Yet!

Time only for a brief post. Busy day ahead.

In connection with our discussion of satan, I reread the chapter on the devil card in Meditations on the Tarot. Tomberg highlights two important characteristics, intoxication and counter-inspiration -- in fact, the intoxication of counter-inspiration. It is rare indeed to encounter a sober-minded leftist. But nor is it common to encounter an uninspired one! Have you seen Keith Olbermann's intoxicated rants?

In-spiration has to do with the reception of spirit. But as we all know, spirit cuts two ways. There are benign and helpful spirits, and malevolent and destructive ones. So, being "inspired" is nether here nor there. Rather, we must always consider the source.

He also points out that there are two modes of evil, a seducing principle and a hypnotizing principle. These two are pervasive in academia, but something must occur prior to the seduction and hypnosis in order for the content to take root, so to speak; one must be susceptible to the assault. There must be a wound, an opening, a breach in one's defenses, as discussed in the previous post.

I believe this is rooted in a type of parenting that places undue pressure on the child, breaking his will and forcing him to conform. As a result, the child will grow up being unable to resist authority -- he will become "hypnotized" in its presence. It is very much analogous to girls who have been sexually abused, and who, as adults, are vulnerable to getting involved with abusive men. Something in them is broken, which the "hypnotizer" and "seducer" easily picks up.

Tomberg also touches on the enslavement that results from creating projected demons. He says that the card is not so much about Satan as such, but about "the generation of demons and of the power that they have over those who generate them." "[B]eings can forfeit their freedom and become slaves of a monstrous entity which makes them degenerate by rendering them similar to it."

Contemporary leftism is all about creating the very demons that enslave oneself, AKA the victim culture. In order to be a self-styled victim, one must first create the projected super-structure of victimizers, e.g., "white privilege," "the patriarchy," "Islamophobia," etc.

These latter are needed by the victims, which is why you cannot rationally eliminate them from the leftist looniverse. Indeed, this is precisely why "structural racism" had to be invented, since there are so few (white) racists to be found. This is how, as one left wing academic put it, we can have racism with no racists!

So, a left-wing victim is a slave of his projected demons. For some reason I surfed into a feminist website the other day, and the bitterness of its victimhood was particularly over the top. Let's see if I can find it. Here it is. I clicked on the link to "Feminism 101," expecting a paragraph or two, but it's a book-length rant. It just goes on and on and on, into every miserable corner of her life. This person has never even wondered if the misery might be coming from within! She is a human toothache who locates the source of pain outside her own big mouth.

Radical feminists are simply slaves of their own creation. And not for one second do such slaves want to venture outside their demonic enslavement! Last night I was reading a book by Dr. Dalrymple, who writes of how difficult it is to get patients to say goodbye to their symptoms, which, after all, are there for a reason.

"Symptoms are like bad husbands and wives: people will go to any length to be rid of them but, once gone, they miss them terribly. The result is that the symptoms return in new and worse forms..." Which is why racism returns as "structural racism" and "misogyny" metastasizes into to the chaotic mess linked above.

Speaking of which, Tomberg writes that "The world of evil is a chaotic world," more like a "luxuriant jungle" than an ordered space, "where you can certainly, if necessary, distinguish hundreds of particular plants, but where you can never attain clear view of the totality."

So true. It is like a pre-scientific mindset in which there are only particulars but no organizing principles. Which is why it is not accurate to point out the ubiquitous "hypocrisy" of the left, since you can't really be a hypocrite if you have no principles to begin with. It reminds me of Pope Benedict's gag about "the tyranny of relativism" -- or of relativism absurdly elevated to absoluteness.

But "Evil cannot be absolute" for "it always depends upon some good which it misuses or perverts; the quality of Absoluteness can belong to good alone. To say 'good' is therefore to say 'absolute'" (Schuon).

