Posted on June 13, 2014 by jonathanjones02

One knows God in knowing finite things through openness to and dependence upon the Logos within all things, and also on account of the indissoluble, nuptial unity of consciousness and being. Everything that exists receives existence from God and subsists mysteriously in God. God is Being itself, not a category of being. There is metaphysical bond between God and Nature. Earthly objects receive reality from God’s own Being; they do not possess their own being. A created order is not independent of God, who is Being and Logos. Yet nominalism denies there is an intrinsic essence in anything, instead assuming that matter has meaning through acts of motion or will. This is distinct from the view that a being is part of God’s nature, because He is united in creation. To remove God further is to place man’s relationship to Nature as one of want and will instead of discovery bound by natural laws. There is then no teleology to life. In reality, the self is not willed but created with purpose. The self should seek communion – or theosis – with its originator – Logos – by an understanding of the telos of life.
The telos of life is theosis with the Logos through ascesis.
The Logos, the Unmanifest, the Being-Intellect, the Absolute, is the source of all, including matter-nature. There is no base division between the natural and the supernatural, as nature is theophany and its fulfillment a revealed Being self-sacrificed in becoming. The point of human life is to use reason to control appetites for the sake of the good, which is Logos.
Substantive moral principles conduce to the common good, principles that officials should read into the majestic generalities and ambiguities of laws. These principles include respect for the authority of rule and of rulers; respect for the hierarchies needed for society to function; solidarity within and among families, social groups, and workers’ unions, trade associations, and professions; appropriate subsidiarity, or respect for the legitimate roles of public bodies and associations at all levels of government and society; and a candid willingness to “legislate morality” — indeed, a recognition that all legislation is necessarily founded on some substantive conception of morality, and that the promotion of morality is a core and legitimate function of authority. Such principles promote the common good and make for a just and well-ordered society.
Truth has an absolute and necessary quality deriving from the unconditional character of existence itself.
Resentment is a contemptible form of egoism.
Original sin should not be viewed as political error.
Culture, more than politics and economic structure, determine the success of society. Politics, who and whom gets what when, shapes but does not originate culture. Politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes, downstream from culture.
A healthy body politic is a healthy culture, which will not highly value the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate. The main justification of the existence of a nation is its culture.
Any self-identity based on negation is ultimately parasitic on the image of the enemy it opposes.
Disputes over law, liberty, and justice should be addressed to a historic and existing community. The root of decent politics is attachment, the motive in humans that binds to place, customs, history, and people who are theirs.
Reality is that which, when one stops believing in it, doesn’t go away.
Obligations precede rights; rights are situational and relative while obligations are metaphysical and absolute. An obligation arises from encountering another.
Humans cannot bear very much reality.
Human power is by definition hypocritical.
Amongst decent civilizations, patricide is suicide.
Identity should be localized. Abstracted, large identity is a revolt against nature, an unnatural adherence and focus on opinions, ideas, and events far away outside of one’s true environmental existence.
The central aim of a constitutional order should be to promote good rule, not to “protect liberty” as an end in itself.
Clarity is more important than agreement.
Absent absolutes of right and wrong, anything can be rationalized. Absent divine origin for those absolutes, they cannot be absolutes.
The only way to avoid metaphysics is silence.
Law is superior to lawmaking because the source of law is a Divine Spirit.
Few rhetorical strategies are more dangerous to truth than weaponized ambiguity.
Humans cannot live well without some form of sacred authority, because choas fills the void of a transcendent order to which they should conform desire.
Sexual intimacy is consecration or desecration, with no neutral territory; little matters more than the customs, ceremonies, and rites with which humans lift the body above its material and toward the soul.
Humans are rational creatures and morality is practical reason.
Truth is the conformity of intellect to reality, not the conformity of intellect to life. This is because Truth and Reality are a Divine Spirit, Christ.
Revolutions are not conducted from below by the people, but from above, in the name of the people, by an aspiring elite.
Science cannot identify intrinsic value; it can only be the handmaiden of the religious.
The child of sin is death; what begins with desire ends with death.
The way of revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised as creeds.
Humans are political by nature. It is not the case they must never use power, lament its use, or severely limit it as if power were some impurity. The question is whether the use of power orders to virtue or vice.
Whenever a state accepts the validity of usurious contracts, citizens are saddled with unrepayable debt. The state allows the usurers to loot labor to pay for the usury burden. Capitalism posits the primacy of usury over human labor as the source of wealth and therefore as the most basic principle of the economy. Capitalism is usury at the expense of labor. To conform to the Good, economics must subordinate itself to the moral law.
Capitalism is state-sponsored usury; economics should be a branch of moral philosophy; labor is the fundamental unit of value; oligarchs highly value the bread and circus of “sexual liberation” as a form of political control, and as a means of wage stagnation.
Superiority excites envy.
Humans inherently need a transcendent purpose, which only God can fully provide.
When a large group of fanatics share a cultural norm of crushing dissent, they self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting ideas they don’t like.
Virtuous activity makes life happy not by guaranteeing happiness, but as the goal for the sake of which lesser goods are pursued.
Bad is the dominion of the multitude.
Totalitarian ideologies develop as rationalized resentment around a common cause, envy and spite.
The truth is treason to evil.
Everything good, beautiful, and true is an indication of God.
Humans invariably form cohesive groups which invariably exploit one another, and with the state invariably functioning as an instrument to do so.
Ideas should be considered contestable, not heretical.
Natural law is too general in itself and needs human positive law and custom to give it definite form. Without social contexts, there is no connection to natural law commands, such as to honor the dead. Natural law needs law and custom to be actionable; custom needs natural law to be intelligible.
Myth is the province of religion and not fiction as it does not deal in imaginary worlds. Myth is received as a narrative of the world, but on a higher plane in which individual characters are dissolved into archetypes and accidents subsumed by fate.
The final objective of the law is to make men morally better.
Symbol, etymologically, ‘brings together’ things that otherwise would remain separate, by providing a new form of expression that unifies disparate realities without being reducible to any one of those realities. It is a sign as much as an idea, a promise, an inexhaustible conceptual and linguistic ellipsis that sustains hope and faith by its very irreducibility, its persistent impenetrability, its invitation to be understood.
Laws inherently impose a moral vision and order on society.
The job of the adjective is to change the noun.
A theory’s validity derives from its predictive power.
The size, complexity, atomization, liberalization, and elitism of mass society is a machinery of misery.
Artistic genius does not absolve sins, nor do sins negate artistic genius.
Society as a compact based primarily on transactional and contractual relations, without the guiding presence of the clergy and nobility, struggles to nourish the sentiments and attachments necessary to dignify a people.
Cultural cohesion and unified nationhood comes in large part from a subset of population genetics that is cultural continuity and genetic similarity.
Sin is the alluring agent of chaos.
No institution can be neutral and any institutional authority aiming only for neutrality will be captured by the faction more committed to imposing ideology.
To change the meaning of a symbol is to change the meaning of reality for those that look to that symbol to structure reality. To communicate and structure inner feeling requires a symbolic order.
Economic and social systems with uncorrelated status paths toward high status are less fragile. The more severe the imposition of a single hierarchy, the more likely people are to engage in conflict.
It is the duty of the critic to annoy the untalented.
Politics is a contest of interests constrained by moral principles but rarely in their service.
Information is cheap while meaning is expensive.
In politics, power helps to control discourse and controlling discourse helps to possess power.
He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how.
As a phallic cult rises, so also does impotence.
A strong and healthy family is the first and basic unit of society and of the state. The strongest and most well-organized state will come to a condition of decline and disintegration if its family unit falls apart and there are no bases of family life and upbringing.
Humans are transformed not from external reasons but from moral changes.
A paper is only as meaningful as the men who create and enforce it.
Most true and lasting sociopolitical change happens through networks of elites and their institutions working with a common purpose.
The soul has needs that cannot be denied, but only deformed and distorted.
There is no democratic path for the mystical imperium of Logos.
Cultural revolution and zeitgeist change happens when elites and elite networks come to agreement on conceptual frameworks, and make acceptance the cost of admission into sociability.
Best for a nation is to be bound by bonds of history and memory, tradition and custom, language and literature, birth and faith, blood and soil.
For those who hate the truth, the truth looks like hate.
The aesthetics of modernism, with its denial of the past, its vandalization of the landscape and townscape, and its attempt to purge the world of history, was also a denial of community, home, and settlement.
Populations separated for an evolutionary significant amount of time evolve different distributions of traits.
The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.
The malice of men can fetch poison from Hell.
Totalitarianism can come from disintegration, even before a totalitarianism of domination. It can dominate by disintegrating. Totalitarianism is a condition in which politics invades all of life.
In a multicultural democracy, citizens vote less for ideas and candidates than for who they themselves are.
Uprootedness uproots everything, except the need for roots.
Hope is memory plus desire.
It is better that scandals arise than that the truth be suppressed.
Successful peasant revolts are rare; successful elite revolts are common.
Politics should be an expression of a fabric of social life organized around families, churches, ethnic groups, trade associations, and other means of belonging. Man’s metaphysical element, oriented to the good, should inform a healthy polis.
A society without shared premises does not exist.
The river of time in its current bears away all the affairs of men, and drowns nations, kingdoms, and kings in the abyss of oblivion. And if, through the sounds of the lyre and the trumpet, anything remains, it shall be devoured in the jaws of eternity and not escape the common fate.
The power of words over reality cannot be unlimited since reality imposes its own unalterable conditions.
Symbols are real. They belong to the mind, which is of a higher level of being than matter.
Human perception of sacred order gives form to social order. Acts of interpreting the sacred within the profane is formation of culture.
Crime, once exposed, has no refuge but in audacity.
By a “condensed symbol” do certain practices and ideas become shorthand for a whole worldview or fearful understanding.
In a scientistic-technocratic culture without binding religious ideals, political discourse becomes a discourse of selective moral scandal.
Civil religion is the appropriation of religion by politics for its purposes.
Politics, who and whom gets what when, is the method by which power is organized and distributed.
There is no social progress outside the moral order.
It is better to be a citizen than a consumer.
The hallmark of a sane society is reconciliation of the present and the future to the past.
Dogmas properly divide good citizens, while a love of generalities unite them.
Ideological language is a seemingly magical instrument of forcing reality to conform to a particular vision of the world.
The modern world demands approval of what it should not dare ask to tolerate.
