The faith is a demanding thing, and the way may well be impossible.

You are a creature, in the flesh, and subject to the stresses and demands of physical survival.  You can no more extract yourself from the natural world than you can leap off the Earth and land on the Moon.

We will ever be at odds with the world, and if we are not, that shall be a warning to us.  As it is, the more one is faithful, the more he will be hated.

The darkness is always closing in.

The world then, with its powerful and mighty, its famed and fortunate, has an appeal the faithful can never capture.  There is enmity and it cannot be bridged.  The advantage, so long as we are in the world, belongs to the worldly.

So you may find yourself beaten down.  In a world upside-down – as it will ever be – your virtue is a drag on your success, your kindness is weakness, your modesty is a limit beyond which your competitors race to defeat you.

You may come to think that, despite the echoes of your dreams, dreams from a far-off place, you are destined to a middling life.  Gray and sluggish, commoditized, leaving no impression by which you will ever be remembered.

But you’ve got it all wrong;  You have swallowed the lie.

I am your brother, listen to me:  You have closed yourself off from God.

God – does not – permit mediocrity.  He will spit you out, and perhaps He has.

Here is how you will find the moment of expectoration:  When did you last avoid a good action because of fear?   It is that simple – in your family, in your business, in your spiritual life, when you have found something good to be too much, or too dreadful, you assumed the temperature of the room.  You were no longer pleasing to the taste, giving satisfaction to the thirst.

The lie is that, as a child of God, you are bound to defeat.  No need to begin fighting, it will all end in flames and ashes.

The enemy is no fool.  He knows that if he can demoralize you before you’ve begun to fight back, he’s already won.

The game is rigged against you, he says.  He holds all the cards.  Go ahead, make a run at it – see how easily you are slapped down?  And what are you resisting sin for, after all?  If it is all for God and the ultimate victory, why does God not win right now?  Why does He make it all but impossible for you to succeed?

Now, do you see how you have been poisoned and duped?  Do you see how the world has trampled upon your God-given dignity, and has stifled the mighty works God meant to work through you?  It is time to go in, whips in hand, and throw the tables over.

The truth is, you have not trusted God enough.  You have accepted, from fear or disappointment, that He will not come through for you.

Perhaps you are inadequate (you are).  Perhaps you are imperfect (doubtless).  Yes, you have failed, and you have shamed yourself, and you have given every earthly reason to any worldly power that you are not up to the task.

Do you see the lie?  You will see it when you hear the truth:  You do not answer to a worldly power.  You answer to the Almighty.

Therefore!  It does not matter if you have failed by worldly measures, over and over again.  It does not matter if you have showed yourself inadequate for the task, lacking in perseverance, intelligence, skill.

Fool!  IT. IS. NOT. ABOUT. YOU.

Do you wonder why Adam and Eve ate of the apple?  First, clean your lips of that bitter sweetness… you have sunk your teeth into the lie and devoured it whole.

Let’s put it starkly, written in a flame against the blackness of night:  The Devil has isolated you from God, and proceeded to devour you.  This is why you are demoralized, beaten down, perpetually inadequate, in motion and going nowhere.

The Devil is virtually a god and has convinced you that you must face him under your own power.  Every failure, every weak moment, every grasp at evil is one more victory for him, and one more defeat for you.  And you have no hope of overcoming him…

…alone.

But of course he has lied to you.  He rigged the game, he set you up for destruction.  Now, you know better.

You, as always, must call on the Almighty.  You must call on Him with all of the desperation of a drowning man, because truly you cannot defeat the waves.  You must call on him as though the enemy came fully armed, has you surrounded, and is counting down to your annihilation.  Because you cannot defeat death.

But He can.

And there it is, my brother, my sister.  Look to Him, always.  Pray to Him, at every moment, for every good thing – especially in your need.

Then, simply hold on.  Work and strive and fight with everything you have, reinforced by the power of God.  One day you will barely be able to stand, and the next you will be lifting mountains.  First, you will strain to walk, then you will race with all speed to the ends of the earth.

Many will doubt, and then you will succeed beyond all of their expectations.

Many will forecast doom, and you will deliver victory.

It is difficult to capture the miracle of the Resurrection.

On the one hand, we all experience it every day, arising from our sleep.  On the other, none but a small child believes he goes to sleep for the last time when he lays down his head.  (Is it a terror of existential darkness that causes young children to avoid bedtime?)

The finality of death is a cleft in the mind, the pit into which all fall and none recover.  What one makes of this creates a divide, while there is no division about waking up each morning.

What happens after we die?  Many guesses.

Whether death is an end, whether it just is the observed failure of the body to persist, whether it is the excising of a very particular person and presence from the world in the way she was commonly known?  Yes, no one argues this.

Put it this way:  Say you believe a loved one lives on, and well he might.  Now you observe him in little signs, a serendipitous word from a stranger, a rare species of flower where one does not ordinarily find it, an annoying thing he always did that comforts you now.  Here is the test:  Would you rather have these little signs for another 10 years, or one more day with him, in his fullness?

Death forces your hand, leaves you the scraps when you crave the feast.  It is a savage compromise, but that is the Universe we are in.

So much for the true and severe loss of death.

Now Good Friday is the collapse, the utter devastation and lifeless plummet into the pit.  It is the heavy-weight fight, the clash of Titans – Life vs. Death.  And Life, as expected (though recklessly hoped against) staggers and falls from unimaginable height to unimaginable depth.

One loses his breath.  Of course he does – he watches the Source of that breath, breathing His last.  He goes under, lost, never to return.

Easter Sunday is the unfathomable resurgence, the great inhale, the impossible gasp.  It is the cure of all depression, it is cause for an old man to leap to his feet and run like a child, it is fire and purpose to accept, stare down, … praise God for a torturous death.

Or become child-like again.  If the night brings terrors, what does the day bring?  What irrepressible joy comes with the dawn of a new sun?  What verve of anticipation passes through your bones just to think of Christmas morning?  (And why Christmas morning, and no other?)

Run, and never grow weary.

Easter is our great Hero finding the bottom of a bottomless pit.  It is saving the souls of the irredeemably lost.

It is slipping into darkness, clawing to stay awake, alive…the sheer terror of all joy, all love, all of everything being ripped away…

…and then you wake up, and there are no more tears, and all you know is love and joy and the thrill of existence.

See – It is death that is impossible.  You will live.

Happy Easter.

I write this at peak Christmas.

Peak Christmas does not happen on Christmas Day – it happens the night before.

All of the preparation, the carols, the extra coins in the red bucket at the grocery store, the stories of good will toward perfect strangers, the re-focusing on just what Christmas is all about, the magic of the nighttime, the anxious awaiting of dawn…

It reaches a head just before bedtime on Christmas Eve.  You could stride along, atop the sheer anticipation.

There are those universal moments – the story of a stranger pulling over to help someone stranded on the side of the road, or a famous person discreetly providing toys to poor children, or a church getting together to feed the homeless a hot meal – which elicit the lament, “Why can’t every day be like this?”  Or you sometimes hear it declared, ambitiously – “Make every day Christmas day!”

It would be nice, wouldn’t it?  A universal disposition toward concern for others, finding satisfaction in bringing joy to others, making impossible things happen – even the gaiety of spirit one experiences, alone, driving along a dark road with Christmas lights shining brightly.