Leftists aren't Evil -- Only Demon Possessed

In a previously unpublished letter, Schuon writes that "It makes no sense to believe in the devil and then each time, when he appears -- most often exploiting a specific situation -- to deny that he is involved." In other words, we need a less theoretical and more concrete, even practical, understanding of how the adversary rolls.

Anyone can see that the left has been behaving in an "insane" manner since last November 8, but there is something going on that transcends mere psychological categories. Indeed, whatever it is, it has also managed to appropriate the psychological categories as part of its strategy. Now, that's thinking ahead! Truly, the lunatics are running the asylum. I don't think most of these people are evil. But their minds have been highjacked by darkness. They are frankly possessed. But by what or who?

As it so happens, I recently read Jousting with the Devil: Chesterton's Battle with the Father of Lies. Perhaps he can help us understand what is going on here. The following exchange is from an interview in 1910:

"In your book just published you tell us 'what is wrong with the world.' As I haven't read the book yet, would you mind telling me what is wrong?"

"The Devil."

However, Chesterton was a happy spiritual warrior: "The finding and fighting of evil is the beginning of fun -- and even of farce."

It's certainly the latter, in that the left is beyond parody. In the book's introduction, Dale Ahlquist writes that "Satan is real. That's the first thing. The second thing should be obvious: Satan is horrible. But the third thing may not be obvious: Satan is also ridiculous. But he is the only ridiculous thing that must be taken seriously."

A ridiculous thing that nevertheless must be taken seriously. That is a very useful characterization, isn't it? So much about the left is so ridiculous that one is tempted to dismiss it as impotent self-beclowining. But it doesn't work that way: no matter how ridiculous the left becomes, it only seems to gain in power and influence.

It goes without saying that the left is utterly blind to its own ridiculousness. Something intrinsic to the process prevents irony, self-awareness, and rudimentary intellectual consistency. It is what makes a Meryl Streep denounce "brownshirts," even while liberal fascist brownshirts are violently preventing Milo from speaking at Berkeley.

Evil is something specifically human, which tempts one to imagine that it originates in humans. In other words, there is obviously no evil in the physical world, nor in the biological world. It only emerges with humanness, so it is easy to think that humans are the source.

Well, sometimes they are. But again, sometimes the evil goes so far beyond what can be explained by psychological categories, that any attempt to deploy them for that purpose is reduced to banality.

You could say, for example, that Hitler was mistreated by his father. Well, okay. So was Churchill mistreated by his father. What's your point?

It more useful to see that Satan exploits psychic weaknesses in order to invade the personality. There is a crack at the foundation -- or at the periphery, in lesser cases of evil -- which is where the demonic energies enter.

I heard Fr. Robert Barron use the analogy of a deep cut to the hand that one ignores. Over time the open wound becomes infected, and the infection can eventually spread to the whole body. So, watch closely over your own cracks, for those are precisely the soft targets that will be probed and exploited by the adversary.

It is very much as if we have a psycho-pneumatic autoimmune system that functions more or less effectively. But some people have the moral-intellectual equivalent of AIDS, such that they have no defenses at all. It is hardly surprising that leftism so disproportionately infects the young and stupid. Remember it is an invasion and rebellion, so it can also ride piggyback on youthful rebelliousness in order to gain entry.

Evil "has no independence or positive existence but always remains parasitic, deriving its life negatively by living off its host." This reminds me of something Schuon says in writing of the "'descending,' 'darkening,' 'compressive,' and at the same time 'dissipating' and 'dissolving' tendency, which on contact with the human person becomes personified as Satan."

So the force is descending and endarkening; and either diffuse or compressed and concentrated. Have you ever seen Watter's World? So often the people with whom he converses have minds that are ridiculously dissipated by evil. They simply make no sense at all, but are nevertheless tools -- and victims -- of the more concentrated evil. Indeed, this pretty much describes the process of a liberal education: hardened evil deployed to soften young and impressionable minds. Marx is hard. His youthful idiots are gelatinous.

Satan is also "a gentleman who promises good things and doesn't keep his word." Could this be why the left always promises the impossible? This is rooted in two fundamental impossibilities, 1) that there is some sort of cure for human nature, and 2) that man can cure himself. That is the recipe for hell, precisely.

