New Times, Ancient Shadows

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The obstacle met by human understanding, while it moves on its way to transcending corporeal existence, is the act of projecting the limitations of what is corporeal and extrinsic in principle onto what is, by its nature, free from any limitation.

To a certain degree this is only natural: one has to use what is readily available and this obviously makes the situation rather analogous to an attempt of depicting a man – body and soul – by outlining his shadow.

For example, the temptation to imagine God as the perfect man, in the sense we humans would like to imagine who or what the perfect man would be, can lead to a straight path into downright metaphysical delusions – from some of the popular cults of Antiquity, which were more often than not built on more subtle insights, to posthumanism of our day and age, where subtlety, i.e. the ironical pause that ancient mythographers seemed to hold towards their idols, has been utterly jettisoned.

It is noteworthy that imagining God as an immortal man wielding a thunderbolt actually does contain more than just a grain of truth, because humanity implies immortality and a kind of lordship over the nature, albeit in the special and highly nuanced sense.

On the other hand, understanding God as a perfect system, which contemporary mentality in its highest extremity essentially ends up with, contains no truth at all, because neither is human intellect a system-building subjectivity, nor is God its perfect form.

However, there’s another way to lose one’s bearing when act of understanding attempts to uplift itself towards transcendence; it is an urge to take the unlimited nature as the guiding light and then proceed to impose its qualities, grasped always with a degree of misunderstanding, onto the limited nature we call the world or, more precisely, creation.

We’ll consider one up to date example of this error.

The outcry of the number of popular postmodern thinkers is that Christianity is a patriarchal religion: as the special brand of “the opium for the masses”, it posits the a male deity that transcendentally predetermines the role of women in society – first through all male priesthood and, consequently, down to other societal institutions.

To a certain – rather considerable – extent this is quite correct, because the essential Christian rites are indeed reserved for men and the reason for this is indeed a principal, not an arbitrary one.

However, the underlying assumption that it all comes to pass because of the historical configuration of power relations between sexes is wrong.

The inversion of the relation between ontological up and down, at work in this particular assumption, is a product of the form of materialist dialectics, further nuanced by psychoanalysis, phenomenology, certain linguistic theories, etc.

Of course, it implies that one needs to consider religious and social principles as the superstructure reflecting material determinants in order to radically change – in fact: obliterate – them, and this is always the aim of deconstruction; world has to be revolutionary changed before one gets to understand it, because there is in fact nothing to understand.

Yet the standard strategy of those opposing this mental attitude is also severely lacking.

Supposedly, the error of both postmodernist thinking and its politics lies in the absolute disregard for biology and the way it conditions human beings. The various examples of comical contradictions contemporary intellectuals and policy makers fall into are pointed out – and they are indeed a legion – and conclusion seems to outline itself:

The biology is human manifest destiny and “The Left” – usual reductionist moniker for the entirety of the postmodern project – is denying it.

As with all that is easily pronounced to be manifest, I find this proclamation rather wanting.

To take as an example one of the most radical and often ridiculed postmodern truisms, is it really a laughing matter when claim has been made that the whole of the Western Civilization is built around penis, to an extent that even Aristotelian logic is nothing but the reflection of, well, its “creator” being a “dickhead” of sorts, because intellect is inherently masculine?

All urge to laugh it out of existence to the contrary, I think there’s nothing funny about it, not only because of its destructiveness, but also because there’s a grain of truth in it, as we’ll show later.

Also I don’t think it’s really refuted by the standard conservative and/or libertarian arguments pointing out the primacy of brain functions and evolution of society in developing the higher functions of human being, as both Zoon logon echon and Zoon politikon.

At its heart the true outrage of this proclamation does not lay in the psychoanalysis and dialectical materialism being stretched into reductio ad absurdum, but in its veiled metaphysical core.

Conservative arguments do not even glimpse, let alone touch, this core because they are not adequate to its origin – those are modern arguments, coming only partly from the genuine common sense, but at the same time rejecting the metaphysical origin of the common sense itself, due to their rather shallow historical presuppositions.

In essence, I would posit that their historical baggage consists precisely of modern faith in biological origin of man and rationality as the creative agent of history, progressing into direction of finding a rational mean term between man and his environment. It doesn’t really put in question the apparently materialistic standpoint of feminism or radical postmodern theories; it only points out that they fail and endanger human species because they are dangerously stretching the confines of matter – i.e. the confines of the ultimate substance of biological and social reality.