Why can the people in darkness not see a great light, every night?

In the classic carol, “Little Drummer Boy,” there are two lines which go:

Little Baby, pa rum pum pum pum 

I am a poor boy too, pa rum pum pum pum 

This verse presents the Incarnation in a striking way.  A boy who is weathered by the elements, who knows hunger, who is always only days away from wasting away – this boy empathizes with the King of Kings, because the King has so completely relinquished His power.

He has arrived utterly powerless, utterly impoverished, an infant lying among beasts.  Of course a shepherd boy could relate.

What’s more, a few lines later – “Then He smiled at me.”

This can be our Lord’s simple pleasure at a shepherd boy’s humble song.  Then again, if you hold in mind the shared poverty, something else emerges:  It is a blessing.

The baby to the boy:  Your humble station, your poverty, are not the shackles you think they are.  You are here before the Almighty, aren’t you?  Did you not see the heavens open up, and angels arrayed like a mighty army, singing my praises?  And with Me, what will be impossible for you?

Of course, on the one hand, we cannot have our own birthdays every day.  Even if you tried to celebrate every day this way, it would – very quickly – exhaust your body’s ability to feel pleasure and your mind’s ability to call it happiness.

So that is the first answer:  Celebrations stand out from ordinary time, and require the experience of ordinary time in order to create the contrast, the novelty, the superlative atmosphere for which they are known.

See it another way – our ordinary experience in the modern world is Christmas-like for those from another place or time.  That the ordinary is no longer special is not only tautological, but part of the human condition.

The second answer rides aloft upon the first:  We are not home yet.

The Incarnation was a rescue mission, an invasion by God Himself to save His children when nothing else would work.

That He arrived as a baby was a profound stratagem, one that brought Him deftly behind enemy lines.  He evaded the princes and principalities, and He softened the guard each of us keeps on our hearts.

That the Almighty became frighteningly vulnerable; that the all-knowing became ignorant of His own name; that He who is Holy, Holy, Holy was tempted to sin…

All of this was done, to save you.

Nothing could be more extraordinary.  “Christmas every day” could never capture it, and it is undesirable in any case – because it would be a fraud.

What Christmas gives us is a flickering light through a dark glass.  It is nostalgic, like the memory of a long-deceased father who loved us very much.  It is one frame per second of the memory we wish could play over and over again.

It is, in short, a reminder of our true home.  Not even Christmas – not the best, most magnanimous, most inclusive, most abundant moment of Christmas – can truly accomplish what is longed for when we ask for Christmas every day.

That is achieved when God remakes the heavens and the earth – this world, the darkness, will pass away.

Everything else is a paltry imitation, and even the holy day itself merely points to this.  You will know it is really Christmas when you hear, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

The Pharisees made an art and a science out of observing the Law of Moses, cowing many followers into observing the endless minutiae and machinations they had devised.  It was indeed a heavy burden – was God really like this?

Or should the commandments of God liberate us from sin, and cut a path to His love and mercy?

Along comes Jesus, who earlier permitted his disciples to pick grain to eat on the Sabbath, and now was healing on the Sabbath.  How could he explain this over and above the endless strictures concerning the day of rest?  -which strictures certainly appeared to take the command “Keep holy the Sabbath” as seriously as possible.

Jesus’ justification is two-fold:  First, a man is more valuable than a sheep (and the Pharisees would certainly rescue their own sheep from harm on the Sabbath).

Second – of course it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.  The whole point – of all God’s commands – is that we ought to do good.  But we sin, so we require God’s mercy and guidance to do good rather than to sin.  The commandment regarding the Sabbath was directed toward being holy – not toward following a rule.

The commandments are not for nothing.  They are the pattern of behavior, the focus and discipline of a man’s spirit toward the will of God.  If you follow them because you love God, you will do well!

If you follow them because you love power and influence, because you leverage them so that men will grovel at your feet or struggle to be conformed to your image, now that you have sufficiently misshapen the Law…

Right then, it is time to turn back.  Immediately.  Turn around – you’ve gone far, far off the path.

But take heed… a viper would be found far off the path.

See it again, one more time:   If there had been no Fall, there would be no Law.  We would be inclined toward the Good, and thus “all things are permissible.”

As it is, there was a Fall – and therefore we are profoundly broken.  We see good, and perceive that it is evil.  We see evil and imagine it is good.  It is an honest mistake, or it would be a diabolical one.

To counter-act this, God established rules-laws-patterns of behavior that would settle all disputes within the will (and the community).  My fallen nature urges me toward an illicit act.  But it is powerful and feels genuine – why not act on it?

There might not be any reason to avoid doing so, except the Law.  Of course, even that was violated, but at least we could then recognize we had sinned, and were in need of a Savior…

Therefore, the Law was good – profoundly good, so that not one iota would be altered until heaven and earth disappear.

And it was this profound good that the Pharisees had appropriated for their own gain.  The promise of God, that one would find true peace and prosperity and joy in following the commandments (“Lord, I love your commands!”), became a long chain of shackles hammered together by men too small to let their brothers live free.  It became an admixture of their neuroses and scruples, their leverage from a distance of a great weight upon their brothers.

This weight they attempted to foist upon and trap Jesus, the Messiah.  As if to anticipate the old atheist riddle, they burdened the Son of God with a weight they imagined he could not handle.

Notice, though:  There is a rock so big that God cannot lift it.  That is, of despair.   And with so many laws, and laws upon laws, and consequences of laws that must be addressed by still more laws, one could easily find, say, lepers and paralytics and tax collectors laden with such an impossible weight.

For love of them – the lost – Jesus flares up with indignation.  His Law – an instrument of liberation – bent back upon itself and sharpened into an instrument of condemnation.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean.”

No – the purpose and the end are God.  They always were.  It was always – dimly – the Beatific Vision, the “well done, good and faithful servant!”  The Fall was a happy fault, because God would not, even then, abandon us.  He would find a still more incredible way to point us back to Him, and deliver us.

And we might say – He’ll be damned if His own rules are going to be used against Him.  How true.

Another great example of a natural metaphor to explain a supernatural phenomenon is evidenced by the manifold answers to the following question:

What, exactly, did Jesus accomplish on the Cross?

It is cast as ransom for a prisoner, as redemption of a slave, as rescue from behind enemy lines, as a jailbreak from the gates of Hell, as vicarious suffering of a punishment, as repayment of a debt, as a lamb being led to slaughter, as a new Passover (itself somewhere between physical/historical and spiritual)…and this is just off the top of one’s head.

What is interesting is that one is often taught that no single metaphor captures it.  In fact, some are downright scornful for some scholars, except that they appear in Scripture, and so must be addressed.  The redemption of a slave received this treatment recently.

I am personally of the view that we should not be so quick to judge Scripture, and that whatever the case may be just is the case.  If God Himself would tell us to imagine we were slaves (to sin) and that He came to redeem us for a price (His suffering and death), what exactly is my objection?  That He did not order the Universe properly so as to avoid a slave analogy?  That He did, in fact, redeem me?  Nonsense.

Anyway, this great spiritual reality strains all analogies, which is a lesson that the spiritual realm is truly a different realm.  Just as new formulas and rules govern 2D geometry and 3D geometry (and beyond), so are there new rules in the spiritual which we can hardly begin to imagine by way of the physical.

