This blog primarily takes stock of the semiotic (or, sign-based) evidence of Divine Authorship in the course of sacred, recorded, and natural history; and, secondarily and successively, to promote historical inquiry in such topics as humanity's relationship to the Natural and Supernatural as a devotional recovery of the virtue of piety with its locus in the Divine Liturgy, Devotion to the Holy Dead, and the Contemplation of Nature. 

The use of the technical term "semiotic" is unfortunately necessary because "linguistic", or "literary", or "verbal" do not truly encompass all forms of Divine Communication.  For this reason, the broader term "semiotic" is used to emphasize the breadth of God's dealings with humanity, both publically and privately. 

Hardly arbitrary, this historical interest in the natural and social world with its connection in the Divine Liturgy is due in part to the two sides of the Divine Office involving (1) The Propers of the Saints (& the Holy Souls in Purgatory), encompassing the great souls of the Church, as well as (2) The Propers of the Seasons that follow the life of Christ who is the eternal Divine Logos and Sovereign over Creation.

 

That is an obscure way of saying that the personal triune God speaks to us through the lives of the saints and, far less immediately, upon the leaves of the Book of Nature herself as commemorated in the human life of Christ in the Gospel. 

This is so not only because the traditional days of penance we call "Embers Days" and "Rogation Days" are explicitly reflective of the natural world but because the Pasch, upon which the entirety of the Christian liturgical calendar pivots, takes place within the Semitic lunar calendar during the Hebrew month of Aviv, which literally refers to the "ripening of barley."

 

Lastly, other than documenting the history of the liturgy and the Christian practical approach to Nature (and its elevation by Grace), this blog is also a resource for the intellectual and spiritual formation of what is called the "domestic church", or the Christian household, where a new generation of homeschooling parents teach their children the old ways in connection with the sturdy pillars of the Apostolic Church and the Natural Law both.

 

May God bless you and your house!

 

[*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 just fixated upon natural theology at the expense of fundamental theology (i.e. the nature and status of Divine Revelation), I realize that the latter is joined to the hip of the former.  Our natural understanding of God is mediated through our experiences and mental and emotional lives.  People are not blank slates upon which the Gospel is written.  Christ always meets people, even those raised in the Faith, "in media res" (or in the middle of something).  Such a conceptual framework structures the blog's approach to "Providence" and the essential properties of God and His operations, including His self-disclosure through the workings of Prophecy and Natural sign systems (my greatest intellectual interest), when read against the general backdrop of history proper (my secondary interest), especially against the highest thoughts and experiences of mankind in the secular world that end up being recorded, considered, evaluated as definitive to Mankind.]

Thanks for reading my blog!

 

 

 

On the Theological Consequence of Arts, Letters, & Worldly Wisdom:

 

Why investigate Divinity through the Arts?  Why not just a traditional approach to Theology?:

 

Because men first know of the world through their appetites and senses.  That our bodies and the needs of the body and the fixations of the senses are what first dawn on us.  Fortunately, these exigencies of the flesh do not end with the objects of our satiation but evolve in complex and nuanced ways and attain a dignity in their own natural right that we call "Pleasure" and, even beyond that, "Beauty." 

It is a token of faith in this blog that beauty in all of her magnificence will raise thoughts to her origin in God.

 

However, what is distinctive about the Christian God is that He values humility which is antithetical to the entire literary enterprise and its demiurgical impulse to create. 

 

Indeed, the etymology of "poet" is rooted in the Greek poiētēs, from poein, poiein "to make, create, compose."  According to Calvert Watkins, a major etymologist, this Hellenic term is reconstructed to be from Proto-Indo-European's *kwoiwo- "making," from root *kwei- "to pile up, build, make". 

There is, in other words, a kind of Tower of Babel behind Mankind's own artistic tendencies to create, to innovate, to expand upon his given freedom and dominion over creation.  Such a connection reminds one of Stephen Daedalus' words, “When a man is born...there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets."

 

A poet seeks what else but the Transcendent?  In Daedelus' case, to "fly by".  But to fly by what exactly?  This is where the nobility ends, for Daedalus imagines nothing above him but the emptiness of the sky: a god soaring freely beyond the sky above the nets of human conventions (so as to what?  To look down upon his lessers?): yet, a poet is just a mere shaper of his materials: who could create ex nihilo but the One he holds in contempt?

 

For Christians, literature and all forms of learning whether mechanical or liberal therefore can either serve the Gospel or seek to replace it.   Nuclear energy is a fine example of this tendency to bring prosperity (cheap energy) or destruction (the hydrogen bomb).  That much is painfully obvious, but Daedalus reminds us that this choice presents itself before we even consider the natural world and its potential, and how one voices his or her allegiance to God is not always clear, which is why the pen comes with its own spiritual dangers: Hardly unique to our century, the artist faces a unique temptation to interject above the Lord's voice rather than to proclaim His good news in his or her own way.

 

Why am I interested then in worldly wisdom and the poet's desire to transcend the trappings of mankind's own understanding in this sense?  Because the greatest opposition to the Living God comes through the rejection of His evidenced involvement in our affairs and the denial of prophecy by the great men of genius whom we consider "elites" in possession of special forms of knowledge, talents, and informed judgement of their own about "how things really are" and "how things should be."  For generations, such men-- -such "thought leaders", titans of industry, innovators, musicians, artists, etc.--- have not considered God at all.  In fact, their vision of the world lacked any reference to Him.

  

For many, including believers, God is just an abstraction--- a distant presence of increasingly irrelevant conjecture (increasing in proportion that society secularizes and displaces Him).  Indeed, among the more spiritually inclined, the talk of "God" is becoming replaced by "Universe" as a metaphysical placeholder of endlessly deferred explanations.   The retention of "Universe" is not atheistic, it seems, but pantheistic (Nature Herself demands homage, respect, delicate negotiation as if she were animal faced, bloodthirsty deity); so, what most reject to my knowledge is not the notion of an ultimate power, of a superhuman power, but the source of that power in God's revelation to humanity through the Gospel.

In their minds, modern society has moved past many of the dogmas of the past and the world of a liberated humanity is flourishing whereas the world of faith was marked by disease, fear, and vulnerability.  This rejection of God that speaks more to Daedalus' condescending indifferentism towards religion than true atheism is ultimately rooted in a belief that religion is a man-made cultural construct of limited relevance that chases questions that we cannot possibly answer in the long-enough term.   And that there are better pursuits that is of the poet's making.  In response, many who are hardly "poets" per se have similarly turned towards a full-fledged pragmatism to live their lives on their own terms, or to forge their own paths, whereas others indulge in a vague or exotic spiritualism, often of a pantheistic quality, as it suits their taste.  Within the realm of literature, mankind has sought a false substitute for religion where man has become the author of his own life. 

 

When modern people say they're "spiritual but not religious", you should actually believe them.  This is because they are not strictly materialists and part of them knows that: They know they cannot be because their subjectivity, their emotional selves, their "folk psychology", what have you, has meaning and value even when they deny that such meaning can emerge in a harsh, meaningless void.  We live in a world of heightened sensitivity towards how people talk to one another and the use of symbols.  That sensitivity is not explicable in a world where materialism strictly speaking is actually taken as true.  To tell someone that their pain is "nothing but" neurochemical processes will not cause them to embrace dispassion of one's own false sense of being; no, they will likely either smile bitterly or even get offended.

This world which is rooted only in biological and physical processes nevertheless assigns a sacred value to each particular variation of mankind, a kind of demand for respect and recognition to their "lived experience" in a world that is still admittedly cold and indifferent to their pain. 

The onus, of course, doesn't fall on the Universe which does not even see people as people.  The onus falls on humanity itself because humans have "agency" even if inexplicably so in a dispirited world.  Man doesn't worship nature to rever her (Romanticism), much less to get something out of her (Paganism).  He worships nature as an avenger upon humanity.

Pluralism-avec-pantheism then is an interesting state of mind and one that is the true enemy of religion (see Revelation 3:16) because it is founded upon a sense of entitlement of one that is by all admission contingent and understands himself as a contingency.  In a world where nothing is necessary in a metaphysically deflated sense of scientific materialism, then how could Jesus Christ ultimately matter?

 

How disarming is it to acknowledge something as true--- but only tautologically so!

 

I cannot emphasize how destructive pantheistic indifference is to the prospects of revealed religion.

Afterall, atheism at least takes revealed religion seriously enough to formally critique the supernatural and thereby opens itself up to losing its own argument.  But an indifferent soul committed to the belief that the outside world is irrational and their own grounds of being merely contingent doesn't care about "winning" or "losing" according to principled debate.  How does one approach any intellectual task among those who fundamentally refuse to recognize that the world is rational to begin with outside of their own configuration?  How do you dialogue meaningfully with such a mind that doesn't see meaning or value outside of itself?  Such a mind embroiled in radical sensuality loathes the very idea of such tasks and cannot be won over by Reason; thereby, the indifferent man merely caters to his own whims and vanities without taking life's propositions seriously.  An indifferent man doesn't say "why?" or "why not?", so much as "who cares?"  He only begins to ask these questions when he experiences pain and loss, which oddly enough is the basis of many theogonies.  But I get a head of myself.

 

The danger of indifference is not the energetic opposition and potential forcefulness of principled atheism, as witnessed in Communist nations and their persecution of Christians and other religious groups, but the embrace of a spiritual entropy typical of the liberal mind, such that the low energy state is deemed irresistible, inevitable, and even the natural tendency in things; and life by extension is configured as a string of contingent events and makeshift "evolving" conditions, the arrangement of which is merely of aesthetic value incidentally (if that much) in the end whereby the value of a life well-lived is judged. 

The solution to indifferentism, therefore, does not rest with apologetics or dialectics in general as those prioritize a determinate whole and a resolution to work out any contradictions and own up to those conclusions.  The root cause of indifferentism is, well, indifference-- i.e. non-commitment either way.  And men and women come to be indifferent from all manner of reasons that are not all that centered in the intellect, so much as the will.  But if you believe the world is fundamentally unreasonable because it resists your demands basically, then you will see yourselves committed (more unknowingly than not) to the prospect of pantheistic voluntarism: i.e. the Universe is the Power, and we must conform ourselves to Her inhuman, non-rational, non-deliberative dictates.  Echoing Schopenhauerian pessimism, the universe is a blind will without explanation or cause at root, and our ideas that we entertain about "the world" are mere fanciful illusions that we project upon a Force that is indifferent to our plans.

 

Knowing the world is hostile, we build our shelter against her.  Modernity has trained us to object to things that make us uncomfortable, but before this impression was possible, the idea of religious authority with its values in redemptive suffering and an intelligible and morally ordered world had itself to be dismantled.  So, at root, I am deeply interested in why modern people came to the conclusion that the Summum Bonum, or God, is a relative construct and an objectively undefined entity, subject to our own whims and fantasies, such as to fill in the details as we will, and why the liberal order itself, which prompted such indifference towards the Public Good, and the political and economic fruit of this-worldly humanist indifferentism, stems from this rejection of Divine Revelation-- be it a tacit or explicit rejection.   More than outlawing religion, it made it just another therapy...

That is the fatal blow of the Enemy and one that has wounded many faithful by rendering it one of many possible options for spiritual treatment.

 

It is the belief of the writer that this evacuation of religion from the public life and thus the conscience of the social animal left a vacuum that was filled only by a chaotic maelstrom of forces, obscured by puffed up political rhetoric, often online, at times hyper-optimistic, most of the time pessimistic, that operates by a false fellow-feeling that comes ultimately from a simulated empathy rooted in new platitudes undergirded by literary conventions nobody understands anymore.  The metaphysical hollowing of modern society has led to a shallow collective life.

 

Even so, man cannot help but be a sign-using creature--- more specifically, he cannot help but tell himself stories.

 

Yet, Narrative shifted away from purposefully recollection in the cultus towards something subject to preference, taste, and amusement in our literary cultures.  Our culture shifted from a theocentric one rooted in the liturgy to a democratic one rooted in entertainment.  The more a society seeks entertainment and the satisfaction of its own concupiscence, whether of "low" or "high" cultural genres, the less pious that society tended to be.  Why?  Because entertainment is relief from commitment and suffering whereas the liturgy is itself the highest of commitments in this life in the embrace of one man's-- the God-Man's-- suffering. 

 

In the end, people still tell stories, enjoy hearing them and debating their meaning and merits, increasingly policing and gatekeeping those discourses, but increasingly they do so only for the power involved in leasing such symbols.

 

The world grows older and yet weirder.

 

If literature is "simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree", as Ezra Pound once wrote; then, how has that added meaning served humankind?  How has literature, or secular letters, faired as a mirror to man's soul compared to that of traditional religion where Mankind trembled at thinking of itself on its own terms because the Book of Life was written in the indelible ink of another world?  And that this modernist project that Pound had envisioned and hinted at in his own phrasings not only died but within the span of one generation-- is that not an interesting fact in itself?  Is it not interesting that most cultural projects are increasingly short-lived as time progresses?  This fad or that fad, one year, one month, a mere week?  As Warhol once prophesied, in the future, everyone will have his 15 minutes of fame?  What pray tell is the shelf life of a meme? 

 

This blog then is interested in the longevity of literary cultures, the disciplines imposed upon us by them, why a decline in literacy should be as much a concern as fertility rates, and the stability of the moral underpinnings of the Great Tradition itself that the modernists tried to dismantle for the reasons supplied by Daedalus above-- this decline of not only religion but literary culture and literacy writ large, being what Matthew Arnold considered as "the best that has been thought and said" in recorded history. 

 

In the modernist mind, art was to supplant religion and yet art too is dead.  Is that not a coincidence?  Again, how do we situate the cultus within the culture that fashions our own tastes as believers or unbelievers both?  Where are Christians to look to fashion their own sensibility, tastes, customs, and cultures amid this undead culture of death?

 

Speak not of post-post-modernisms!

 

Modernism and its political expression in liberalism doesn't seem to truly die but consumes itself indefinitely--- so the question is, how shall we live in the here and now to be spared the non-existence of the zombie horde?

 

If you are interested in such topics then please stop by occasionally to read and reflect.

 

Be well!