If Christ is the Answer, What is the Question?

What does Christianity say about reality: what does it presume, and what does it add that we couldn't have just as well figured out on our own? 

As to the former, I think it presumes a philosophy of common sense realism; after all, Christianity is a non-starter if, for example, existentialism is case, existentialism being for Sartre the attempt to draw out the implications of a strict atheism.

Nor can Christianity be reconciled with positivism, materialism, rationalism, idealism, Marxism, hedonism, nominalism, and so many more. If these are true, then Christianity is not only false but cannot possibly be true.

Let's see, going down the list, there's absurdism, atomism, advaita Vedanta, analytic philosophy, Averroism, academic skepticism... and that's just some of the A's. 

I'm not sure if anything on the list short of Thomism -- or let us say the perennial philosophy more generally -- is capacious enough to do the job. Admittedly, I have no familiarity with some of those schools of thought, but surely they would have crossed my desk by now if they had something to them. In any case, my mind is always open. 

Clearly Christianity presumes a number of things about reality that have become controverted over the past half millennium or so -- for example, that a text means what it says, that there is such a thing as objectivity, that the universe is intelligible, that man possesses free will, that there is a reality transcending nature, etc. 

In our view, denial of any of these assumptions results in a self-refuting reductio absurdum -- for example, to say that objectivity is impossible is an objective statement. Likewise, to say that ultimate reality is material is the denial of spirit by spirit. If there is no free will, we could never know it, for truth is transcendent. And if a text has no fixed meaning, then nor does deconstruction -- it just becomes self-canceling nonsense.

Yesterday we spoke of how, for early Christian thinkers, "the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth." Voegelin goes on to say that for these men, Christianity was "not an alternative to philosophy," but "philosophy itself in its state of perfection." Okay, like how?

The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according to reason... have in a sense been Christians.

This is in accord with what Augustine said:  

That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity.

The Logos is eternal, but "the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation of the Word in Christ" (Voegelin, emphasis mine). It seems that the Logos is in history in a general way before becoming particularized in Christ. It's a strange idea, but once you accept the existence of the Logos, why not? 

For what exactly is the Logos? Reason, rationality, intelligible structure, intelligent beings. Who says the fullness of the Logos couldn't dwell in a single person? This is essentially the metaphysical claim in the prologue to John -- that the Light that gives light to man qua man becomes flesh and dwells among us, not just then but now. Indeed, it must always be now as a consequence of infinitude assuming finitude.

 Anyway, Voegelin suggests that

a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man.

Ouch. I wouldn't go that far -- not everyone is cut out for philosophy -- but what is the question to which the Incarnation is the answer, and how does this event (and person) answer it?

There is no conflict "between gospel and philosophy," only "between the gospel and its uninquiring possession as doctrine." In other words, the latter is an unphilosophical attitude because it reduces the mystery to some explicit formulation, essentially conflating the words and the reality to which they point.

Instead of simply memorizing cutandry answers, "a sensible first step toward regaining for the gospel the reality it has lost through doctrinal hardening" is "to restore the inquiring mind to the position that is his due." 

Because "question and answer are intimately related one toward the other," the Answer "will not help the man who has lost the question." The life of reason involves

This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking of the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer. 

So, between question and answer is the luminous search; but man "can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible."

No luminosity for you! (A reminder that the light shines in the darkness but that the willfully dark cannot comprehend it.) 

Even prior to Christ, there is always the divine pull accompanied by man's restless seeking, both taking place in the tension of the in-between. For Voegelin these are reducible to a single movement: "In the one movement there is experienced a seeking from the human, [and] a being drawn from the divine pole." Put another way, God is "the mover who attracts or draws man to himself."

And Christ incarnates this very movement, from and to the Father-Source?

That was a question. It says in John that Christ will "draw all men to himself." And

This drawing power of Christ is identified with the pull exerted by God.

Was that the answer? If so, could you elaborate?

To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence in society and history.... of God's pull becoming effective in the world through Christ...

I don't know what else to say, so we'll end with this passage by Josef Pieper: there is a

rounding out of the circle in which the beginning and the end, the primal Origin of the creation and the ultimate Consummation of the creative process, meet and touch in Christ. 

And

we have no alternative but to conceive of this Incarnation as something which is still present and which will remain present for all future time. 

Supposing you're asking the right question. Right?

What Is It All About?

There's no reason to follow a religion unless one not only believes it is true, but conveys the ultimate truth(s). But in what manner does it do this? Literally? Symbolically? Experientially? Explicitly? Implicitly? And by what standard, and compared to what? In other words, how do we judge its truth? 

Yesterday's post set me off into an unplanned exploration of these and related questions, and now I'm going to share some of my preliminary findings, for example, 

every philosophical interpretation of the world and human existence relies, at least subconsciously, on certain general assumptions, which are not so much "knowledge" as rather "belief."

And Christian doctrine in particular, although its primary focus is salvation,

implies as well certain fundamental teachings on specifically philosophical matters -- the world and existence as such (Pieper).   

After all, it's not falsehood that sets one free. And to engage in philosophy as such "means to reflect on the totality of things we encounter, in view of their ultimate reasons," so there is an unavoidable convergence of philosophy and religion, unless one begins by placing arbitrary limits on one's philosophizing. No, "philosophy consists in the simple question, 'What is it all about?'"

And who is it that knows what it's all about? If we're reflecting on the totality of things, "the subject as well as the object is part of the totality encountered," and "true philosophy deals with everything given, within as well as without." 

Yesterday we touched on the ever-present distinction between reality and appearances. Now, no one ever says "ultimate appearances," since this would be an oxymoron; rather an appearance is always of a "deeper" reality (i.e, toward synthesis and unity). And

Precisely this dimension constitutes the aim of the philosopher's question. He investigates the ultimate, the "real" meaning -- not of this or that but of all that is.

Conversely, "Each science formulates one particular aspect" of the totality, and "studies only one tiny slice of reality but does so with extreme precision."

Which reminds me of an aphorism: 

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact.

Likewise, we are proposing a view of religion that considers it to be the ultimate science of the inexact, for "exactitude" and "infinitude" are at antipodes. Thus,

there exists a certain dimension the philosopher is concentrating on, about which the empirical sciences have little or nothing to say.

I think we need both, although philosophy must be subordinate -- or ordered -- to something transcending philosophy per se. Pieper suggests "the image of a polyphonic counterpoint," and why not? After all, as Balhasar says, truth is symphonic, thus implying a vertical harmony of voices within a horizontal melodic development:

In such a composition, independent melodies correlate with each other, accentuate, challenge, perhaps even disturb each other in such a way as to create a fresh, rich and captivating harmony that can no longer be explained by merely adding together its individual components (Pieper).

