What’s Wrong With The World Part XXII—Conclusion—The Mother of Reason

Conclusion—The Mother of Reason

If Reason herself, armed like a goddess with the lightning and Medusa-headed hoplon of the chaste Minerva, cannot smite nor deflect nor defeat the Cthulhian indignity, ugliness, insanity and inanity of the modern rebellion against life, liberty, nature, and reason what, then, is to be done?

If, as every Christian man since the First Century has believed, we live in the Last Days, and that mere months or moments separate us from the Second Coming, the only thing to be done is to carry on through the remaining fragment of time with the cheerful stoicism expected of saints and martyrs.

In such a case, the only thing to do is to await in joyful hope for the Deus ex Machina and then the curtain to be lowered on the stage of the tragic drama called Earthly history, so that we may join in the comical cast party held immediately after, shake hands with the Playwright, and gaze in wide-eyed, childlike wonder that the actors playing Hamlet and Laertes are not only not dead, but are the best of friends.

However, the cheerful stoicism with which Christian actors on the stage of the tragedy of Earthly history are expected to carry out our parts also includes that it is not our part to abandon the Earth to the foetid, chthonic and mephitic gargoyles of modernity: our part indeed is to drive them back into their sewers, holes and caves.

Joyous Christian stoicism requires hope and good cheer that gloomy pagan stoicism does not require. When all worldly evidence conspires to announce that the Age of Reason, so brilliantly begun, has ended with the Age of Unreason is upon us; Reason herself, her torch extinguished, sees no hope. But Christians do not limit their hope to worldly things, no more than the conquered peoples in Vichy France or Quisling Norway put their hopes in the Nazi occupier. There is something beyond Reason that supports her, and gives Reason her authority and power.

In my youth, I thought a return of the exiled philosophers would bring light to the darkened world; but I despaired, because if all lamps of thought and learning are smashed, and the Vestal fires of ancient tradition quenched, whence comes the fire to light to candle again?

The despair that in my youth clouded my wit was born of the simple error of cause and effect.

As I mentioned above, to me it seemed as the world had gone insane at around the Victorian Age, deepening in insanity throughout the Great War, the Russian Revolution, and the modern intellectuals, as if afflicted with a case of St. Vitus’ Dance, seemed busily engaged in tearing away all the limbs and organs of the mind of man, as if eager to blind and lobotomize the world. At the time I regarded this as a revolt against modernity civilization, a rebellion against rationality.

I submit that my youthful prognosis was wrong and was too optimistic. If it were merely human reason that the modern world rejected, reason could cure it, because unreason is self-defeating and self-destructive, and reason enjoys such obvious advantages over unreason both for human felicity and human potency. Unreason is literally weak and powerless: to sweep it away, all that would be needed (so Ayn Rand might suggest) is a general strike by the rational men, the men of the mind, who could stand nonchalantly to one side, perhaps smoking a cigarette marked with a dollar sign, while the men of unreason destroyed themselves, and could emerge against after the shouting and dying was over to restore civilization on a rational basis.

As I said, too optimistic, if not utterly naïve. For I was an atheist in my youth, and during my bachelorhood and early fatherhood, and so I mistook against what it was that the modern world was rebelling. I dismissed Nietzsche because he was irrational, a polylogist,  a mystic, but I did not dismiss him because he was an atheist. I thought, as most atheists think, that faith in God and loyalty to the principle of logic and reasoning were mutually exclusive. St. Thomas Aquinas, had only I believed what I read in him, would have put me right: Logos, the Greek principle of Logic, as well as the Christian Word of God, is one and the same.

The moderns were not rebellion against reason. What philosopher can rebel against reason? They were rebelling against the thing from which Reason sprang. They were rebelling against the fountainhead, not the stream. It was Faith, the mother of Reason, who was the target of their incoherent ire. They were rebelling again God, and they had to rebel against Reason in order to make their Miltonian rebellion work.

