Spies and Scientists in the Unseen World
I received a charming but disturbing compliment to one of my columns on Wokeness being a materialist restatement of Gnosticism. She writes:
I absolutely LOVED your article. Me, swimming somewhere between theosophist mystic and evangelical Christian and alchemical magician and ascetic world hating environmental evolutionist, I have to say, you brought this to absolute clarity! But I am not a gnostic! I know the whole schematic and I detest it. But it drives a molehole throughout our entire existence yes.
I believe in a God that is Good although he may be unreachable and a Savior that gives us a chance to redeem ourselves by following in HER footsteps. I believe in that bridge back to Paradise and it starts with me.
My comment: I am as pleased with flattery as any man of below-average dignity, so I am glad she liked my column. I rejoice to hear that she detests Gnosticism, which I regard as a satanic parody of all that is good.
However, the waggish and casual blasphemy with which she ends her note prompts me to issue a warning, which I think may be of use to my beloved readers, or to any who have ears to hear.
The unseen world is unseen.
That does not mean we have license to invent any fables as tickle our fancy about it. The unseen may be listening.
What little we know of it comes from visions and dreams and intuitions we have gathered on our own, or from revelations, accompanied by signs and wonders, from sources in the unseen world, or spokesmen allegedly representing those sources. It is a twilight world, one glimpsed in a darkling looking-glass.
What, then, are we to make of the unseen?
In particular, what are we to make of visions or visionaries that are rare, unusual, or even contrary to what generations have held true about the unseen world?
I have friends and family who, like our follower of a female Christ above, adopt nonstandard beliefs when it comes to the unseen world.
One tells me the gods are instantiations of a general psychic energy which springs from the universe and can be shaped by human rite and ritual to suit ourselves; another, who frequently has visions and speaks to ghosts, reports that there are no bad spirits, no fallen angels, no imps nor angry ghosts among the inhabitants beyond the veil.
Others say Christ and Satan are brothers like Abel and Cain, or that Christ was a prophet like Moses, not divine, or that matter is the source of all evil, never created by God, hence an illusion of the senses, and that neither sin nor evil exists.
So, for me, the matter touches very close to home. Nor am I a man who would have been convinced in earlier days of the validity of the traditional approach to address these questions. My ideology of strict atheism required I dismiss all such issues out of hand, unexamined.
Nonetheless, I am now convinced that any other path outside traditional wisdom, and the confirmation of the witness of history, is fraught with danger, so it behooves me to warn others as yet unaware.
Allow me to propose that, while it is not necessarily the case that a well-known and widely-believed proposition is a true proposition, it is also wiser to believe what two witnesses confirm.
What is well-known and widely-believed is not certain to be so, but nonetheless it is prudent not to disbelieve without sufficient reason for entertaining disbelief.
If you or I adopt some centuries-old and traditionally mainstream belief about the unseen world that is false, we at least know any error we make is shared by many.
Consider:
If the unseen world is like the natural world, a neutral realm from which evidence can be gathered, then we are like scientists attempting to study a far island beyond Australia from which few travelers return, or the far side of the moon, beyond reach of ground-based telescopes. Nature does not lie, but she does not volunteer information either.
If the supernatural world is like a foreign realm, a realm at war, some provinces of which are held in enemy hands, then we are like spies peering at the promised land, perhaps hearing reports of fruitful fields flowing with milk and honey, perhaps hearing of walled cities crewed by giants and mighty men impossible to overcome. Unlike Nature, enemies mean to deceive.
So suppose we hear a report that Christ is a girl, or some other oddity of the unseen world never heard before.
Should we use a standard less rigorous than scientists or spies?
A scientist hearing of the furry but egg-laying platypus from Australia meets something as far beyond his experience as the Abominable Snow Man. He would be wise to wait for confirmation.
Likewise, a spy in a realm hostile to him runs the risk of being fooled by counterspies, falling pray to deliberate disinformation. The enemy would be delighted to mislead the unwary, to create division and confusion.
Spies would be wise to be more wary than scientists, for the platypus and yeti are not actively attempting to ensnare the naturalist with falsehoods. A monotreme is not using his utmost cunning to convince biologists to misname mammal or marsupial.