Yes. Sounds like the cosmic symphony to which I alluded on pp. 22-23 of The Book. Let's glance at it, and hope it's not too embarrassing:

The universe is like a holographic, multidimensional score that must be read, understood, and performed. Like the score of a symphony, it is full of information that can be rendered in different ways.

A little fruity for current tastes, but the point is well taken.

Today's little symphony will attempt to harmonize Pieper and Voegelin, although we won't have time to finish. In an essay called The Gospel and Culture, Voegelin asks why early Christianity attracted "an intellectual elite who restated the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy and, by this procedure, created a Christian doctrine?"

Come to think of it, that's precisely what this post is trying to be about: restating the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy.  

If the community of the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history...

Which I'm afraid it will do if it fails to reenter the culture of our time. It's too late to enter it's life of reason, since there isn't one. But perhaps it's not too late to resuscitate that life of reason, if not collectively, at least one assoul at a time. But in any event, consider the fact that once upon a time, "the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth" (emphasis mine).

That would be total truth, or the truth of the totality, but how does it do this? To be continued...

Religiology and Ultimate Reality

At the end of yesterday's post the following sentence popped unthinkingly from my fingertips, and now we have to figure out of it's true, true-ish, or what: 

For whatever else a religion is, it is a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality, or the absolute, or one's deepest concerns.

Well, it is symbolic, since it is conveyed to us via language. And it is more or less systematic; certainly Catholic doctrine is highly systematic, while other denominations are less so -- for example, Quakerism, which, from what little I know, is grounded in immediate experience:

Unprogrammed worship is based on silence and inward listening to the Spirit, from which any participant may share a message. In unprogrammed meetings for worship, someone speaks when that person feels that God/Spirit/the universe has given them a message for others. After anyone speaks, several minutes are allowed to pass before anyone else speaks, to allow the message to be considered carefully. Friends do not answer or argue about others' messages during meeting for worship.

So, the religion the almighty & them works out betwixt 'em. Silent head & open heart. 

Then there's Zen, which is also refreshingly dogma-free and grounded in experience. Taoism too is pretty uncluttered. 

But let's get back to the claim: a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality. Our first witness will be Schuon, even though, like a bad lawyer, I'm not certain how he will answer the question.

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral.

That seems to track with our thesis: a system to help us discern between reality and appearances. Elsewhere he writes that religion  

is an integral whole comparable to a living organism that develops according to necessary and exact laws; one might therefore call it a spiritual organism, or a social one in its most outward aspect. 

In any case, it is an organism and not a construction of arbitrary conventions; one cannot therefore legitimately consider the constituent elements of a religion independently of their inward unity, as if one were concerned with a mere collection of facts.

Ah ha. That's helpful, for it implies that the system we're talking about is not static, but rather, a holistic or organismic "process structure" with interior relations. 

Analogously, a single part of a biological organism cannot be understood outside the whole. Certainly Catholic theology looks at revelation in this way: for example, it exercises the old hermeneutic circle vis-a-vis scriptural interpretation, in which the whole is in the part and vice versa. I guess you could say that Christ vivifies each part. 

Next witness: our Aphorist, of course, and again, I'm not sure of his testimony, but this first one is a favorite:

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

True, but this presumes the existence of the soul to which religion speaks. Just how does it speak to the soul?

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

And

Even in the immensity of space we feel caged. Mystery is the only infinity that does not seem like a prison.

Conversely, 

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

Instant karma:

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment. 

Back to our thesis. To put it another way, religion is a symbolic system to help us navigate the farthest reaches of the soul.

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores...

Depending on how you look at it, it is a dimension of height or depth, but in any case, 

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

 Moreover,

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

 This is partly because

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

So, to lose one is is to lose the ability to make sense of the the other. Returning full circle to religiology and ultimate reality,  

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

And speaking of the whole vivifying the parts, 

The voice of God passes through the sacred text as a wind storm through the leaves of the forest trees.

Beautiful simile. To be continued...

Appearances, Reality, and Applied Ignorance

Let's begin with what we don't know and can't know.

If only the people in charge would live by Petey's axiom! But the reason people typically want to be in charge is because they begin with what they think they know about the unknowable.

There is the known; the unknown; and the unknowable. But to know that something is unknowable is no small thing, for it is at the foundation of what Hayek calls the Great Society, by which he means the large-scale spontaneous order, or self-organizing system, that is a result of human actions but not human design.

Indeed, such a system could never be constructed by the human mind, since it is energized by a virtually infinite amount of knowledge and information dispersed throughout, and present in each individual. 

Now, I am a big fan of the human intellect, which can know everything knowable, which is to say, being. But the future doesn't exist. Of course, we can make accurate predictions in deterministic system, but the free society

constantly adapts itself, and functions through adapting itself, to millions of facts which in their entirety are not known to anybody.

Only in "small groups of primitive society can collaboration between the members rest largely on" facts and circumstances known more or less by everyone. Which is why central planning is such an atavistic temptation. Toss in the deliberate provocation of vices such as envy, and you've really got something!

But in a complex order, our little bit of knowledge is dwarfed by the knowledge dispersed throughout the system, and which allows us to benefit from the expertise of others. Thus,

a 'civilized' individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives. 

In short, "We all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess." Ironically, a complex society allows people to know close to nothing, leaving the details to others. In fact, our post-reality civilization is so affluent that its elites can afford to know less than nothing and still pretend it's knowledge.

At the moment there are a couple of Russian guys in my kitchen repairing the freezer. Left to my own devices... let's just say I envy people who really know something about something, whatever it is, from cardiology to refrigerator repair. 

What if we didn't have money, and the only way I could reimburse them would be to exchange my knowledge for theirs? For truly truly, I have only useless knowledge to give, in that it's not for the sake of anything else.

The civilized soul is the one who is interested in unusable truths.

Even old Aristotle knew that

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

The cosmos is a complex system. Is there any way we can dumb it down and make it intelligible? Is it reducible to something we can wrap our minds around -- even with our invincible ignorance of all the ins out outs, for example, of the nature of dark matter, or of how quantum and relativity theories relate?

Those aren't things I'll ever figure out, but I do have any number of physicists working on it.  

So, what's a guy like me supposed to do? Well, I hereby reaffirm that 

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter.

Beginning with the truth of Being, which you might say is the Ultimate Quality. And indeed,

What ceases to be thought as qualitative in order to be thought as quantitative ceases to be thought as significant.

Which is to say, of ultimate significance. Just how do all these qualities get in here? Are they really reducible to quantity? Or perhaps it's the other way around -- that quantity is a vehicle for qualities, as appearances are the veil of reality.

