On the Solemnity of the Annunciation of Our Lord: On the Virgin Birth

A guest post by commenter PBW:

Nothing is impossible to God. Occam’s Razor cannot separate the works of God according to any principle of economy. What economy is evident in a cell, a tree, the biosphere, the galaxy, the farthest reaches of the universe? Irrespective of the models we construct to map and try to predict the behaviour of these things, all of them, in their concrete reality, are unfathomably complex, and each is a unique instance. What principle can place limits on the actions of the creator of all these wonders?

With this in mind, consider the conception, gestation and birth of Jesus of Nazareth. Accepting as an irreducible given that Mary, his blessed mother, “knew not man,” there is a minimalist scenario – Occam’s scenario, so to speak. On this view, the action of the Holy Ghost consisted in fusing a DNA strand of his own making with the DNA in a mature ovum of the Blessed Virgin, which at the moment of the Annunciation and Mary’s fiat, was making its way down one of her fallopian tubes. And with, “I am the servant of the Lord,” that fusion took place, and the Son became flesh as a single fertilised ovum.

Take Care That You Knock On the Right Door

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you: for every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened.

Luke 11:7-8

The door is *always* locked only on the inside. Open it, and bid enter whom you would. They will come, whom you invite.

But beware: it works the same way for the demons as for the Holy Ones.

On Big Lies

“Big lie propaganda is comparable to judo or ju jitsu, in which the victims own momentum and exertions are used to defeat him . . .” 

Department of the Army, Defense Against Enemy Propaganda (1963)

Big lies are designed to hoodwink little liars.  Big lies work because little liars wrongly suppose that all lies are like their own picayune fibs, and because little liars lack the imagination to conceive of falsehood on a grand scale.  Big lies work equally well on most honest men and women, since the lies these honest men and women pride themselves on not telling are, in most cases, picayune little lies.

Poe’s Psychic-Atomist Critique of Wayward Modernity – Part II

Joseph Mallord Turner (1775 – 1851) – Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1834)

PART TWO. The worldwide, instantaneous ekpyrosis of “Eiros and Charmion” illustrates Poe’s thesis dramatically.  In “Eiros and Charmion” Poe wrote the first cosmic-collision story, to be followed fifty years later by H. G. Wells in “The Star,” and popular ever since.  Cosmic-collision stories tend to be end-of-the-world stories, a pattern set by Poe’s dialogue.  Earth passes through the tail of a large comet, the chemistry of which draws the nitrogen from the atmosphere, leaving only the oxygen, at which point everything combustible, including the human body, bursts into flame.  Eiros, who died in the extinction-event, narrates the last moments of life to Charmion, who had graduated to “Aidenn” by ordinary death prior to the cataclysm: “For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things”; then – “the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame, for whose surpassing brilliancy and all-fervid heat even the angels in the high Heaven of pure knowledge have no name.”  Eiros quotes the Apocalypse of St. John and remarks on the hauteur with which the humanity of the time dismisses the ancient lore of comets.  In those passages subsists the criticism of wayward modernity: The mentality of the End-Times adhered only to “science” and rejected its connection to the cosmos – to God.  Comets once signified, but they have become mere phenomena, “divested of the terrors of flame.”  The awe that people once felt in respect of cosmic manifestations the final generation will need to re-learn in the moments before its demise.

Poe’s Psychic-Atomist Critique of Wayward Modernity – Part I

Joseph Mallord Turner (1775 – 1851) – Light and Colour (1840)