Along these lines, Wild writes that "The heart of my thesis... is that the main work of the devil is to insinuate deficient ideas and false ideologies."

Looking at Genesis, we see that "a superiority complex was the beginning of all evil," i.e., the pretension of man displacing God. And the left is specifically and unapologetically in the business of inculcating "pride" and "self-esteem," which is to say, pathological narcissism and unearned respect. Look at how our professional child abusers are reacting to Betsy DeVos!

We alluded to the Devil's ridiculousness above. He is also "stupid as well as devious." This must ultimately be because he rejects truth. It reminds me of criminals, who may be vicious but are also stupid, with lower than average IQs. And the left is of course the pro-criminal party, whether it is protecting alien felons or fomenting violence against the police.

For Chesterton, "the only thing I will say with complete confidence" about evil "is that it tells lies.... whatever they are, they are not truths... about this world."

In fairness to the left, they clearly believe we are evil, and they have no compunction about saying so. Their rhetoric is always cranked up to 11, such that Trump is Hitler and we are his Storm Troopers. But how did we get so evil? In other contexts, the left will insist that there is no such thing as objective morality, and that "good" and "evil" are just social conventions -- a diabolical opinion if ever there was one!

But just as we are enjoined to hate the sin and love the sinner, Chesterton notes that "The assertion that a man is possessed of a devil is the only way of avoiding the assertion that he is a devil." It's a more sophisticated ontology. So, I don't say that Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer are evil per se, rather, only demon possessed. They are the tools, not the master.

Organic Religiosity, with No Added Ingredients

Awhile back an anonymous reader left the following comment and question:

I agree with your assertion that deification is the purpose of man.... I would also be interested in your take on the situation, as you perceive it directly, without input from other minds.

For instance, Jesus is first encountered by reading about him or hearing him discussed. Imagine you had never touched a book or discussed spirituality with anyone. You are clean of human influence. What were/are your self-discovered intuitions on the matter of God?

I've been sitting on this question, waiting for an opportunity to weave it into a post. This may be that post, since the next chapter in Gnosis is conveniently called Is There a Natural Mysticism?

The short answer is that there is and must be, given the nature of cosmos and man, which contain and reflect one another in both preverbal and transverbal ways, mysticism being an "extra-linguistic" phenomenon.

In other words, mysticism is a direct apprehension of, or encounter with, the divine presence that bypasses language. So, it seems there is a common nonsense available to all. Let's see if Schuon agrees with that characterization.

"The concept of a 'natural mysticism'" goes to "forms of spirituality that do not enter into the framework of a given religion..." That being the case, it can ascend only so high, being that it "remains enclosed within the created... which it can in no way transcend" in the absence of a direct intervention from God. If you recall the symbols I used in the book, it may be thought of as the apotheosis of what man may attain via (↑) alone.

Nevertheless, as I believe we shall see, there really can be no (↑) without (↓), being that they actually constitute a continuous spiral and not broken or independent lines. Our ascent is already God's descent, just as our knowledge must be a "drawing out" of something that is already implicit in the phenomena we know. Obviously the intelligibility of things must be prior to our intelligence; it was there long before man arrived on the scene.

Recall Ibn Arabi's gag describing mystical union as being "alone with the alone." Well, in reality it is being "together with the together." And as the Fathers often remarked, all truth comes from the Holy Spirit. Put them together and you understand that all knowing is a two-gatheredness with the divine mind. Either it has roots that go all the way up, or it is nothing at all.

Time out for a cryptic word from our Aphorist: Any shared experience ends in a simulacrum of religion.

Likewise, God's informal grace falls on the world long before it formally rains dogmas and catechisms. However, such general graces will "have an 'irregular' and quasi-accidental character," because... how to put it... It reminds me of something Chesterton says... Which I can't locate at the moment, but I did find this: in his early writings, Chesterton "was intuiting Gospel truths from within life itself, 'without much help from religion'" (Chesterton as Mystic).