Profundity is not in what is said, but in the level from which it is said.

If that's the case, let's try to say something from the highest and deepest level, and see where it leads, for

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

Therefore, "significance" lies in that gap between appearances and reality. Only man can say that "things are not what they appear to be," i.e., that things appear one way, but in reality are another way. Which in turn is rooted in a kind of applied ignorance, similar to what Hayek said above. 

In other words, we don't take things at face value, but inquire into deeper causes -- even the cause of being and of causation. We are perpetually curious, which is to say, open to being. But most people have neither the time nor inclination to sit around all day thinking about being. Which is where religion comes in, from genuine ones to the crude political religions of the left.

For whatever else a religion is, it is a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality, or the absolute, or one's deepest concerns, and that's about it for now....   

Social Justice and Progressive Tyranny

We left off with Pieper's claim that "Whoever rejects truth, whether natural or supernatural, is really 'wicked' and beyond conversion." 

Now, just because one doesn't reject truth, it doesn't mean one possesses it. Rather, we are philosophers, AKA lovers of wisdom, not owners; it's a dynamic and open relationship. 

Pieper says that for Aquinas, reason is

nothing other than "regard for openness to reality," and "acceptance of reality." And "truth" is to him nothing other than the unveiling and revelation of reality, of both natural and supernatural reality.

So, you could say that prior to truth is our openness to it: unlike other animals, we are open to being itself. Or not, in which case Genesis 3 All Over Again. 

Reason "perfected in the cognition of truth" is therefore the receptivity of the human spirit, to which the revelation of reality, both natural and supernatural reality, has given substance. 

Truth of Being = Revelation + Receptivity. Or, one could just say Intelligibility + Intelligence, respectively. The intelligibility of being is a kind of ceaseless revelation, while our intellection is openness to it. And prudence is grounded in conformity between the two:

The pre-eminence of prudence means that realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality. He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is. 

Now, I suppose everyone believes, or at least convinces himself, that he's in touch with reality. But in our day, common conceptions of reality are so radically different that it forces us to conclude that one side is dwelling in unreality. Which accounts for the hostility, because not getting your way is one thing, but not getting your reality -- and being forced to acknowledge unreality -- is a bit more alarming.  

If you want to do good, good intentions aren't enough; rather,

Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to the real situation, that is to the concrete realities which form the "environment" of a concrete human action; and that we therefore take this concrete reality seriously, with clear-eyed objectivity. 

Hmm. What if what we need to know in order to achieve some specific outcome is literally unknowable? If so, then presuming to know the unknowable is not going to end well. As it so happens, I'm also rereading the Hayek's Koon Klassic Law, Legislation and Liberty, in particular, the volume on The Mirage of Social Justice. 

You probably just read my mind, because if social justice is a mirage -- literally a kind of collective delusion -- then we might just have identified the essential disconnect between right and left, and left and reality. And you would be hard-pressed to find a progressive who doesn't enthusiastically believe in "social justice," even if they can never precisely define what it means.

It's a big subject, so one is tempted to say just read the book. Let's see if I can extract some of the most juicy insultainment. 

As Petey often says, let's begin with what we can't know, with "the impossibility for anyone of knowing all the particular facts" of a complex spontaneous order (Hayek). It's why we have rules: because the of our ineradicable ignorance of the future:

Rules are a device for coping with our constitutional ignorance. There would be no need for rules among omniscient people who were in agreement on the relative importance of all the different ends.

Which is why it is so repugnant to our reason to change the outcome of a rule-based system, for example, vis-a-vis student loan forgiveness, college racial discrimination against Asians, or climate scammers tweaking their models in order to arrive at the preferred results.

Speaking of affirmative action, diversity, inclusiveness, and all the other progressive buzz words,

The idea that government can determine the opportunities for all, and especially that it can ensure that they are the same for all, is therefore in conflict with the whole rationale of a free society.

When people say "social justice" they really mean "government coercion." Certainly they (at least secular types) do not mean that "society" will bring about the desired outcome, rather, a tyrannical entity that has the power to change the outcomes of a complex system.

But this much is obvious. Let's dig a little deeper to see where Hayek converges with Pieper on the subject of prudence. For Hayek, belief in "social justice" is not only imprudent, it is downright primitive: it is 

a direct consequence of that anthropomorphism or personification by which naive thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes. It is a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions.

So, we still must have rules, including rules of morality that inform our actions. But 

the demand for 'social justice' is addressed not to the individual but to society -- yet society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific purpose.... 

It is because of belief in the mirage of social justice "that people have placed in the hands of government powers" 

to satisfy the claims of the ever-increasing number of special interests who have learnt to employ the open sesame of 'social justice'. 

Or, in the words of the Aphorist, 

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

But in reality,

No social class has exploited the others more brazenly than the one that today calls itself "the State." 

Pathocracy and Oughtocracy

Is it normal to spend all day pondering the meaning of normality? Probably not, so I'm not the best person to ask. Truly truly, I've never felt "normal," and I suspect that this is what prompted my interest in psychology to begin with. 

First, there's the problem of normal vs. average; again, the average cannibal is presumably not normal, but compared to what? What and where is the human telos? We are what we are, but what are we supposed to be? I had to get a Ph.D. only to find out that no one can give me a straight answer.

It seems to me that a fruitful avenue is to examine this gap between Is and Ought, for it is also the gap between immanence and transcendence. If the Ought is not here, where is it? Let's say I want to become a "better person." The sentiment is here and now, but where is it coming from? What is its cause?

Off the top of my head I don't know, but I know who might know: Josef Pieper in his Four Cardinal Virtues. 

After all, what is a virtue? It's a built-in tendency toward a telos such as courage, moderation, justice, etc. A virtue is something we ought to cultivate and achieve, and failure to do so renders us, if not frankly "abnormal," at least dis-ordered. And recall that this all started with a meditation on the nature of personality dis-orders, both individual and collective (to the extent that the latter exists).

Pieper begins by pointing out that the quest for the proper human order has been going on for a long time:

contemporaries of Socrates already took for granted these traditional categories [of virtue] sprung from the earliest speculative thinking.

So, ever since man donned the thinking cap and began wondering WTF?! it's all about:

They took for granted not only the idea of virtue, which signifies human rightness, but also the attempt to define it in that fourfold spectrum [prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance].

Has there ever been a society that celebrated weak and cowardly men? I mean before ours? Or that invented "social justice" as a way to avoid the obligation to behave justly? Or that promulgated the morality of moral relativism? 

The 'doctrine of virtue' was one of the great discoveries in the history of man's self-understanding.