In the case of reports of the Unseen World, abundant warning exists, from the lips of Christ Himself, to eschew false Christs, or false reports claiming Christ is here or there. We have been told the Devil disguises himself as an angel of light. We need not be told that card-sharps and mountebanks pretend to have spirit medium powers to gull the gullible.
We have been told foes will attempt to fool us, so we are fools to ignore the warning.
In this case, I suggest we give deference to the reports preserved by institutional tradition as confirmatory witnesses. These, in tern, can be buttressed, if need be, by any number of reports easy enough to find of ghost sightings, faith healings, near-death-experiences.
With this in mind, being as prudent as possible, what is wise for a skeptic to believe about the unseen world, that is, the world he cannot see?
That there is such a world is not open to openminded doubt.
Ghosts sightings, visitations of spirits, signs of wonder, the healing of the sick and the raising of the dead are things encountered commonly enough in current days and in history that only someone ideologically committed to rejecting all such reports rejects them. Eyewitnesses supported by every indicia of honest testimony, sane men with no reason to lie, have seen or done such things as cannot be explained by skeptics.
Beyond its mere existence, we need not doubt that the unseen world contains justice.
All major religions of which we have record speak of a judgment after death, where the justice not found on earth is measured out: the Egyptians of old spoke of one’s heart being measured against a feather; the Greek spoke of heroes rejoicing in Elysian Fields, while Tantalus, Ixion, and Sisyphus were tormented for their proud offenses against the gods; the Norse spoke of Valhalla for the brave and Hela’s realm for kinslayers and adulterers; in the East, Karma measures out rewards and punishments with ironclad justice from one life to the next; and the Buddha promises escape into the paradise of nonbeing called Nirvana. And so on. Even New Age mystics rehashing and rebranding ancient heresies and speculations speak of such supernatural reward and punishment in worlds beyond this, or of evolution to higher beings, and unity with godhead.
The question then becomes whether there is one god or many, transcendent or immanent, and whether benevolent or indifferent.
Even polytheists usually identify one god as an elder, leader or king, and nearly all old myths and reports of the unseen world adumbrate a primal creator or source of which the many gods are children or servants, perhaps created beings themselves. On a psychological level, the belief in a dozen coequal prime rulers of the universe and of the moral order of the universe, is impossible.
Theology, which is the rational study of the unseen world, is impossible when each report of any wandering spirit, local hero-king, or ancestral shrine is taken as one and the same as the lawmaker of the moral order of the universe: this indeed is why the poet’s inventions of the doings of classical gods are collections of scandal and absurdity.
In a debate between a philosophical saint and pagan sage of Rome, the saint called down a blessing: “May your son show the filial piety that Jove showed Saturn; may your daughter be as chaste as Venus.”
This of course was an absurd thing to offer as a blessing, as Jove was a parricide, and Venus an adultness. When the pagan objected, the saint mildly replied, “Why, they are your gods, not mine.”
If there are polytheistic gods who each of them embody all virtues and moral principles, and who are subject to no reports of kinslayings, beheadings, adulteries, oath-breaking, seductions, or acts of cannibalism, the tales of Osiris, Ganesha, Odin, Krishna, Ishtar, and Chronos are not among them.
Whatever the merits of polytheism, this cannot be the true view of the unseen world, or else the ideal that justice is found in the next life is delusion. A moral order to the cosmos requires a single governing cause or first principle. These other beings are either created creatures like man, capable of good and evil, or else are fables invented by man.
Again, and for the same reason, the idea that God is transcendentally indifferent, as certain Eastern sages or Stoic philosophers have speculated, unwilling or unable to answer human prayers, negates the ideal of justice in the afterlife. A God who is an neutral and ever-present non-entity, a mere “Force” or “Life-Force” as certain Gnostics or New Age thinkers propose, or who is as indifferent to human suffering as the Brahma of the Hindu, or the gods of Lucretius, suffers the same absurdity.
If God is equally in the mouse fleeing the snake and in the snake chasing the mouse, equally in life and death, equally in pain and pleasure, foulness and fairness, equally in the degraded and in the sublime, then he is not god, for such a being is not anything.