Later, "His faith in Christ raised these truths to higher dimensions," but "the root truths of the Gospel about the nature of reality were already present in his experience" (ibid., emphasis mine because That's What I'm Talkin' About).

"Chesterton was already living in two worlds, but it was Christ who revealed to him the true nature of both. Many truths in the Gospel were not so much discovered as confirmed for him" (ibid.). That too is What I'm Talkin' About.

I can't find the quote I'm looking for, but it has something to do with digging channels for flash floods (of grace). But the following is also helpful, for it goes to the absolute need for humility -- of humbly receiving and not eagerly grasping:

"There is a relevant story from one of the desert fathers who had a vision of an angel, who said to him: 'The Lord has sent me to you.' The humble little father answered: 'I don't know any reason why the Lord would visit me.' And the devil left him."

What was said above about Chesterton "living in two worlds" is very helpful. For there are always and inevitably these two worlds, no matter how you cut it. Try as you might, you can never confine things to one and eliminate the other. I would say that Gödel's theorems are a "merely" logical reflection of this deeper ontological reality: that your world can be consistent or complete, but not both.

I also believe we have our "two brains" for just this reason. Just as our two eyes permit us to perceive depth, and our two ears allow us to have a bitchin' stereo, our two brains disclose a world far richer than just one or the other alone would permit.

And in the final analysis these worlds are "rational" and "mystical." They are also "fundamentalist" and "ironic," but that's the subject of a slightly different post. But if you are a Raccoon, everyone you disagree with is being a fundamentalist where they should be ironic, and being literal where they should be mystical. And they are often being mystical in a totally untutored way, with no channels at all, just a downpour on a featureless plain.

However, it has gotten to the point that the people with whom we disagree are becoming frankly satanic in their confusion of the worlds. Here again, this is the subject of a slightly different post, but it comes to mind because I'm reading another book by Wild called Jousting with the Devil: Chesterton's Battle with the Father of Lies.

Maybe we'll vary the scheme and discuss this on Monday. Suffice it to say that one would have to be spiritually deaf and blind -- not to mention tasteless -- to not see that the country is in the midst of a hysterical demonic attack. To put it another way, the left is making it very hard to not believe in satan.

"Devil" is cognate with division and discord. Conversely, intelligence "brings back to unity." There is one view of the world "that is intellectual and unitive, and another that is existential and separative: the first envisions everything in relation to unity, even Existence," while "the second sees everything in relation to separativity, even Intelligence" (Schuon).

But guess what? The separativity dwells within the unity, or we couldn't even know it as separate. Thus "it is a matter of combining these two modes of vision, for each is valid in its own way" (ibid). Doing so reveals the depth of the cosmos, in that we see the mystical in the every day, the supernatural in the natural, the whole in the part.

So that's about it. I can think of no reason why the Lord would visit me today.

Have You Been Truthed Today?

To affirm that "truth is one" is not identical to saying that "there is one truth." Rather, the one truth can -- I would say must -- manifest in a diversity of ways. Indeed, it is precisely because truth is one that reality -- which is so diverse and mayaplicitous -- is true.

To back up a bit, I'm perusing an essay by Schuon called Diversity of Revelation. To back up a bit further, I've decided to reread all of Schuon's books from the beginning. Well, almost the beginning, and almost all. For various reasons I'm starting with Gnosis: Divine Wisdom.

The reasons I'm doing this are twofold. First, I've had a long run of mediocre books that makes me feel as if I'm not getting anywhere. We don't want to be like the man of whom Churchill said "he occasionally stumbled over the truth but always picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened." With Schuon, I always feel as if I'm drilling down to the core. Plus, he always stimulates my own thoughts.

Come to think of it, this would constitute an experiential example of diversity flowing from the one truth. Again, just because something is true, that doesn't mean it is static. Rather, I would say the closer we get to it, the more dynamic, fruitful, and explosive. In my opinion, this is one of the characteristics of the trinitarian God, who is not static but inexhaustibly creative, even the very source of creativity.

