This blog primarily aims to articulate the criteria for literary evidence of Divine Authorship in its intervention in the course of recorded history; and secondarily and successively, to promote the study of the past as a devotional connection to this living intervention. 

 

Less abstrusely phrased, the blog considers a few things: first, what is meant by the phrase the "Living God"?; second, when people speak of Divine Revelation as both 'inerrant' and 'divinely inspired', what does that mean?  And why would any rational mind find testimony alone compelling (and indeed, is this testimony totally unaided?)?'  Third, coming to believe certain things about Our Creator, how are we to know what God intends for us both universally and individually in the here and now based upon such testimony and other aids?  Finally, how have others in the past-- specifically, the "saints" or holy ones-- answered these questions?

 

These are some of the questions that interest me and possibly yourself, dear reader.

 

What do I intend to do with such questions?  Make the case for the following assertions: (1) Faith in general is not opposed to Reason but a constitutive fact about the mind and its finite relation to the Created Order (for only in God, the Source of All, are Faith and Reason identical on account of His omniscient Intellect and perfectly good Will); (2) The Christian Faith specifically is not only reasonable in this more general sense, but perfectly harmonizes with the human condition by revealing aspects of human potentiality unknown beyond its active witness upon the Earth that both preserves and nourishes the Gospel (i.e. the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church); and (3) This universal, catholic, & apostolic Faith in its fullness is demonstrably in line with other things we know more directly about the world where both worldly and divine knowledge point to the same conclusions about the true Ends of Man and his ultimate happiness.

 

That's a lot to assert, I know...  All in good time!

 

To cut off misunderstandings off at the bud: the project takes its opening cues from both Natural Theology in general and the main theses of Classical Theism, more specifically.  While I'm not fixated on natural theology so much as fundamental theology (i.e. the nature and status of Divine Revelation), such a conceptual framework structures the blog's approach to "Providence" when read against the general backdrop of history proper, especially as it concerns the development of elite, aristocratic, freeman's culture, e.g. philosophy, arts, and letters (i.e., what we now term the "humanities").   Above all, it's important to note that humanity's self-same image in God--- namely, our rationality--- implies that the use of reason does reveal something definitive about God and that this hazy memory in our souls is the grounds upon which the Gospel is planted (Acts 17:23).  Thus, Faith and Reason are not enemies or even antithetical but part of a larger disclosure or revelation of God to humanity.  What I hope to do is to place "salvation history" in this sense within the greater backdrop of history proper (a distinction first brought to my attention by the work of Giambattista Vico, 1668-1744).

 

Why am I interested in all that?  Because the greatest opposition to the Living God comes through the rejection of His evidenced involvement in our affairs.  While many reject the very concept of a Creator, most in fact do not.  What most reject instead is God's revelation to humanity through the Gospel.  This rejection that speaks more to indifferentism than true atheism is ultimately rooted in a belief that religion is a man-made cultural construct that chases questions that we cannot possibly answer.   In response, many have turned full-fledged pragmatist to live their lives on their own terms, whereas others indulge in spiritualism as it suits their taste.  Indifferentism is an interesting state of mind and one that is the true enemy of religion (Afterall, atheism at least takes religion seriously enough to formally critique the supernatural).  At root, I am deeply interested in why modern people came to the conclusion that God is a relative construct and an objectively undefined entity and why the liberal order, the political and economic fruit of this-worldly humanism, stems from this rejection of Divine Revelation-- be it a tacit or explicit rejection.

 

As the "magistra vita" or 'teacher of life', History is the philological spawning grounds of humanism and the critical frame of modernity itself.  As such, history is not simply an accumulated facts about the past--- who could document such an infinite gulf of manifold experiences (most of which are forgettable)?   Rather, it is more interested in what facts are selected and how they are arranged and for what purpose.  Before there was a Michel de Foucault and the "School of Suspicion", there was a Desiderius Erasmus, a Lorenzo Valla, and other self-styled humanists who served as the ur-debunkers of religious authority.  Great scholars and critical readers and collectors of documents, books, and archives, these men noticed patterns in the way language was written.  This knowledge allowed them to identify authors, periods, and other facts about the texts.  No longer were these traditions taken at face value, it has been said.

But history has another sense as well--- a more popular and less erudite sense...

 

Few realize that what we call "history" is distinct from the past itself, as it is defined by a canonical grasp of humanity's greatest accomplishments as well as its deepest mistakes.

 

History is a narrative of narratives, an essentially literary craft, that necessarily leaves a lot out of the story.  Anybody who has ever drafted an essay or composed a story, knows that not every thought in your head should make the "final draft."  So it is with history:  In order to be coherent, selectivity is necessary.