Many people know of the “Big Bang” or singularity theory of cosmic origin, but far fewer know that the author of the singularity theory was a Belgian scientist-priest, Georges Lemaître (1894 – 1966), who, in addition to his work in mathematics and physics, served as an artillery officer in the Belgian Army in World War I.  The name Lemaître rarely crops up in textbook discussions of the singularity theory although it does appear in the Introduction to the Wikipedia article on that topic.  The name of Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) goes absent in the Wikipedia article about Lemaître, where it would in fact assume some relevance, an observation that one can extend to Lemaître’s own published writings.  Lemaître enjoyed broad cultivation.  A typical Jesuit, he knew the humanities and arts as well as the sciences.  He could hardly have remained unaware of Poe’s self-described masterpiece, the “prose-poem” Eureka (1848), which Charles Baudelaire had translated into French in 1863.  To Poe belongs the actual invention of what Lemaître would call, in a popularizing essay of that name, “The Primeval Atom” (1946).  Even the details of “The Primeval Atom” find anticipation in Eureka, which formed the basis of lectures that Poe gave to bewildered audiences in the last year of his life.  One wonders whether Lemaître’s omission of Poe’s name was calculatedly prudential.  Disclosing the inspiration of Poe’s cosmology would no doubt have occasioned supercilious commentary.  Better not to complicate the issue by tying the theory to a bizarre literary text by a known eccentric, full of heavy satire and laced throughout with manifold irony.  Better not to adduce the author of “The Tell-Tale Heart” or “The Masque of Red Death.”

One Big Demonic Globalist Voice vs Many Small Truthful Voices

One of the most profound distinctions (so-called ‘polarities’) forced upon us by these times, is the stark choice between each person making his own inner-discernments about the truth of reality; or else a willing and willed embrace of what we know to be a world of lies and manipulations, emanating from the institutions of The Global Establishment.

Bruce Charlton, 3/8/2021.

I sometimes misunderstand Bruce, but he seems to be saying that we have two choices: submit to the big, ubiquitous, demonic voice of the corrupt world system, or discern truth inwardly. In my view, his words are correct but they miss the most important thing: Discovering the small truthful voices. We don’t have to discover truth all by ourselves. It’s not just me versus the world. It’s us versus the world.

Possibly Bruce regards it as an obvious given that we can encounter truth through the voices of others. Maybe the inner discernment he speaks of is nothing more than the act of choosing which voice to believe. (That is, after all, the key choice that any person makes.)  But in his current writings he emphasizes the untrustworthiness and wickedness of the current authorities and institutions, and the need for inner discernment. He doesn’t write much about the importance of the small truthful voices which can still be found in books and online.

Meaning or Nothing

Synchronicity strikes again, as usual.

Sinister Sentimentality

You are no doubt familiar with this pithy apothegm from Joseph de Maistre:

“In my life I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, and so on. I even know, thanks to Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare I’ve never encountered him.” *

I will adapt this to the moral panic of the moment and say,

“In my life I have seen Chinamen, Indians, Afghanis, and so on. I even know, without needing to have read Montesquieu, that one can be Persian. But as for an Asian, I declare I’ve never encountered him.”

On Our Inheritance of Original Sin

Original Sin is one of the more scandalous Christian doctrines (there are lots of them). How can an innocent baby be guilty of Original Sin? How can we be born into Original Sin, through no fault of our own? And how did Adam’s sin manage to corrupt us, all these millennia later? It seems nuts, and insanely unjust.

Most of the difficulties can be cleared up with a few clarifications.

Are Politics and Metapolitics No Longer Mainly About Conservatism Versus Liberalism?

Some thinkers say yes. I say, in one sense, yes. In another sense, no.

Starting around 1970, the New Left, having failed in their 1960’s attempt to seize open power through Revolution, shifted to the strategy of completing the takeover of institutions by leftist thinking through the use of legal and incremental means. This takeover had started in the Nineteenth Century, but it kicked into high gear when the Left began their modern campaign.

Like the proverb of the frog whose water temperature jumps suddenly, this move of the left inaugurated the era of open political battle between leftists seeking to conquer society by instituting leftist laws / rules and installing leftist officials, and conservatives seeking (often halfheartedly) to block leftism. The dominant paradigm of political warfare consisted of rival candidates seeking elected office, rival legislative factions seeking to pass or block laws, and citizens opposing or supporting laws (at the governmental level) or regulations (at the private sector level), all of which involved masses of voters or constituents exerting force by collective action.