Discovery. Not "invention," "opinion," or "imposition." Rather, something universal -- implying a universal obligation (or ought): a proper order. 

This is different from a list of extrinsic obligations such as the Ten Commandments. In fact, let's leave God out of the discussion for now, and focus on nature -- specifically, the intrinsic nature of man. Even the village atheist has a conscience, that is, a sense of what he ought to do and believe: we all ought to be atheists.

But the doctrine of virtue speaks to persons qua persons:

both of the kind of being which is his when he enters the world, as a consequence of his createdness, and the kind of being he ought to strive toward and attain to...

Again, immanence and transcendence, horizontal and vertical, Is and Ought. The four classic virtues "can enable man to attain the furthest potentialities of his nature."

What about the fall?

We'll get to that later, but suffice it to say that the virtues may attain a supernatural perfection via the infusion of grace. Which is what sanctity, sanctification, and theosis are all about. This is the realm of "better than normal."

Oughtocracy. I just googled it, and the first thing that comes up is the autocrat Trump, so apparently I am the first to use this word. 

When I think of what it might mean, it is the opposite of what we've recently seen, say, in the streets of Philadelphia. In an oughtocracy everyone would do what he ought without being asked, whereas in the pathocracy of Philadelphia (or any other progressive city) we see mobs of people doing what they ought never do.

I suppose we've never had a perfect oughtocracy since Eden. But even Eden didn't become Philadelphia -- the city of brotherly love -- overnight. 

My favorite chapter of this book is the one on prudence, which is the virtue of virtues; without it, would-be virtues can become vicious. For example, courage without judgment would characterize a Nazi willing to die for the cause, or an Islamic terrorist.

In other words, none but the prudent man can be just, brave, and temperate, and the good man is good in so far as he is prudent. 

It almost looks like courage, justice, and temperance are the "content" of prudence (AKA judgment). But what is prudence itself, and how is it -- again, objectively -- possible?

Well, it goes back to classic realist philosophy that begins with Being: Being precedes the truth to which the latter is ordered, and truth precedes the good (i.e., the "doing good" of prudence). 

Long story short, we must first know the truth of things before we can act prudently. At the other extreme (i.e., of postmodern relativism), there is no reality, nor can we know it, which conveniently eliminates the Prime Directive of prudence. But "Classical Christian ethics"

maintains that man can be prudent and good only simultaneously...., that there is no sort of justice and fortitude which runs counter to the virtue of prudence; and that the unjust man has been imprudent before and is imprudent at the moment he is unjust.

Above I made a passing wisecrack about the injustice of social justice, but prior to this must be a deep disconnect between mind and reality (or Being), if only because of systematic stupidity or aggravated tenure. We shall return to this subject in due course. Suffice it to say that it is a doctrine in which no one ought to believe.

Speaking of which, our contemporaries -- this brood of vipers -- "will often call lies and cowardice prudent, truthfulness and courageous sacrifice imprudent." "Pragmatism" or "utilitarianism" displace prudence, which reduces to an expedient moral nihilism.

We'll end with this, which is also a good -- no, the best -- beginning:

Truth, then, is the prerequisite of justice. Whoever rejects truth, whether natural or supernatural, is really "wicked" and beyond conversion (Pieper).

"All laws and rules of conduct may ultimately be reduced to a single one: to truth" (Aquinas).

Pathocracy and Normocracy

We're still pondering Christopher Rufo's The Cluster B Society. First, some context is needed for the designation "Cluster B," which refers to a group of personality disorders revolving around emotional or erratic traits, i.e., the narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, and antisocial personalities.  

Which leads to the definition of personality disorder: last I checked,  any personality disorder involves enduring and inflexible patterns of behavior or emotion leading to significant subjective distress or objective impairment. This impairment can be in relationships, in work, or in adaptation more generally. 

Untreated, a personality disorder is essentially a lifelong condition, in contrast to presumably time-limited ones such as major depression, and also to even more serious lifelong conditions such as schizophrenia. On the spectrum of severity, personality disorders are somewhere between everyday neurosis and severely compromised reality testing, e.g., delusions and hallucinations. 

It's easy enough to apply psychological categories to a collective, but is this a valid exercise? Take an extreme case such as Nazi Germany. Is it helpful to say that Germany was a Cluster A and B society, with paranoid and antisocial traits? What was the cause of this, and what is the cure?

A somewhat random google search suggests that only 1.5% of the population suffers from a Cluster B personality disorder. If that's the case, how can half of the U.S. be in the grip of a collective personality disorder? 

Well, something is wrong with these people, and we aim to find out what it is. We could say that they're pathological, but by what standard? What is normality? Is there a universal standard for how a human being ought to be? If there are personality disorders, what is a properly ordered personality? 

What if these folks just want to fit in, or are imitating high status people, or were effectively indoctrinated in college? What might look like a personality disorder could be just weakness, stupidity, conformity, status seeking, and other character defects. Just bad breeding, as they used to say.

Rufo correctly notes that

scenes of American public life increasingly resemble a Cluster B psychodrama: victimhood replaces accomplishment as the standard of merit; accusation replaces disagreement as the means of settling disputes; false compassion becomes the primary method of manipulating citizens into compliance; and the whole scheme is enforced with the threat of violence: obey, or suffer the consequences.

But again, if everybody is just imitating everyone else, where do we locate the pathology? By virtue of what standard? In other words, if there is an unhealthy and wrong way to be, this implies a healthy and correct way.  

I apologize for the rambling, but I'm pondering this in real time.

As a result of my psychoanalytic training, I used to think that personality disorders were environmental as opposed to organic or genetic. But now I'm inclined to the view that they are more genetic, although there is always an interaction between genes and environment. 

Take, for example, a woman with borderline personality disorder. Usually we will discover a chaotic childhood with unstable caretakers, but what if this is because one or both of the parents has a personality disorder that is rooted in genetics? In general, mental illness runs in families, but genetic research suggests that the resultant chaos is at least equally cause and (genetic) effect.

Let me just jump to my bottom line take: psychologists began noticing an increase in personality disorders in the 1970s, but the genome hasn't changed since then. What has changed? 

One of the biggest changes has been a loosening of cultural standards, one consequence of which is that mental illness that had been previously repressed is allowed to openly express itself. It very much reminds me of the Ferguson Effect that has led to the spike in crime. 

True, there is more criminality, but this is because of the new absence of constraints and consequences. Criminal tendencies that had previously been "repressed" by law enforcement are now openly expressed. (And criminality itself is heavily genetically loaded.)

You get more of what you tolerate, and our culture has become so tolerant that we're surrounded by the intolerable. If you have no standards, people will meet them.  

