Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In nomine Patris, et Filii, et Spiritus Sancti.  Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

In the mid-1980s, I saw the need to preserve and revive the theological arts.  Living in Seattle at the time, I put a name to it: Seattle Society of Orthodox Theologians.  My wife outlined an imprint and our daughter colored it:

Organizationally nothing came of it.  Other than me, I could not think of a theologian who would want to participate.  Perhaps the need for an organization existed not.  The need for a cadre of theologians to structure civilizations’ and nations’ fundament persists.

Today Spengler wrote with some passion about the lately-celebrated shrink Jordan Peterson and restoration of sacrality in culture.  I commented:

Correct, therapy is not what we need.  I’d say therapy got us to this mess and into it, but that is another subject.  A realization of our personal and joint sacredness, resting on a specific religious history — and significantly richer than the thin gruel of the antinomian left-wing of the Reformation — is towards what we need.

Some billionaires could engineer construction of an on-going cadre of theologians, encouraging home-and private-schooling, to include, from age 12 *for those showing interest,* immersion in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, to the point of facile reading of primary literature at least and, ideally, speaking and writing in Latin.

Then from age 16, and again *for those showing interest,* deeper and deeper immersion in the secondary and tertiary literature of theology, which necessarily introduces correlation with agriculture, law, military engineering, medicine, music, drawing, and all other arts.

Theology is a body of knowledge — like medicine, architecture, war-fighting, etc. — a very ancient body of knowledge, guaranteed accurate and reliable by replicated experience over millennia.  Theology is not an array of opinions.  To restore that body of knowledge is to lay down the keel of the ship of state, to extrude the axis of the culture of happiness, to fortify the premise of the insouciance of humor.

Kant remarked that Scots of his day were the most educated nation in Europe.  Reason: the Presbyterian Kirk had since some time ordained that all, all, Scots children learn Greek and Latin at least and many also Hebrew, along with mathematics.  That training immersed them in the vast wealth of human experience world-wide, turning them out as inventors of the first water in virtually all fields of inquiry.  Claret in the Lowlands and whiskey in the Highlands also were seen to have an improving effect.

In other words, the impetus driving the concept of a Seattle Society of Orthodox Theologians remains vivid.  The name may be poorly chosen: its acronym goes to SSOT.  But the thought is valid and the need vital.  I have no doubt that, one way and another, The Almighty, Who fosters both theologians and clergy (they are not the same role and do not share responsibilities) is seeing to it.

Βασιλεία του Θεού
Kingdom of God

Update 1: The Declaration of Arbroath (The text in Latin and English)

Update 2: Glenn Reynolds: Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad

I do not agree that the battle is between classes.  That is Socialist analysis, strictly horizontal, no vertical component, and so un-thorough, attenuated.  I think the battle is between Pelagians (self-salvation) and Christians (gift-salvation) . . . again.

Update 3: If you want to improve politics, unleash freedom.  If you want to improve religion, unleash theology.  If you want to improve culture, unleash religion.  Culture is the form of religion and religion is the substance of culture (Tillich).  The end of the ways of theology is politics and the end of the ways of politics is freedom.  Freedom starts everything and ends everything.  You want to right the world?  Be free and set your world free.  In a word: detach.  Get your filthy mitts off the world, relax, and be content.

Underneath and over all of this is the phenomenology of freedom.  Everything, really, is about freedom, which, at root, is freedom of movement, geographical freedom.

Geographical freedom is the source of spiritual freedom, which is the source of intellectual freedom, which is the source of moral freedom, which is the source of political, commercial and social freedom.  Religion, too, true religion, is entirely, 100%, about freedom: finding, achieving and maintaining it as movement across geography.  Freedom from religion is more vital and therefore precious than freedom of religion.

Basically, send the young ‘uns upstream to try their hand at making an algorithm to overcome the presence of disloyalty, stupidity and/or insanity at the top of a chain of authority.  And have them prove by outcomes that the algorithm actually works to that effect and that they can convince top authority to use it against what they, top authority, consider their best interests, i.e., perpetuation in power of themselves, who operate by low, barbarian impulses: disloyalty, stupidity and/or insanity.

Update 4: Spengler’s (David Goldman’s) essay on Jordan Peterson, referenced above, evinced the following comment string:

hornspe to Spengler:
Your observations are as always, clear and thoughtfully defended. However I disagree with your implied premise that there is a way to clear the debris of Political Correctness by bringing our society back to a more religious orientation. I do not object to the goal, I simply do not see the way to do it. Not with the tools at our disposal.