Which makes me think of uberCoon Meister Eckhart. Probably a lot of his orthoparadoxical utterances make perfect nonsense in light of the approach we are discussing:

Earth cannot escape heaven; flee it by going up, or flee it by going down, heaven still invades the earth, energizes it, makes it sacred.

God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop.

God forever creates and forever begins to create. And creatures are always being created and in the process of beginning to be created.

So, I guess you could say truth is a verb. Therefore, we wouldn't ask someone if they "know the truth," but rather, something like "have you been truthed lately?" or "how's the truthing going today?"

Along these lines, McGinn writes that "Trying to force a mystic as creative as Eckhart into a rigid system of thought is a self-defeating project that can only blunt the depth and challenge of his message."

For Eckhart, God is a kind of perpetual "boiling over" or outflow of creative exuberance. He cites a scriptural basis for this in Psalms: God has spoken once and for all and I have heard two things.

The following, from a sermon by Eckhart, goes directly to our point: "Distinction comes from Absolute Unity, that is, the distinction in the Trinity" Thus, "Absolute Unity is the distinction and the distinction is the unity."

McGinn elaborates: "the more distinct, or different, the Trinity of Persons is, the more indistinct, or absolutely one, the three Persons are in their pure potentiality, namely, in the divine ground." On the one hand "God is distinguished by his indistinction from all other things"; on the other hand "The One itself points to distinction."

There's more, but you get the point. Back to Gnosis. Schuon writes that "Truth and Revelation are not absolutely equivalent terms since Truth is situated beyond forms, whereas Revelation... belongs to the formal order."

If Truth is the verb alluded to above, might we say that revelation is a kind of "nounification" of the verb? Certainly it is an attempt to tame and domesticate what must always remain the Wild Godhead. No matter how much we know, it's only a fraction of the great unknown.

One area where I differ from Schuon is on the question of diversity. I believe I would be correct in saying that for him, diversity is already maya and therefore "outside" divinity, whereas the Christian tradition situates the diversity firmly within it.

In fact, Eckhart posits a kind of meta-trinitarian God, in the sense that the Trinity is begotten of the Godhead. It's just that neither is prior; rather, like the distinction between Father and Son, the distinction between God and Godhead is also a unity.

"In the Godhead God 'unbecomes,' so that this ground must be described as pure possibility, the unmoving precondition of all activity..." (Eckhart). This is where "God Is" shades off into "God Becomes" -- or where the pure I can add the AM. Thus, whereas Godhead can say "I," the three Persons of the Trinity can each say that "I AM." But this whole procession of distinctions is complementary to the ground of indistinction.

This is why God cannot be captured or contained in the distinctions of conventional speech. Rather, "The uncreated Word shatters created speech while directing it toward the Truth; in this way it manifests its transcendence in relation to the limitations of human logic.... To wish to reduce divine Truth to the conditionings of earthly truth is to forget that there is no common measure between the finite and the Infinite" (Schuon).

I can't help thinking this is why Jesus went out of his way to leave us no book, rather, just himself (from which the book flows). Of all people, he would know that booking himself -- enclosing himself between covers -- cannot be done. What he left was a relationship, a gift, a ceaseless truthing that cannot be reduced to mere truth.

E Relativismi Absolutus

We've all heard the cliché that "we are a nation of immigrants." First of all, we're a nation of settlers. The immigrants came later. But the relationship of nation to immigrants is that of whole to part. You cannot add up a bunch of diverse immigrants and hope that a nation will emerge. That is the way of Balkanization, strife, and violence.

Rather, vice versa: one begins with the nation to which the immigrants must adapt. In short, we assimilate immigrants. It is not up to us to be assimilated into their strange gods, beliefs, practices, and sports.