It's the same with the alarming spike in sexual pathology and confusion. Ideas and behaviors that had previously been repressed and channeled into healthier avenues are openly expressed.    

 

By definition, everyone starts off immature. It only becomes pathological if the maturational process is arrested. But "maturational process" implies a telos, so one way of normalizing immaturity is to eliminate or ignore the telos of development. In a society of cannibals it is normal to be a cannibal. Indeed, objection to cannibalism might land you on the menu.

So, what is normal? How would we go about defining it in a way that isn't culturally relative? What things ought to be repressed and not tolerated? Rufo writes that 

American college students find themselves in the midst of an unprecedented mental-health crisis. According to the University of Michigan’s Healthy Minds study, more than 60 percent of college students meet the criteria for at least one mental-health problem -- a nearly 50 percent increase since 2013. 

But again, by what standard of normality? And what if much of this is due the psychological Ferguson Effect mentioned above?

That's a Big Question, and this post has already gone on too long, but a couple of days ago I read a post called Truth and Politics that provides some preliminary clues:

In our era, truth is under systematic assault from moralistic fanatics who are at the same time thoroughgoing relativists and dyed-in-the wool subjectivists. The Catholic journalist Karlo Broussard put it well in his recently published booklet, The New Relativism: “The agents of relativism are still out there, seeking to fit the world to their own desires and likes rather than discover and understand the world in order to better conform to it.

It seems there is something intrinsically pathological about relativism, especially when it becomes a new absolute: 

The fervid intensity of the woke absolutists, their endless anger and excoriation, should not be mistaken for a commitment to truth and truth-seeking. Their indignation, their aim to “cancel” -- to morally obliterate -- those they cannot abide is a consequence of the fact that they have left the world of objective truth and measured moral judgment behind.

Speaking of systems and what they tolerate or suppress, this new system permits the unleashing of primitive sadistic impulses on acceptable targets: 

these vehement enemies of Truth with a capital T do not hesitate to accuse their opponents of departing from the only acceptable narratives regarding ubiquitous white racism, the self-evidence of gender theory, the grave threat to democracy posed by conservative populists and moral traditionalists, and the unquestionable need to genuflect before the authority of “Science” as redefined by politically correct elites.

In this upside-down system, the normal are punished: there are widespread "efforts to silence those who still affirm that 'freedom is ordered to the truth and is fulfilled in man’s quest for truth and in man’s living in the truth'”:

Ideological fanaticism is the inevitable consequence of a nihilistic denial of an order of things, of a natural moral order available to human beings through reason and experience.

The new Absolute Relativists

have slowly transformed our institutions into what psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski calls a “pathocracy,” or rule by psychological dysfunction....

In a Cluster B society, psychological disorders are job qualifications rather than problems to be solved; ideology replaces competence as a marker of distinction....

 We'll end here, even though we're just getting started.

Progressivism is the Disease it Pretends to Cure

Yesterday's post asked the eternal question, how do you heal a progressive? For one thing, if they don't recognize that they have a problem -- and that the real problem doesn't have a political solution -- they're not going to seek treatment. 

Generally speaking, the worse the mental illness, the more the denial. Imagine getting a Keith Olbermann to acknowledge that he might have a little problem. Achieving such a stable breakthrough with a personality disorder might take months of therapy.

I say "stable breakthrough" because people with personality disorders are, like anyone else, capable of insight. But because of a certain developmental arrest, they are subject to primitive defense mechanisms such as denial, splitting, and projection, so as to nullify the insight. In order to become stable, the insight must essentially develop from a temporary state to an enduring trait. 

This is the maturational process, and it proceeds at its own pace. Children don't become adults overnight. It only took me four or five decades, and I'm still working on it. Looking back on it, I guess I missed a few developmental milestones along the way due to PTSD -- Partying Til the Shadows of Dawn.   

Youth is an infirmity that old age does not always cure.

I heard that.

Yesterday we began a discussion of Christopher Rufo's Cluster B Society, and he's definitely onto something. Recall what Voegelin says about the impossibility of debating ideologues, and how the effort to do so becomes "medical in character" because it must "diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence" so as to initiate "a healing process."

Certainly I know what he means, but I don't think a medical model is the best way to frame the problem. For example, in medicine it is important that the physician recognize the problem, but in psychology it is important that the patient do so as well. In both cases there is "pain," but especially in personality disorders, the pain is denied, split off, projected, externalized, and acted out in relationships.

Analogously, if you go to your doctor with a broken leg, he doesn't have to first help you come around to the view that your pain is a consequence of the broken leg. Nor would doing so have anything to do with the "cure" for a broken leg, whereas in psychotherapy accurate recognition of the source of the psychic pain is very much part of the "cure."

But cure is a bad way to frame it, because there isn't one. "Cure" shouldn't even be in the vocabulary of a psychologist, for it is written:   

Anything that fully solves problems has no relation to them.

The authentic problem does not demand that we solve it but rather that we try to live it.

We only know how to solve the problems that do not matter.   

Indeed, 

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

This is another reason not to conflate medicine and psychology, because imagine having to first convince the patient that he can't cure his own illness, before proceeding with the cure. 

In reality, everywhere and anytime,

The soul is the task of man.

And  

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

Which implies that progressives will always be with us, because there is always a fresh generation with skulls full of mush who externalize their problems and imagine there's a cure for human nature. Good times, good times... til the shadows of dawn. 

Seriously, it's a relief to imagine that someone or something else is responsible for your pain. Moreover, tolerating emotional pain is a central part of maturity.

Here's an important one that goes to the heart of personality disorders:  

Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature in order to refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

In a Substack article, Rufo shares some perceptive reader comments on The Cluster B Society:

I think perhaps the greatest degenerative element of our Western social psychology over the last 60 years has been the displacement of a mentality of “we are all sinners” by a narcissistic mentality of maximal “self-esteem.” 

Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone or something else to blame for each and every one of your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as “victim” and then ask: Who needs to be cancelled?

There it is: like institutionalized character pathology, or a personality disorder writ large. On the one hand,

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.

Among which is that    

Self-satisfaction is pathetic proof of lowliness. 

Another reader points out how

Many organizations purporting to be about justice and positive goals are in reality led by highly disordered individuals and stirred by a mentality infected with disordered patterns of reasoning and emotion. These people gravitate toward positions of power and influence . . . they push unhinged agendas behind the scenes, without accountability. 

The wider public needs to get wiser and understand this dynamic. Just because someone claims to be fighting for justice, human rights, or charitable causes doesn’t mean that this is what’s actually happening.

That is so true that I have nothing else to say, but I'll say it in the next installment.

How Do You Heal a Progressive?