The cultured man has the obligation to be intolerant.
A people either dominates or yields to domination.
Women can both rock the cradle and dig the grave of civilization.
The who and whom question of politics is powerful because humans are inherently tribal. They are rational insofar as they rationalize their decisions and will. Politically, human will should not become law without strict regard to human limitations and a transcendent moral order.
Labor is the source of all economic value.
Only those who have a properly-ordered view of the end of life can obtain any semblance of fulfillment.
In war, the law is mute.
The incarnation is the ultimate expression of what it means to be human, now and in the age to come. The human being, therefore, is at once an ensouled body, and a bodily soul. One’s personal identity and wholeness is bound up with this interconnection. The body is the visible, objective expression of the life of the soul. What happens to the body happens also to the soul, and what happens to the soul happens also to the body.
Sexuality is an inextricable part of the cosmic order and therefore of the social order.
Worship and communion must be physical to carry transformative power. Life must be anchored in the physical, especially religious faith. When the virtual becomes too large it produces emptiness; it infects with emptiness.
Worship and communion must be physical to carry transformative power. Life must be anchored in the physical, especially religious faith. When the virtual becomes too large it produces emptiness; it infects with emptiness.
Signs refer to an external, pre-linguistic world, not a construct of human experience. Representation is not performative but referential. Humans cannot deconstruct and reconstruct self and society at will.
Authentic human freedom is the freedom of just reciprocal relations.
A human society worthy of the adjective “human” must articulate a metaphysical system to make sense of reality, to offer consolation, and to present a sense of meaning so as to face vicissitude.
Art is communion between inspiration and the soul of the observer.
Modernity banishes spiritual enchantment, a unifying vision of the whole of life and death. To reject the sacred, which means also to reject sin, imperfection, and evil, is to reject the reality of human limits. To be “free” from religious heritage or historical tradition is to situate oneself in a void and thus to disintegrate. The absence of a transcendent dimension in secular society weakens the social contract in which each limits freedom in order to live in peace with others.
To be “liberated” from anything that restrains the “autonomous” will or desire is to be a slave to the passions.
There is no such thing as a lost cause because there is no such thing as a gained cause.
As varied as revolutionary forms are, a common feature is correlation between the elevation of politics to religion and the negation of the supernatural.
The subtlest foe of humanity is the tyranny that wears the mask of humanitarianism and benevolence.
Wisdom is that which is true.
At the foundation of strong wit is truth.
Women should inspire, not aspire.
In every action, humans reveal what they value.
Good art is inherently anti-egalitarian.
Public opinion is an effect, not a cause.
Those who can influence one to believe absurdities can influence one to commit atrocities.
Social isolation and societal secularization will lead to a personal loss of spiritual meaning.
Dormant and misdirected religious impulses can do grave damage to a social order.
The study of politics is not principally the study of ideas but the study of power: how power is acquired, lost, used, and concealed, and who or whom gets what when. The primary political question is which elites will rule, not whether elites will rule. Elites tend to rule through myths, stories, and ideals that justify their dominion by endowing it with moral credibility. Seizing and holding institutional power – the legitimization of managerial control – is served by ideas and civil debate, but are not its source.
In political affairs, stability itself tends to be de-stabilizing.
A primary political error is unbounded moralistic optimism.
Tribalism is a long-standing, global phenomenon.
There is a moral hazard to externalizing risk
Revolutions have little to do with the masses. They are made and led and defended by elites, and the people follow who wins.
Tradition is a socially embodied argument.
Scapegoating and ritual sacrifice is an essential aspect of group identity and solidarity. Sacrifice and scapegoats organizes in a polity as a response to a sense of crisis.
When truths become unspeakable, they eventually become inconceivable.
A culture’s greatest achievements come in pursuit of ideas that transcend human differences.
The nature of man is intricate; the objects of society are of the greatest possible complexity: and therefore no simple disposition or direction of power can be suitable either to man’s nature, or to the quality of his affairs.
Humans need shared loves and a coherent narrative – a shared vision of the good – regarding human identity and common life to flourish.
Religion is essential to the functioning of a society, and the etymology of the word is “to bind.” This is why conquering tribes throughout history have taken the faith of the natives they ruled – or made sure the defeated converted to their way of thinking.
It is impossible to create a system so perfect that man does not have to be good.
Human freedom is in the space between the will to happiness and the will to justice, both of which are given to lead to Logos.
The law of nature is certain and imprinted by Logos. The principles of knowing and acting, and of the proved conclusions, agree with the proper end of man. Human reason knows these conclusions from the consequences of life, so that man may recognize and choose the good and avoid opposites.
Family, community, religion, and nation are inexorably linked.
Elite culture, and elite networks, are the deciding factor in the direction of a culture.
Power is best and most fairly exercised when closest to those subject to it.
Demography is the basis of political power. Demography is socio-political destiny.
Manners are a matter of morals and metaphysics when a culture is determined to deny reality.
Nations are distinct geopolitical creations to privilege tribes – race and ethnicity. A nation can lose the loyalty of the people which established the nation for the benefit of themselves and their posterity. It will become de-nationed, a nation in name only, divorced from the mystic chords which historically composed it.
Liberalism, the political expression of the Enlightenment project, is fundamentally false. The project claims neutrality, to stand above every particular conception of the Good, granting freedom to all and favoritism to none. Yet it imposes its own narrow vision, a tyranny of abstracted equality and freedom. Claims to neutrality are an imposition, without assertion, that its claims are objectively true. Therefore it does not assume the responsibility that comes from being a recognized establishment.
Freedom from constraint is different from freedom for virtue. True freedom is only found in obedience. Miracle, mystery, and authority bind to Logos, but these things are not the same as faith. They are icons through which one can view God. If they are substitutes for God, disordered desires, they become idols. Ordered liberty is true liberty: man must in and through the exercise and practice of virtue learned in communities achieve a form of local and communal self-limitation.
A paradox of modernity is refusal to define progress in a way accordant with the nature of fallen man, a rejection of hard-won wisdom.
Tradition is the handing down of permanent values, which by definition must be recognized as such by experience, not conceived theoretically as instruments.
The wealthier a society, the lower the relative cost of degradation.
The earth, a pale blue marble cast among the stars, testifies to the Logos.
A man has as many masters as he has vices.
Men compete, then cooperate. Women compete, then cast out. Vertical male hierarchy, even if established by violence, in the end ensures a place for all. Order is kept via violence, rules-based discipline, and threat of demotion. This allows for clarity, graceful losing, and the possibility of peaceful surrender. The order is stable. By contrast, horizontal female hierarchy causes churn, clique formation, uncertain and shifting status, and frequent change of allegiance. This is not order: it is zero sum and highly unstable.
Through aesthetic judgment humans strive for a world that signifies and amplifies their humanity.
It can be as wrong to love good things in the wrong way as it is to love the wrong things.
Real and lasting political and social policies are not the result of blueprints or manifestos but the product of talent, or lack thereof, applied to circumstance.
The public square is shaped by those who are most committed to seeing their vision of society realized and made hegemonic.
The fact that a person has a desire is no guide in determining whether such desire should be indulged.
The brutality of a totalitarian oligarchy or tyrannical dictatorship is proportional to the cowardice of the men of the non-oligarch “underclass.”
The instability of evil is one small morality of the cosmos.
The mind should guide the will toward the good; the more the will knows the good, the better able it is to love it. And the more a rational human’s embodied spirit knows and loves the good, the freer it is.
Revolutionary abstractions of liberty and equality have, time and again, given rise to tyranny.
All political ideologies are false. Politics are not subject to universal formulas and deductive syllogisms in the manner of mathematics.
The liberal project of creating neutral institutions has two problems. First, it is destructive because the bonds of affection out of which communities are built are, by definition, non-neutral. Second, it is a lie because someone must administer this project; and administration, though advertised as neutral, is not. People are not neutral and some must administer over others.
Dying to self is a lifelong challenge.
Beauty is unity, proportion, and clarity. It is good and true, perceived by humans through senses that inheres the object.
To live without a faith, without a patrimony to defend, without a steady struggle for the Truth, is not living but existing.
Man loses the possibility of contact with metaphysical reality when materialism kills possibility, deflects intent, and deforms living a higher spiritual life.
A proposition that can’t be acted upon must be false, or meaningless. Related, if a person cannot avoid acting as if a proposition is true, then it must be true.
Nominalism can be asserted only by means of the universals it reprehends.
Error, sin and disordered affection, is seductive and prolific.
Nothing cures one of the illusion of human rationalism quicker than expressing an unpopular opinion.
Sin is not only rule breaking but declining to live in accord with the structure of reality itself.
Religion teaches metaphysics, how to examine the self and one’s relationship to the universe. A materialistic philosophy has no sense of the spiritual or sublime, leading to solipsistic, overly emotional fevers.
Good art is from religion. Such art frees the mind from the parochial trap of the immediate.
Man has a purpose. The human body bears the image of God, though tarnished by sin, and is a pinnacle of a created order imbued with meaning. A primary task of life is conformity to the means by which God orders creation, for the sake of harmony with His purpose.
Political power attracts pathological personalities.
True joy is found in commitment to something greater than the self, and the sacrifices entailed by it.
Those who give scandal are guilty of murder. But those who allow themselves to be scandalized are guilty of suicide.
To be obsessed with questions of power and status is to possess a constant personal insecurity.
The result of virtue-signaling is a boosted signal at the expense of virtue.
Goodness is what best conforms to truth and a thing’s proper end.
The tenuous threads that hold society together are difficult to knit and easy to shred.
The attraction of an ideology is not in it end vision but in the means needed to realize it.
The most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is the ignorance of work.
A social-spiritual void demands infinite promise and surrender to a totalizing force.
Human beings defend themselves by attributing their own bad traits to others.
The human person is an indivisible unity of body and soul; the male and female bodies are bearers of intrinsic meaning. The facts of biology are integral to personhood.
A so-called egalitarian empathy, projected from afar and without discrimination, is principled rather than properly attentive. It is content to posit rather than to see the humanity of its beneficiaries.
Humans are wanderers looking for a cheering hearth, shipwrecked sailors searching for a last port, who should embrace life as a pilgrimage and as a purposeful journey – one to be spiritually undertaken by arduous, unrelenting effort.
To find true and enduring love, stop indulging lust.
Disgust can be an essential human strength.
Literature ought to deal in universal truths.
Female hypergamy is fed by male neediness; it is starved by male aloofness.
Permitting the mob is assisting the mob.
Marriage has to be sexually complementary because only the male and female partnership mirrors the generativity of the divine order.
Humans are a species with amnesia.
The dignity of man ultimately depends upon the primacy of the Good and the affirmation of the sovereignty of God.