However, attempting to dissolve the confines of matter in the way postmodernism does, and – what is essential to point out – the sense of certainty it thereby dissolves together with materialism, is not an act of understanding conditioned by modernity.

In other words, it is surely an error – and a grave one at that – yet neither historically new nor solely a historical one.

It is a rather ancient metaphysical error.

And metaphysical error cannot be defeated by common sense, but only by the metaphysical truth.

So, let us finally outline one of the expressions of this error, illustrative for the subject at hand.

Its structure betrays what we defined above as the way of descending from the unlimited towards the limited nature and making the later conform to the erroneous understanding of the former.

It goes like this: if God is all powerful and has a Son, then surely he could – nay, should – be a girl, too.

However comical this might appear at the first sight, and however novel, it is in fact neither.

Putting aside for the moment pre-Christian religions, the idea of divine androgyny is not a new invention even in the Christian context and was present in some among the Gnostic doctrines of the first centuries of Christianity, as well as even among the Gnostic leaning early Church fathers. The so called “female principle” in God, whereby God can be understood both as the Mother and the Father is also present throughout the quite long history of occultism and was, to an extent, appropriated by some of the psychoanalysts of the Twentieth Century.

The logic behind it seems to be as follows:

If God is perfect, one cannot deny Him those attributes or powers that are eminently, and in principle, peculiar to female and are in no way present in male, also in principle. To deny this would be to deprive unlimited reality of its unlimited nature and us, humans, from the nurturing tenderness of our divine source, because this we perceive, via eminentia, as something that should be one of the virtuosities of God qua loving God.

On the other hand, one God whose being is to give birth to one God while remaining one God eternally in one God, seems to be impossible to comprehend without affirming both principles of fatherhood and motherhood to Him (Her?).

How would a conservative oppose this ancient idea?

Whereas, for example, the average conservative proponent of free market and continuity of institutions, while begrudgingly affirming the evolutional success of Catholic Church in promoting “conservative values”, would likely wave all of this off as irrelevant speculation of someone “having too much time on his hands” (as if mortal man can ever have too much time on his hands), this error is in the long run more devastating to mentality it imbibes than anything revolutionary terrorists from Jacobins to Communists were able to muster against their opponents and victims.

No conspiracy theory about Communist subversion outliving the USSR can protect the West from the fact that the rot comes from the strange, never really outspoken, appeal these ideas hold for the majority of people. Also, let it be mentioned in passing, they are also intensely present and influential for a long time, albeit in a different form, in the East and play a significant role in what is unfolding as an attempt to rebuild the spatial confines of the USSR.

This is not a manifest appeal, as social reforms emanating from them are very rarely supported from below, but it is an appeal nonetheless, because they are almost never refuted on their own merit.

It is, to wit, an intellectual appeal.

And they have to be refuted on their own merit, because if not, it could just mean that the mind, supposed to refute them, deep down finds them true.

It’s not enough to realize the destructiveness of contemporary gender politics – which most people intuitively do, while the principle from which this politics emanates has been widely, albeit unreflectively, accepted.

Human mind thinks before it thinks that it thinks; it makes inferences that remain in the shadows while directing the will into certain direction; and modern-cum-postmodern mind is indeed being set into direction that makes politics of dissolution acceptable.

Human nature rebels against this, but the mind remains set; because, if it weren’t, there would be no chance, not only to impose, but even to make an argument, for example, about whether woman can decide to be a man or vice versa.

Well then, it sounds so banal, but it’s also so true:

If you want to change the world, first change your mind.

Let us proceed then towards the rather different mindset and see how St. Thomas Aquinas can provide a hint for changing one’s mind:

 

“It is obvious that bodily generation of living beings comes to pass through active and passive powers (per virtutem activam et passivam): the active is, naturally, called the father whereas the passive one is correctly called the mother. Therefore among the activities required to generate the offspring some are particular to father, while others are particular to mother; to pass on the nature and the species is fitting for the father whereas to conceive and give birth is a fitting for the mother, being the patient and recipient. As the procession of the Word is coming to pass (…) by God thinking Himself (Deus seipsum intelligit) – and God’s act of intelligence is not coming to pass through some passive power, but the actual one, because the divine mind is not in potentiality but only in act – it follows that in generation of the Word the presence of the principle (ratio) of the mother is not fitting, but only of the father. Therefore, whatever of the bodily generation distinctly fits both the father and the mother, Holly Scripture ascribes to Father alone; it is said, namely, that Father gives life to the Son and that He “conceives and gives birth to Him”. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles bk. IV cp. XII pg.