Human actions are rational, or at least I'm old enough to remember when they were. Old Aristotle called man the rational animal, but he also called him a political animal, and boy, wouldn't that be nice: a rational political animal!

Ha (the hollow and bitter kind).

Now, how is it that man is rational? For the moment we confine ourselves to some rational system or model, we thereby become irrational. I suppose this is another way of asking how it is that man always transcends himself.

In the essay we were discussing yesterday, Voegelin says that human existence 

is not opaque to itself, but illuminated by the intellect (Aquinas) or nous (Aristotle).... In the exegesis of existence, intellect discovers itself in the structure of existence; ontologically speaking, human existence has noetic structure. The intellect discovers itself, furthermore, as a force transcending its own existence; by virtue of the intellect, existence not only is not opaque, but actually reaches out beyond itself in various directions in search of knowledge. 

This is at once obvious and deeply mysterious -- that we possess such a (as Schuon puts it) "supernaturally natural" faculty of transcendence. In fact, if we do not transcend mere rationality, we cannot be rational. As Voegelin explains, while "human action is rational,"

that rationality hinges on the condition of an ultimate end. The indefinite regress from means to ends, which in their turn are means to further ends, must be cut short at some point by an ultimate end, by a summum bonum.

This limit or end  

is the condition of rationality in action.... there would be no substantive rationality in any action, if the whole network of a man’s action could not be oriented toward a highest good from which such rationality radiates down to the single actions.

For Aristotle,  

Not only would the nature of the Good be destroyed without a limiting good that is no means to a further end, but there would be no reason (nous) in the world at large.... 

So, here we see an implicit relationship between the denial of transcendence and destruction -- ultimately the destruction of man and of reason: of man the rational animal. And by extension the political animal, since his politics will be deeply irrational and destructive as well.

As to the ultimate end or reason of things, clearly it 

is not to be found by ranging indefinitely over the field of existent things. But if it is not to be found in the field of existent things, where is it to be found? To this question, Intellect, by virtue of its reasoning power, will answer that it is to be found in something beyond the field of existent things...

This tension-toward-transcendence goes to the very structure of being, and we just have to accept the truth of this, regardless of how pleasant. Voegelin describes it on the one hand as "awareness of the fundamental structure of existence together with the willingness to accept it." But 

Correspondingly, we shall define untruth of existence as a revolt against the condicio humana and the attempt to overlay its reality by the construction of a Second Reality.

Now, leaping ahead to the implications, I think we can broadly define mental illness as a lack of conformity between psyche and world or reality. But not so fast, because if a whole world has become sick, then conformity to it will be sick as well. A "well adjusted Nazi" is a poorly adjusted human being.

Let's look at a couple of graphs I yoinked from PowerLine. The first one shows a dramatic decline in religiosity -- combined with a significant increase in woowoo -- among Democrats:

It's rather difficult to believe that as recently as 1999, Democrats were nearly as religious as Republicans, but it's not hard to believe that 37% remain religious, considering what religion has been reduced to on the left, which is to say, another form of spiritual if not mental illness. 

Given the alarming rates of mental illness on the left, their religiosity takes the form of either acting out or a cry for help. The woowoo is mainly just estrogen-fueled magic, AKA toxic femininity.

Speaking of irrationality and spiritual illness, the following chart is even more alarming:

It doesn't break the findings down by party, but if 61% of the population wants the government to regulate speech, we're done. Unless we somehow make a remarkable comeback, but mental illness tends to be intergenerational, so this is not something that can occur overnight, but would take decades to repair.

Which leads directly to the next subject, an essay by Christopher Rufo called the Cluster B Society. Maybe you should read the whole thing and we can discuss it tomorrow. 

Back for a moment to Voegelin's essay on the difficulties of debate in our time. Putting him and Rufo together, it seems to me that the question is going to come down to: how is it possible to argue with a mentally ill person? As a former clinical psychologist, I can assure you that argument will get you nowhere. But you already knew this, because you no doubt have liberal friends and relatives. 

"Rational argument," writes Voegelin, "presupposes the community of true existence." Otherwise, "debate" becomes 

medical in character in that it has to diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence and by their noetic structure to initiate, if possible, a healing process.

Truth, Existence, and a Kick in the Balls

While sipping the morning cup and bumping around the internet, I suppose I'm always looking for something. I don't know what it is unless and until I find it, and this morning I found something  that goes to the Matrix -- what it is and how it is formed. 

It's a bit conspiratorial for my tastes -- I don't think there is a cabal at the top that's been pulling the strings for the last 75 years or so -- but certainly his description of the phenomena is accurate, irrespective of its cause. I think the cause ultimately lies in human nature, for if it didn't, man couldn't so easily fall into the trap. 

For man to fall repeatedly into the same trap, just paint it a different color each time. 

For

Humanity only changes the rhetoric of its stupidities.

Let me first provide a few excerpts that caught my attention: "ideological subversion" involves changing 

the perception of reality of every American to such an extent that despite of the abundance of information no one is able to come to sensible conclusions in the interest of defending themselves, their families, their community, and their country.

The first stage of ideological subversion, or "active measures," involves what he calls "demoralization," after which 

exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who is demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures.... he will refuse to believe it, until... a military boot crashes his balls. 

Again, irrespective of the cause, we have obviously reached a stage in which half the country is unable to assess true information -- for whom facts mean nothing, and who refuse to believe what is in front of their faces. They are living in the ball-crushing Matrix. 

Now, how did we get here? Widespread higher education has a lot do do with it, as does mass media, but those are just means. How does the seed of subversion get planted, and what is it exactly?

Voegelin tries to get to the bottom of it in an essay called On Debate and Existence. In it he describes the difficulty of engaging in debate with matrix-dwelling ideologues: in so doing, we discover that

no agreement, or even an honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence -- with regard to the nature of man, to his place in the world, to his place in society and history, to his relation to God. 

Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence... called the Second Reality. 

The argument could not achieve results..., as it became increasingly clear that not argument was pitched against argument, but that behind the appearance of a rational debate there lurked the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses, we may say, when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared.

So, we're ultimately dealing with a different mode of existence. While this sounds extreme, anyone can see that the situation itself is extreme. One has only to tune into a press briefing by Karine Jean Pierre to see this elaborate Second Reality. The deeper question is why so-called journalists not only accept the Second Reality but help to construct and maintain it. Certainly no one questions it. There is sometimes a bit of carping at the margins, but not enough to damage the Matrix itself. 

This breakdown of reality demands an explanation:

The phenomenon of the breakdown as such is well known. Moreover, the various Second Realities, the so-called ideologies, have been the object of extensive studies. But the nature of the breakdown itself..., and above all the methods of coping with the fantastic situation, are by far not yet sufficiently explored. 