One of the more acute ways of demonstrating this point follows:  Imagine you are speaking to a man who has been blind since birth.  How would you describe a beautifully cut, flawless diamond?

You could approach it – perhaps some exquisite smell, like a rose, with an almost geometric perfection – or perhaps by means of heat and texture, as well as construction that might be conveyed by touch.  You see the point, though.

In no way have you shown this man the diamond.  And we left you the benefit of four senses.

Likewise, in no way do we really understand what Jesus accomplished by His Passion and death.  Yet even a child can understand it was marvelous, miraculous work, and precious to possess.

Nota bene:  Naturally, these metaphors do not refer to purely physical phenomena.  The social construct of slavery, for example, does not appear to have any parallel in the animal kingdom, and relies on abstractions such as dignity (or lack thereof) and power.  The spiritual analog is, therefore, a next-level abstraction.

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.”

– John 1:1-2, 4-5

Supposing you had a real but indescribable experience – how do you go about sharing it with a friend or confidant?

Consider an epiphany you’ve had.  There was some problem, some riddle of existence which you could not answer.  Perhaps for days, perhaps for years, you sought the answer and could not find it.  (We are already speaking in metaphor, but hang with me).

And then, quite unexpectedly, you had it.  The answer.

Now the physical phenomenon of an epiphany might be described as a new neuro-pathway, the literal (physical) firing of synapses across particular neurons in a particular order which rendered the new thought to your consciousness (whatever that is).

For one thing, this is a quite dull and tedious way of telling the story of your epiphany, but let it pass.

For a second thing, it is anything but clear that thought is, our could be, a purely physical phenomenon.  Never mind this, too.

The salient point is that the truth discovered, the object of the epiphany, the objectiveness of the truth, is non-material.  Insomuch as we engage with it, then, we are operating in the abstract/spiritual realm.

So when you say something like, “And then I saw it…” or “That’s when the light bulb came on…” – which functionally mean the same thing – you are pulling an abstract experience through the filter of a physical experience.

Or, you are reaching up to understand the abstract by means of the physical, which is the thesis here.

Now what if (literally) God came to Earth and became (literally) man, and dwelt among us?  What if this God-man taught and demonstrated a doctrine which corrected our moral and intellectual (spiritual) deviancies, healed and exalted our wounded bodies (literally) so that we might transcend them to a greater reality?  How would you describe this experience?

You might call Him the Light of the world.  You might describe Him as irresistible, unassailable, like a light in darkness – in no way can the darkness overcome the light.  Just so, in no way could evil overcome Him or His mission.*

And if you’ll accept the Gospel and believe in Him, that same invincibility – on the spiritual level – is conferred upon you.

Next example…

*Arguably, even mission is a metaphor.

We have laid out three ways of knowing the spiritual realm, which is further proposed as the true realm.  The physical realm is but an echo.

The difficulty remains that – ordinarily –  we know the physical realm with a higher degree of confidence than the spiritual.  It feels more real because it is more obvious and less deniable.

There is a reason, after all, that apostates are made by imprisonment and torture.

So if there are three ways of knowing the spiritual, which are nevertheless nebulous to the populace; and if we have a systematic and reliable way of learning about the physical; what could ground us more firmly in true knowledge of the spiritual?

Here is my thesis:  The spiritual realm is the source of the physical.  It is often analogous to, but not an exact emanation of, the spiritual.

In some ways this sounds like Plato.  I said before – honestly – that I don’t know whether the world of Forms is real.  Nevertheless, we are not saying that there are forms, per se.  We are saying that, if one imagines that forms exist, it gives us a useful way of learning about the spiritual from our experience of the physical.

Indeed, suggesting that humans have a spiritual sense captures what we’re about here – that one’s physical senses are analogous to one’s spiritual sense.

But what if your spiritual sense is dull, or inoperative?  Or what if you simply don’t trust it?

What if you think Plato is interesting, but he’s mostly talking ho-bunk?

If, still, you wish to learn something about the spiritual realm, I suggest you can learn it by a careful study of the physical realm.  We’ll take some examples next time.

There is a reason, after all, that saints are made by imprisonment and torture.

We have established that humanity, over and above the emus, has an innate sense of the spiritual realm, and this is demonstrated by the persistence of religion in human life, among other things.  Against the naturalist, we see the impossibility that human life could have been purely physical, because of the ease with which humans engage in abstractions.

In other words, a single kiss from my daughter is the kiss of death for Naturalism.  Requiescat in pace.

This frees us to advance:  What do we know about the spiritual realm, anyway?  What can we know?

Our difficulty is that the physical realm seems so…well, obvious, immediate.*  When we want to say something about the physical realm – the sun is shining, the tree is blooming – these things are generally provable by observation.  Humans broadly agree about the facts right in front of them, in this sense – we don’t argue with the weatherman about whether it’s raining, nor the traffic reporter, for that matter, who sees down the road and looks upon other roads.

The spiritual realm is not verifiable in the same way.  It is not engaged with by means of the physical senses…though, it can be indirectly verified that way.  Let us return to that another time.

For now, the grievance of the naturalist is more important than his arguments:  If beliefs aren’t scientifically verifiable, then anyone can believe anything they like!  How can this rise to the level of knowledge?

That’s true.  That’s a good point.

One argument, which we have alluded to already, is that humans have a spiritual sense.  It “looks” upon the world and detects certain abstractions, like good and evil, beauty, even truth.  The philosopher Alvin Plantinga says we have a “sense of the divine” which justifies our belief in God.

For another argument, we derive from Plato the world of “forms,” which are abstract and ideal molds from which the physical instances are derived.  Is there an ideal form of a chair?  I don’t know, but there is something remarkable about the ability to make a chair without explicit instructions, as though the idea exists as a universally accessible concrete entity.

Let’s take a third.  That is, the natural order appears to be governed by laws, which laws have no physical properties.  These laws are often expressed by mathematics, which is the highest point of agreement between the naturalist and the supernaturalist – math works, is practically the most reliable form of knowing that there is.

Whereas the naturalist may agree that mathematics is the language of the Universe, the supernaturalist goes further and says that information does not simply occur, but is articulated by someone or something.  Math is preceded by Logos, which gives the Universe structure and predictability and knowability.

And so, we can have knowledge of the spiritual realm by direct experience of it (the spiritual sense), by abstraction from the physical structures to a spiritual ideal, and by observing that the physical realm operates according to non-physical laws, which laws must have their own reality.

Any of these, arguably, is more reliable that the physical world itself as a deliverer of truth.  You will find people who claim to have seen the spirit world in a vision or a near death experience.  You will find others who hold to the Platonic view of the world.  And still others construct reality on a foundation of abstractions – arguably, all of modern science, for a start – and build a monument of knowledge thereupon.

*Who stops to wonder – is this by design?

A basic biological creature – an emu, perhaps – only deals in the physical.  Life is all hatching and growing and foraging and mating and running and dying.  Often it’s not quite that good.

By the naturalist’s account, this ought to be everything for humanity, and we may as well enjoy it while it lasts.

It would be everything, except for that pesky “brain virus” that clings to religion, that continues to believe old fairy tales against all experience and evidence…or so they would have you believe.

I don’t notice the godless being all that critical about paganism.  They will tell you this is because the pagans do not trouble them, but they are ignorant of history and human nature besides.