That thoughtlet was inspired by a passage in an essay by Schuon, A Sense of the Absolute in Religions. You could say the emergence of what is called "modernity" is characterized by the discovery of the Other(s). Especially the really weird and/or annoying ones. We're not just talking about an Englishman meeting a Frenchman or what have you.

Most people prior to modernity -- and well into it -- passed their entire lives without ever encountering a genuine Other. But in the so-called Age of Discovery we met all sorts of strange beings, for example, when Columbus bumped into Native Americans.

Anyway, Schuon highlights the problems that occur "when the diversity of traditional perspectives gives a pretext to those who wish to destroy the very idea of the absolute and the values connected to it."

Now, there is a valid, healthy, and necessary form of relativism; and a sick, twisted, and even demonic one. Leftism, of course, champions the latter, because it is an ideal pretext to attack and undermine the Absolute, AKA God.

The valid form of relativism is encapsulated in the motto of the United States, e pluribus unum. But look at how the meaning has been changed by the left:

"The traditionally understood meaning of the phrase was that out of many states (or colonies) emerges a single nation. However, in recent years its meaning has come to suggest that out of many peoples, races, religions, languages, and ancestries has emerged a single people and nation -- illustrating the concept of the melting pot."

What a nefarious sleight of hand! Because of this verbal legerdemain -- word of the day, legerdemain -- the leftist can say with a straight face that this or that recently arrived immigrant is JUST AS AMERICAN AS GEORGE WASHINGTON or whomever.

Well, it depends, doesn't it? If they just want to recreate the third world socialist craphole from which they escaped, then they're not really American at all. I used to live in the San Fernando Valley, parts of which have been slowly transformed into Mexico.

But if Mexico is such a great place, why did they leave? Likewise, if Islam is such a wonderful religion, why not live in an Islamic country infused with Islamic values? Why come to a Judeo-Christian nation, of all places?

Because of what the left has done with diversity: which is to say, deployed it as a Trojan Hearse to sneak in their death culture and normalize their absolute relativism, a relativism that has severed itself from its very reason for being, i.e., the Absolute.

Absolute relativism does not, as the left suggests, elevate every culture to equal value. Rather, it just undermines the sane, decent, and functional ones, i.e., ours.

What is the solution? "Confronted with a relativism that is growing ever more intrusive, it is necessary to restore to the intelligence a sense of the absolute, even to the point of having to underline for this purpose the relativity in which immutable things are clothed" (ibid.).

Go back to what was said above about e pluribus unum. The first English-to-Latin translator I googled suggests per diversitas immutabile, or "through diversity, the immutable." We could equally say e relativismi absolutus or something.

But the purpose of religion is to disclose the absolute beyond religion. If it doesn't do that for you, then you're doing it wrong. But in any event, don't be like a dog or a liberal and stare at the finger to which religion is pointing! (Or the Absolute to which their relativism properly points.)

For "with God, truth lies above all in the symbol's effective power of enlightenment and not its literalness.... The uncreated Word shatters created speech while at the same time directing it toward concrete and saving truth" (ibid.).

In other words, the One, by its very nature, cannot be contained by speech, certainly not on any one-to-one basis. Rather, it pours itself out in diverse manifestations.

But don't confuse the appearance -- the diversity -- with the reality of which it is an inevitable expression! That's just stupid, for the expression is not as real as the reality it expresses.

In God We Trust Science (and vice versa)

Last night the idea popped into my head that we really know nothing. Indeed, this is the stance we must adopt if it is the case that all scientific knowledge is by definition incomplete and on the way to something else.

Nevertheless, "it remains a timeless temptation to claim that the unknown has been reduced to nothing, or at least almost to nothing." But logic dictates that "the magnitude of the unknown is, well... unknown!" (Verschueren).

So, when my mind taunted me with the idea that we know nothing, it's just a way of taking seriously the notion that we have no idea how much we don't know compared to what little we do.

I remember in grad school, I had a particularly brilliant professor who would weave these spellbinding lectures off the top of his head, as if he were in a trance and just channeling truth from some other dimension. During one, I remember him coming to a temporary stop, wistfully shaking his head from side to side, and saying, "but we know so little..."

