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There Can Be Only One Unmoved Mover

For simplicity, say there were only two unmoved movers, β & ψ. They would each be an actus purus, by definition. They would both likewise be necessary and eternal.

Neither of them could influence the other, obviously. So, they couldn’t do or know anything about each other, and would not therefore be either omnipotent or omniscient. Nor could either one of them be properly understood as ultimate, because by the definition of ‘ultimate,’ there can be only one ultimate. So neither of them could be God (that’s why I didn’t label them α & ω).

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New Articles

Apropos of Kristor’s recent recommendation of an essay, available online, by the redoubtable René Girard (born ninety years ago), I call attention to my latest contribution at The Brussels Journal, “Globalism as Sacrificial Crisis,” a discussion in review of The Mark of the Sacred by Jean-Pierre Dupuy, who works from a declaredly “Girardian” perspective. The Mark of the Sacred is a courageous analysis of the existing crisis in terms of Girard’s concepts of mimesis and the sacred. The review is a follow-up to two earlier ones that also appeared at the Journal – those of Gregory Copley’s Un-Civilization and Eric Cline’s 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. I am indebted, as always, to Luc van Braekel, for the handsome treatment of the text.

The article is here: http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/5148

I am also indebted, as often I have been in the past, to Angel Millar, webmaster of The People of Shambhala, for posting my essay on “Ur-Civilization, Cosmology, and the Invention of History,” which couches a discussion of how much we know of the human past, and of how certain many people are of knowing everything about it, in the context of a quest for the merits inherent in what its detractors refer to as pseudo-archeology. Readers of The Orthosphere who are familiar with such names as Ignatius T. Donnelley or C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne, might find some modest pleasure in my paragraphs.  (As I hopefully predict…)

The article is here: http://peopleofshambhala.com/ur-civilization-and-the-invention-of-history/

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Book Review: “Persons: the difference between ‘someone’ and ‘something'”

Persons:  the difference between ‘someone’ and ‘something’
by Robert Spaemann

“Person” is a funny category.  In its contemporary sense, the world managed to do without it before 300AD.  The category “human” fit our fellow intelligent creatures, and the word “person” originally meant “role”.  It was elevated to a philosophical concept by theologians in order to explain what it was that is multiple in the Trinity and one in Christ.  Unlike “human”, which refers to a nature, “person” is defined in contrast to nature, that which is one in God and two in Christ.  The settled definition of a person, given by Boethius, is “the individual substance/subsistence of a rational nature”.  The emphasis, then, is on being a particular existent, as being the existing subject that holds a nature (or, in the case of Jesus, holds two).  As Robert Spaemann, the author of this intriguing book, explains, “person” refers not to a particular nature but to the particular way intelligent beings relate to their nature.   This personal mode of existence is alluded to in saying that a person “has a nature”, implying non-identity with that nature and a degree of freedom in engaging with it.

The key quality of personal existence is transcendence.  Like all animals, we have drives, and we naturally regard other beings according to how they relate to those drives’ satisfaction.  But we are not stuck regarding the world this way.  Even to realize that this is a limited perspective is to step beyond it.  Even to, like Descartes, wonder if all one’s perceptions might be false is to maintain the personal attitude of transcendence, because one retains the knowledge that there is an outer world, an outside perspective, in addition to one’s inner world.  That we can try to respond to things according to their objective truth or goodness (the “view from nowhere” rather than my self-interested view) is the mark of our dignity.  Thus, a dying man would prefer to hear a distressing truth to comforting lies even when he is beyond the point where the truth can practically affect him.  As free beings we can choose illusion, retreat into immanence, relinquish our specifically personal dignity, but even this is a distinctively personal act.

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Revelation is a Holograph

God is an indivisible whole, so any bit of him is all of him. Nothing new can ever be added to revelation, then, because wherever revelation occurs, the whole of God enters into the prophet, and is present there, fully disclosed to him who has eyes to see.

With each ingression of God to the created order, the whole of him enters in. So each instance of his ingress, and each instance of every type of him, is a synecdoche of the whole of him. Thus is he completely present in every atom of creation, in each speck of consecrated host, each Christian, each congregation – and in every passage of the Scriptures.

In principle, the prophet can see the whole of God in any part of him. Because the whole of God is present in every bit of him, a vision of any such bit is for the seer a glimpse that takes in all that God knows. So it is that those who return from the mystical ascent report having seen “everything.”

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The Retortion of Social Construction

If the notion of the social construct is true, then the notion of the social construct is itself a social construct. It is without any basis in reality, so that there is no real reason we should notice it, or order our lives thereby.

The consequence is that when someone argues that, e.g., marriage is a social construct, so that we may change it if we like so that gays can marry, it can be argued with equivalent force that the notion that gays ought to be able to marry is likewise a social construct. We may therefore reject the notion of gay marriage, under the banner of social construction, and there will be no way that the moral nihilists can gainsay us. If there is no moral reality, so that no one has any basis in that reality for an argument against gay marriage, then by the same token no one has any basis in moral reality for an argument against the proscription of gay marriage – or anything else, whatsoever.

In general, it’s no good to argue from moral nominalism to any moral realism. You can’t get any ought from “there is no such thing really as an ought.” Thus to talk at all about what it is right or proper to do is implicitly to recognize the falsity of moral nominalism; if moral nominalism is true, then nothing is really right or wrong to do, and such talk is all just nonsense. Moral discourse of any sort at all implicitly agrees to the presupposition that moral discourse has something real to discuss.

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The Enemy Speaks His Mind

Sometimes our Adversary hurls his mask on the ground and dances on it screaming with rage. In the video below you may see embodied the term toward which we ultimately tend, as things now stand, and so long as our current ideological tyrants continue to have their way. He’s Abubakar Shekau, the leader of Boko Haram, responding to the risible hashtag campaign against his gang’s kidnapping of 276 Christian girls.

To clear up any confusion about his plan, our Enemy makes it clear at 0.24 on the video: Kill Christians.

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Hope

One of the many reasons I posted so little here at the Orthosphere over the summer was that in the months leading up to the family vacation that began in mid-June I had been feeling more and more discouraged about the culture wars, and thus enervated. The handwriting was on the wall, the Persians at the gates of the City; and other watchmen on the web were doing a great job. What could I add, really, to the fight, especially given that it seemed foredoomed to go against us?

Sure, I was busier than at any time in recent memory with family and business affairs. But such business had not kept me from writing in many decades.

In retrospect, I just needed that vacation. I was tired. I know this because only a few days into the vacation I began to feel hope again.

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No Flood Needed This Time Around

Birth rates are plummeting globally, so that even in countries where fertility is above replacement, it soon won’t be. In 150 years or so, the only people around will be religious conservatives, because other sorts of people with looser morals aren’t reproducing (thanks to the Pill, and all its knock-on social and economic effects, noticed in this video).

We have to step back and realize that what is happening to man right now is a pervasive and radical winnowing, comparable almost to the Flood. It’s natural selection at work, weeding out liberalism from the gene pool, and via co-evolution from the meme pool.  Put another way, liberalism is a lethal intellectual mutation. Whether it takes 50 years, or 1,000, liberalism is doomed, because it is at war with reality. Not only is it not nice to fool Mother Nature, it can never, ever be done in the first place. The Logos of the world is not mocked, no matter how amusing our petty pranks at his expense seem to us.

Fortunately for those who are deleting their own ilk from the world’s future, this winnowing may not involve catastrophic war, plague, or economic collapse. The autophagy of liberalism need not destroy civilization in the process. Civilization, even the West, might just squeak through and prevail in the end, preserving some of the best bits of what it has so far achieved. We might get through this winnowing with very little pain and suffering: no mass death, just a series of successively smaller, successively more traditional generations, as liberals die off after long, entertaining, meaningless lives.