It doesn't feel as if it was that long ago that "the universe of rational discourse was still intact because the first reality of existence was yet unquestioned." But Voegelin suggests that the process has been unfolding for a long time, or at least has its roots in a process that began some 500 years ago. 

Me? I suspect that the pathology is always present in some form or fashion, and that dates don't matter. The construction of second realities is more of a timeless temptation going back to Genesis 3. Reality and truth can be painful, so unreality is always an option:

the quest for truth is the perpetual task of disengaging it from error, of refining its expression in contest with the inexhaustible ingenuity of error. 

The inexhaustible ingenuity of error. It almost sounds diabolical, no? As if these diverse ideological second realities have the same implicit Author.  

For Voegelin, thinkers such as Aquinas and Aristotle might as well be contemporaries. He always speaks of them as if they are very much at the cutting edge of philosophy. Modern thought "does not modify the problem but only its symbolic expression," such that "the scholastic and classic problem is indeed identical with our own." 

Today's thinkers are simultaneously more "critical" and naive; classic philosophy can appear naive, but this is only because "first reality" and the "truth of existence" were 

not yet questioned; hence there was no need to distinguish it from an untrue existence; and consequently no concepts were developed for a problem that had not yet become topical. The truth of existence was taken so much for, granted that, without further preparation, the analysis could proceed to develop the problems of metaphysics as they presented themselves to men who lived in the truth of existence.

But now we've reached a situation in which thinkers living their existence-in-untruth are meditating on the truth of existence, and presuming to tell us what's what. Few would acknowledge the self-evident principle that "first philosophy is the science of truth," that is, "of that truth which is the origin of all truth." This goes to 

the first principle whereby all things are. The truth belonging to such a principle is, clearly, the source of all truth; for things have the same disposition in truth as in being.

Until Kant and his progeny come along and ruin everybody's lives and eat all our steak. 

Nevertheless, "a universe which contains intelligent beings cannot originate with a prima causa that is less than intelligent." Seems to me that unintelligence is parasitic on intelligence. If it's the other way around, then we have no intellectual defense against the Matrix. 

To be continued...  

What Else Makes a Man?

Yesterday we touched on "intelligence, sentiment, will," i.e., "truth, virtue, freedom." There's also objectivity, but I suppose this is an intrinsic component of human intelligence. Some people believe objectivity is just a human conceit, but 

Unless one accepts that man is fundamentally objective, one quickly finds oneself in refutation of oneself (Bina & Ziarani).

Clowns gonna beclown themselves: 

One has to start with the self-evidence of objective truth. Any attempt to deny the self-evidence of truth -- or being, or reality, or absoluteness -- will be self-defeating. 

Think about all those progressives who insist on the principle that all truth claims are masks of power:

Any system of thought that proposes an absolute principle while denying the notion of truth -- hence the notion of objectivity -- is condemned to self-refutation.

Aside from tenure, why do people do this? Not sure, but let me think back to when I was an idiot and see what I can come up with...

Okay, it's definitely a status thing in the context of a system that rewards intelligence. In this system -- moreso today than ever before -- their are hordes of sub-mediocrities who are completely unself-aware and simply imitate other high-status primates. It's a shortcut to superiority over others while creating a superficial explanation for everything -- like, say, the 1619 Project. It provides a cheap omniscience while conferring prestige on its proponents, so what's not to like?

Rob Henderson recently dismantled a work of "anthropology" along these lines called The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. Omniscience? Check. Status? Check. Just look at the universal acclaim on amazon -- NY Times, New Yorker, Atlantic, Washington Post, LA Times, WSJ, NBC, et al. To garner the praise of all those prestigious legacy sources implies that the book must be truly horrible.

Hmm, I always check the negative reviews first:

People were, are and can become again sweet caring bush hippies grooving sustainably with nature. War, conflict, genocide, cannibalism, slavery and the rest of human nastiness are departures from the fact that people were all basking in freedom, equality, anarchy, mutual aid, caring and all other good things until Eden was destroyed by evil men who didn't or don't take Rousseau's opinions seriously. This exercise in historical make believe would be a funny self parody if people didn't take this exercise in wishful thinking seriously.

They make a point of rejecting Eurocentrism yet the entire book is based on narratives from Anglo-European writers or their interpretations of romanticized Indigenous values.... Sort of an "Ancient Indigenous Wisdom" fallacy. 

We have two fan-boys of slavery-driven economics hoping a lack of total pre-historic knowledge might somehow be hiding some success of a slave-driven economy.

they have fallen into the same bad habits of prejudice, bias, and unsubstantiated generalization as all of the white, male, Eurocentric scholars who they criticize on almost every page. 

In short, 

leftist propaganda disguised as history based on undocumented conjecture.

Well, that was fun. But did we learn anything? I think so. Again, consider the universal praise by Trusted Sources -- all the Smart People -- in comparison to the value of the book, which is quite literally less than nil. What's going on here, aside from a massive jerk circle of mimetic and status seeking elite opinion?  

Oh well. Let's move on. Truth will always be an unpopular, rearguard action. And

We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers.

Going back to what makes a man, what about imagination and creativity? I guess those would be a combination of intelligence and possibility, the latter being a reflection of Infinitude, another name for which is All-Possibility.

That's a coincidence: in the very next paragraph Schuon goes into the question of objectivity, which in one sense is superior to subjectivity, but it depends, for "reason is objective only on condition of basing itself on exact data and of proceeding correctly." 

Look at how climate alarmists, for example, reason perfectly correctly about their catastrophically flawed data. Or the idiotic book mentioned above -- as Henderson says, the authors 

repeatedly ask the reader to “rethink,” “reimagine,” and “reconsider” everything we think we know about the development of human societies, suggesting that humans have become “stuck” to such an extent that we can no longer imagine the possibility of “reinventing” ourselves.

"Reimagining" ourselves implies that we were only imagining ourselves before. How about a little objectivity?

Sentiment "lacks objectivity only when it is excessive or misplaced," and "not when justified by its object and is, in fact, a kind of adequation." In other words, loving lovable things is a kind of objectivity, whereas loving evil, or hating the good, or believing falsehood, are inherently pathological. 

Now, the author of The Dawn of Everything (Graeber) was a far left anti-capitalist activist, so he essentially wrote a 700 page tribute to his own misplaced sentiment. The existence of this stubborn and dogged tendency to misplaced sentiment tells us much more about human nature than anything in the book. Someone needs to reimagine reimagining!