What? This guy seemed to know everything! And now he's telling me he knows so little? What does that make me? It made me feel as if I would never know even a little, let alone a lot, to say nothing of everything. Which was my secret goal.

But as we've discussed before, there seems to be a geometrical reason for why the more we learn, the less we know. If the totality of what we know is represented by a kind of circular spotlight, then the more it illuminates, the larger the circumference. Obviously you can't increase the area inside the circle without expanding the circumference in kind. Thus, knowledge only deepens the Mystery, unless you are completely devoid of irony.

For example, the discovery of the genome is an impressive feat of knowledge. But it only increases the mystery of how such infinitely complex information could arise from non-information. If DNA were simple, then maybe it wouldn't be such a leap from inanimate to animate.

Which is why one needs to begin with metaphysical assumptions that render the transition from non-information to information conceivable, and certainly not impossible. This is very different from "intelligent design," which is an ad hoc theory to fill in the gaps between randomness and order -- in which God intervenes directly to transform the former into the latter.

But in our metaphysic, existence is intelligence as such. God doesn't need to intervene directly, because his creation is a priori suffused with the divine intelligence. Without it there is neither intelligence nor the intelligibility implicit in every existent thing.

Indeed, in this metaphysic, to exist is to be intelligible to intelligence. "Unintelligible existence" is a non sequitur. Everything that exists has an essence (or form) that makes it what it is, and therefore knowable. "True" and "exist" are synonymous terms.

"Without a Creator God, scientists would lose their reason for trusting their own scientific reasoning. The mere fact that reason exists -- including its order, its contents, its principles, its rules, and its power -- calls for an explanation" (ibid.).

These are not self-explanatory, but are rooted in a higher and deeper principle. Thus, "leaving God out of the cosmos would reduce reason to a mere neural experience that leaves us only with the sensation of reason," not the real thing.

There are many ironies in Christianity, but this is one of the most consequential: that the possession of reason makes us so darn godlike, while at the same time guaranteeing the impossibility of becoming gods. The same phenomenon exalts our greatness and seals our littleness.

Any "thing" -- i.e., existent -- abides in the space between two intelligences, God's and ours. Thus, as Josef Pieper puts it, there is a "double concept of the 'truth of things.' The first denotes the creative fashioning of things by God; the second their intrinsic knowability for the human mind."

The irony is that the very same principle that renders things knowable by man is precisely that which renders them unknowable by man. In other words, we can know anything that exists; but we can never completely know so much as a grain of sand. There is a horizon of mystery in all knowledge, from the simplest to most complete. That latter is reserved for God.

But in any event, don't be an idiot. "Do not think that it is possible to do both, to argue away the idea that things have been creatively thought by God and then go on to understand how things can be known by the human mind!" (ibid.).

For if there is no God, there is no truth at all, and no reason whatsoever to trust the mental agitations of a randomly evolved primate. If natural selection is a sufficient explanation, then our knowledge -- like everything else -- will continue to change, but one thing it will never be is true.

If knowledge isn't the effect of truth, then we are reduced to opinions. And if that is the case then the left has it right: weaponized opinion is all, and may the more powerful and violent lie win -- as in Berkeley the other night, and most "elite" universities every day.

Pretending to Know what Can't be Known and Unknowing what Can

Another promising book that didn't quite pan out is Aquinas and Modern Science: A New Synthesis of Faith and Reason. Nothing in it is coonologically incorrect. I fully agree with the author that Thomas's philosophy is as able today to reconcile the worlds of science and religion as 700 years ago. But I guess there wasn't much in it we haven't discussed before.

Aquinas "wrestled with how Christian religion would be affected by the most advanced science of his day," which is something we like to do around here. He was especially critical of the "double truth" promulgated by Islamic philosophers, "that a notion could be true in theology or religion" and simultaneously "false in philosophy or science." No, that is a non-starter. Truth is One because the One is Truth. Absent the One there is no truth at all.