Here, Aquinas gives an account on the nature of the birth of the Word in the godhead as a preliminary before he plunges in the theology of Trinity.

Some of the objections he had in mind while writing it were precisely the core metaphysical errors, including the one we pointed out before.

It is important to note, however, that this passage has not been developed from criticism or, more generally speaking, was not based on the negation of something. The answers to objections are put forward only after the truth has been set. This keeping to the form of author’s expression is one methodological principle that must always be borne in mind in order not to invert the very principle he attempts to expound. Metaphysical principle is not a negation but an affirmation, even if human intellect can only express it in negations, i.e. it does not need its opposite in order to be what it is, whereas quasi metaphysical principle, as the one we are going to inspect now, is indeed built upon contrarian opposition to something else.

Ask yourselves, if you will, why is nowadays every proposition to essentially change and invert something, from the very notion of sexual bipolarity to institutions like marriage, initially not met with correspondingly simple intellectual answer to the contrary? When someone demands that Church should ordain priestesses or that one woman should legally marry another woman and afterwards change her sex and then marry another man, the objections are always complex, always beating around the bush, mustering evidence that this is not really right or, if courage has been mustered together with the evidence, natural.

Why not simply ask, why?

If something hasn’t changed for millennia, why change it now?

This is not simply a conservative question: it is a metaphysical one; the one stemming, namely, from the intellect ruled by the entirely different principle then the one ruling its opponent.

Yet it is almost never put in this way and this is a clear sign that the opposite principle rules the minds – if not hearts – of both the masses and intellectuals.

This other principle is the one of negation. If we want to outline it, it is best to approach it via negativa and state that this is the principle of destruction or – quite the same really – of deconstruction; everything that is deserves to be deconstructed, reformed, changed or brought to naught; those people who instinctively oppose it when proposed in such pure form – and they’re thankfully still a majority – are nevertheless infected by it in their minds, and cannot shake it off, appeasing always some of its demands, whereas none of its demands should be appeased at all, because there will be no end to them. Principal negativity seeks dissolution and as such cannot be stopped emanating its “activity” simply by feeding it with new things to obliterate.

It has to be stopped by being rejected in essence.

Because St. Thomas Aquinas lived in an age where this principle was not prevalently present – at least not in the same sense it is present now – it was very important to point out how he thinks before expounding on what he thinks, because the one is conditioned by the other.

Now, as the birth of the Word in God is unlimited, eternal, act, no limited and temporal act can rightly express it. What’s more, as both eternal and unlimited, it precedes all other possible acts or energies that world – both visible and invisible – abounds with. Therefore, the human conception and birth of progeny is not the exemplar but only the symbol of what God does ab intra. In other words, the birth of the Word is absolutely not conditioned by natural gender and even the principles that could be understood as eternal exemplars of natural gender, but only accidentally outlines for us why genders/sexes are separate; what it outlines essentially, on the other hand, is that pure act does not need the pure potency, whereas the limited act has to be complemented with limited potency.

Genders are separate because nature needs them to be separate and this also means that natural living being needs them to exist: the very separation – a primary difference that ensures the continuity of life in nature – is what living in the certain sense essentially is. The essence of man is not the being of man because he is the creature in need of opposite, but at the same time congenially complementary, creature; also, this is the primary element of society; primary difference that is always complemented by the primary unity of male and female.

In God, on the other hand, the emanation of the Word is the eternal act of Truth that is being articulated, which is essential to supreme abundance of the One Who originates all, but is Himself without origin. This relation is ultimately intrinsic and real because it is a relation coming to pass in the heart of the pure act/energy that is perfect and free to such a degree that it does not need anything extrinsic to be what it is. Therefore, it does not need what we humans call potentiality, power and, ultimately, matter to be what it is.

This is where the error slips in.

The idea that God should have dual attributes of femininity and masculinity stems from the presupposition that possibility is the autonomous principle, equal to its complementary principle of actuality.