 

But how do we select what to pass down?  And who decides?

 

People do, obviously, as the great humanists would point out.  But what is meant by "people"?  Do I mean individuals who pen this or that history as the humanists would point out?  No-- emphatically not.  History is dialectical relationship.  That means it is the result of an exchange between what came before and what is recognizable in the here and now as credible.  That means there is a rhetorical heart to the historical process that is certainly not the exclusive work of individual historians.  No, something grander is at work that they participate in.  This observation is typically overlooked by those who wish to tear things at the seams and let it all unravel.

 

A good teacher of her pupils, History doesn't mix her lessons with the half-baked 'takes' of individuals as she presents herself to posterity.  She has a jealous grasp of her children and guards over their cultural diet!  To comprise a digestible record of "worldly wisdom", an ordering must be rendered, received and passed down from generation to generation, reflecting above all this canonicity, i.e. "ordered by a rule of excellence" of something worth remembering, to lend coherence to both profane and sacred memory of the past.  Ultimately, this memory is what buttresses the institutions that make society a possibility over time.  When memory fades, institutions become arbitrary.  When institutions become arbitrary, they become hated more so than loved.  When something is hated enough, it is destroyed.  When something is destroyed, other things are impacted.  And so on and so forth.  It's important that the entire process begins with our shared memory of things and how that memory is guarded and defended, attacked or altered.

 

The necessity of a canon to memorability itself is a subject of interest to the blog especially as it relates to the testimony of prophecy.  Ultimately, some things-- often the most precious of things--- are given to us through inspiration rather than deliberation alone.  Their strength is manifest in their effects and we look upon it with reverence, not criticism.

 

"Worldly wisdom" on the other hand is the end result of this process of filtering the consequential from the trivial in a deliberate way but also knowing the "why" beyond one's arbitrary personal preferences in order to understand what was inherited.  The danger we find ourselves in presently is that each man and woman determines what is worth possessing and then decides for themselves what is worth remembering and what must be left behind.  We end up with a splintering of cultures and the loss of the common life.  Institutions eventually lose their relevance and die because individuals forget their obligations to the institutions that shaped them.  In the long run, this negligence has measurable consequences for individuals and nations.  We end up keeping only those institutions that "make sense" to us (for now) but we forget that institutions shape us just as much as we shape institutions.  There is in other words a false sense of mastery over the past that emboldens those in the present to alter things without realizing the risk, both material and spiritual, to everyone around them.    Entire ecosystems die because one integral part goes out of balance.  Why do we care so much about nature and so little about our society's sustainability by way of cultural continuity?  Why do we think so little of the spiritual domain of humanity's ultimate concerns and celebrate the nihilistic stripping away of anything that originally bound us to each other and our shared origins?

 

However you feel about the direction of the modern world, if you look towards something as modern as Maslov's 'hierarchy of needs', you soon realize that our world under liberal assumptions of the good life are like a pyramid cut off at the middle. 

 

 

Most of those non-material (spiritual) needs which the material order serves are treated as if they are individually determined utility preferences rather than collective commitments to the "Common Good".  Does anybody ever question which rarefied ends enjoyed by the individual such as self-actualization, transcendence, morality, aesthetic enjoyment, etc. are made possible only in a society (pace Margaret Thatcher)?  For those who find this hard to follow, here's an example: imagine an individual invents a game to play.  Suddenly, you are faced with a few problems: first, unless he intends to play the game by himself, others must learn the game (thus, the game must be learnable in principle); and second, the "rules" by which a game achieves coherence and enjoyment are not dictated by the individual's whims in each passing moment (Rather, even in games like Solitaire, following the rules is part of the enjoyment!).  Would shooting a basketball be "fun" if we imagined the rim to occupy wherever the ball falls through the air?  Is it fun to play a game when your opponent is the referee?  No.  What informs these rules (e.g. each has his turn, actions have consequences, rules are set from the beginning and all are subject to them impartially, results are binding, referees cannot be players, chance has its say, space is delimited on the board, etc.) are inherited from previous games.  There is adaptation in other words-- and clever imitation for sure--  but not true invention.   In this blog, I will elaborate that this truism characterizes everything we deem conventional.  As Aristotle pointed out, we are social animals.  Modern men and women would nod their heads but still misunderstand that term just as Rousseau misunderstood that term.  They still think these conventions can be collectively rewritten in the present at the expense of fixed aspects of human nature.  They do so because they have a false sense of mastery over themselves, over the natural world, over ultimate concerns.