Likewise, if justice is a mechanical act of Karma, repaying past sins in former lives with present evils, or explaining current blessings to be merely the wages earned by past acts of merit, there fact that the cycle continues forevermore makes the justice of the afterlife indistinguishable from the Hell of Dante: a place where those trapped within must abandon all hope.
If the wheel of life is eternal, all suffering and bliss, past, present, and future, is as meaningless as a wallpaper pattern.
Likewise for the sublime promises of the Buddha to escape from the wheel of eternal suffering, for then the extinction of the self, the self-will, the self-awareness, is the goal. Nirvana is the extinction of pain by the extinction of self. It is suicide writ large: it is a tale of cosmic despair, not hope.
It defeats the promise of bliss and justice in the next life, which is a nothingness, in the same inhuman way the promise of endless repetitions of endless lives of suffering defeats that promise.
Besides, we have credible reports of resurrections from the dead both in the ancient and the modern world, whereas report of memories from past lives are spotty at best, and open to other interpretations.
A similar and parallel argument to the justice of the next world for the sublime bliss beauty of the creator and his works can be made. The beauty sought but rarely found in this life, shows that the source and summit of all things fair is in the next life, the promised paradise dimly seen by poets, visionaries, prophets, and, oddly enough, near-death experience survivors.
That the Elysian Fields and other pagan dreams of paradise are portrayed as exemplary in aesthetic appeal, a source of bliss, can be used as confirmation that the creator of the beauties of nature is himself the creator and source of the beauties of supernature. Beauty, like justice, is real, and not merely a human invention, or human opinion.
If the unseen world therefore is real, and is governed by a single creator and authority, and upholds standards of goodness, truth, and beauty, the benevolence of this creator follows logically, from the mere fact that we would be unaware of, and suffer no craving for, truth, beauty, and goodness in human existence.
A race suited for mortal life in a material universe would and could have no concept of anything higher or better: like a race of unfeeling robots, we might regard death, pain and suffering as inefficient or inconvenient, but neither would ugliness offend our sense of aesthetics, nor would injustice offend our sense of fairplay.
Mortal men, on the other hand, are not suited to life in a merely material universe, nor could a merely material universe, operating on merely material regularities of molecular behavior, have produced entities unsuited for itself.
If Darwinian evolution had produced mankind, it would have wiped out awareness of the unseen world for the same reason it would wipe out a tribe of blind men whose eyes told them distant threats were near or nearby threats were far off.
The idea that a persistent falsehood afflicting all men is universally useful for their survival and propagation is absurd, for it implies reality is faced best by those who cannot face reality.
If we honestly thought honesty was deadly to the generation of the species, generations of the species would not honestly think so.
So, then, merely by an examination of what the preponderance of evidence, reports both credible and not, have told of the unseen world requires certain definitive conclusions it would be folly to doubt without good reason: first, that the unseen world is real; second, that it holds both the afterlife and the Creator; third, that it holds the judgment not found on earth; four, that it holds the realm of bliss and beauty not found on earth.
But our inquiry need not stop here. In addition to witnesses, and the words of prophets and poets of old, we can call Reason herself to the witness stand.
Philosophy, by pondering proofs that the nature, including man, cannot be eternal, nor uncreated, nor unruled, nor meaningless, nor unbeautiful, nor illogical, demonstrates sufficiently that there must be some first principle or first cause, a point or purpose or final cause giving rise to existence, to life, to human life, which must be supernatural. Nature cannot arise from itself, and nothing comes from nothing, ergo nature must arise from supernature.
Despite what you may have heard, order cannot organize itself spontaneously, it can only manifest innate order previously hidden, as a building is hidden in a blueprint, or an oak in an acorn.
To say that order arises from chaos spontaneously, where the chaos contains implicit order, is merely word-game, for it does not explain whence the implicit order came to be ordered.
It is the same word-game played by modern physicists who venture into philosophical speculations by saying the Big Bang created spacetime without cause from nothing, whereas by “nothing” is meant a primal condition charged with immeasurable energy potential equal to the total mass-energy of the observable universe. In other words, by “nothing” is meant “everything.” This is merely Orwellian jabberwocky muttered by learned men venturing outside their field of learning.
To create a universe demonstrating order and beauty, and further demonstrating the reality of duties of a moral nature, requires a Creator that is uncreated, hence eternal, authoritative, meaningful, beautiful, and rational.
This Creator, having set all in order and all in motion, must moreover be omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent in the same sense in which we speak of a playwright having the power and wisdom to write his play, and his presence being inset in every word of dialog and trifle of stage direction.
In a word, philosophy says the universe must have a LOGOS, which is a Greek term encompassing the several meanings of word, thought, principle, reason, proportion, account.
The alternative is to make the statement that the cosmos and everything in it is meaningless. Meaningless here means the cosmos and everything in it is uncaused, irrational, unaccounted-for, incomprehensible.
But the statement “the cosmos and everything in it is is meaningless” is itself one of the things in the cosmos, and, by its own testimony, is meaningless.
So if the world is ruled by a Logos, a rational and transcendental benevolence, reason suggests benevolence would not allow human suffering to prosper without hope of ease and salvation from pain and death.
We should expect not only visionaries to see glimpses of the unseen world, but for visitations of the unseen world to make themselves seen.
If there is anything on the next world that the next world requires and desires moral man to know, the next world cannot lack the power to make itself known.
Here we are not merely scientists studying nature or spies studying the enemy, but hosts welcoming messengers from afar, students hearing a master, sons hearing a father.
This is what we call revelation: the world we cannot see, the world we cannot reach, can reach and see us. The question is when has it done so?
Once the witness of tradition, and philosophy, has spoken we then can call the witness of history to the stand.
The final question is whether history contains such a report of the revelation of the unseen. Those in the West know that history does, and, since the word was spread worldwide, few indeed are those who have heard no hint of this gospel of remarkable good news. Indeed, we date our calendar from the crux of the event.
There is as much evidence that Christ was executed by Pontius Pilate as the Caesar was assassinated by Brutus, and, likewise, that the risen Christ was touched by Doubting Thomas as that Brutus saw great Caesar’s ghost before the Battle of Philippi. Both events are reported as history in the only sources we have.
Ah, but there are and always have been contrary reports.
Suppose you meet a prophet claiming the Messiah is a madonna, or Satan a saint, or that all men are gods.
To be fair, this is not any more extraordinary than the claim that the Messiah is in bread and wine, or Saul of Tarsus a saint, or that Christ both fully man and fully god.
To be fair, the unseen world is by definition odd, unusual, extraordinary, visited only by madmen, psychics, prophets. If you or I adopt some odd and usual belief about the unseen world, the mere fact that it is odd does not necessarily mean it should be dismissed.
But what does even a cursory examination of the contrary claims reveal?
One need not venture far into the Internet to reach the Country of the Blind, which such odd and oddly self-refuting ideas flourish like bloated and brightly-colored mushrooms in gloom.
One says that there are many gods, all of whom are real, except only Christ is not real. Another says there a no evil gods, no devils, no false messiahs, no false Christs, except only Christ is not real, because He claims to be the only one — and we cannot have that.
Amid all these jarring claims, and heresies reaching back through history, if one has visions and dreams, or speaks to ghosts and spirits, how is one to know whom to trust? Why is the Torah of Moses to be preferred to the Koran of Mohammed or the Golden Tablets found by Joseph Smith?
Why accept the miracles of the Apostles as proof of their divine mandate? Do not the followers of Mary Baker Eddy also heal the sick? Did not Apollonius of Tyana raise from the dead the daughter of a senator?
For that matter, why should the young lady whose comment I quote above not hold to her unique blend of theosophy, evangelical Christianity, alchemy, asceticism, and environmentalism? Why should she not think a bridge back to paradise starts with her, and that the savior is female? We hear from the popular culture that the Force is Female, after all.
But, to be blunt, the justifications for entertaining doubt to me seem doubtful, particularly if we adopt the prudence of doubting only that where we have an honest reason for doubt.
Which ancient and orthodox claim is open to honest doubt, if any?
The idea that Christ was not divine is a commonplace and recurring heresy, which no doubt will dog the faithful until the end of time.
Likewise, the idea that there are many Christs, or that any believer of any sect may select his own path to finding Christ, or, more absurdly, may become a Christ himself, is recurring in history, and has a particular appeal to the modern mind.
Here, we can call again the testimony of witnesses, of reason, and of history. If we find indicia of unreliability, we can rationally discount the testimony from a source fraught with doubt. If a witness as a reputation for untruthfulness in his community, or among his peers, that is cogent evidence that his testimony can be dismissed.
This is particular true in the case of heresiarchs, who perhaps are the least inventive of all mankind. It is difficult to name a heresy that is completely original: they are contain some variation of the lie first told to the Women by the serpent of Eden, that Man is God and God is not.
Likewise, when an opinion particular appeals to the pride and self-regard of our particular generation, or confirms some evil work all are eager to confirm, suspicions should be piqued.
There are myriad minor heresies and absurdities at work these days, but they fall into two basic camps, at least in the West: Modernism, which includes all the variations of Wokeness, Neomarxism, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, Feminism, and so on, and Mohammedanism.
Modernism can be dismissed by the testimony of Reason; Mohammedanism by the testimony of History.
The Modernist is obsessed with eagerness for novelties in art and entertainment, hence entertains a bias favoring whatever is new as if this means it is improved and evolved. Even the word evolution itself implies the later superior to the earlier. But this is a bias no more logical than the opposite, which is to prefer the old merely due to its age.
In truth, some old ideas, institutions, and ways of life are worthy of respect because they have withstood the test of time, and been proven useful and beautiful across repeated generations. At the same time, some old ideas, institutions, and ways of life are contemptable, having degenerated into comfortable corruption, accumulating misuses and hidden evils like hulls collecting barnacles, hence are overdue for a good scrubbing.
The modern mind is obsessed with the ideal of egalitarianism, that all men, hence all cultures and all ways of life, and hence all ideals are equal. All ideals are equal, none better than the other, none of any real meaning. It does not matter what you believe, just so long as you believe sincerely.
The egalitarian ideal is the current default assumption of our popular culture. No one is to pass judgment on another; the only sin is to call sin sinful.
Everyone is born without original sin, men are malleable, human nature is whatever you yourself say it is. Everyone concocts his own meaning for himself; no meaning has meaning. The stance is called nihilism.
Nihilism is indistinguishable from Gnosticism for all practical purposes. To say “reality is whatever you hold it to be” is but one short step from saying “you are the creator of reality.” Gnosticism preaches that you are a god mired in self-delusion who need merely wake to be enlightened.
This is the same as saying life is meaningless. As above, if such a statement is true, the statement itself testifies to its own lack of meaning, hence is false.
As for the other major challenge to orthodoxy, I submit that, to be persuasive, the Mohammedan must answer why his prophet disagrees with all other prophets of God, and conducts himself in a fashion contrary to the laws of God.
Has this prophet produced any miracles, cured the sick, or raised the dead?
Or has he does exactly what all false prophets do, justifying enormities in the name of God, drawing the sword, abusing women, spreading falsehoods about the faith? To be blunt, Mary Baker Eddy has a better record of healing the sick and working signs and wonders than Mohammed.
I submit we have no honest reason for doubting orthodox teaching when the challenge to it is yet another incarnation of a heresy long ago debated, discussed, and dismissed by centuries of wiser minds than mine or yours. Wokeness is a rehash of Marxism which is a rehash of Gnosticism and Hermeticism. The claim that Christ was not divine was sufficiently investigated and refuted during the Arian Controversy, centuries ago.
Mohammedanism is a refinement of the Arian Heresy, demoting Christ not merely to inferiority, but to the status of a prophet and false prophet. The various satanic absurdities of promising a paradise of endless virgins powered by an endless Priapic orgy in return for a martyrdom where murderers slay the innocent rather than be slain need no detailed examination.
And as for Christ being a girl, I’ve met him. He is a he.
He is also not a man to be trifled with.
God judges no man. Christ does.
That is my word of warning. Do not speak lightly of one who will sit in judgment over you on the World’s Last Day. Do not mock your judge.
I am not the only man who heard Him says so. I am not even the only man named John who heard Him say so.
If I may quote.
For the Father judgeth no man, but hath committed all judgment unto the Son: that all men should honour the Son, even as they honour the Father. He that honoureth not the Son honoureth not the Father which hath sent him.
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.