Much as it will pain my atheist friends to hear this, the role of reason in the Western world was invented by the Greek, upheld by the Romans, and when those Romans became Christians, Reason was merged, melted and mated to the Christian religion so that one cannot accept Christ without accepting reason, and cannot accept Reason without accepting Christ.

Reason without Christ, if elevated to the sum and final Good of Man, leads to inhuman anger like Marx or inhuman selfishness like Ayn Rand, or inhuman angry selfishness like Dawkins, or inhuman inhumanity like Peter Singer.

These days, the only context in which the pagan sages and their work is viewed is through the restorations, writings and interpretations of the Christian saints. If the two were not linked, the Moderns would embrace Reason and reject Christ: and to be sure there are Deists and Objectivists who do. But their relative obscurity implies the position is a balancing act, difficult to maintain, almost ad hoc. The position of a Deist or an Objectivist, someone who worships the God of the Philosophers or who vows to live life for no other man, this is not a position leading to a sufficiently robust theory of ethics, politics, aesthetics and norms to serve real human beings as sufficient guides to duty and happiness in real life. No one in a sick bed calls for a Deist preacher to fly to his side, so that he might recite the Watchmaker Argument one last time.

The role of reason as an objective and authoritative instrument for determining true from false, certain from uncertain, makes sense and serves practical use in life in the context of Christian metaphysics.

In Christian metaphysics, we believe in an objective and rational creation created by an objective and rational Creator, who both designed Man and granted him the power of reason to deduce the unchanging moral and physical laws of creation; and designed the creation with moral and physical laws vulnerable to the mind and reason of man.

What other metaphysical system supports reason? Confucius is a pragmatic rather than abstract thinker, and speaks dismissively of metaphysics. He comes to the same pragmatic conclusions as a Machiavelli or a Hobbes, and deduces that the best way to rule the commoners is by iron law; Lao Tzu is mystical and will not even speak of the Way, since the Way that is spoken is not the Way; Buddha rejects the world as Maya, illusion, and seeks the answer to the world’s pain in the renunciation of the world, the retreat into the stillness of non-thought; al-Ghazali put paid to Avicenna’s thought or Averroes’ that cause and effect, or the objects of the created world, had their own unchanging and rational nature, but instead proposed a world as arbitrary as the Maya of the Buddhists, except it was the will of the incomprehensible Allah; and the various neopagans who pretend to follow the lore and wisdom on the classical thinkers are merely persons who adopt a Christian worldview but leave out Christ, or add a belief in reincarnation, or want a universe where magic is licit, or sexual deviance, but above all one where they are never criticized, judged, or condemned—the thoughts and writings of Aristotle and Plato, much less Marcus Aurelius or Epictetus, will not be found among the neopagans, but will be found among the Christians.

Modern metaphysics, to the degree that such a ragged collection of junk can be said to have one, speaks fondly of reason, when and only when it is a useful stick to beat the cur of Christianity, but then goes on to say:

(draw a deep breath)