It is more a case of making allies with a common enemy.  If modern religion disappeared, Paganism would immediately gain from it.  We know this by looking back before Christianity emerged, and noting that human nature has not changed.

But Paganism is the bellwether of Naturalism’s demise – its miscarriage, really.  If Naturalism could not dam up religion from the earliest days, it never had a chance.*

Why is this significant?  The question is the answer.

That is, significance is the first handhold out of the physical realm.  If physical objects can be imbued with meaning beyond their physical utility, then we are also engaging in a realm beyond physical activity.

Think of a flower, for instance.  It has physical utility, a place in the natural order.

Now think of giving a flower.  One is not offering the flower in order to pollinate another flower, or for ingestion, or for composting or anything else.  Instead, the giver and the receiver both perceive an abstract (roughly, a spiritual) significance to the flower and the act of giving the flower.

This is what the naturalist could not prevent from happening, never could prevent from happening.

*The usual line is that humanity has sufficiently advanced, or will inevitably advance, such that religion will be seen for the fraud it is.  They believe we will see Christianity like we now see Roman paganism.

As a matter of fact, the sword has another edge – if the Stoics and the Enlightenment could not free the world from the grip of religion, it is doubtful that anything else could.  Rather, one religion comes to dominate another at any given point in time.

What one must immediately see is that the spiritual and the physical are completely different.  And we have always seen this.

They are parallel lines, running together but never crossing.  If we were mere physical creatures – like the lower animals – a “spiritual realm” would never occur to us.  Even among men, we are dismayed at those who are singularly focused on the physical – a woman obsessed with her looks, a man with his riches.

Just so, the spiritually obsessed are often mocked, detached as they are from the most basic and necessary elements of living on a physical planet.  The ditz, the new age believer – we instinctively understand that they enjoy a disposition supported by those who daily reckon with the elemental – dirt and steel and sweat and disappointment.

But the spiritual is more real, the foundation of the physical.  God spoke the Universe into existence, and not the other way around.

So, why not detach from the physical?  Why not all be esoterics?

Surely you’ve thought of that.  And what came of it?

You’re here, reading today – surely you’ve thought of forsaking the world completely, praying all night, perhaps, as Jesus did, or else fostering such piety that you might levitate while in an ecstatic vision of the Almighty.  Are you familiar with the Stigmata?

And you did not wonder, at least for a moment, what that would be like?

That, my friend, is exactly what forsaking the physical looks like.  It looks like holes through your hands and blood and water flowing from your side.  It is a coronation with thorns, because they are no better or worse than gold.

“My kingdom is not of this world.”  No joke, that.

My friends, it is dreadfully painful to forsake the world, because you just are a physical being.  Your very being responds to the environment, to the stimuli impressed upon you.  There is the objective quality about it, that if you are shot through the heart, you will suffer and die, no matter what you believe or how you live.

And yet…

Yet, some do forsake the world.  Not absolutely, but – shall we say? – in spirit.

Now, how are we to resolve this paradox?  We exist as physical and spiritual beings, and while the spiritual is more fundamental, we can be destroyed by physical means.  The two do not intersect, and yet we cannot ignore either of them.

How do parallel lines cross and remain parallel?

They do so, if you view them from a third angle, another dimension.

“The condition of human nature … is such that it has to be led by things corporeal and sensible to things spiritual and intelligible.”  – St. Thomas Aquinas

As always, St. Thomas has not only arrived where we want to go centuries in advance, but he has done so with precision and the poet’s flourish.

Still, every generation must grapple with the world as they find it.

The contemporary search for proof of God’s existence often runs through the sciences, namely physics, though the atheists fancy that biology can do their work for them.  Neither is necessary to show that God exists, nor can either possibly show that He doesn’t exist.

Rather, what grew out of that search, for me, were the ready analogies that physics offers for spiritual phenomena.  I learned, for example, that the very laws of physics break down as one approaches the first instant of creation, the Big Bang.  Seeing the Universe issuing forth from the command of God, I found it remarkable that there was nothing but the spiritual realm, when all of the sudden laws, mathematics, particles, energy, space and time came “screaming” into existence.  The abstract realities – laws, mathematics – reached terminal velocity, like a satellite re-entering Earth’s atmosphere, and the resulting fire and fury resulted in forces, space, time, and matter, immediately and inexorably falling into order.

That analogy is not exactly what I mean, but a bridge to it.

That spiritual realm persists – it has to – even while our physical world lives and grows, fights and loves, and decays and dies into the matter that forms new life.  And how do we know the spiritual realm exists?  The first analogy…

It would be odd for any creature to have a sense which senses falsely.  Biologically speaking, this would be extra baggage, more body to protect and feed.  There are even instances of fish which had sight, when a group of them came to be effectively trapped in a a cave for many years.  In order to save energy, they evolved the loss of their eyes.

In other words, there was first light, and so the eyes developed and were useful.  Then there was no light, and the eyes were not useful, and soon they atrophied away.

Now when many billions of people around the planet claim experience or evidence of the spiritual realm, are they like fish with eyes and no light?  Why haven’t we evolved the loss of this spiritual sense?

What if, instead, the organ (the soul) survives because there is something that it detects, which proves useful for living in a physical reality?

There is much here; we will explore it.

It is good to remember, from the outset, that attributes applied to men are fundamentally transformed when they are applied to God.

You may call a man “holy,” and get a picture of a radiant presence, even a halo.  You might imagine him self-possessed, patient and long-suffering, with a peaceful magnetism.

When we call God “holy,” we mean a furnace of holiness, a star going supernova, a light so bright it puts out your eyes.  It is a blast unrelenting, rendering all else to dust and incinerating even the dust, so all that remains is the perfect purity of His Spirit.

One is the vessel, the other is the source.  One is derived, the other is the original.

Holiness is a fitting introduction to jealousy.  The holiness of God dictates that nothing else could exist, unless He permitted it to be so.  And His holiness requires that there be very good reasons for anything else to exist.

What could those reasons be?

We advance:  The Christian faith teaches that these reasons are rooted in God’s great love.  The creation of the Universe, the creation of man, the endurance of sin, the suffering and redeeming work of the Savior – these are all effects of the cause, that God is a loving God.

Now when is it that a man becomes jealous?  It is when he desires something very much, to the extent of claiming possession.

My wife.

My son.

My daughters.

My friends.

My faith.

This should not be reduced to contractual ownership, the way I might own a car (which I might also desire very much).  That is an economic relationship.  We are discussing covenantal relationships, which include a spiritual dimension, something real but non-material.

You could not pay me enough to possess me as a husband, there is no material consideration great enough to earn you – from any man – the limitless gift-of-self required.

Likewise for he who is the bridegroom of the Church.  Could you have paid Jesus Christ any consideration for his passion and death which would have adequately compensated him?  What sum would represent an equal exchange?

It is absurd to ask.  Likewise for the husband and wife.  (This is truly why prostitution is regarded as sinful – it infinitely devalues a person’s worth, manifest in her body).

Now, that which is possessed – what if it is threatened, stolen, or seduced away?

We see this in Hosea, where the prophet is compelled to marry a prostitute, who subsequently commits adultery.  Predictable, but no less painful.

God selects this as the metaphor for His relationship to Israel, and there is no compulsion except for His own will.  He is compelled, in fact, by His love.

What does love have to do with it?

He made them.  He conceived and created them from nothing.  They were something much less and much more than a flight of fancy, so little did He require their existence and so much did He desire it.

And He saw His image in them, and said it was very good.

Then, over and over, Israel His bride was unfaithful to Him, worshipping other gods and disobeying his laws.  Their desire to be fulfilled – which would find ultimate satisfaction in God alone – was gorged with vapid, vulgar imitations.  They were seduced, deceived, and led astray.

There is a touching sequence in certain stories of a husband who goes astray, and finds himself in ruin until his wife comes to rescue him.  She will often be forced to defy his “friends,” those who have participated in his downfall and desire for the party to continue.  She rightly sees that what he wanted was not good for him, and she quite literally fights to protect him from it.  There is sometimes a parental thread within the fabric of a marriage.

Likewise, Hosea loves Gomer for what she is, and it is not good for her to be a prostitute.  When she reverts to that darker life, he goes after her.  It is a cause for shame, it is humiliating and painful – but it is virtuous and true.  Here in Hosea 3:3, we begin to see how love and jealousy lose their distinction:

“You must dwell as mine for many days. You shall not play the whore, or belong to another man; so will I also be to you.”

Which is this?  Love?  Jealousy?  Love expressed as Jealousy?

Far from competing, this jealousy – jealous for the good of the other, jealous in protecting from evil – is the manifestation of love.  If Hosea wasn’t jealous, we would have to wonder if he loved Gomer at all.

It is much harder, deeper, and sheerer with God.  To be unfaithful to Him is to invite destruction into your life.  To love Him in return is to embrace everlasting life.

If those are the stakes, no wonder God would be jealous for us.  If He did not thunder from Heaven and flood the Earth and punish sins, we would have to wonder if He loved us at all.

In our time, Christmas is a lovely thing.  It is universally observed as a time for giving, family, good works.  Only a little more narrowly, it is the great holy day, brought out as something better than any heirloom or treasure, recognized as the arrival of a singular hero, God Himself.

The comfort of family and traditions veils the shock.  Consider the infant!

A baby in the room will elicit warm smiles, soft coos, sure hands to cradle her.  The infant receives and cannot offer, cries but cannot articulate, trusts but cannot protect herself from harm.

At Christmas, we are not often reminded that the world is still enemy territory.  Christmas is the time when it feels as though the world could be otherwise – perhaps there could be peace on Earth.

But that is not the pretense for the Incarnation.  The pretense is that the world is fallen, is in need of redemption.  The pretense, as Christ later says, is that men are wicked, this generation is faithless.  They cannot grapple with the mess they’re in.  It will destroy them.

Now, if you had all power and determined to fight and win this conflict, would you begin by emptying yourself of all that power and appearing as an infant behind enemy lines?  This is the paradox that would destroy all reality:  That God made Himself utterly vulnerable to death.

That baby in the manger is everything.  And he has nothing, can say nothing, can protect nothing.

Why?

We with finite powers may begin to answer this:  If we had all power, we might storm the earth, take the holy innocents trapped behind enemy lines, and speed them to Paradise.  And then, if we had the stomach for it – and we would, being holy – we would destroy whatever remained in water and fire, and begin again.

But who, exactly, would you have rescued?

All are under the grip of sin.  None are innocent.  You would return to Heaven empty-handed, and turn around and destroy all those you meant to save.

Do you see the predicament?  We are willing captives.  We choose this every time we sin.  Meanwhile, God loves us and wishes to redeem us to unimaginable glory.

If He comes in force, we are likely as not to resist!  Our guards go up, and all of the things we value more than we should, all of the priorities we have placed above Him – these things we cling to in defiance of Him.

Not you?  Do it now, then.  Go where He has been calling you.  Give up the sins, give up even the good things which nevertheless stand in your way.  Leave all things behind – do not look back – and follow Him.

See it now?  You are the enemy’s territory.  Your heart is behind enemy lines.  God cannot rescue you by destroying you.

Make no mistake.  There is evil, and it must ultimately be destroyed.  Violently, with a permanence so profound you will not remember it existed.

Yet you are redeemable, and one of the ways you can observe this is by your response to an infant.  Do you offer a smile?  Does your hope awaken?  Would you protect the baby from harm?

It was a master stroke, wasn’t it?  God almighty, appearing as an infant invader?

He had to come claim your heart, first.  Only then could He lead you out.

Our Mother is patient and kind.

The first joyful mystery is the Annunciation.  This, of course, refers to the moment when the angel Gabriel announced to Mary that she would bear the Son of God Most High.

One often reflects on the magnitude of this announcement.  From then-Cardinal Ratzinger:

The salutation to Mary (Lk 1:28-32) is modeled closely on Zephaniah 3: 14-17: Mary is the daughter Zion addressed there, summoned to ” rejoice”, in formed [sic] that the Lord is coming to her. Her fear is removed, since the Lord is in her midst to save her. Laurentin makes the very beautiful remark on this text: “… As so often, the word of God proves to be a mustard seed…. One understands why Mary was so frightened by this message (Lk 1:29). Her fear comes not from lack of understanding nor from that small-hearted anxiety to which some would like to reduce it. It comes from the trepidation of that encounter with God, that immeasurable joy which can make the most hardened natures quake.”

Now see:  Could more than a day have passed since Mary prayed to God to send His Messiah?

Oh, how God answers prayers.

This thought has appeared elsewhere, but it warrants repeating:  The first Glorious Mystery is the Resurrection.

That’s the first mystery of glory.  A man rising from the dead.

And then there’s more…

My reflections during the Rosary are often in words, concepts.  But once, when I arrived at the Crucifixion of our Lord, words failed me, even within my mind.

Yet I had an image of Christ on the cross, so I just looked at Him.

The Luminous mysteries are unique in that they contain “The Proclamation of the Kingdom.”  But this is not a story proper – there is no clear thing happening, but a man speaking.

Still, it had to be done – Jesus had to announce the purpose for which He had come.  In that, I suppose the story, as it were, is as much about us hearing the proclamation as it was for anyone, in any time.

In other words, the Kingdom is always arriving.  What will you do with this?

“Joyful” mystery – finding of Jesus in the Temple.  Personally, I am struck by the interpretation of this event which says this is the nearest Mary came to experiencing sin, which is a loss of intimacy with God.  She, for a period of a few days, felt His absence most acutely.

The second Sorrowful Mystery – I am shaken by the fortitude of Christ at the pillar, being cut to ribbons by the centurions’ whips.

We were made – my God, You made us – with nerve endings that would give us awareness of the world around us, and also of our physical condition.  When something is harmful to our bodies, it hurts.

Here, after centuries of perfecting the art of torture, we see the full exploitation of this ostensibly useful feature:  Those nerves, down to the tenderest tissue, are slashed and ripped away from the Body.  What the body simply is, is torn away.  It is painful even in the abstract.

And for love of all the world, He does not quit, or complain, or break.

The crown of thorns represents the full ignorance of man.  You could not capture it more perfectly.

The Transfiguration sometimes strikes me – if one may speak this way – as one of the most important stories in all of Scripture.  It is the pre-resurrection assurance of glory.  It is one thing to have a voice from Heaven at the baptism – and that is enough! – but to have the same voice, and then to see the Man, resplendent in light.

It is everything short of rising from the dead.  It is a stone’s throw away from creating ex nihilo.

And finally, for now, the assumption of Mary.  By this point all of the mysteries have been lived out, before her eyes, except those which elevated her to her final glory.

She has seen the culmination and climax of salvation history, the entire hope of the whole history of her people.  The Lord Himself now dwells on earth as Holy Ghost, setting the world on fire.  There is no more doubt about the course of history.

What of her, then?  Was that enough, to live through all of this?

It might be enough.  And yet, all of that – all of it – points to something more.  Something higher.

So Mary will not descend to the grave, but is lifted to Heaven.  What a love our Lord has for her!  How she carries His original hope for all of mankind!

And I cannot begin to fathom the celebration that occurs at her coronation…

Let us add a little depth to the metaphor.

The human being – and the human race, by expansion – possesses two drives which we in the modern world call “Progressive” and “Reactionary.”

Left and Right, or “To subdue the earth” and “To heed the natural order.”

Now, the metaphor is that of Cthulhu, swimming.  The current pulls everything to the right, toward the natural order, terminating in a sheer fall – certain death.  Therefore, Cthulhu swims left, to escape the turbulence and danger of the natural order.

The further he swims left, the less imminent the danger.  He might finally relax in the water, even become playful.  Yet, dangers still exist, and since he knows everything to the right becomes more threatening, he swims left.

And now the water is much calmer, still pulling but requiring very little effort to resist.  Cthulhu might begin to impose his own design on the river, building a place to be seated by the bank or small dams to break the water.  He will lose the exercise of those muscles which preserved him in the rapids, in favor of skills that enhance his pleasure and comfort in these less troubled waters.

New dangers await.  Stagnant water harbors bacteria.  His muscles have atrophied – if he wanders too far down river, he will surely drown.  Other creatures compete for food, and even as the apex predator he can be overwhelmed by a mass of them.  Moreover, there is an indescribable sense of discomfort, of not quite fitting in one’s environment, which the great beast cannot understand.  That, quite simply, is that he was made to rule in stronger waters, to challenge himself, to conquer mighty forces.

Proceeding left has always brought him pleasure and comfort – progress – and so he swims further left.

The metaphor can continue, but it will become complicated, even convoluted – if it has not already, for your tastes.  Let us look and see something.

There is a sense of melancholy about this metaphor, I think.  That is, Cthulhu – the complete body of a human society – is never finally satisfied and safe.  And someday he will die, his body carried along, ever more rapidly over the edge.

The human restlessness is such that it will want to challenge the rapids at times, but not for long.  Wanting for some activity to challenge his mind and body, imagining even that his survival still depends on it, man swims ever Left, requiring that he impose his will more and more completely on reality.

Somewhere up the river, he thinks, is Utopia.  Then he will be happy.

Now, “up” is correct, but the river is two-dimensional.  The way out of the river is not upstream, but up, out-of-stream.

If this seems like nonsense, or incredible, or the perfect answer – welcome to religion.  Religion is the pull of humanity up out of the river of this world.  It is the third dimension, which might elicit these varied responses from two-dimensional creatures.  One’s subjective response does not render it void.

Indeed, a properly ordered religion must position itself up, out of the river, and from that height throw down a rope.  If Cthulhu – a human society – will grab it, he will be saved both from the dangers of the Left and Right.  And it must be a strong rope, held up by a mighty arm.

We come to some paradoxes then.

If leftism is subjugation of the earth – the drive toward civilization, away from natural order – then isn’t more leftism equivalent to more civilized institutions and behavior?

If rightism is respect for the natural order, then isn’t more rightism a drive toward primitive living, before industry, science, and all the rest?

They seem quite the opposite.

That is, conservatives seem to prefer everything that happened in America from 1776 through the 1950’s, give or take a few years.  Conservatives love ‘murica – liberals aren’t accused of that.

They prefer industry, they prefer making the most of all potent energy resources, they prefer capitalism and business, they prefer social traditions (very orderly, structured).

Liberals, for their part, are more closely associated with the back to earth movement, to doing what one feels, to giving the benefit of the doubt where certain practices go against the cultural grain.

They have been marching since the 1960’s, starting with the sexual revolution and gradually conquering the media, education, and politics.  In many cases, they have undone what existed, rather than build new institutions.  (Same-sex marriage is not a new institution – it is the loosening of an old one).

What gives?

If this big idea is correct about leftism and rightism, we have already alluded to the next layer:  Whatever leftism established a generation ago, rightism is now defending.  Whatever leftism is pushing, no one wished for a generation ago.

There is yet another layer.

In America there is a Christian tradition, one inextricable from its founding.  The Christian religion is properly ordered, so that it forms tight institutions, bright lines, and produces many goods on Earth.

For any progress to be made – and we are in the age of the Progressive – these institutions, this Christian grip on the structure of society, must be undone.  The work of leftism, in this case, is to erase whatever may be attributed to the natural order, or to God, in favor of what man might do for himself.

It is, indeed, a push to subdue the earth.  And men.

Meanwhile, modern rightism looks like a paradox, because it ought to be a drive toward the natural order – but it looks like a drive toward anachronistic technology and social structure, and filthy fossil fuels, and unjust wages.

Think of someone who is not conservative, if you want a true sense of rightism.  Think of a reactionary.

Here is someone who quite seriously would reinstitute a monarchy (with all of its quirks and flaws) and restrict the vote, and champion the formation of socio-economic classes because …

That is what happens in the natural order.  In nature, the fittest survive.  The powerful get what they want first, and the weak receive the crumbs.  If anything.

The natural order, you understand, is not about equality.  The liberal push for equality is necessarily a synthetic effort, because men are not equal.  And men are not equal to women in the natural order.  And no beast is equal to a human in the natural order…and so on.

The conservative is only defending what your forebears installed.  The reactionary looks at at fixed point further in the past, and identifies that as the true balance in human affairs.*

Christians will no doubt have observed something here:  Original sin is a move to the Left.  That is, the original disobedience of God was a play for power on the part of humans.  Humans wished to subdue reality, and know it.  Know it for what purpose?

“…then your eyes will be open, and ye will be as gods.”

It is enough to shudder.  But!

As punishment, God brought down the natural order on humanity – hard.  Women would suffer in childbirth, and man would raise produce only by the sweat of his brow.  And all would die.

Natural death is the far end of rightism.

So, it is correct to say that the Old Testament is story upon story of humanity in dissonance with the natural order, and suffering greatly because of it.  And God, by grace, and mercy and love, saving them.

The New Testament is widely seen – if not in these terms – as a move to the Left, and all of Christianity is sometimes mocked because of this transition.

But they should not spurn the transition so quickly.  By Christ’s sacrifice, God gave humanity an escape from the extreme Right, which was NOT the extreme Left.  It was neither, and both.  Step back and see:

If you were a two dimensional creature, how could we begin to explain the third dimension to you?  You would necessarily flatten all of our words and actions, so that you could understand them in your two dimensions.  We could not really explain it at all.

And you would be right, and wrong.  Mostly wrong.

That’s the role of Catholicism.  At its best, and its core, it says to all the world – “Yes, but none of this is quite right.  Look – you are going to live forever.  Forever.  Now, how does that change things here on Earth?”

It might make you more of a rightist.  And more of a leftist.

But mostly, it would make a resurrectionist, with your eyes cast above you, which neither the left nor the right can comprehend.

* And again, chronology is not critical in and of itself – it is something of a tape measure, to let us know how far left we’ve come.  The Reactionary might also push for things that are in the spirit of a monarchy, but have not ever existed.  In that sense, if he is successful, the Reactionary is looking toward the future, through the past.  Chronology is not strictly useful.

If, in the course of human events, we face threats on either side, how are we to avoid them both?  How, if one is simply the consequence of existence, and the other is the consequence of striving to go on existing?

The next big idea:  Religion is our salvation.

This idea is reflexively rejected by some, particularly in light of hyper-current events.  Religious extremism – namely radical Islam – is on the rise, and it is hard to see how massacres in the name of Allah can be associated with the common good.

We are going to have to re-establish our removed perspective.  Remember, you are an alien from another planet, or you are from the future.  Observe the world as though it does not immediately threaten you, a state of fear which always distorts reality.  Rather, view it as an art critic, or an economist.

Now:  Even if a religion is false, it can be a net-benefit as long as it is properly ordered.  What does this mean?

It means that, after some distance traveled to the left, in the name of buffering society from the natural order – that is, after a population has become civilized – a powerful social force is needed to prevent further drifting to the left.

It is needed because endless drifting to the left is the road to perdition.  It eventually leads to destruction not by nature, but by man.  It must be avoided just as arduously as destruction by nature.

That is why religion often appears to be a conservative force, because it is restraining the leftist impulse of civilized people.  The paradox is that religion itself is a civilizing force on populations that are far to the right, still close to the natural order.  In that way, it is also liberal.

One of the complaints today is that Christianity is outdated, regressive; one of the complaints about early Christians is that they cared about the pagan poor more than the pagans did.

That is essentially the same Christianity, appearing on both the right and the left of two given cultures.  And this is why I have been fond of saying that Catholicism is neither conservative nor liberal – it is both, in exactly the right places.

So a properly ordered religion is that which will restrain a culture from going too far to the left, or the right, to the point of destruction.  There is one other thing, which separates religion from ideology.

That is, that religion admits a realm beyond the natural.  Ideology is a funny business, because it ostensibly is focused on this world, and the proper values and order that a society should have…but its promises are always unrealistic.  Quite literally.

Religion, on the other hand, does not restrain itself with the natural realm.  Religion sees through it, beyond it, to the essence of reality.

Yes, there is a world all around you – but where did it come from?  Ideology hardly cares.  Mythology barely cares.  Religion cares deeply, out of all proportion to the natural or synthetic order.

That is precisely why it is vital to civilization.  For a society to be sustainable, it must perceive its object as something bigger and better than mere survival, so that the effort of resisting the left and the right is worthwhile.  Don’t believe me?

Take away religion, and all quasi-religions.  This includes the Carl Sagan brand of scientism.

Do that, and you have nothing but nihilism.  You have utter despair, loss of meaning and purpose, on a massive scale.  Mere survival is not enough for the nihilist – indeed, they sometimes take their lives as a result of their nihilism.

With religion, society can achieve a kind of balance in tension between the two forces.  It can even rotate after a fashion, so that it becomes more leftist in certain ways and more rightist in other ways.  It may be that there is no permanent balance – but all that is needed is some balance.*

Further proof – GK Chesterton’s saying that unless man believes in God, he will believe anything.  The critical point is that man must always believe something, because he cannot possibly know everything.  We are always drawing lines of best fit.  Even this series skips over a lot of details in order to present a working model…which itself is a map.

And that is enough to tie off that thread.  From here, we will consider some of the ways in which Catholicism might participate in modern politics, as compared with the present status and view of religion in politics.  Furthermore, I will attempt to offer a few applications of the big ideas in this series, which may be of some use.

**It occurs to me – and surely to the reader – that we could get into some geometrical imaging here.  Perhaps a triangle…a trinity!

No, I’m not ready for that.  Neither is the world.

“Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists.”  – Joseph de Maistre

We come to explore why the series is called Politics..and Catholicism.  (Sure, go for a James Lipton voice there).

Earlier I made reference to properly ordered religion.  We will admit, for the sake of discussion, that a plurality of religions might qualify as properly ordered, even though they cannot all be 100% true.

We saw last time that the building and development of civilization just is a move to the left of the natural order.  It is an attempt by a population of humans to buffer themselves against the unrelenting current of the natural order (such forces as entropy and predation, which is entropy at 4x speed).  In so doing, a population can succeed so well that they are capable of swimming beyond stasis, further left, upstream.

This Cthulhu will do, unless there is some compelling reason (or force, or impulse) not to.  Some restraint, some dissonance with the population’s experience and expectations against reality, perhaps.  Or else some overwhelming incentive, worthy of abandoning the promises of swimming further left.*

Before stating the expected thesis…what is so bad about swimming ever to the left, anyway?  Didn’t we say that way lies Utopia?  Even if it is ever receding, doesn’t this indicate the desired and everlasting march of human progress?

(Perhaps you see a river in your mind, and a far-off horizon.  The Utopia is exactly like the horizon, but it is so haunting and alluring – not almost spiritual, but actually so – that the emptiness of the horizon reflects a world where natural dangers are erased, and life is lived tranquilly, with perfect understanding of everything.  Even the present feverish pitch of sexual fixation and exposure is suffocated and vanished, only a means to this godlike end.  Yes, I have tasted and seen…)

The problem is two-fold, and unfolds like proofs for the existence of God.  On the one hand, you have the historical account – every time we’ve tried Utopia, it ends in absolute disaster.  Look to any revolution and the events that follow.  It is easy to point to Stalin’s Soviet Union, but consider the “enlightened” French Revolution, when so many rationalists found themselves enraptured in a murderous frenzy.

On the other, it is a practical impossibility, which is why it so often ends in bloodshed.  People cannot be depended on to act with perfect virtue, no matter what traits are called virtuous.  You can call stealing good, or murder innocent – and people will violate them.  In order to silence the signal of human discord and rebellion, those humans must be exiled…or exterminated.

It is not only discord, but it is also the human inability to completely comprehend everything, which is necessary for controlling all variables in an environment (including an artificial one).  Ask a film director how difficult it is to make a movie exactly according to his vision – and then he has no control at all over the theater, or your living room.

Such a paradise cannot be achieved on this side of Glory.  It is utterly opposed to Glory, moving ever to the left, where men are made into gods, and all the natural order is destroyed, terminating in the abyss.

In other words, that way lies irreversible damnation.  Once walk through the gates – leave all hope behind.**

What shall it be, then?  The primal, fearsome end of the natural order, which is death?  Or the everlasting oppression of one man, or some men, dominating all the others, destroying that which conflicts with their designs?

Enter religion.  And you thought they invented “Hell” just to scare you.

*Here we have an understanding why suffering typically provokes a move further to the left – over time a population will inevitably lose members.  The reflex – not the reason, mind you – is to swim further away from the danger, not to live in harmony with it.  Therefore, a wealthy country experiencing relative peace will come to find smaller and smaller losses as intolerable as the great losses it once suffered.  If we have swum this far upstream, the rhetorical question goes, we can surely swim further and provide comfort/security/wealth to even more of our population.

**Yes, Hell is real.

Bring yourself back to the early days of humanity.