Underlying this is the urge to “rescue” the Origin from the necessity and to preserve His absolute freedom.

But what kind of necessity and what kind of freedom are we talking about here?

The necessity of pure act bears absolutely no likeness to anything we find in created world, save for the degree in which creatures accomplish precisely the level of freedom from the extrinsic and/or corporeal allotted to them in the hierarchical universe, both visible and invisible. When we say that Father has to bear a Son, this means only that the act in question is the expression of His actual, not possible, freedom to bear an eternal fruit of his own Being and by His own Being; His necessary freedom to speak the Truth that He is. If we are to understand this necessity as an impediment on freedom, then what we are really doing is projecting the human image upon God, because human ability to act is built upon constant need to choose among different potentialities. On the human plane of existence, the necessity absolutely impeding freedom would be taking one potentiality and making it absolute. This is plain to see in the popular Science Fiction, where chain of events that led to present can be changed by some imagined time travel where changing one of the finite causes in the past changes the future and, consequently, present reality. But this is properly named fiction, because the so called chains of events that human mind observes are in fact infinite, because matter can be infinitely divided, so the only thing making one set of extrinsic and accidental causes necessary is man’s own subjective decision to point it out as such, while neglecting the infinity of other similar causal chains. [1]

Thus the illusion of necessity comes to pass, whereas what we’re really dealing with is fatality that completely puts out of play the inner causes of things and, most importantly, human finitude.

And human freedom is essentially complementary with human finitude, whereas God’s freedom is super-essentially congenial with His eternity.

Clearly, therefore, the error lies in the inversion of metaphysical principles – up becomes down and down becomes up, until everything finishes up on the same level. The hierarchy is gone.

When we apply this line of thought to the problem of male and female sex, we see what is at stake; the duality of sexes is the expression of finitude and thus of the human nature itself. The idea that, somehow, the creator has to be androgynous, amounting to declaring him a man that transcended the first limitation of human nature, is first and foremost a projection of human image upon God; it is, by definition, an attempt to imagine a perfected man or, to be more precise, a highest degree of the actualization, not actual actuality, of power imaginable to human being.

Yet God is not the potency to be Who He Is but He Is Who He Is.

What we understand as the power of God is His actual act which is eternal and yet yields the creation that is finite, so from the point of view from below it is properly seen as an all-powerful or infinite possest (“can-is”, Nicholas of Cusa). Eternity is not, as it is sometimes imagined, the infinity of time and is neither strictly related solely to time, as if it were its complementary opposite; every potency, not only the time itself, is related to eternity as to the qualifying origin, whether it be the material duration of natural being or finite power of an incorporeal one, such as soul or an angel. The reason for this is that everything we initially apply the word ‘is’ to, is only insofar as it was created from the eternity.

Eternity, properly speaking, ontologically precedes every potentiality, visible or invisible, in the absolute sense and the process that can be understood as intrinsic to it, by its very nature, is not a creation but, in the words of St. Gregory Nazianzen, oion ti pelagos ousias – “like open sea of Being”.[2] The singular acts of this pure energy can be comprehended in creature only in analogies and symbols; they are its effects constantly remaining in the act that created them and preserves them in existence.

Therefore, when we say that Father bore the Son, no power of potentiality was involved because the eternal “was” of this act is a necessity standing before every created being on the basis of which we can get our limited – and limiting – notion of necessity.

As we have already pointed out, the closest thing resembling it in the created world is the act of giving birth.

Giving birth is not an act of creation but the action emanating from one being’s very nature when it reaches its apogee and, if understood as non-corporeal, it is ultimately intrinsic, exemplified in spiritual beings in the act of conceiving the thought that naturally gives birth to articulation which is a thought being spoken. As the progeny is not created by the parent, but comes to pass by being given a share of parent’s nature, the eternal Father, unimpeded by anything extrinsic in His act, gives all of His nature to the Son. While natural birth implies diminishing in the parent and a necessary degree of detachment of origin and the originated, in pure energy/act nothing is diminished or detached and the origin and the originated is undividedly one Being.  

However, the act and potentiality in the creature indeed correspond to the complementary opposites of male and female.

If we are to bring things back into mud from where we started this expose: no matter what feminists might imagine, it is the male who rather obviously acts upon female in the process of conceiving a child. However, this anatomical/biological fact is just a faint – and crude – reflection of what is ultimately an ontological fact preceding it and therefore cannot really exhaust all possible relations between man and woman; they can be reduced to mere action of one body upon another only in pornography and postmodern thought; if it all could be so reduced, while ideal of the equality of sexes being granted, then the radical feminist idea that every sexual act is an instance of rape would be quite correct, because the very act is, when taken in itself, an instance of the purely material, unredeemable, inequality of two differently built bodies.

Yet as we are properly speaking about differently created souls, and moreover nothing in this world is really in itself, especially the corporeal individual, relations between man and woman are not determined primarily biologically, but metaphysically. And as the pure masculinity would indeed be the distant image of the pure actuality and, consequently, of intellectuality, when the process of generation in all its forms is concerned, the first eternal conception of the Word is properly the act of the Father alone, with no need to project our own intrinsic gender division into Him.

The incorporeal beings are genderless because their way of being potential and actual does not require them to reflect corporeal differences, whereas incarnated beings are indeed differentiated by the way the soul informs the body. The uniqueness peculiar to human being lies in the fact that both body and soul are one particular being different from any other being, both in body and soul. The difference between human male and female is thus something that cannot be removed from actual men and women, without each one of them ceasing to be a particular person he or she is.

Moreover, as the complementary character of potentiality and actuality transcends the biological sex, it is indeed possible for woman to enact potentialities that can be understood as masculine, but only insofar as this does not dissolve the boundaries her soul places upon her bodily nature, and vice versa. Any act of trespassing over these boundaries is an attempt to re-create the person that is already being irrevocably created and, as such, it ends up in the act of destruction because human being is not capable of creating out of nothing.

It is, therefore, quite wrong to oppose the postmodern principle of dissolution by falling back on biology, because man and woman are not primarily biological, but created beings and the very principle of their nature is ultimately immaterial. This notwithstanding, the reason why, for example, Catholic priest cannot be a woman is the nature of the central rite of Christianity – the Mass; as it is understood as enactment of Christ’s sacrifice, the priest who performs the rite represents incarnated Word Who is necessarily understood as being a Son, not a daughter. Whereas secular minded conservative can wave this off as irrelevant, one who gets waved off by his gesture is rather he himself; the fact that biological givens are more obvious to us then metaphysical ones doesn’t mean that they are more important. In reality, the former is just a faint echo of the later, something, I would claim, postmodern deconstructionists intuit far better than their opponents, if for nothing else, then because their historical roots go deeper.

In conclusion we’ll provide some thoughts to that effect.

If we were to imagine an eternal female, according to metaphysical outlines given both by Christian Tradition, but also even by the best rounded pre-Christian metaphysics, it would be a possibility without the need of actuality, something that would correspond to an understanding of pure privation of being or pure matter deprived of only one possibility – that of receiving a form.

The name sometimes used for this peculiar metaphysical image – because it is above all just an image – is Chaos.

And, when Chaos is concerned, the possibilities become infinite only insofar as the reality turns into nothing; supposedly, as in some Gnostic theogonies, both ancient and contemporary, God is originally the Abyss of nothing out of which comes the striving of the will that creates the world as the afterthought of God creating Himself, or giving birth to Himself. Yet this is first and foremost the most perfected projection of human finitude – an absolute human privation – that seeks to be remedied and made eternal on entirely human terms. The idea that Logos, as the actual image of God, is somehow “tyrannical” because it doesn’t include the possibility to choose in the same way human beings are compelled to chose, but cannot enact the ultimate choice of being what they are, because that is already given to them, is just the blind urge to imagine oneself in the midst of the absolute fulfillment of one’s own potentialities, without them being conditioned by one’s own actualities. The peculiar consequence of this is that each and every one has the different notion of just what this fulfillment is, so we end up, not with reality, but only with infinitely inflating plurality of realities.

The proper element in which the intellect on such trajectory must move can be exemplified by the image of darkness.

The light of Logos in one’s life is primarily providing the outlines of one’s own created nature and with it, one’s own boundaries. Only on this condition can one be a man or a woman. In the dream world of Chaos, on the other hand, the boundaries are primarily non-existent and pure potentiality is being actualized by absolute freedom of will that is initially completely blind; this blindness is what we could, by our limited power of articulation, set in the symbol of intellectual blindness which is a darkness proper, whereas in the metaphysical sense it is the articulation of the unqualified will of Nothing to be Something.

One of the things no man can easily accept is that he is a creature. One of the reasons why this is so hard to accept is that the realization is primarily not of power but of limit, and the final limit at that.

The acceptance, on the other hand, is both individually personal and metaphysically universal act of bowing down before one’s own Origin and the gift He gives.

Properly speaking, it is an act of humility.

This act is, according to Christian Tradition, conditio sine qua non of salvation. It lays bare the human being for becoming the vessel of God’s direct act, turning the innate human potency into actuality, until the vessel is full.

Also, according to Christian Tradition, the only such human vessel who by her own act received the fullness of this actuality was a woman.

And by virtue of her own quite feminine act of humility she merited to become the only creature to give birth to God Himself.

In this short account of the hieratic history we can plainly see what inversion of principles does and why is it cataclysmically dangerous.

If duality of principles was understood as innate to godhead, then the historical drama of salvation recounted in Gospels loses any meaning; precisely the eternal Fatherhood of the Word makes way to historical motherhood of the Word incarnated – only the Father gives birth to the Son, but only the Mother gives birth to Jesus Christ; in human terms, Virgin transcends human limitation precisely as a woman, with absolutely no ontological relation to man, because the conception of her Son was not the act of finite energy contained in the natural sexual act, but the act of God Himself.

How would this be possible – oh, ye Gnostics – If God was a Girl?

The hierarchy is such that the apparently lowest level of it could just prove to elevate the whole process back into its origin, but in order to see this, one must follow the guidelines the hierarchy provides.

The place of Heaven and Earth is a set place, not a postmodern “weltspiel”, where up is down and down is up. Inverting this order brings forth Chaos and, ultimately, the counterfeit of hierarchy, because, as chaos principle is unreal, it has to eventually start mimicking what is real and abandon the free play of ideas and political projects in order to build the real illusion, obligatory for everyone living under it.

Obviously, then, metaphysical error is bulletproof for conservative attacks. It takes quite a bold intellectual strike to realize that the very present “postmodern situation” is in fact the manifestation of metaphysical delusion and not merely a fit of madness that can be remedied by getting things back to normal, modern, mental attitude of enlightened humanism, where “market knows best” or “biology will set things right”.

No, it won’t set things right, because things are not set wrong by defying biology but by defying God.

Postmodernists don’t call for abolition of religion or confining it to the private sphere. The whole project is, I would posit, the one of re-enchanting of the world that rather resembles necromancy than “rational critique of religious beliefs” so beloved by secular liberals, conservative or otherwise.

The modern mindset, flawed as it was, still retained the echo of Logos in the form of its very belief in rationality, albeit detached from its exemplar and transformed into an ideal of human science making world better for human beings. Postmodern project, on the other hand, has nothing to do neither with science nor making anything better for human beings; it rather strives to abolish the limit, i.e. ‘human’ in human being, because humanity naturally puts it in the set place in universe. This re-enchantment of the world moves along the lines of blind potencies or powers that laid dormant through a brief period of modernity and are now coming back to the surface or, better still, are coming back out from the shadows where they briefly lingered; I would say that these quasi entities and quasi possibilities of being are nothing but malevolent forces that spiritually blinded peoples of ancient world invoked, shunned and at whose feet every now and then sacrificed their children. As such, they’re historically far older than anything the modernity could muster up against them and the comical aspect of postmodern process of dissolution of modernity is only such if one believes that people will, in time, wake up and get back to normal.

But that’s a rather flimsy hope. Indifference of act, potency, gender, good, evil and every imaginable opposite whose duality can serve to impose an ontological hierarchy of some kind is only inflating. The process itself obviously has no original relation to what modern people used to call common sense, not because it stems from nonsense, but because it emanates from the center which transcends common sense of modern man.

It emanates from darkness of Chaos and its correlate is the darkening of the mind. Now, as we have seen with male/female complementary duality, light/darkness duality is more real the less material it is, i.e. the intellectual darkness is the superior image to mere physical blindness, because it is the inner blindness that impedes the proper energy of immaterial principle in human being.

Therefore, to argue with people who have no problem to castrate their children in sex change operations on the basis of biological facts is not only wrong.

It is plain stupid.

Darkness of mind is the state stemming from the man giving himself up to the influence of the principle that is opposite of the one that would enlighten the mind. This can occur through wrong reasoning, imagination, generational abandonment of social mores and such, but ultimately it is a decision, a choice of evil over good. Therefore, the combat against what we call the politics of dissolution should stem from the change of mind and reversal of this choice.

Not to put things in too apocalyptic terms, as we said at the outset, the masses still tend to cling to nature, which in itself provides some light to human mind; but intellectual disposition is undeniably directed in the opposite way and in order to make it conform to reality in the true sense of the word – and this means in the direction of the origin of natural light – it has to be turned around in the significant and quite dramatic sense of the word.

The social reforms occurring in the midst of our now only barely unified civilization are utterly destructive to its core and cannot be so easily reversed, because there is no return to modernity. It is in the very nature of modern project that it is irreversible – its only vector is directed forward. Therefore, as the shadows of the ancient world ever more boldly step on the scene, would it not be possible to expect that its light could shine undimmed, once again? Both the principle and its parody are older than ancient, after all. They are older than history, but were for a short period obscured by an attempt to make history absolute and free from their grasp. I think we can assume at this point that this period is over and challenges facing generations coming to age now cannot be answered by the answers it provided.

Could it be then, that more dark things get, the more visible the light becomes?

Flimsily poetic as this may sound, I find it a far more realistic possibility than anything mustered by those who don’t recognize that our world in some sense reverted back into its historical origin, further than most of us realize. As the old darkness is at work in the minds of men, unimpeded by the electrical light of modernity, the first light also begins to be more visible, simply because one’s attention is pushed into its direction, like when the eye in the dark room naturally grasps even the hint of light.

For the love of this light that shone in the darkness from the beginning I wrote this and thereby once more just did what I could.

 

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[1] “(…) the Philosopher shows in his Metaphysics that, if we assert that every effect has a direct cause we must necessarily grant its effect, it follows that all future events come about by necessity. For if each effect has a direct cause, then any future effect will be reducible to a present or past cause.

Thus if we ask whether a certain man is to be killed by robbers; and, in turn, another cause precedes this effect, namely the fact that he went out of his home; still another precedes this, that he wished to look for water; and a cause precedes this, namely, his thirst; and this was caused by the eating of salted foods; and this eating is going on now, or was done in the past. Therefore, if it be so, that, granted the cause, the effect must be granted, then, necessarily, if he eats salt foods, he must get thirsty; and if he leaves his home, the robbers must encounter him; and if they encounter him, he must be killed by robbers.

Therefore, the Philosopher concludes that it is not true that, granted the cause, the effect must be granted; since there are some causes which can fail. Again, it is not true that every effect has a direct cause, for something that comes about accidentally, for instance, that this man who wishes to look for water encounters the robbers, has no cause (SCG III, pg. 51, emp. KT).” For detailed discussion of this issue see: http://en.kalitribune.com/imperatrix-mundi-on-traditional-notion-of-destiny-pt-1/

[2] “God has always been, is now, and will be forever.  “Is” is the best term, however, for “has been” and “will be” are our own divisions of time, which are due to our mortal nature.  But the One who eternally Is, used this name when he revealed himself to Moses on the mountain. He comprises within himself existence itself, an existence that neither begins nor ends, a great, boundless ocean of being, which effortlessly surpasses any notion of time or natural law.” (θεὸς ἦν μὲν ἀεὶ καὶ ἔστι καὶ ἔσται · μᾶλλον δὲ « ἔστιν » ἀεί. τὸ γὰρ « ἦν » καὶ « ἔσται », τοῦ καθ᾽ἡμᾶς χρόνου τμήματα καὶ τῆς ῥευστῆς φύσεως · ὁ δὲ ὢν ἀεὶ καὶ τοῦτο αὐτὸς ἑαυτὸν ὀνομάζει, τῷ Μωϋσεῖ χρηματίζων ἐπὶ τοῦ ὄρους. ὅλον γὰρ ἐν ἑαυτῷ συλλαβὼν ἔχει τὸ εἶναι, μήτε ἀρξάμενον μήτε παυσόμενον, οἷόν τι πέλαγος οὐσίας ἄπειρον καὶ ἀόριστον, πᾶσαν ὑπερεκπίπτον ἔννοιαν καὶ χρόνου καὶ φύσεως.) source , translation Alex Poulos.

Branko Malić

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