Biology explains more than sociology.
What a person does with sexuality cannot be separated from what a person is.
“Church” and “state” should not exist as separate institutions; rather, spiritual and temporal authority should cooperate together within a single social whole for the establishment of earthly peace, ordered to eternal salvation.
A culture can degrade such that seeking or holding political office is, in and of itself, proof that the person is psychologically and morally unfit to hold public office.
For humans to cast aside their past of place is to pollute the spiritual ecology. The past cannot be only consumed; it should in some way be incarnated.
Social order is not grown in a “state of nature” in which liberty is untrammeled. Liberty presupposes order; once a proper social order is established, it will engender such liberties as are rightly fitted to historical circumstance. Then, liberty supports and reinforces robust social order so that it is robust under stress. If social order is mad, so will liberty be mad. Liberty will devour social order, as liberty is a subsidiary of social life. It is a derivative feature of social order, but not its source. Social order consists in constraints upon individual acts, whether through custom, taboo, scapegoating, or law. Social order is the source and basis of liberty, not vice versa. And where there is no social order, there is no freedom to do anything but fight.
What can happen to a man has happened so often that little remains for the imagination.
It is a false conception of freedom that severs human beings from one another, especially their society, nation, and family. This erodes the common good, natural law, and collective morality, exacerbating a reign of egoism.
Public paternalism can encourage private virtue.
What foreign arms could could not quell, by civil rage and rancour fell.
One need not support coercion to recognize that the state cannot be neutral. And in its choices, the state contributes heavily to public de-legitimization.
Valuing tradition does not mean valuing the past as past; it means valuing what in the past was eternal, with the potential to renew the present. It is a mistake to try to recreate the past, which is a foreign country.
The human body is a part of moral ecology, which helps to create an environment within which others live, people toward whom there are responsibilities to act with respect and affection. There should be a sanctified sense of wonder at the beauty of the person, and were a hidden-ness is the a habitat of glory and sanctification. The body is more than one more trivial amusement for the temporary satisfaction of passing interests. Physical intimacy only truly matters, and only is truly satisfying, within such parameters. If sex is no longer sacred, it becomes empty.
Sacred things are most often secret things. For the body, modesty preserves its meaning.
Freedom is not the lack of restraints or “self-realization;” it is following of the order and reason that stands outside of creation, the Logos.
Sheep attract wolves.
It is not enough to hold correct doctrine in mind. Humans must construct lives, build habitus, in such a way to be oriented towards God and in constant motion towards ultimate unity with Him, an unfailing awareness of the divine presence and doing all things with Him in mind. Secularism is the negation of man as a worshiping being. To be fully human involves true communal worship with grave consequences for viewing the world. The cosmos and the natural terrestrial world are sacramental; the world is an epiphany of God where humans can encounter His revelation, power, and presence.
Demons and the monsters of sin grow more powerful the more humans deny their reality. A man has as many masters as he has vices.
Friendship between females is a temporary ceasefire.
Little that is truly important in life can be measured or quantified.
Rationalization is moral engineering.
Beauty will save the world.
Lust transforms into disgust of object and self.
Eternity is newness as such and the source of all that is new.
The more decrepit the paradigm, the more immoderate and extreme the truth “seems” within that paradigm.
What goes un-said tends to go un-thought. What is outside of acceptable orthodoxy to be said tends to stop thinking well about societal problems.
When the freedom to be creative becomes the freedom to “create” oneself, then necessarily God is denied. Man is stripped of dignity as the image of God at the core of his being. The defense of the family is about man himself. When God is denied human dignity also disappears; whoever defends God defends man.
Where orthodoxy is optional it will be proscribed.
Technological power has little to do with knowledge.
When a person sets a goal, they inherit a lifestyle.
Freedom of speech is freedom from consequences.
Seemingly chance events are still caused, even if only by a coincidence of causes.
Beauty is a primary sign of God’s presence. In beauty and goodness does truth take concrete form. Wisdom requires humans wed their souls to the good and the beautiful so as to discover the true.
Good literature is an approach, through fiction, to truth.
Secular thought is full of repressed religion. A “godless” search for universal law is futile; without a law giver, universal moral law has no meaning.
A great challenge is to understand the place and priorities of one’s identity. Race and ethnicity, while real and measurable realities, cannot fully support the definition of personhood. Therefore identity politics is misguided because prioritizing race or ethnicity above all else artificially bloats it with meaning.
When there is a problem of elite overproduction, secular elites try to take roles from religious organizations.
People tend to mistake what is good for them personally with what is good for the institution.
Logos involves not just logic, reason, and order but communion. Therefore reason is intimately connected with transforming encounters with the living, loving God.
A racial group is an extended family that has a higher than random level of coherence and continuity due to some degree of endogamy. Viewed as concentric circles, it is extended family partly inbred. An ethnic group is a population united by some cultural characteristics that are typically passed down within genetic families but that don’t have to be, such as language and religion.
If there are justice and law and hope in the universe, they are to be found on the far side of the grave. And if none of these things exists, then there is no unimaginable reality, nor any point in one, nor any point in poetry and music and speech and temporal love – just mud and silence.
Civilizations are a combination of racial expression, of the collective genome, and of their ideas, hopefully of high purpose and character.
“Freedom” is the not absence of anything standing in the way of individual will.
Feminism is a death cult because it reverses sexual polarity; it pushes men and women apart to assume roles unnatural to their biology.
Any pretext of philosophy that does not bear fruit in the cultivation of virtue and the guidance of conduct is futile and false.
Rivalry and violence result inevitably from the clash of mimetic desires. Then, there is scapegoating. The discord is refocused onto a third person or group, an outsider. The former rivals form a unified front and redirect their efforts toward a scapegoat whose elimination, they convince themselves, will resolve the original conflict of competing desires. And the scapegoat, once safely out of the way, is sanctified and even deified. The story of the scapegoat comes to serve as a founding myth for cultures and religions.
Politics is more about tribe than policy. In a democracy, people vote for who they are.
Ideology can be a source of tribal identity at its most extreme if dependent not on principles but on the psychology of an adversarial relationship to rivals – if rivalry is a source of meaning. This is why extremist ideologies tend to be built upon fabulist views of a future: the more spectacular the vision, and the more unreachable the goal, then the more immersive the cause.
Sin is some manner of disorienting, distorted love.
Feminism asserts that men naturally want to harm women, followed by pleas to men to solve women’s problems.
Those who remain in the world, if they will not surrender on its terms, must maneuver within its terms.
All states have their origin in plunder and conquest.
In society, if there is nothing but transgression and dissent, then there is nothing to give acts of transgression the purpose, substance, and meaning that make them more than just puerile self-indulgence.
To be alive is to be locked in struggle with death.
Success with women is more disillusioning than failure.
Individualism is not the alternative to statism, but a primary cause.
Nothing causes more outrage than a statement that is both obviously true and fervently wished by everyone to be untrue.
To know is to be responsible.
The greatest of social changes tend to happen insensibly. Even when they seem sudden, this is merely a very long gradual transformation finally bearing fruit.
Humans are as courageous as they are convinced.
Violent delights have violent ends.
There are always public consequences of private vices.
People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.
Philosophically liberal nations are physically arranged to produce maximum loneliness, arranged economically to produce maximum anxiety, and disposed socially to produce maximum alienation – they slouch in the direction of depression, rage, violence, and death. A philosophically liberal order catechizes. It is not neutral.
Large social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval.
Pride is the root of sin; therefore, humility is its eradication.
For empires and nations, grand socio-political strategy is a by-product of geography.
Society is affectionate first, or it is not society. Only derivatively can society be exploitative, abusive, and evil.
A symbol is a concept that brings together data and organizes them in a rational, orderly way to convey meaning.
A capitalist culture is, of necessity, a secularist culture, no matter how long the quaint customs and intuitions of folk piety may persist among some of its citizens; secularism is capitalism in its cultural manifestation. Interminable acquisitiveness, self-absorption, lust, and moral relativism are not an accidental accretion upon an benign economic system but the inevitable result of fundamental capitalist values.
Nothing is beautiful but the true.
Women are the body that reflects the soul of her society.
Symbolism and stereotype tend not to lie.
Linguistic engineering always precedes social engineering.
Biological similarity, in and of itself and guided by nothing higher, is not sufficient for a thriving society. A shared faith, the ties of a common culture and language, can guard against materialism, cultural malaise, and spiritual disconnection.
The only way to avoid becoming metaphysician is to say nothing.
Everyone is a traditionalist in their area of expertise.
Reality edits falsehood.
Humans falling in love is less of a choice than an experience one suffers, a power that humbles individualism. Forms of love are mania, a madness that might have a divine inspiration.
That which humans cannot see can protect them from what they do not understand.
For a good community, a shared moral sense is embodied, enforced and passed through institutions, customs, and personal loyalty.
A strong sense of loyalty can cut both ways: it can blind one to subversives, but once betrayed it fuels a righteous vengeance for the scalps of one’s betrayers.
Statism in liberalism enables an individualism that requires statism because philosophic premises demand constant “liberation” from externally imposed limits (nature, tradition, God). Then is the creation of substitute constraints in the man-made form of the state. The result is a degradation of life and citizenship.
Societies no less than people can serve both God and Mammon.
Liturgical worship is an essential declaration of one’s citizenship in the Kingdom of God, such as kneeling before the Creator.
A “neutral” nation-state based primarily on abstract principles and without attachments to a particular culture, language, religion, tradition, history, or shared sacrifice cannot inspire the necessary mutual loyalty and national cohesion required for a morally decent, cohesive society to thrive.
The aspirations for transcendence that young people especially feel so keenly need outlets for expression and cultivation in art and the devotional life of religion – not in politics or emotive tribalism.
It is rare for a man to be at home in more than one culture, but it’s an alluring myth. Being among one’s own kind means no need to explain a cultural or historical reference, that little is exotic, conversations are subtle and more allusive, humor can be deft, one does not apologize for just being, and where there are also niceties to observe and taboos to avoid – obligations that are not comprehensible to outsiders.
Flourishing consists of doing things, not just in getting things, or having desirable or pleasant experiences, or having things done. The good consists in activity. Human goods are realized by acting, thus enriching life and ennobling oneself as one fulfills one’s natural human capacities or friendship, knowledge, and aesthetic appreciation. The common good is best conceived as a set of conditions for enabling members of a community to attain for themselves reasonable objectives, to realize value for the sake of collaboration with each other in community, which enables people to do the things of integral flourishing.
Human flourishing comes from a common idea of virtue, one relational to other persons and grounded in the Logos. A decent society requires the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjugation.
Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers humans the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them.
Conservatives believe in unchosen obligations, in pieties, whereas classical liberals, right-liberals, believe the source of obligation is choice.
The critic should have no theory, no ideology, no asphyxiating -ism. The critic’s chief loyalty is to beauty and wisdom, to the well made and usefully wise, to the ligatures between style and meaning.
Good and bad coexist and remain present in humans, amid idealistic gestures that crash into daily disappointments.
Whatever a man prefers to God, he makes a god to himself, even as all creation is an icon or an idol responsive to the divine. Participating in the truth means to be mastered by it rather than mastering it. The supernatural was not a distinct or separate realm of being that superimposed itself onto an independent and autonomous realm of nature. Instead, it is a divine mean to bring created realities of time and space to their end, or telos. Access to truth is sacramental participation, theosis, toward the unfathomable mystery of Logos. Humanity has descended from a sacramental entry into the mystery of God to a syllogistic mastering of rational truths. Whereas the earlier sacramental symbolism had regarded truth as participation in divine mystery, a new rationalist dialectics maintained that truth meant complete rational comprehension of propositional statements. Yet everything in reality points toward the ultimate reality, which is God – or Being itself, as distinct from the Supreme Being. One should enter into the sacramental mystery of God, not pursue a syllogistic mastering of rational truths. The divine Logos is reflective in all.
Man is a rational animal in which will follows intellect. The will cannot create its own contents – it must first receive them from reason, as man cannot define what is real or good apart from his knowledge of what is.
There are four things people need to thrive: a theological or philosophical view that explains death and suffering, a family, close friends, and meaningful work.
Humans exist across time but are also inescapably trapped in the present moment.
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
The division of citizens into distinct groups and classes composes a strong barrier against the excesses of despotism by establishing habits and obligations of restraint in ruler and ruled alike grounded in the relations of groups or classes in society.
A good poet will borrow from authors remote in time, alien in language, and diverse in interest.
When humans sin, they magnify demons.
In the business of romance, the hindbrain owns the forebrain.
A civilization that fails to protect and preserve the legacy of its ancestors will fail to protect and preserve the future for its descendants.
Sexual selection electrifies all human interaction.
Shame and hypocrisy are essential for a decent society.
Leviathan is voracious and never satiated.
The political nature of man is that by which man is organized into particular, morally authoritative self-ruling units. These are nations, tribes, polities.
That which is of the political right is of belief in social entropy and in the denial of a natural tendency for society to “progress.” Concern with order, discipline and hierarchy follow.
An ideologue is someone who can’t count past one.
Civil peace is not the natural state of affairs; it is an achievement of civilization.
Live life as a tourist, not a pilgrim because life is a pilgrimage, not a vacation, and a collective undertaking of a certain destination.
Cultural heterogeneity and egalitarianism do not exist in a polity.
Public protest and activism is not the path to power. They are the end result of it.
The false action of philosophical liberalism is to charge the state with maintaining social stability and preventing a return to natural anarchy, as humans are by nature non-relational creatures, separate and autonomous. They are not so.
The goal of the liberal project of modernity is universal individualism and contractual relations between individuals, with no non-commercial community bonds which would limit. Such transactionalism is dehumanizing because humans did not evolve in a social vacuum.
The fictive kinship that sustains a healthy culture and national cohesion is more easily formed and coalesced in a nation of ethnic and racial kinship. Culture flows like a river from the source pool of genetic heritage. Without the binding agent of race and ethnicity, the ability to find commonality in shared history, shared values, and shared myths is corrupted and greatly weakened.
Defining freedom as liberation from social relationships and obligations culminates in national ruin.
Man is always and inherently shaped by his place.
The material world is not inert matter upon which humans project meaning. It is charged with meaning that humans discover.
Liberalism is false because autonomous self-determination is false. The state cannot be “neutral” and atomized “individuals” united by nothing but the pursuit of their own private “good” is inherent conflict. Thus the result: fragmented persons divorced from land, heritage, kin, progeny, body, self, and God.
All gods who are not the true God become hungry.
Rejection of moral truth allows for rationalization of cowardly, destructive, degenerate self-indulgence.
Sustaining virtue through the things humans have in common – habits, traditions, and institutions, as orientated toward the Logos – builds a happy and productive community life.
Moral posturing and virtue signaling do not usually accord with the actions of revealed preference.
A borderless world exposes society to the vacuum of space, decompressing and ripping apart traditional community, leaving “individuals” to float as isolated, lonely, interchangeable atoms. A world of nation-states, by contrast, is one in which competition is structured by the nation and the mediating institutions within it. These institutions are in turn connected to one another politically, economically, and culturally – invested in the whole, yet functional and responsible.
Justice refers to a reasoned ordering and is primarily about God’s intellect.
Culture devoid of sacred sense loses its sense.
Without the bonds of locality and family, the common good and an enduring, productive, and collective morality disappear for the reign of egoism.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.
Good art and writing can be revelatory of transcendence. They are not merely expressive of the creator’s feelings, but should be arrows to pierce hearts and open eyes to Truth.
Charm is the ability to insult people without offending them; nerdiness the reverse.
If old truths are to retain their hold on men’s minds, they must be restated in the language and concepts of successive generations.
Modernity is a comforting drug, but it is wrong to trade the sacred and the sublime for the mundane and the modern.
Identity tends to be the strongest level of persuasion.
A good society can live for a while within a democracy. Then, the hemlock. Democratic parliaments are not forums where debates take place, but where popular absolutism registers decrees – to arrive at a judgement and then seek a principle. Democracy is a troubled spirit, a disease, fated to never rest, and whose dreams, should it sleep, present only visions of hell.
Peace isn’t the absence of war; it is the application of justice in charity.
To “liberate” human desire is to liberate violence.
Mind, soul, and body feature an inseparable relation, as they were wondrously intertwined. The created order has multiple causes — first and final, efficient and material causes. Creation is the realm in which humans participate as living and moving as the Logos provides a great book of metaphors and analogies for grasping His will for the world. And so the sensible realm is not a purposeless thing, a domain of physical causes awaiting human mastery and manipulation.
Political power should be exercised for a version of the good life as orientated to the Logos, not to secure “consent.”
The main “tradition” of liberalism is a liturgy centered on a sacramental celebration of the progressive overcoming of the darkness of bigotry and unreason. To participate in that tradition, that liturgy, is necessarily and inescapably to commune with and be caught up into a particular substantive view of time, history, world and the sacred – the liberal view.
Constitutional processes best work in the social ecosystem of a particular people, where a people can understand the folkways of their extended kin.
Clarity of text is major sign of the maturity of an idea.
Hierarchies are celestial. In hell all are equal.
The main criterion of “progress” between two modern cultures consists primarily of a greater capacity to kill.
Female beauty is objective, universally agreed upon, and biometrically standardized.
Modern man is a prisoner who thinks he is free because he refrains from touching the walls of his dungeon.
Only under patriarchy are women’s beauty and femininity, and men’s strength and masculinity, fully appreciated.
The modern world demands that humans approve what it should not even dare ask them to tolerate.
People possess desire for solidarity that cosmopolitanism does not satisfy, immaterial interest that redistribution cannot meet, and yearning for the sacred that secularism cannot provide.
Race is not a social construct; society is a racial construct.
The human condition is that humans are fated to wonder as they wander and to wander as they wonder.
Liberalism minimizes virtue for voluntarism (the “unfettered” and “autonomous” choice of individuals) and an appeal to self-interest. This conception of “liberty” undermines appeal to the common good and induces a zero-sum mentality that becomes nationalized and polarization for citizens increasingly driven by private and largely material concerns. Liberalism thus sees the traditional institutions for the transmission of virtue as inherently oppressive, by their very purpose and intent, and as a limit human choice and a restrain of human action.
Diversity is a weak and stupid god.
Any system tends to chaos unless energy is put into it.
Liberalism is itself an ideology, not simply a procedural construct, and it depends on a prior set of beliefs concerning what is good. Philosophical liberalism will atomize the polity, and turn life into a market with a supreme good being “choice,” such is its nature.
Moral action is a matter of personal motivation, resolve, action, responsibility, and consequence, requiring a sense of personal identity and continued moral commitment over time.
The paradox and tragedy of feminism is that it fulfilled the dreams of generations of male predators.
The mind follows the heart, and the heart directs the body, which reciprocates in kind.
When a country is mostly homogeneous, there is no need for identity politics. Once a country is demographically fragmented a country, however, identity politics is inevitable as it is based on human nature.
Pre-collapse late stage empires are marked by a retreat from the masculine virtues and an embrace of the feminine vices.
In societies where people differ from each other in race, ethnicity, and culture, social antagonism is greater and political economy outcomes are worse.
Freedom is the learned ability, cultivated through discipline and education in virtue, to properly govern one’s self in accord with the Logos of creation. The freedom to do what one desires is a false freedom because the world is limited but desires are not, so that in pursuing them humanity become their slaves. Becoming free, then, is the process of achieving mastery over selfish impulses.
Most surviving conventions exist for excellent reasons.
Legitimacy comes from acceptance, not imposition.
No people welcome armed missionaries.
Art presents the most refined figuration of reality.
Technology has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization.
When politics has come to be what it ought to be, it turns humans not to the practical life of the world but to the contemplative life, to the highest things.
The diffusion of a mechanistic, technological mentality has been accompanied by the disappearance of the words true and false, good and bad, even beautiful and ugly. A consequence of the rejection of permanent values is a replacement of the dyad ‘true-false’ with the dyad ‘progress-reaction.’
Humans are happiest when they align emotions with material and moral realities. A rational life is better than one built on self-deception and false hope.
Humans are only free to be what they are, which is rational in Logos. To rebel is to be enslaved.
Freedom is not the lack of external restraint. Freedom is the learned ability, cultivated through discipline and education in virtue, to properly govern one’s self. The freedom to do what one desires is a false freedom because the world is limited yet desires are not, leading to a slavery of the passions. Becoming free is the process of achieving mastery over base impulses.
As “individuals” in philosophical liberalism are stripped of the cultural norms that formerly governed social conduct, the resulting anarchy requires the state to step into the breach by threatening to punish those who violate the “rights” of others. People are “freed” from old restrictions only to be subjected to the more abstract, alienating powers of capitalism and bureaucracy.
There is a circularity between good politics and good individual conduct. A society can only govern itself well if it comprises self-governing citizens, and citizens can only learn self-government within a well-governed society.
Those on the alert to oppose tyranny may fail to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.
In a decent polis, there is an abundance of churches, voluntary associations, and mutual aid societies with significant function and role in the larger society.
Opposition offers the luxury of principle in politics.
The law of prayer is the law of belief: how humans worship God shapes what is believed about Him. Defection from liturgical traditions leads to defection from the creed itself.
The maximum of unconstrained individual liberty requires a tyrannical rule of law. It requires anarcho-tyranny. In a society with a strong cult, people are more apparent and more meaningful. Their idiosyncratic differences are glorified by contrast with their basic agreements and magnified in virtue of their basic agreements. In a society coordinated under the aegis of a strong cult, people are more at liberty than in a disordered libertarian society.
A functional and cohesive nation is an extended phenotype of race.
It is not hypocritical to treat different things differently. It is hypocritical to treat same things differently – especially for men and women, who are not the same, as the fitness costs for promiscuity are quite different.
The good society is a society that makes it easier to be good – but only with common agreement of goodness and freedom in content more substantive than individual will.
A symbol is something that both points to something greater, and participates in it. Symbol means to bring together, to integrate. The antonym for symbol is diabolos, which means to tear apart, to separate, to throw through another thing. Thus the diabolic is a disintegrating force. Humans live in a world in which they have lost the reflexive sense of God’s presence in all things, symbols and icons.
Choice is important in liberal systems as it hides the fact that consent is so easy to manipulate and because hegemony is so often based on the covert manipulation of disordered passion. Yet liberalism fails because at its core it stands for “liberating” the “individual” from unchosen obligations. Liberalism “forms” consumers, not citizens.
A fixation on what is measurable in political decision-making is a way of pretending to be apolitical while actually favoring a certain style of politics.
People are not fungible.
The winners of a revolution might not have deserved victory, but the deposed might well have deserved the fall.
To live well is to live in a way proper to being, a way of meaning. Love is the basic act and order of things; it brings all all there is into existence; it is through love that all there is continues into existence, and it is for love that all things exist. Reality is triadic: all things are in, through, and for love. Being is therefore an order and logic of love. Properly understood, freedom is rooted in an understanding of reality as love, with a commitment to this truth. Love grounds human freedom.
In nations with a Deep State, the official ranks of government don’t coincide with real and lasting power.
A dictatorship of relativism does not recognize anything as definitive, as the ultimate goal consists one’s own ego and desires.
Truth reveals itself.
Masculinized women are the worst of both men and women, stridently aggressive and competitive like men but lacking the instinct of loyalty, cooperativeness, and duty of men – cruelly subversive and passive-aggressive like women but lacking the nurturing vulnerability and intoxicating femininity of women. Nothing good can come from entangling the masculine and the feminine in physical and psychological bonds each was never meant to accommodate.
Feminism is a disease of envy. It spreads via women due to the temptation to envy the position of men. For men, it spreads via the temptation to declare oneself the only real man, as other men aren’t worthy of respect.
The liberal conceptions of autonomy and abstract, universal reason little allow for complex notions of identity, affection of families and persons, the subjectivities of everyday life, the emotions of moral and political commitments, and variations in human reason.
Either there is a Logos at the foundation of reality, inherently intelligible and meaningful, and therefore natures and forms that persist across time and environment, or reality is fundamentally meaningless with meaning as a construct.
Without a sharing fundamental moral principles, a society does not hold together.
Critical reflection should distinguish the true prejudices by which humans understand from the false ones by which they misunderstand.
Human nature is conquest: tribe against tribe, forever, unchanging, intractable.
A woman’s indifference, not indignation, is the opposite of her love.
Assuming the “individual” as the fundamental unit of political, social and economic order shears the “individual” of the republican virtues cultivated within communities of tradition. Though this is done in the name of empowerment, it actually makes one subject to tyranny. Limitless emancipation in the name of progress is a final and binding mechanism of control. Every quasi-religious concept about liberty and freedom can be used by a parasitic elite.
If one argues for the non-intentionality of the cosmos, he must employ instances of intentionality.
Moral ambiguity is inherent to serious drama.
The liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life is false. Man has both a temporal and an eternal end; therefore there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And as man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.
Culture is a form of capital, a kind of power. It starts as credibility, an authority one to be taken seriously. It ends as the power to define reality itself. It is the power to name things.
The end of rational being is to be governed by the laws of nature and the interest of the universe, for these two are both the oldest and the best rules to can go by.
Humans are not fungible and the human races are not interchangeable.
In its high philosophical formulation, cosmopolitanism is loyalty to Logos, as a good life consists in man’s subjecting himself to the inherent, unchanging order of the whole.
Art can act as a deep expression of the unconscious mind. Great art resonates with a people when it taps into those elements of the collective unconscious most in need of resolution, broaching unresolved tensions of the conscious and unconscious minds, ultimately providing a step towards psychic integration. The artist may not even be aware of the full extent his work is accomplishing this.
It is not accurate that the framework of human action, the only humanly significant realities, the only ones which are entitled to incontestable rights, are the individual on the one hand and humanity on the other – that between these two there is nothing of worth. Such a doctrine should not apply to different areas: in economic terms, against any form of protectionism; in political terms, against any form of national sovereignty; in moral terms, against any intermediary group whose legitimacy might contradict the rights of the individual or of humanity.
Love is to will the good of another. Love for another can never be simply an emotion, a desire. To be fully itself, it has to exist in relationship to an idea of the Good. A shared concept of the Good is necessary to govern the self.
Man proposes; Heaven disposes.
The people, not the paper, make a nation. Nations, peoples, and societies are defined first and foremost by genetic relation. and only secondarily by a common shared religion, language, culture, history, and customs.
There has to be a shared, communal conception of the good for moral reasoning to have authority and meaning.
There is always a king.
Cities must attempt to satisfy all the faculties, spiritual and material. The urbanites task is to build the conditions whereby life in the city is worth living.
Many things which were better in the past have been abandoned for supposed convenience.
The truth is armor.
All sin is disordered love.
Very little interesting would happen in a woman’s life if she did not have a man to make it happen.
Writing is the best way to distance oneself from the century in which it was one’s lot to be born.
Struggles for power are not the basis of society, but rather defects thereof. Society is constituted fundamentally of charitable exchange, communion, friendship, familiarity, and commensality.
The liberal state suppressed the warrior and priestly castes – the two main barriers to its power – in the act of establishing itself, and then embarked on a project of destroying all vestiges of the ethos of both castes.
Envy tends to be the true force behind moral indignation.
Indifference, not hate, is the opposite of love. Love means choice, discrimination, preference; to love means to choose and therefore there is nothing further from love than indifference.
To find what out what a man is, look at what he doesn’t try to prove. To find out what he isn’t, look at what he is trying to prove.
In order for societies to function well, there must be commonality of values and visions.
Religion must be a cultural experience and commitment, as one needs the support and formation and achievements of a culture. The human person is a cultural animal.
None in politics can foresee the consequences either of what he destroys or of what he constructs.
If a man is driven by lust and desire, he loses his positive, decisive will. As culture becomes infected by emotionalism and desire, forces rise which are not directed through a man’s will for good. He is open to political, economic, and sociological manipulation by elites.
Reality tends to be defenseless against a well-armored, comforting narrative.
There cannot be be good laws where there are not good arms, and where there are good arms there must be good laws.
Humans either approach beings according to their inherent order or they surrender them to egotistical exploitation. Should they decide to see things and persons within the horizon of their natural goals and order, they get to know them more intimately, learn to love them, and mature. Yet if they turn away from the inherent order, they see only from a selfish perspective.
Power is controlled by elite minorities. These are groups of men with similar political, economic, and cultural interests. Driven by insatiable appetites and irrational beliefs, men seek to dominate each other or to escape domination by others. This struggle inevitably results in a minority coming to power – monopolizing as much as possible political, economic, military, technical, and honorific resources, excluding and oppressing the majority. This bureaucratic oligarchy rules the majority and exploits it for its own benefit through force and fraud. The record of this unending rise and fall of ruling minorities is human history.
Women lead homes and men lead nations. Men test actions and ideas and women test men. Men assert their interests through logic, dominance, and physical strength. Women assert their interests through beauty, guile, and deception.
Evil preaches tolerance until it is dominant, then it tries to silence good.
Social order is sacred order. Society is ordered by what its people consider to be sacred.
With modernity, humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. Modernity is a phase of diminished consciousness.
The love of God pervades all reality, and a misdirected love distorted by humans values the transitory and worldly. God wills unity, not uniformity, in a law of love that rules all. A cosmos of many splendors is meant to live in harmony, and in Love’s will is human peace. A rightly-ordered human desire, the base of moral agency, should be the driving force behind all human interaction with others and the world.
The right to misgovern oneself is as valid as any other political right, and it is exercised more often than most.
The basis of reality is relational – the Triune pervades all reality. The Creator has ordered His creation, and His intelligence is everywhere present; it fills all things and can be discerned by those with the eyes to see.
The natural, material world is dependent upon the immaterial world in the sense that the former is caused by the latter in a fundamental unity.
The alpha and the omega of politics is demography. The social, cultural, political, and economic character of a country is of strong relation to the people there.
Where orthodoxy is optional it will eventually be prohibited.
Libertarianism is liberalism, a conservation of “enlightenment,” and a sacrifice to an undefined “freedom.” If the term is defined, it is done so negatively, becoming indistinguishable from license.
Societies need an authoritative account of ultimate values to legitimate political institutions. The collapse of metaphysics leads to a crisis of authority – that highest values are exposed as relative and contingent.
The death of culture begins when normative institutions fail to communicate ideals as inwardly compelling, beginning with cultural elites. Resistance to the diabolic requires remembrance, which requires enculturation. The culture of modernity annihilates memory as an enemy.
People must live for something beyond themselves, or they, both as persons and as a people, perish in aimless wandering.
Philosophical liberalism is a mix of rationalism and romanticism – a romanticized rationalism.
The sacred gives birth to societies.
Every functional civilization has regulated the sexual behavior of its females as a matter of practical necessity. The demand for cheap labor and the sexual and political “liberation of women” were defining features of nearly every major civilization collapse.
Every man participating in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs or convictions, and his metaphysical dream of the world.
Identification by race becomes a constant idea if there is always an other to continuously remind you of the trait.
Time participates in the eternity of God’s life. It is this participation that is able to gather past, present, and future together into one. Yet nominalist metaphysics occasion a loss of the sacramental dimension of time. Before the liberal, scientific revolution the world was more a garment men wore about them than a stage on which they moved. A desacramentalized view of time tends to place the entire burden of doctrinal decision on the present moment. The Tao, the Logos, unites will and nature at their common Source. Everything on earth is reflective and analogous to something in Heaven.
Not much is inevitable until it happens.
Human blunders shapes more history than wickedness.
Nations are essentially societal, political and geographic expressions of race, of tribe, of extended family partly inbred. The further a nation retreats from this, the less it resembles the nation of its distinctive heritage. A homeland unrecognizable to its native people is not a home; it’s an imposed fiction. Worse, it’s a spiritual prison.
Miscengenation is a genetic portal to social chaos.
It is common to learn from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.
The liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, which states that political rule must order man to his final goal, should be rejected. As man has both a temporal and an eternal end, there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to the eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power. Because man’s temporal end is subservient to his eternal end, the institutions which exist to help fulfill temporal ends must be subservient to those which help to fulfill eternal ends.
Liberalism is the view that equal freedom is the highest political, social and moral principle. The goal is to do and get what one wants, as much and as equally as possible. It assumes transcendent standards don’t exist, or aren’t knowable. Thus desire is the standard of action. Desires are equal and all equally deserve satisfaction. Nothing is exempt from this system, so everything becomes a resource to be used. The result is an overall project of reconstructing social life to make it a rational system for maximum equal preference satisfaction. However, traditional ties like family and inherited culture aren’t egalitarian or hedonistic or technologically rational. They have their own concerns. So they have to be done away with or turned into private hobbies that people can take or leave as they like. Anything else would violate freedom and equality. Elites assume liberalism as true, ultimate, and socially necessary. So far as elites are concerned, liberalism gives the final standards that everyone has to defer to because they’re demanded by the order of the community and also by the fundamental way the world is. It is the established religion. Like other religions, there are saints, martyrs, rituals, and holidays. All education is religious education, so education is shot through with liberal indoctrination. Liberalism even has blasphemy laws, in the form of the laws against politically incorrect comments. Liberalism is a stealth religion. It becomes established and authoritative by claiming that it is not a religion but only the setting other religions need to cooperate peacefully. Yet religion, as with liberalism, has to do with ultimate issues. The religion of a society is simply the ultimate authoritative way the society grasps reality, so it can’t be subordinate to anything else. Liberalism has been successful at obfuscating its status as a religion, and that’s been key to its success. People believe they are keeping their own religion when they give first place to liberalism. Original religion gets assimilated and becomes a poeticized version of liberalism. Liberalism holds that humans are essentially separate, sovereign selves who will cooperate based upon grounds of utility. This is a substantive set of philosophical commitments deeply contrary to the truth that humans are by nature relational, social, and political creatures; that social units like the family, community and Church are “natural,” not merely the result of individuals contracting temporary arrangements; that liberty is not a condition in which humans experience the absence of constraint, but the exercise of self-limitation; and that both the “social” realm and the economic realm must be governed by a set of moral norms – above all, self-limitation and virtue. Left-liberalism (“equality” as unconcerned with the Good) and right-liberalism – the belief in the universal equal rights of individuals (“freedom”), in turn lead to further left-liberalism (“equal freedom”), the belief in enforced group equality of outcome. Left-liberal and right-liberal “progress” celebrate domination over nature, the sort of progress that makes purses from human skin. Humanity and societies do not consist of universal individuals. They consist of various cultures, ethnicity, languages, and races – all of which have particular identities, characteristics, abilities, values, and agendas. The mass presence of different groups in a host society, far from advancing right-liberal freedom, empowers identities and thus changes the host country to government-enforced equality, whose ruling principle is equality of outcome for all groups.
The main principle of liberalism is the belief that the self, namely one’s own self, is the highest value and the source and criterion of all values, a belief that is expressed as self-love, self-worship, and expressive individualism as the highest good. Under the liberal order, the substantive content of one’s choices as compared with the substantive content of other people’s choices is irrelevant. All that matters is that they are choices made by the self. Liberalism strips the mind of its necessary capacity for making judgements along a gradient. It does not want to admit that it is an exclusive theology, and thus does not want admit that it is rejecting a definite other theology, a rival set of beliefs about God and man. Liberalism is based on two foundation principles, each false: the sanctity of individual choice, and the liberation from natural limits.
There is no finity apart from the Infinite; no solute apart from the Absolute; no power apart from Omnipotence; no time apart from Eternity; no creature apart from the Creator.
If a work of art merely evokes seedy and disgraceful things, and has no compensating vision of redemption, then it has no aesthetic merit.
Few things are more frightening than the relentless, cheerful presence of contradiction.
Prayer leads to belief and liturgy to theology.
The purpose of words is to convey reality.
The best type of human life, that in which the tradition of the virtues is most adequately embodied, is lived by those engaged in constructing and sustaining forms of community directed towards the shared achievement of those common goods without which the ultimate human good cannot be achieved.
A set of highly sophisticated institutions developed by and for a particular people at a particular point in time and space is not operational for all peoples under all circumstances.
Hell is knowing what other people think.
Liberalism is a political form of a technological view of reality, of a mechanistic understanding of nature. Political philosophy presupposes a view of reality and of human nature, and a technological order sets the basis for our political order, a way of construing the world according to technological criteria. Truth becomes what is technologically possible. Yet humans can only discover limits of possibility by transgressing limits, so technological society has a permanent revolution as a way of viewing the world and there is no such thing as an intrinsic order built into reality. There is no ultimate meaning beyond what is chosen. Freedom is, then, not about having and exercising the power to live out the good, but about acquiring and utilizing power to enforce will. The state is free to transgress.
The mark of an authentic and living tradition that it points beyond itself. Tradition is like an icon, and it must be rooted in transcendence and begins with revelation. Enlightenment’s claims of universal rights grounded in “reason” saw itself as not depending on Tradition to arrive at truth. Yet it is difficult to hold on to these supposedly universal truths without having grounded them in the tradition that produced them.
Modernity’s inadequacy to spiritual realities is in its incomprehension of consciousness, agency, meaning, value, morality, and in the limit truth, beauty, and virtue – or their antipodes. It is incapable of coherent treatment of any of the basic aspects of life as it is actually lived and experienced. It is unable to understand minds; it wants to make bodies basic and reduce all experience to motions of bodies. To be religious with a clear philosophical conscience, or do theology, or think coherently about minds – to live a fully human life, a good, rational and intelligible life, of meaning and significance – one must invert the Modern perspective: one must take the spiritual to be basic, and the corporeal to be something added visibly atop it – not superfluously, but superveniently.
All things exist and have a God-given essential nature independent of human thought. The essence of a thing is built into its existence by God. Its ultimate meaning is guaranteed by this connection to the transcendent order.
There are three kinds of truth. An objective truth is one that can be demonstrated scientifically or logically. A subjective truth is a truth that can only be apprehended personally. It doesn’t mean that it is objectively untrue, but that its truth can be known by taking it into one’s own life and living as if it were true. An intersubjective truth is a truth that is only true when it is shared by a network of subjects. It is a subjective truth that depends on a group of subjects believing it for it to have the force of truth – such as currency.
Irreconcilable differences are what separate countries are for.
A major struggle of society is the struggle of memory against forgetting.
Democracy does not work in multiracial societies.
Persons are not concrete entities, but rather characters of concrete entities.
Being is acting. Actual occasions are not static, but dynamic; not dead, but alive. They are intensional, about things other than themselves: first, their causal inputs, obtained from their past by their feeling or grasping (“prehension”) of the moral and aesthetic character of that past; second, of their consequences, the states of affairs that arise from occasions as they have decided to be – the final causes of things, meanings, intentions, or purposes. The nisus toward the Good, inherent in all things essentially, derive from their forebears who share in it, but most and in the first instance from their palmary incipient prehension, which is of and from God, who as First of all things is first in every instance of becoming.
Culture is a process through which people learned to bind and to loose, to form their souls to a higher order, hopefully a “sacred” one that allows life to continue, generative, and regenerative. An anti-culture is one that destroys all possibility of order and of the generation of life.
The state expands as civil society contracts. When persons stop acting responsibly, government enlarges. The greatest invitation to statism is a society that won’t take care of itself. Especially susceptible to this trend is a construction of government as an open-ended rationalist process. Better is a nation born with ethnic and cultural preconditions. The most successful national or constitutional orders are expressions of already formed cultures.
The permanent bureaucracy determines the shape and structure of a sociopolitical entity, mostly ignorantly and for their own benefit; and any political analysis that doesn’t start from there is worthless. Only a crisis, actual or perceived, produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions taken are responsive to the ideas around. It is important to develop alternatives to existing policies and to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes less so.
Fortune is a wanton creature that does not stay long in one place.
A false, fashionable notion is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances. Ideology, fear, envy, and utopia are causes of war.
Moderation is not an ideology, not an opinion, not a thought. It is an absence of thought.
A society that has no strong concept of the Good other than granting individuals within it maximum liberty to live as they prefer to is not a society that has within in it the capacity to govern itself. A religion that is about formless ‘love’ is a religion that worships emotion, and that makes an idol of the Self.
It is not the personal that is political, but the political that is personal. People with unusually thin skins ascribe the small insults, humiliations, and setbacks consequent upon human existence to vast and malign political forces; and, projecting their own suffering onto the whole of mankind, conceive of schemes, usually involving violence, to remedy the situation that wounded them.
Finite, relative problems can be solved; infinite, absolute problems cannot be solved. Humans will never create a society free from contradictions.
Tradition is not the worship of ashes but the preservation of fire.
Public vice begins privately, in a reciprocal relationship.
The future casts a shadow back into the past.
The solipsism of expressive individualism damages society’s most crucial institution, the family – the primary source of basic order, structure, discipline, support, and guidance every human requires.
Best is the expressions of rootedness: a sense of place and of history, of self derived from forebears, kin, and culture.
The entire world testifies to God’s presence in His creation.
All modern political teachings are secularized theological concepts.
There can be no patriarchy without the king, and no king without the patriarchy to model.
A purely juridical order devoid of metaphysical and theological judgment is as logically and theologically impossible as a pure, metaphysically innocent science. One cannot set a limit to one’s own religious competence without an implicit judgment about what falls on the other side of that limit; one cannot draw a clear and distinct boundary between the political and the religious, or between science, metaphysics, and theology, without tacitly determining what sort of God transcends these realms. The very act by which liberalism declares its religious incompetence is thus a theological act. Its supposed indifference to metaphysics conceals a metaphysics of original indifference. A thing’s relation to God, being a creature, makes no difference to its nature or intelligibility. Those are tacked on extrinsically through the free act of the agent.
In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people: those who work to further the actual goals of the organization, and those who work for the organization itself.
The natural and default state of men among men is hierarchy. This is because hierarchy is the end-product of competition and men instinctively compete with each other.
As insanity and non-reality pervade culture, tensions and resentments generated in daily life by the dissonance between reality and culture grow, and with them the demand for catharsis in ritual sacrifice of scapegoats.
Even the most systematically skeptical have little choice to avoid faith. To speak of accident is to assume the existence of something that is not accident, something like purpose. One cannot avoid the choosing of icons. Many false gods have ridden a triumphal chariot over heaps of corpses.
The simplest and most psychologically satisfying explanation of any observed phenomenon is that it happened that way because someone wanted it to happen that way.
To speak of the person is to speak of soul and body, of an existential urgency, as the soul is the principle of being whereby a person in space and time and body is bought to full communion with God’s mystery. The truth of Logos forward in time is comprehending to the soul. From this truth are visions persons generate and those they receive.
Facts do not “speak for themselves.” They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theories or visions are isolated curiosities. Thus science and technology do not imply growing intellectual complexity in the lives of most people; it can be the opposite.
In literature, importance is not important – only good writing is.
Citizens desire to vote when the intermediary institutions between them and the state have failed. Different forms of government work for different groups of people. In multiracial societies, citizens do not vote in accordance with economic and social interests but in accordance with race and religion.
The liberal vision of political community as founded upon the formality of social contract and around universal human values and rights, neglects the reality that every such community must be bound together by the forces of sacrifice, of faith, love, and identity, forces that are inescapably particular. Peoples and places are forged around shared customs, values, religions, languages, histories, cultural canons, symbols, and sacrifices and it is only thus that universal human goods are realized.
To learn who rules over you, simply find out whom you are not allowed to criticize. The powerful tend to claim they stand only for everyone’s equal rights.
A polity cannot remain the same as the population changes.
The only part of any religion that is empirically verifiable is original sin.
Every nationality, every ethnicity, prefers to be misgoverned by its own people than to be well ruled by another. Culture follows genetics. Across time, environment, and culture, people first think with tribal blood. Blood trumps principle and organizational structure. A lasting and real nation is a country of a common blood.
Habits become character. Virtue are habits which people require to live satisfying lives and which communities require to function as communities. Four are especially important: honesty, marriage, industriousness, and religiosity, meaning loyalty, temperance, and patience at a minimum. Four principle factors make up a successful human life: family, vocation, community, and faith.
The health of a nation is inversely proportional to the number of laws needed to govern it.
A society’s stability and fairness and unity count for more than its aggregate wealth. A nation should be a cohesive society, not just a random group of people within an arbitrary set of borders. It’s a product of a certain history and the repository of a distinctive culture. A citizen should be educated to understand that country’s history and take pride in its culture and traditions.
The true basis of a rightly ordered society is proper adequation of human lives to the Good. The basis of right social order, and therefore the proper objective of public policy, and for personal comportment, is pursuit of the Good. Democracy for its own sake, with choice and consent as the highest values, is a ridiculous and ignoble circus.
A society of “consenting adults” is a society that does not care about one another. It is a public existence without concern. Invading this moral vacuum is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Brotherhood is the defense against this, based upon kinship and rootedness. This is the answer to many significant public questions.
Culture is a pattern of moral demands, a range of standard self-expectations about what one may and may not do, in the face of many possibilities. Different cultures have different standards of inhibition and release; but within particular cultures, those who are members of it know what is permitted and what is not. There is at some point “anti-culture” – a cultural system that cannot do what cultures are supposed to do: say what is forbidden. Cultures endure when institutions embody common understandings of the good, that are all the more powerful for being implicit.
Life is a shipwreck, and humans stagger around the beach, trying to help each other make sense of it all, looking to the lighthouse, so as to get through the catastrophe and find the way back home.
Culture derives from biology, and civic habits and principles cannot be severed from the people and their pedigree.
Atomized societies that are susceptible to demagogues, not societies that enjoy strong social bonds and organic communal solidarity.
Freedom pre-requires order and pre-requires hierarchy. Remove the hierarchical order and what remains is chaos. Thus there is always an oligarchy.
Heaven is earth’s model; earth is heaven’s creation. The universe has a telos, and is more than matter in motion. Innate in all creation is the basis of rationality and the ultimate appeal of ethics – not utility, consent, and social contract.
As roving bandits become more stationary bandits, they call themselves kings and princes.
Absent a transcendent basis for laws, they cease to be something that attempts to mirror the divine order (law doesn’t point to a reality beyond itself), but rather becomes about manipulating things to achieve desired ends.
Non-liberal forces – tribal, familial, religious – speak more deeply than consumer capitalism to basic human needs: craving for honor, yearning for community, desire for metaphysical hope.
Happiness is the fulfillment of human nature, not in the domination of nature.
Evil is self-destructive. If a system, ideology, structure, philosophy, person, or thought contains within it the seeds of contradiction, internal or external, or systemic collapse, it is against God and therefore evil. Also for those with unresolved or incorrectly resolved cognitive dissonance is this true, because God is both real and Creator of reality, and all that is in conflict with reality is necessarily in conflict with Him.
Anti-political politics is politics not as the technology of power and manipulation, of cybernetic rule over humans or as the art of the utilitarian, but politics as one of the ways of seeking and achieving meaningful lives, of protecting them and serving them – as practical morality, as service to the truth, as essentially human and humanly measured care for humans.
Goods, whether of the divine or of “progress,” exercise final control over arguments and conclusions. Political analysis becomes, like other dreams, the expression of human wish to the admission of practical failure.
There is no such place as utopia; everything is a trade-off.
The “free market” is based on the definition of freedom as an absence of external constraints. The wider choice, the freer the market. This is problematic because it is agnostic about the existence of good and evil. The free market, thus conceived, catechizes into believing there is no truth, only individual desire. But desires are unavoidably social, so the will to power in society belongs to those who maximize individual choice by tearing down any structure or belief system that denies the primacy of individual choice.
The assent to beauty is one with the assent to God, as Beauty Itself is one of the divine names. Beauty refers to a real property of being rather than a description of a subjective judgment of “taste.” The encounter with something beautiful is indeed an encounter with a particular participation in Beauty itself and, therefore, opens a path for perceiving intellect to approach God. More than allowing sympathy or communication between one human mind and another, artworks by their nature participate in the Beautiful. It must be that beauty is real, is a divine name, and can manifest.
The faintest of all human passions is the love of truth.
Any guarantor competent to all creaturely goods cannot but be omnipotent, omniscient, and ubiquitous. It cannot but be the absolute judge and arbiter of all goodness, beauty, truth, righteousness, virtue – of all perfections whatever. An absolute, omnipotent sovereign is present for any transactions ending in the realization of any lesser goods – no king, no kingdom.
Good craftsmen are not expressing themselves. They are expressing something outside themselves because craft is not about selfhood.
No function of man has as much permanence as virtuous activities.
To discern the nature of anything requires an understanding of its end and function.
It is human nature that people are more likely to be appalled at the crimes of their enemies and excuse or ignore those of their allies.
A wicked society frustrates familiarity; and there can be no fraternity where there is no common sense of familiarity. A rightly ordered society will understand that all men are made imago Dei, and honor their basic dignity.
The natural law, derived from a natural order in which things are identified by functions within a whole, is telelogical. There is a natural end so as to live satisfactory lives in accordance with the natural order of the universe. Social and political order is attained by conforming to this natural order. Politics is an adaption, as particularities of an environment conform imperfectly with the truths of the natural order. Too much should not be asked of politics, as the social and psychological complexities of human civilization cannot be remade according to plans. A metaphysical assumption of telos should be present in socio-political thought, as the principles of political order are found not by utility, contract, and consent.
Liberty is not the basis of rightly ordered society; is rather a byproduct of a rightly ordered society. A society that lacks liberty, that contravenes the doctrine of subsidiarity, devolves to each organ of the social hierarchy (thus, in the limit, to individuals) all the powers they can well handle, or delegate in their turn, is not just; but that injustice lies not in its lack of liberty but that it is wrongly ordered. Liberal individualism, the creed of self-interested, socially autonomous people, leads to a dictatorial majority.
Horror is reaction to human hubris and ancient desire for man to be as god. It is a reaction to radical self-autonomy, particularly in the sexual realm. Sexual intimacy will always have consequence. Horror is a revulsion to its excesses, to Enlightenment “morality.” The source of mayhem is sexual “liberation:” voluntary sterility is horrific. To remove the consequences of intimacy (human life) from the act itself is to engage in horror. In fiction, this offers fright to an audience that also senses the true source of horror. To step outside of the moral order is to enter horror, the results of lust without restraint. If “liberty” is used not to act in accordance to ordered reason, to Logos, but to simply to gratify passion, then the act of such “liberty” make man in the thrall of passion. Sexual passion separate from the moral order leads to murder, terror, death. The genius of the Enlightenment was to make passion an instrument of social and political control. Horror is a revolt against it. Fairy tales, myths, and horror are stories humans have in common to think through dilemmas and to keep alive registers of emotion and imagination otherwise eroded. Continue reading →

Catholicism

Posted on June 11, 2014 by jonathanjones02

Against a nihilistic sentiment that little is of real consequence, Catholicism insists that everything is of consequence because everything has been redeemed by Christ. Grace perfects nature; it does not destroy it, as agape does not obliterate eros. Grace strengthens human love by inwardly ordering it once again to God. The Protestant insistence on individually inspired enthusiasm and charism rather than revealed, deposited doctrine, on Scripture apart from interpretation by the Church in history, denies the actual, real presence of Christ in the Church, the Incarnation.

A Religious Rule of Law

The debate between Protestants and Catholics primarily concerns authority: is it to be found ultimately in the Church or in the Bible? It would at first glance appear obviously clear that the Protestant answer is correct. The Bible, not an institution or its leaders, should be the believer’s guide in all things. One is then liberated from the arbitrary will of those holding ecclesiastical power.

This is deceiving, however, for the Bible does not plainly interpret itself. There is much that is not just verified but illuminated by a lively history, for Christianity is a religion that necessarily insists upon extraordinary historical claims. If someone, as his own “priest,” can enjoy direct access to the meaning of the text and the will of God absent the guidance of an authoritative body, what are believers to do when unsure of what the Bible means, or when there is sensible, intense, and important disagreement as to interpretation? The standard Protestant answer is that the Holy Spirit will lead the believer toward understanding. Then what criteria are there for determining exactly what the Spirit is saying, or whether He is actually speaking at all?

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Decadence

Posted on June 11, 2014 by jonathanjones02

The so-called moderate Enlightenment is the philosophical, social, and political movement whose leading light was the English philosopher John Locke. Despite common description of this movement as “conservative,” it was as radical in its principles and effects as the so-called radical Enlightenment, as exemplified by the French Revolution. The moderate Enlightenment promised Liberty to the masses, but in reality it was a massive bait-and-switch operation that has never delivered what it promised — anywhere, at any time — because Liberty is nothing more than the elevation of a new form of supreme political authority in the place of the old one.

Liberty has not made men free, but rather it has relentlessly opposed and driven from the life of the State the very Truth that makes men free. It is a denial of sin from disordered desire: either loving the wrong things or loving the right things in the wrong way. Instead, a rightly-ordered traditionalism reconnects man with the wisdom of his ancestors – arguing that the most important wisdom is to acknowledge God, the Logos, and that intuition is the foundation of wisdom. Intuition knows that consciousness is real, and therefore that the materialism of Enlightenment is false. The human soul is pervasively present in the universe itself. Truth is intrinsic to reality, as it is to consciousness. The point of life was to conform the soul to Reality — to harmonize with a cosmic order that exists independently of the soul, but that can be known. In the modern era, man regards what he once saw as divine order of the cosmos as, instead, inert matter to be manipulated and shaped according to man’s will and genius. What toxic culture calls freedom is truly bondage; a man has as many masters as has vices. And so-called sexual liberation is a form of political control. A nominalist position – that there is nothing natural inherent in the structure of nature, as it’s only matter, upon which humans can impose a will – is false.

The social order the moderate Enlightenment destroyed was Christendom. This society received its basic philosophical underpinnings from Greek political philosophy, particularly the understanding of man and the state as developed by Plato and Aristotle. These philosophers developed a “politics of the soul” based on the insight that the purpose of human life is the cultivation of virtue. For the Greeks, the state, arising from the society of families, is natural to man; human nature demands life in a polis. Indeed, man cannot attain the perfection of his nature except in the polis, which takes care of the soul by promoting and protecting both virtue and religion over and above mere security in person and property. Far from being an imposition on the natural order of the state, the Catholic Church perfects it by revealing the true religion that gives man the knowledge of true virtue and right theology. This “Greco-Catholic synthesis” completed, perfected, and elevated the insights of Aristotle as to the nature of both man and the state. And so the truth is not a proposition; the truth is a Person, Logos, a mode of living. The truth is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived. Wisdom is how to approach suffering so that, through love, it becomes transformative and redemptive. A man’s greatest act, his true religion, is consciously to identify himself with the true, the good and the beautiful. He cannot change the world. And it’s difficult to change yourself. But, as a first step of telos to Logos, he can choose to identify with the true order of being, and the God who is its Author.

The nominalists were incorrect to contend that God existed as a category of Being, instead of God as Being itself. Unfortunately, now the nature of language, including the religious language used by believers to talk about God, veers by default in a univocal direction, as if “God” were the name of a thing, an ens, an entity within the totality of being. Nominalism served as the philosophical underpinning for the instrumentalization of the world, and the world became something for humans to use to fulfill desires. There was no transcendent natural order to obey, as humans could, supposedly, do and be whatever they wanted to do or be. Desacramentalized and denuded of God’s presence via metaphysical univocity – nominalism’s claim that God is only part of Being; that He is the highest being within the universe – the natural world would cease to be the theater of God’s grace or the playground of evil’s princeps mundi. Instead, it would become so much raw material, awaiting the imprint of human desires. This would come to be called an “objective” view of the world. Democracy and liberalism, divorced from concepts of the good, have little eschatology, vision, fulfillment, point of arrival. They are instruments of desire and power.

Public recognition of true religion is essential to a Christian order and accords with the demands of reason. Such an order requires a certain intolerance of false religion but truth is the highest common good, the good that the state exists to defend and promote. Since religion is not merely a private but a public good, governing authorities must recognize it, defend it, and promote it. Revelation of the good through Logos precedes Scripture and becomes deposited in Scripture but is not simply identical with it. Thus revelation is always greater than the written word. There is no such thing as sola sciptura because the essential element of scripture is the church as understanding subject.

It was this Greco-Catholic synthesis that the moderate Enlightenment opposed and ultimately overthrew. Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, in particular, established a false understanding of nature and, in particular, human nature, from which they concluded that human society is unnatural to man. In his natural state, according to Hobbes and Locke, man lives in perfect, untrammeled liberty. It is only to protect this liberty that men, by “social contracts,” form political arrangements in which they give up certain of their “rights” in order to assure the continued possession of their most fundamental rights: life, liberty, and property.

The moderate Enlightenment established a materialistic understanding of the state. Government, arising from the consent of the governed, derives its authority only from that consent; gone is the Greco-Christian understanding that government derives its authority from Logos (God in Christ). Moreover, the purpose of government is to protect individual liberties, not, as in Christendom, the common good of society — a good both material and spiritual. The “Hobblockean” state thus proposes Liberty as the highest good of man, at least in his corporate life. It is to preserve this Liberty that men form governments and, if necessary, overthrow them when they breach the social contract.

The American Revolution, far from establishing freedom for the citizenry, only set up a new regime that was just as oppressive, if not more so, than the regime it overthrew. The American Revolution and the establishment of the U.S. government under both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution were the work of a relative few in the English colonies and not expressions of universal popular consent. New governments, both state and federal, exercised raw power to enforce obedience to their demands. The federal government, from its inception, whittled away at state authority, and such federal hegemony is a logical development of the Constitution itself. During the Civil War the federal and Confederate governments, though wrapping themselves in the mantle of Liberty, nevertheless grossly violated the freedoms of their people. From its inception, the American republic labored under an oppressive government and that the Liberty it promised was but a thinly veiled exercise of power, which has devolved into bureaucratic oligarchy in the early 20th Century. This is the tradition of Locke, as the fundamental tenet of Liberty — that the securing of individual freedom, not the defense and promotion of the common good, is the chief end of government.

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