We mean this quite literally. This little talk by Fr. Robert Barron reminds us of what is at stake. In discussing the devil (starting at 3:48), he spells out the etymological roots of the word, which connotes casting apart and scattering.

Conversely, God is the principle of ingathering, of synthesis, of unity. Now, synthesis recurs on every level of reality; to even posit a "cosmos" is to affirm an implicit synthesis of the totality of reality. Truth is always a unity, but its possibility is rooted in the prior oneness of God.

Science studies existence -- i.e., things that exist -- whereas metaphysics is concerned with the being of which existence is but a property. For this reason, "there is no science without metascience."

That is, "the sciences cannot be studied by the sciences themselves," any more than the eye can see itself or the hand grasp itself. Naive scientists can pretend to avoid metaphysics, but only on (implicitly) metaphysical grounds. For similar reasons it is impossible for human beings to avoid religion. An overtly religious person is simply honest about his religious assumptions.

Most of this is just plain logical. I think I've mentioned in the past that one of the things that prompted me to abandon liberalism was that I kept discovering truths that contradicted liberalism. Of note, this had nothing whatsoever to do with embracing conservatism, which I would have still rejected a priori. It was something of a shock to discover that certain truths arrived at in a completely dispassionate and disinterested way were entirely unwelcome on the left, to put it mildly.

To cite one glaring example, an intellectually honest pro-abortion person would have to concede that the Constitution in no way enshrines the right to a dead baby. The fact that this "right" is rooted in an invincible lie is quite revealing. (Earlier in that talk, Barron reminds us that Satan is the father -- or source -- of lies, and a murderer from the beginning.)

A similar example of ironyclad logic is that "those who defend scientism" are "unaware of the fact that scientism itself... is a nonscientific claim." No one can prove scientism via the scientific method. To think otherwise is absurd. Why can't we all agree on this?

Satan?

Perhaps. But I don't want to sound crazy just yet. Nevertheless, there must be something -- some principle -- that prevents human beings from all being on the same page with regard to certain undeniable truths. If we can't agree on first principles, then there is little else with which we will agree. What is so frustrating is that these principles can be known. We don't have to guess or speculate or bullshit about them.

Here is an Undeniable Truth with which only a tenured ignoramus or ideological knave can disagree: "Scientism [or naturalism, or positivism, or utilitarianism, et al] poses a claim that can only be made from outside the scientific realm, thus grossly overstepping the boundaries of science." It is self-refuting, because "if it is true, it becomes false. It steps outside science to claim that there is nothing outside science."

This is the sort of logical idiocy I've been teaching my son to be able to sniff out. If some relativist or deconstructionist tries to tell him there's no such thing as truth, he knows how to respond. And he will accept no evasions or equivocations. The conversation will proceed no further until the deconstructionist answers the question: is that true?

So many arguments could be settled -- or at least stopped in their tracks -- by two words: Prove. It.

In fact, Thomas Sowell says you can pretty much put the left out of business with three questions (jump ahead to 3:45): compared to what, at what cost, and what hard evidence do you have? As he points out earlier in the clip, there are no "solutions," only more or less costly tradeoffs.

Did you hear a single liberal spell out what we were giving up in order to get Obamacare? Or what we were trading for the trillion dollar stimulus? Or what we were going to get -- good and hard -- in exchange for pulling our troops out of Iraq?

And just as there are no cost-free solutions, there are no... how to put it... no scientific theories that don't exclude infinite dimensions of reality. The word "infinite" is used advisedly, because the infinite is everything we don't know, and what we do know is always a fraction what we don't. And God is everything we don't know -- in the apophatic sense.

When God Knocks You Over

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Living in the Real Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Loss of press access to the White House.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Worlds are Better than One

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Short Post About Nothing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unlearning to Crawl

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Open" Thread ("Updated")

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

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

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

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

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

******

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

Homo-Drama and the Broad Way of History

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God was Framed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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