For Schuon, human intelligence involves the realization of an "equilibrium between the intelligence of the brain and that of the heart," so it is not as if we should toss sentiment aside, for, among other reasons, it is connected to spiritual intuition (as opposed to mere reason), so there is the possibility of a dysfunctional rational objectivity and a functional sentimental subjectivity.

To be continued...  

What Makes a Man?

 What makes a man, Mr. Schuon?

Intelligence, sentiment, will; or truth, virtue, freedom.

Ah, a limber mind, challenges met, obstacles overcome, doing the right thing -- and tears, for strong men also cry and have sentiments. 

A few posts back we wondered out loud whether in some sense and in a manner of speaking, anthropology might be theology, and vice versa? At the outset let us eliminate the idea that God is but a projection of human psychology, because that is not what we mean. At all. 

Which doesn't mean this sort of naive projection doesn't take place, because it does, all the time -- for example, by atheists who never tire of ridiculing and rejecting a deity of their own making. We, of course, also reject the imaginary god of the village atheist. 

Let us attach the wide angle lens to our cosmic camera and open the ƒ-stop to ∞. What do we see? First, we see that some kind of relation exists between man and "ultimate reality," irrespective of how we conceive the latter, or even if we have only the concept. 

It seems we can't help thinking about the ultimate principle, whether we do so implicitly or explicitly. For example, even materialism -- the crudest conceivable metaphysic -- posits matter as the ultimate principle, only ignoring how principles exist and how man can achieve knowledge of them. 

In fact, even a nihilist who pretends there is no ultimate reality ends up turning himself into ultimate reality, which reminds me of what Voegelin says in an essay called The Murder of God: "It does not suffice"

to replace the old world of God with a new world of man: the world of God itself must have been a world of man, and God a work of man which can therefore be destroyed if it prevents man from reigning over the order of being.

The new and improved Marxist-socialist man  

is not a man without religious illusions, but one who has taken God back into his being.... The new man is, like Nietzsche's superman, the man who has made himself God.

Nice work if you can get it, but

the attempt to create a superman is an attempt to murder man. Historically, the murder of God is not followed by the superman, but by the murder of man..., the homicide of the revolutionary practitioners (Voegelin). 

Now, what is ultimate reality? First, it is something that is distinct from all appearances, which introduces a kind of (humanly) unrelievable tension between the two. For example, the progress of science is always from appearances toward a deeper reality, or from multiplicity to unity.

However, from another angle, ultimate reality must include the principle of appearance as such, so must be "in" every appearance -- in the same way, for example, that the cause is in the effect, or how the principle of unity must be present in all numbers (each number being a multiple of one).

Any principle is something from which consequences follow, and God is the first principle from which everything ultimately flows. This doesn't mean we know God, only that we know that God -- the Principle -- must exist.

Now, man and God (or however you want to express this Tension) are ineluctably mixed up together in the cosmic caper we call existence. There is no culture without some version of the God Principle, so God is an unindicted co-conspirator in all human activity, emphasis on the spira -- and on the con -- as in "breathing together."

Not to say God is guilty of our mischief, for this would be analogous to holding the treasury department responsible for bank robberies. Nevertheless, the treasury department prints the money, as God projects being via his continually creative act. 

Nor do we deny natural evolution at the far end of the spectrum, only to say that human isness can in no way be reduced to monkey business. No, we are suspended between the nonlocal Principle and a local animal form, and that's just the way it is. If we were literally reducible to our genetic code, we could never know it; or, to know it is to have transcended it.

Which I suppose goes to the question of free will -- again, of challenges met, obstacles overcome, doing the right thing, etc. 

Now, some of our intellectual betters like to are compelled to say that free will is an illusion, while others willfully insist that the will to power is all there is, and that all philosophies and narratives are just masks for the exercise of power.

Oh, by the way, these thoughts have been provoked by an essay called Outlines of a Spiritual Anthropology, contained in the same book we were discussing yesterday, From the Divine to the Human. In discussing the absolute toppermost of the poppermost, Schuon says that the divine perfections contained in the Absolute are 

Knowledge, Love and Power, which evoke the human faculties of intelligence, sentiment and will.

Of course, these are not separate in God, only in us -- which is why a progressive idiot can say something as stupid as man being reducible to will and power, thereby tossing out intelligence and sentiment (and by implication, man). In reality, 

Will is not an end in itself: one cannot will except by virtue of either a knowledge or of a love. 

At least in a normal person. But eliminate truth and love, and the will to power is all that's left -- a naked will to achieve without a limber mind.

I don't always take the Bible literally, but I do take literally the axiom that man is in the image and likeness of the Principle, or better, the Creative Principle. 

Here again, this is where anthropology becomes theology and vice versa, because it is as if these two mirrors are held up to each other, so long as we stipulate that they are not on the same plane, which would reduce to pantheism, magic, nihilism, or some other deformation of being. If the Principle is Absolute, then we are the "reflected" or "relative" absolute. It's why we can even know absolute principles.

All "anthropology" depends on a "theology" in the sense that every science of man must prolong a science of God. 

This is at once self-evident but is worth emphasizing "in a world which, having forgotten the divine, no longer can know what is human."

Like God, man is made of spirit, only embodied spirit. In turn, the spirit "is made of knowledge and love -- or of intelligence and sentiment -- then of will, the latter necessarily drawing its inspiration from one or the other of these two faculties." 

Schuon relates the perspectives of intelligence-knowledge and sentiment-love to "the polarity of the masculine and feminine." Obviously the one hardly excludes the other, but speaking only for myself, it is a great relief that my wife isn't built like me. Schuon compares knowledge and love to light and heat respectively, and who wants to live in a warm but dark environment, or a bright and freezing one? 

Above we mentioned that the will is a function of knowledge or love, but we all know people in whom it is a function of hatred and ignorance. 

Here, will becomes willfulness, and is actually no longer free. I'm pretty sure Jesus has something like this in mind with various admonitions against hating in the wrong way. Sure, it's necessary to hate evil, but do make sure it's evil, and also make sure you're intelligent and humble enough to know the difference (and there is no intelligence without humility -- and a bit of self-awareness -- which amount to the same thing).

In fact, Schuon says that the content of our character "combines what we will and what we love," which is "the domain of virtues." This perspective places intelligence at the summit, whereas "the perspective of love, on the contrary, places love at the summit and views intelligence and will solely as functions in service of love."

I would say that if you naturally tend toward one, you probably need to work on the other. I love truth, and I guess that's a start, but you know what Paul says: 

If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing. 

So, in my case, knowledge comes easily and naturally. What Paul just said? Not so naturally, but here's hoping it comes supernaturally, because I don't want to be hermetically sealed in my own Bobness, which is no achievement at all.