By way of analogy, were walking down a path and circling around to cross ove a place we had been before, we fell in a deep hole that was long ago dug for that purpose by the enemy. It has since been reinforced and made deeper and better hidden for the same purpose. We can continue on until we get out. The intellectual religions were the tool, the ladder if you will, that we used last time, but the steps up to them are too remote to use again. What you are therefore remembering is where we were, and that place is all but inaccessible from where we are now.

For example, Judaism, particularly the Orthodox variety, is one of the most intellectually sound religious traditions in history. It’s the “Judeo” in the Judeo-Christian that has enlightened the world, ended slavery, bestowed freedom, etc. etc. ad infinitum. It’s as good as it gets and it’s a tiny minority religion. Catholicism in its more traditional forms isn’t as rare, but is no longer a growth industry. The best of historical Protestantism is overwhelmed by compromise.

A move toward more religiosity isn’t going to go back to the grand intellectual traditions that brought us out of darkness, that’s too difficult post-Frankfurt School. Our universities are intellectual killing fields. I read your column faithfully because your erudition is so very rare. That means when people turn toward faith they are FAR more likely to go toward the familiar anti-intellectual, hyper-emotional choices. The move toward more religion is far more likely to end in the tent-revival “you only need one book” variety of Christianity practiced by Pentecostals who think babbling incoherently is speaking in tongues when the clear description in the Bible they claim is literal truth, states that it is a state of communication instantly understandable to all people in their best understood language.

At some level people understand that the enemy has blown up the bridges back to the world as it was. Peterson is a phenomenon because at some level, he advocates embracing simple truths, for example, surrounding yourself with sensible people who mean you well. He is also willing to attack PC idiocy using language intelligible to the majority of the PC infected. You correctly, and with some outrage, attack his assertions as constituting an objective as ridiculous as telling adults not playing in traffic. True enough, but my guess is that it has been a long time since you have been around people to whom that is valuable advice. Sir, the Western world, I am sorry to say, if full of adults playing in traffic. I see them a lot. I have friends for whom my wife and I may be among the only acquaintances who do not share their insanely terrifying world-view.

Good people who misapprehended the world based on the repellent ideologies foisted on children in the schools, fill their lives with parasites and scolds. It runs the gamut between a terribly broken sister-in-law, who cannot be committed under the current laws, and has cheerfully given away tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars to buys magic crystals or hear someone channel her departed grandmother who somehow always feed her narcissism. Worse there many in our circle who consider themselves somehow afflicted by evil because they are decent, diligent and therefore successful, but have begun to doubt the beneficence of government which daily tries to break their legs with insane regulation. Allare afflicted with people they consider friends, none of whom have jobs that create value, but all of whom are now shrill in their constant harping about privilege, typically when they want something. One who is constantly fighting for survival from the regulatory state does not feel “privileged”, but they are unable to defend themselves to their envious “friends” because they lack the vocabulary to do so.

Peterson provides that vocabulary, AND it is intelligible to those they need to use it on. Now you and I can offer far better and more valid arguments, but not ones intelligible to those they need to influence. Now by this I do not mean the hateful scolds attacking them. Those people are not worthy of the argument. I mean others in their circle who they would like to give reasons not to ostricize them in the face of these harping cry-bullies. Asserting eternal truths, as you and I might do, is like trying to explain air travel to a Yannomamo villager who thinks there is an impenetrable roof in the sky. If you want them on a plane, you say you do not fly so high as to crash into it, you do not try, in that moment, to explain modern cosmology, or even to deny an outright falsehood they have always mistaken for the truth.

Quoting eternal truth is useless to those infected with Political Correctness (and not all of them have a terminal case, indeed most don’t). Stating that they must now consider “my Truth” (a ridiculous concept if there ever was one) is actually quite a powerful argument. Now, to be sure, it is idiotic therepudic language that means nothing, but we are speaking to intellectually mutilated children. So long as “My Truth” comports absolutly with objective reality, I am leading them astray only in terms of the label. That then morally obligates me to explain that distinction later when they are in a place to hear it.