…. the universe is incomprehensible or irrational or lacks cause and effect because science proves the universe exists in a noumenal realm of which we have no knowledge; man is incomprehensible or irrational because he is but a machine or a beast or an evolved creature who is merely occupying a waystation to the next step of evolution, the superman, the Moorlock, whose moral code we have no way to comprehend and no right to judge … Science has disproved free will, and hence neither man nor superman actually has a moral code and sexual perversions are determined by genetic defects, therefore to condemn or judge any person on a moral and ethical ground is immoral and unethical and an abuse of your free will according to the non-laws of the non-universe … Meanwhile, reality is subjective and words have no innate or stable meaning, therefore reality is what the Party says it is, and words mean what the misinterpreter wants them to mean, not what the speaker means them to mean. Women are men and children are men and dogs and cats are men and everyone is a man except for men, who should act more loving soft, and girlish … Except that girls are men, so to use the word girlish to describe a feminine trait is an insult … Except that all cultures are relative, all words mean nothing, so that there is no standard of chivalry decency or courtesy we enlightened must uphold; except that political correctness trumps factual correctness, so that there are very strict and very ruthlessly enforced and utterly arbitrary standards of courtesy that we define according to real or imaginary offenses that victimized hence morally superior victim-groups can define; and we, the enlightened, not members of those groups, get to define what offends them on their behalf, whether they agree or know or not … And your brain is merely a collection of meaningless atoms thrown together by selfish genes, and your feelings of unselfishness are chemical influences distorting your thought, therefore proper moral conduct consists of abiding by altruistic and unselfish impulses, on the grounds that the self genes created them in order to propagate the species; and the first, highest, and only principle of human conduct is to screw as many partners of either sex as frequently and vehemently as possible, using birth control to ensure sterility, killing your children in the womb whenever convenience, angry boyfriends, or whim so dictates, and killing inconvenient old people as soon as they are either brain dead or might be an inconvenience to maintain. Such are the absolute yet relative moral commandments deduced and not deduced from the scientific principle of reproduction of the fittest, to be unselfishly and selfishly followed…

(whew) Need I go on? There is no role for reason in a nonsense world.

With no supernatural and no natural laws there is nothing for reason to reason about: no cause and effect and no free will, no human dignity, neither properties in the philosophical sense nor property in the legal sense, nothing but the endless whining of the endlessly selfish self-indulgent slaves of vice. If the world is meaningless, then everything in the world—life, logic, truth, justice, fairness, freedom, honesty, love, romance, dreams, ambitions, hopes, as well as ideas and ideals and science and the chaste goddess Reason herself—likewise is meaningless.

Now, to be sure, there are in the West still some Aristotelian philosophers who take no notice of Christianity: but in that case their view of the role of reason and their explanation of why it works tends to follow the Aristotelian, that is, the Christian view. Those moderns are not rebellion against reason, but are its advocates (albeit in a strictly limited way, since such will not admit the role of reasoning, say, in theological matters).

If the moderns are abandoning reason, but not in rebellion against reason, what do they rebel against? It may seem as if they are rebelling against life.

Ayn Rand was right that the followers of collectivism and communism are being driven to death, and that only a massive structure of lies could deceive the people into embrace a system that promises wealth and delivers misery. What she mistook was the source: no sane person actually wants to kill himself. The Progressives are not seeking suicide. The evil spirit that leads the Progressives, however, is trying to kill them. The Father of Lies was a murderer from the beginning.

We Christian men, and whatever allies we can find among men of good will in other faiths, or among atheists who adore the foundational concepts of liberty and law on which this nation is based, we are not fighting an alliance of Progressive fascists and Islamic fascists.  We are engaged in spiritual warfare with that same Dark Lord who has deceived the all the unwary sons of Eve, and now deceives all the addicts addicted to falsehood and envy and perversion and corruption. We struggle against principalities and powers of this world. The pagans and agnostic and Christ-bashers and intellectuals and screaming goofballs and sneering know-nothings are not our enemy, no more than a madman is the enemy of the doctor. The disease is the enemy. Darkness is the enemy, not those who are blind in the dark because they have thrown their lamps away.

Philosophy is the rational approach to life, but it is not life itself. Philosophy is the reflection on worldly and divine things, but it is not itself divine. Philosophy is the handmaiden of religion, but cannot (despite the comical attempts of the French Revolution to the contrary) be elevated to the status of religion itself. The attempts to make a philosophical principle the soul and center of life always end either in obscurity, as in Deism or Stoicism, or in horror, as in Communism.

When the American sense of life is found again, and placed on a correct footing, the Western philosophy will return to sanity.

Where is the tree of life? Where is life to be found?

Can anything bring life to a dead culture? When Egypt fell, she never rose again, and no new pyramids were reared, and no new hieroglyphs deciphered. Likewise Babylon, and the Empire of the Hittites. The Medes are no more found. Is there anyone, save for scholars, who speaks their languages or worships their gods? And of the Persians, how many Zoroastrians still light the sacred fires?