 

The problem of society is a deep one.  Even our imaginations are constrained by social conventions.  Just think of Marlowe's Faust who spends all of his precious time and newfound powers in catering to the approval of kings and queens!   The mage so powerful that he could likely bend the world to their knees is playing a trumped up version of a court jester and indulging in parlor tricks to amuse others!  Such is the extent of modern men and women's alienation.  They are creatures of habit who mistake their powers as something innately impressive.  What does it matter to master the world, if you cannot master yourself?

 

In religious terms, this decapitated pyramid is most clearly restored under the Divine Liturgy which is the most perfect expression of community, morality, and self-realization under the Ecclesial Body of Christ (or, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church).  It is another endeavor of this blog to document what this means in a more concrete way lest the promise of a cultural solution will seem wanting to the uncommitted and skeptical reader.

All in good time!

 

A disclaimer: a literary blog on "fundamental theology", Holy Wit is not to "prove" that God exists (as there are more focused minds for that undertaking). 

I am not interested in "proofs", "proof texting", or what have you.   There is no apologetic or polemical aim to this blog either.  And while a theist (that is, a believer in a personal God; rather than an impersonal "life force" or what have you), I am decidedly uninterested in an existential algebraic equation to solve the universal riddle.  I know just enough philosophy and have enough practical experience to know how little that would satisfy, both believer and skeptic alike.  I don't take satisfaction in koans or navel gazing either.  I leave the paradoxes and metaphysical finger traps to the unbelievers.

 

So is my reliance upon the Faith arbitrary and the result of non-rational considerations (e.g. emotional instability, psychological weakness, or wishful thinking)?  Is this all what Sartre termed "bad faith"--- that is, cowardice in the face of life?

 

My beliefs do have reasons and my religious life is often dry, so I do not believe so.

 

I begin instead with this modest set of propositions intended to foreground a personality, or a Divine Intelligence and Will, at the root of the world:

 

So, let us begin with ordinary assumptions:

 

(1) People today don't recognize personalities as the grounds of ultimate reality (say, as they did in pre-industrial societies that revered deities).  Quite recently, modern people have mathematicised natural science (and presumably "tamed" the natural order by doing so (see Francis Bacon) and deny that there is such a thing as "ultimate reality."  In their mind, there is just reality.  Full stop.).

So, what is the problem with that?  For starters, equations or theorems that explain reality in its clearest expression, such as the "laws of nature", while beautiful and majestic (and even useful), are provided as full explanations in themselves as if they close the book on the question of what the world involves, but on their own equations and other accounts simply don't do anything.  They summarize a mathematical relationship, or posit a measurable process at work, but their existence in fact presupposes a mind to derive and explain.

 

Basically, you cannot answer ontological questions with physical theories since questions of existence are prior to instantiations of existence (i.e. matter, energy, and stuff).  To ignore this category error would be like answering a "why" question by describing what happened.    Physis (the etymological root of "physics") means 'nature' and its meaning is contrasted with nomos which emphasizes human convention (or "law").  However, over the course of modern history, "physics" as a discipline became preoccupied exclusively with matter and energy as the fundamental basis of the measurable world (because you can weigh things and measure things like temperature).  What it could measure in terms of mass and energy then became the defining features of "physical reality" in an abstract sense.  This blueprint of the world that emphasized the mechanics of what made it work is interesting and useful but it is just a blueprint to be worked on for particular ends.  Prioritizing the map over the territory (such that the map overrides the territory in the minds of human beings) would have made little sense to the ancient philosophers (with the exception perhaps of the atomists and epicurean-adjacent minorities).  Philosophically (and culturally), this 'physical reality' became synonymous with reality itself, expunging other considerations to nomos or "convention" as typically understood by the Greeks who discovered this distinction that makes the "theory" of anything possible.  This is why "religion" became a question of individual commitment and association (nomos) under the aspect of mere opinion in the eyes of modern people (and thus subject to discretion and preference), while public health institutions were treated as collectively binding because of "science" and its monopoly on truth.

 

This shift, I contend, is fundamentally mistaken:

 

Equations and theories are but abstract entities.  On their own, they still don't do anything (so searching for them as an ultimate explanation for world-originating and world-sustaining action is bound to fail).  They can only chart correlations and speculate as to causal links in the proximate sense--- and nothing more.  Same with concrete things in general--- on their own, mindless things don't properly do anything.  Rather, they are acted upon by mindful personalities that have a will.  Case in point: If your explanation for the physics and geometry of the game of pool talks in detail about the plane tables, balls, and sticks--- and not the players!--- then you've got a warped explanation for what pool is and how it all works.