This, I think, is what you are missing with Peterson. He speaks a language the broken children of the Post Modern Intellectual Masacres still understand and he is implacable in his defense of basic reality. Yes, he errors by recourse to Jung and that is troubling, except that Jung is the source of many of the morphemes the language he speaks is built on. If each and every person infected with mild to moderate cases of Political Correctness embraced Petersonism or some version of it, and shed their parasites and all mental opposition to basic reality, we would amputate the entire Frankfurt School cancer in a single blow. We would be better than we are now.

I’m sorry, but we fell down a very deep and very black hole, and there *is* a ladder…two actually. The one we used to get to the top the last time doesn’t have any rungs on the bottom, and the one that has rungs on the bottom, doesn’t have any on the top. I’d respectfully suggest we get the hell up the one we can, get into the light so we can see, and then determine if we can either get to the other ladder or move it closer to where we are.

David R. Graham to hornspe:
You argue well for Pelagian soteriology (self-salvation) with Barthian skepticism (the hole you speak of). And you think a massive depression is needed to start a typhoon. Anything else? Some of Tillich’s students produced a volume of lectures by him at U Chicago, titled “A History of Christian Thought.” It remains available.

davidpgoldman to David R. Graham:
I do not know why Hornspe’s coment is awaiting moderation. I agree we would be better than we are now if everyone embraced Peterson. Here is his conclusion (for those who can’t see the comment):

“This, I think, is what you are missing with Peterson. He speaks a language the broken children of the Post Modern Intellectual Masacres still understand and he is implacable in his defense of basic reality. Yes, he errors by recourse to Jung and that is troubling, except that Jung is the source of many of the morphemes the language he speaks is built on. If each and every person infected with mild to moderate cases of Political Correctness embraced Petersonism or some version of it, and shed their parasites and all mental opposition to basic reality, we would amputate the entire Frankfurt School cancer in a single blow. We would be better than we are now.

I’m sorry, but we fell down a very deep and very black hole, and there *is* a ladder…two actually. The one we used to get to the top the last time doesn’t have any rungs on the bottom, and the one that has rungs on the bottom, doesn’t have any on the top. I’d respectfully suggest we get the hell up the one we can, get into the light so we can see, and then determine if we can either get to the other ladder or move it closer to where we are.”

This is well put and I agree with it broadly. But it should be noted that America had numerous periods of backsliding followed by Great Awakenings. The 1830s and 1840s were miserable decades, and then came Lincoln. The 1960s were madness, and then came the evangelical revival, and not long afterwards Reagan. Can we return to our true nature as Americans yet again? I don’t know. In the meantime I don’t object to Dr. Peterson taking on PC. I simply don’t think that it’s enough.

David R. Graham to davidpgoldman:
Thankfully, I could read Hornspe’s comment through yesterday before responding to it. Now I see it in moderation but with a link to open it regardless, and the link works.

Therapy (boot-strapping, Nixon’s hardscrabble) is useful and necessary but not enough to sustain life much less fulfill it. As self-criticism/scrutiny, therapy is mandatory *after* an enlightenment, large or small, to prevent irrational enthusiasm and other improprieties. But before enlightenment, it is not enough, to say the least.

But Hornspe’s mass movement metaphor most triggered my furry eyeball’s epiphany. Power is in righteousness, not in numbers.

We Americans inherit a revivalistic tradition which close-hauls into the winds of history, yielding excitement without substance, vehemence without tenacity. It has its uses, freedom-ensuring not among them, although war-fighting is. Our effective Founders comprised Low Church Anglicans, relaxed Calvinists, and Sephardic Jews.

I submit that freedom they protect with national sovereignty is the true nature of Americans, and that it is a constant of our history, as it is the constant of religion worthy of the name. And I think we are constantly returning to our freedom’s root, especially when we see poison hosed at it by non-Americans.

FWIW, most American revivalism, then and especially now, descends from the left wing (antinomian) of the Reformation, the wing which claimed to have new revelation which surpassed the bible and all governmental systems (shades of mullahs claiming Medina Koran abrogates Mecca Koran … after they wrote Medina Koran). American so-called Christian Evangelicals/Fundamentalists are legalists, like most current American Jews, which is to say left politically, not right politically.

Law is an ass, can be written to make anything sound legal, and is. Of course, what makes something actually legal is the force of arms.

This is an irony of modern discourse: that so-called Christian Conservatives are in fact Leftist/Legalist Totalitarians. A general freedom they number not among their values.

Mark David Hall: How Reformed Theologians’ Commitment To Self-Rule And Resisting Tyranny Helped Form America

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA