Having conquered Death, Jesus has conquered our entire system of things, of which Satan is yet still Lord – for a time. The Logos, who is the King of kings and Lord of lords, the God of gods and Light of light, gave dominion of our cosmos at her beginning as a fief to his satrap, the seraph Satan. Satan then, with some number of his vassals, rebelled against his Lord and King, and so Fell from grace, and from his throne in the Court of Heaven. With him and his angels the whole realm of which they were minsters Fell in train, defected by their defection. So death – entropy, noise, error, sin, thus the gradual decrease of her power and being, her beauty, activity, life – began to eat her.
Decadence
The Basic Error of Modernity versus the Basic Truth of Tradition
I’ve just finished one of the 20 or 30 best books I’ve ever read. Theophany: The NeoPlatonic Philosophy of Dionysius the Areopagite, by Eric Perl, is only 138 pages long (counting end notes, but not index or bibliography), but it took me months to read, because it is so packed with insight. I could read only a page or so in a given session, before I had to set the book aside to process what I had learned. Perl opens Neo-Platonism and sets it forth plainly and coherently. Before I read it, Neo-Platonism seemed to me a foggy confusing mess. Having read it, I feel that I understand Neo-Platonism as it were from the inside; so much so that I am able to see that it has informed my own thought from the beginning. Indeed, I daresay I may just have discovered that I have been a Neo-Platonist all along!
Highly recommended, for those who are interested in metaphysics generally, or in ancient Greek philosophy. Or, for that matter, in thinking clearly.
I write about the book now because in his conclusion, Perl nails the divergence – or as I would characterize it, the divagation – in intellectual history that gave rise to the whole of modernism: to liberalism, nominalism, Kantianism, the Nietzschean transvaluation of values, to relativism, and so forth; in the limit, to nihilism, to nonsense, to insanity, and so to cultural deliquescence. Beginning on page 111, he writes:
Add Mathiness, cook … whatever
From a post I just stumbled upon, thanks to the invaluable folks at Synlogos, a quote that pretty much sums up our present predicaments:
… adding “mathiness” to an abstract caused people to rate it more highly in inverse proportion to how much they knew about math and models.
See, we have all these people – expert people – who think that they know how to think, when really they don’t.
Could there be a more cogent argument against democracy?
Why Did the West Go To Hell?
A guest post from long time commenter Imnobody, who has revealed his hidden nom de plume: Virapala
[Why Did the West Go To Hell attempts to be a logical and historical explanation of the genesis of today’s Absurdistan: a world where you are evil if you say that pigs cannot fly. You can contact the author on virapala.merdeta.com]
Part I.a.: A General Overview
Introduction
After some decades of observing, thinking and reading about the decadence of Western civilization, I have decided to write my ideas about this topic. I started writing about the concept of rights, which went completely out of control, producing four different long posts. I quickly realized that the topic of Western decline is so complex that there is the danger of the forest not being seen for the trees.
So I have decided to write a general overview of the causes of decadence in Western civilization, trying to hide or summarize as many details as possible. The outcome has been this text, which is divided into two different posts. The text is a bit long, a bit heavy in information and includes some claims that are not justified. My idea is to start from this general overview and write other texts to tie up the loose ends and explain better the ideas presented here.
Contra the “News”
Dude, they don’t want you to know what’s really going on. All their “news” – all of it – is made up stuff, or picked out and heavily edited, aimed at disturbing you, so that you keep tuning in to find out what’s going on, so that they can keep disturbing you, so that you then support some narrative or other. Not, NB, necessarily the risibly fake Establishment Narrative of our Overlords. Just, rather, some narrative or other, by which you might be controlled, or at least influenced.
All narratives feed the core Narrative. All of them. Including those that point out its absurdity and evil.
All the narratives are bullshit.
Check out of all of it. Focus on what the 4 year old said this afternoon – or on how to get such an one as wholly your own, and impeccably honest. That’s real. All this other stuff is almost entirely noise. Let the noise sort itself out. Almost all of it will disperse with the passage of time. You have no control over any of it. You need not – so, nor should you – concern yourself with it.