Ah, but there in the fires of the Magi we have a hint of light. Zoroastrians still read their ancient texts and worship the Wise Lord. That is the element of the ancient world that survives.

Judging from history, there is one and only one world civilization that fell into destruction and was resurrected without loss of its identity: and that is the Roman Empire, which shattered, suffered attack from Paynim and Norsemen and Nomad, collapsed to barbarism, but revived in the form of a renaissant Christendom, and rose the greatness unsurpassed in the history of the world. The thing that revived Christendom was Christ.

The America has uniquely, several times in history, drawn back from the brink of destruction and returned to her foundational principles. She has shed the blood of tyrants and patriots, or led revivals of Christianity to astound Christendom and to appall the kingdom of Antichrist. Such could easily be in our future: the Progressive have already successfully aborted their children to the point where the demographics favors the followers of the faith of Abraham.

The cure of the world is not a return to philosophy. Philosophy will return once we return to Theology.

Even those who disbelieve, or despise the Church will in times to come realize that they have no palatable options but to support her, unless they want to support the yawning void of nihilism, the mindless love of violence and vice and self-indulgent self-destruction which is rapidly becoming the only other option. The void of nihilism is the gate to Hell.

That void is all that is left once the soul and once the philosophy of a civilization has been lost. It is a void of infinite darkness. Only an infinite Light can fill and vanquish it. And the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it.

1

You said ‘The world is going back to Paganism’.
Oh bright Vision! I saw our dynasty in the bar of the House
Spill from their tumblers a libation to the Erinyes,
And Leavis with Lord Russell wreathed in flowers, heralded with flutes,
Leading white bulls to the cathedral of the solemn Muses
To pay where due the glory of their latest theorem.
Hestia’s fire in every flat, rekindled, burned before
The Lardergods. Unmarried daughters with obedient hands
Tended it By the hearth the white-armd venerable mother
Domum servabat, lanam faciebat. at the hour
Of sacrifice their brothers came, silent, corrected, grave
Before their elders; on their downy cheeks easily the blush
Arose (it is the mark of freemen’s children) as they trooped,
Gleaming with oil, demurely home from the palaestra or the dance.
Walk carefully, do not wake the envy of the happy gods,
Shun Hubris. The middle of the road, the middle sort of men,
Are best. Aidos surpasses gold. Reverence for the aged
Is wholesome as seasonable rain, and for a man to die
Defending the city in battle is a harmonious thing.
Thus with magistral hand the Puritan Sophrosune
Cooled and schooled and tempered our uneasy motions;
Heathendom came again, the circumspection and the holy fears …
You said it. Did you mean it? Oh inordinate liar, stop.

2

Or did you mean another kind of heathenry?
Think, then, that under heaven-roof the little disc of the earth,
Fortified Midgard, lies encircled by the ravening Worm.
Over its icy bastions faces of giant and troll
Look in, ready to invade it. The Wolf, admittedly, is bound;
But the bond wil1 break, the Beast run free. The weary gods,
Scarred with old wounds the one-eyed Odin, Tyr who has lost a hand,
Will limp to their stations for the Last defence. Make it your hope
To be counted worthy on that day to stand beside them;
For the end of man is to partake of their defeat and die
His second, final death in good company. The stupid, strong
Unteachable monsters are certain to be victorious at last,
And every man of decent blood is on the losing side.
Take as your model the tall women with yellow hair in plaits
Who walked back into burning houses to die with men,
Or him who as the death spear entered into his vitals
Made critical comments on its workmanship and aim.
Are these the Pagans you spoke of? Know your betters and crouch, dogs;
You that have Vichy water in your veins and worship the event
Your goddess History (whom your fathers called the strumpet Fortune).

About John C Wright

John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.

May 7, 2012 @ 4:11 pm

Musings, Reasonings