For all of us, even the experts, this is going to be a guess.  There is a saying that the least educated person in a historical period is more an expert of his time than the best scholar today.  This seems obviously true, and more true the more one thinks about it.

As little as we know about a culture within history, so much less do we know about a culture prior to history.  The densest and most surely communicated channel just doesn’t exist – that of language.

The first human population had to be focused on survival (what else was there?) and build from there.  Build what?

It appears that they built a system of the division of labor – hunters and gatherers – as well as migratory patterns in response to environmental stressors (eg. availability of food and weather patterns).  All of these practices are very much aligned with the natural order – as far to the right as humans get, if you will.  In fact, taken as pure concepts – which they surely weren’t in practice – you have virtually no subjugation of nature happening here.  Rather, you have nature leading the dance, and human beings following her lead.

I say they surely weren’t pure concepts, because toolmaking in human predecessors dates back a couple million years.  This would certainly be an imposition of human design on nature, the first small step in subduing the earth.  Such artifacts are the earliest signs of leftism (if you will).

One might persist that innovations like knifes and spears simply brought humans onto a level playing field with their would-be predators.  Indeed, other animals also demonstrate rudimentary toolmaking.  Moreover, a spear is surely not a gun, which seems to give greater advantages to the human over the animal.

All such debate ends, then, with the dawn of agriculture.  Somewhere between 13,000-11,000 BC, we find evidence of cultivation, even seedless figs!  Farm animal domestication occurred around the same time, all of which enabled the development of permanent settlements.

This imposition of human design upon plants and animals, I maintain, is a leftist impulse.  I am just a guy thinking, of course, you may call it whatever you wish.  But I think you will begin to see some phenomena explained the longer you entertain this idea.

Now these are the first great leaps of humanity.  Writing developed +/- 10,000 years later, and this enabled the communication across space and the transmission across time of incredible amounts of information.  This accelerated learning and innovation, as there was a steady and growing foundation of information to build from.

Skip ahead +/- 3,600 years, and you have the printing press (notice the diminishing time between major advancements).  Gutenberg’s invention is credited with all manner of advances, including a higher literacy rate, the faster spread of more information, and the wider spread of that information.

The more disparate innovations are shared, the more they accelerate innovation.  One mind makes a leap forward; another observes it and has some mental door unlocked for him.  He enters the next room and makes another leap forward.

Along the way, and directly related to these innovations, are advancements in science and technology.  And these too, according to our earlier big idea, are leftist moves in human activity.  Simple knowing – as in science – is arguably neutral, but you see how easily “and technology” follows.

And technology is certainly an imposition of human will on nature.  Look around you!  Subdue the earth, indeed.

These innovations occur in other areas of human endeavor, as well.  We have not plumbed deeply at all, and I will scarcely mention such others – law, politics, economics, culture.  They read like the headings of an old newspaper, things which might change over time, which people like to know about.

The sum total of these is what we call civilization.  The impulse to impose our will on the existing order is a leftist impulse, while the impulse to accept and preserve the existing order is a rightist impulse.  The leftist impulse drives toward utopia, which is always receding in the distance; the rightist impulse drives toward the natural order, which took us tens or hundreds of thousands of years to escape from.

We all know, in our basic instincts, that we prefer civilization, the imposition of human order, upon the natural order.  But the natural order just is the ruling order – if you do not resist it, or build against it, you are pulled back into it.

Does any bridge or dam last forever, unattended?  Have you ever seen a building which was abandoned 100 – even 20 – years ago?  The natural order is always pressing on us, always driving on.

So, Cthulhu is ever watchful of that looming eventuality, and ever swimming left against the current to escape it.  That just is what civilization is.  As long as Cthulhu – the collective human population – desires this protection from the pure natural order, it must swim left.

But Cthulhu is not intelligent enough, being a great beast acting on drives and impulses, to know when it has swum too far to the left.  Without some respect for the natural order – which is all we have, there is no other natural order – without some understanding of it, we do not understand how to order our civilization at all.

Remember, a constant and pure drive in only one direction is the road to destruction.  You only have to choose your destroyer – nature to the right, humans to the left.

To avoid this, we need some corresponding power which holds civilization in tension, which honors the rightist impulse and respects the leftist impulse, and appropriately restrains them both.  This we call religion.

Let’s take another important point:  Everyone is rightist about certain things, and everyone is leftist about other things.*

To thoroughly embrace either rightism or leftism, to the exclusion of the other, is a form of inhumanity.  Consider that the very first humans – indeed, one of the key ways we identify a hominid as human – were making tools.

A rock in the natural order is not a knife.  But it can be subdued, fashioned for that human purpose.  As soon as you start acting on any human design – anything not already found in nature before we arrived – you start acting on the leftist impulse.

This is not a sin.  Conservatives, you will not lose your soul by admitting it.  Indeed, conservatives are often innovators!  …exactly because they are willing to be leftists in certain areas.

The converse is also true.  Since Cthulhu – society – is always swimming left, yesterday’s liberals will often find themselves today’s conservatives.  That is because they were fixed on some cultural norm – say civil rights – which was to the left of the mainstream culture.  They were part of the push, the swimming to the left, until they accomplished their objectives.

Many of them, having pushed the culture left for their own ends, were surprised when the cultural momentum continued to the left – when sexual orientation and gender identity were added to civil rights – so that they soon found themselves more conservative than liberal.

There is even a name for this – neoconservatives.  Nor should they lose heart.  The shift does not mean they have gone to the dark side of politics.  Rather, they were fixed on some objective good, which had a subjective relation to the culture.  It didn’t matter whether the culture was to the left or the right of that good – they would have pushed for it either way.

Thus the…relative…futility of defining oneself as liberal or conservative.  That ground is always shifting.  So we will have a general idea of your positions today – but less idea tomorrow.

The truth is, if you tell me you are a Progressive or a Reactionary, I might have a better idea of your positions – because those are both off the map.  They are not subject to the volatility of the present day.  We know that they would have the map dramatically altered.

But a real human being will typically find themselves all over the map.  Perhaps they have been to some remote corner of the landscape, and they can say with confidence that any modification to the map would be disastrous to travelers there.  Or they might say the opposite, that the map needs to be modified, because everyone traveling there is getting killed.

More typically, they have visited a number of places themselves, and discerned where the map ought to be changed (so strict conservatism is false, for them) and where it really cannot be changed (so strict liberalism is false, for them).

Most typical of all, or so is my opinion – few have been anywhere at all.  The map has afforded them the luxury of having an opinion without having the experience – the authority gambit.  Here you have priests and pundits alike, soothsayers and celebrities, all of those who ply their trade in the immaterial.  These types you tend to find more thoroughgoing in their leftism or rightism, seldom switching sides.

Perhaps we will return to them.  You may wish to know why I would lump priests in there.

Where we really must go next is to the next important truth.  Why civilization itself is the primary reason Cthulhu always swims left, and why an enduring civilization is one that finds itself held in tension – which is why religion will never go away.

*I might as well say everyone is conservative about some things and liberal about other things.  But I want to shift into more precise language, because conservative and liberal are positions relative to some center, which could be almost anywhere.

Adam and Ed start their deep dive into The Beatitudes.

Ed continues his Reasoning to God series with part 2.

The Triduum series concludes with Holy Saturday.