There is only one narrative that matters really, and ontologically, so permanently, and for real: the narrative of your relation with the Most High, and so – as entailed therein – of your decisions about this or that worldly thing in respect thereto, which lies within your ambit of influence. Such as the aforementioned 4 year old, and his mother.
Just do the right thing, in respect to those near you. Everything else is noise.
So is it a distraction of the Enemy, from your right thing, right now.
God help me, I preach to myself first and foremost. God help you, too.
Clown World: Its Apotheosis Actualized
What more is there to say, honestly?
Hat tip to Reminiscence of the Future:
The most gruesome and striking thing about it is its manifest and cringesome stupidity, ugliness, and forthright falsehood. It is painful just to witness its cognitive dissonance, its moral incoherence, even at a great distance. Like a great grandmother dancing “seductively” before an audience of young virile men (as if such a thing could ever really happen, outside of a Disney production), it revolts the intellects; and, what is far more indicative, it sickens the loins. For, it upends everything. Insanity cannot but ensue.
God help us.
Moloch Wants His Meals
Attentive and faithful readers will recall my post of shortly after the rejection of Roe versus Wade, in which I proposed that despite the righteous rule of the Supreme Court, Moloch would try to find some other way to sate his insatiable appetite for human lives. He shall ever want his human food – of attention, lives, bodies, worship – so as to maintain himself for a time until the end, which is foredoomed by his own evil and thus his inaptitude for being, if not by the judgements of the Most High (which – the conditions of being per se being wholly aspects of the Most High, eternally and so necessarily, amount to the same thing: to controvert the conditions of successful being just is to controvert the Logos of being as such).
Sure enough, the Dutch seem set to come through for their omniphagous Master, ensuring a constant supply of victims to his holocaust. The Canadians likewise are doing their part in his behalf, with their burgeoning program of killing people who suffer more than the bureaucracy of death considers quite proper.
Let’s be clear here: the Dutch proposal is that parents should be able to kill their children up to age 12.
Age 12.
Discernment of Spirits is 3 Fold
In approaching the problem of discernment, we should be clear that what we must discern are spirits: lives, and different ways of living them.
What, to begin with, are the criteria by which we may discern whether a given spirit is good or bad? Philippians 4:8:
Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.
Pretty clear, no?
Spirit has 3 meanings. The spirit of sloth, for example, is 3 fold, and all 3 derive from the fact that spirit denotes life – that every spirit is a life:
The Moral Logic of Social Welfare Necessitates Monasticism
Back in the day, all social welfare services were provided by monks and nuns. If you showed up at the door of a monastery or nunnery destitute or sick or starving, or all three, you could be pretty sure that you’d be taken care of, with good stout simple food, baths, laundry, and clothing, basic medical care, lodging, and so on (provided the house had room; if they hadn’t, the monks or nuns would do their best (with the priests of local parishes) to place you with another nearby house that had room). In exchange, you’d be expected (as soon as you had recovered enough) to work in the business of the house – the breweries, vinyards, tanneries, ropewalks, farms, sheepfolds, counting houses, treasuries, and so forth – and to attend liturgy at least once a day (not nearly as often as the monastics who had taken charge of you). You could stay on at the house as long as need be, provided you contributed to the household like everyone else, behaved yourself, and showed up in chapel at least once a day. It was also advisable to go to confession and get cleaned up and healthy that way, too.
That’s how it was throughout Christendom, anyway, for centuries. Elsewhere, you’d be out of luck.
Bad Faith as Endemic – ergo, Fundamental – to Modernity
The basic idea is that moderns cannot as such believe anything honestly and with a whole heart. This follows straightforwardly from their nominalism – which, often, they do not even suspect might be in them operative. So, their beliefs are all tentative, ad hoc, only their own and private, nowise dispositive of any reals external to themselves, certainly not at all authoritative (over anyone else, or even over themselves) and thus *not truly believed.* This is why moderns are so prone to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation.
They don’t believe the Narrative in their hearts. But the Narrative is all they have to go on; and one must perforce go on. They have no confidence in anything else.
The Orthosphere 