 

At root: Only people and personalities do, act, order in such a way as to intend something.   In short, to speak of the "laws of nature" unironically while emphasizing that there is no natural "law giver" is nonsensical as far as metaphors go.  Being men of numbers more so than words, many physicists have yet to explain how a law could write itself.  They haven't even given up the metaphor which is a sign of either theoretical sterility or conceptual poverty.

 

Another problem is that the human moral order of judgements and the natural scientific order of facts as assumed under modern materialistic civilization necessarily occupy the same universe by their own admission, but moderns typically don't see the disconnect between treating orcas and diseases one way (that is, not blaming them for their acts), while holding human beings up to moral scrutiny.

To do so, you'd have to distinguish non-human nature from human nature into different natural kinds.  Yet, as you do so, you move away from strictly empirical science (as many scientists would contend!) towards....well, metaphysics.

 

You see, some questions and concerns simply won't die no matter how hard you try to ignore them.

 

(2) Of course, there is a moral order in humanity.  We are responsible for ourselves and our actions in ways that non-rational animals are not.  But why?  My response appeals to the obvious: There is intention in human beings; and thus, through humanity, there is intention in the Universe; therefore, that must be explained just as much as molecular formation (e.g. table salt, water, etc.) from smaller atomic particles (e.g. sodium, chloride, oxygen, hydrogen, etc.) that existed at an earlier time following the "Big Bang" are deemed explicable.  The possibility of molecules did not come after atomic particles existed as if the existence of molecules were accidental and only attributed to the atomic particles themselves (that is, by reductionism).  Because we are speaking of possibility vs. actuality, it was all dictated at the "Big Bang" independently of any actually existing things.  So, following the same logic, intention and meaning did not come after human beings but were dictated similarly in a timeless instant theologians have called Eternity.  Is there an equation to explain any of this?  No, you see, truth begins and ends at this personal level of the spirit--- neither at the abstract level of numbers nor at the mindless level of matter.  Moderns hate to speak of this truth as objectively apparent to all of humanity, but the spiritual exists in a category of its own.  Its proof of existence is the conscience (or, if you brutally prefer, moral intuition), as well as other manifestations, e.g. the human ability to speak infinitely with only a finite vocabulary (see Noam Chomsky's theories on hierarchical syntactical structure), the intrinsic limitation of A.I. to perform basic mathematical operations with large enough numbers, and other apparent anomalies that should not exist under eliminative naturalism that denies the Transcendent.

 

(3) More simply expressed, from a literary point of view (that is, where anthropocentric meaning derives), the essence of the world's drama resides not in particles, equations, or whatever the physicists would have you believe.  As unconventional of a spiritualist as William James would attest that much in lamenting about the innate stupidity of "whirling particles"!

The essence of the world's drama and our own grasp of a meaningful life resides most visibly, albeit not exhaustively, in human beings.  Yes, not exhaustively: for human beings did not set the world in its order nor do they sustain it.  Humanity are temporal beings as anything else and have an embodied origin within this created order (and thus, less controversially, we can neither create the world as a whole, nor ultimately create meaning out of nothing which is why archetypes and topoi, the concerns of this blog, continue to shape individual stories going forward).  Therefore, the explanation requires something analogous to what we are that is also literally super-human that is not of this world (as we are) but mysteriously the source of it.  The argument has seen a lot of spilled ink on the metaphysical and scientific topics, but as I've emphasized above: that level of argumentation doesn't interest most people.  We don't die for biology, physics, or even philosophy.  We die for our country, for our families and friends.  Ultimately, it is those things that matter most and which structure our values and lives.  In the person of Jesus Christ, God knew this, which is why Jesus did not come as a Socrates, a Zarathustra, a Gautama or what have you.

 

With that said, I am interested in shifting this locus of natural theology's connection to fundamental theology away from scientific concerns to the literary so as to bridge a connection from narratives in general-- where meaning is crafted---to Logos Himself (that is, the Person of Jesus Christ).  That is why this blog hopes to lead to a fundamental theology from the terminus of "worldly wisdom", including the greatest stories ever told and lessons to be learned from the greatest men to have lived, to the Person of Jesus Christ who is the apex of that same human condition.

 

If you're interested in this interrogation of both sacred and profane history, feel free to follow me on Twitter:

Ivstin@ingeniumsanctum

 

I will notify the actual and prospective readership of new blog posts. 

 

I appreciate your efforts in reading this far.

 

Pax Christi!