A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing. ~ Archilochus
People can be like foxes or hedgehogs. The fox has a wide-ranging mind that is able to synthesize many ideas. The hedgehog is more plodding, focusing on one major idea. The world needs both types, even if most people are neither.
Tacit and explicit knowledge
Michael Polanyi, in his book Personal Knowledge, made clear the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge can be communicated through the written or spoken word.
Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, cannot be communicated in that way. It is more like “knowing how” rather than in knowing. Tacit knowledge comes only by doing. Polanyi provides examples like riding a bicycle, learning to swim, becoming a wine taster, and medical diagnosis. Just reading a book or attending a lecture on those topics will not make you proficient in any of those activities. With rare exceptions, it is necessary to learn under the tutelage of someone else with more experience. Nevertheless, many people prefer to bloviate, as a simulacrum of tactic knowledge, without actually knowing how.
This distinction is even truer in esoteric matters. Reading a text has its place, but it is no substitute for the know-how of reaching higher states. The latter requires trial and error, with feedback from someone who has.
Faith Journey
In this Lenten season, you may hear people discussing their effeminate sounding “faith journey”. That sounds like some sort of horizontal motion, whereas the Tradition always spoke of an Ascent to God. Most famous perhaps is Dante’s Divine Comedy which describes the soul’s ascent to Heaven.
St Bernard, who was a direct spiritual influence on both Dante and the Templars, made that the centerpiece of his De Consideratione. In the first book, Bernard criticizes the Curia for its worldliness and carnal spirit, even criticizing the Church as a den of thieves. Clearly, not much has changed in the past thousand years. The Church today, as an institution, seems more concerned about air conditioners and immigration than spiritual enlightenment. However, that has no effect on the Tradition itself, which is solid.
In the fifth and last book, Bernard turns his attention to God and the Angels. In contemplating them, the soul transcends the realm of becoming to find her true home. He said that the higher things can be known in three ways:
- By opinion
- By faith, which knows truths in a veiled way
- By understanding (or intuition or gnosis) which knows the same truths openly
Thus, we see that salvation comes not from “faith alone”, but from the higher intellect or gnosis. Faith sees God through a glass darkly, while gnosis sees Him face to face. Giovanni Gentile points out that these three stages correspond to Virgil, Beatrice, and Bernard in Dante’s own spiritual journey.
Bernard’s teaching is not unusual, as I can provide many examples. But that just adds to the store of explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge requires that one actually embark on the contemplative path described by Bernard.
The Crucifixion
In the early years of TV, there was a show called The Millionaire. The premise was that an anonymous donor would donate one million dollars to a different person each week. The effects of that windfall on the various recipients created the drama of the show.
The Crucifixion pays off the debt mankind incurred from the Fall, restoring the human race to the status quo ante before the Fall. What have we done with the windfall?
Suppose Frank went into debt from gambling losses. Most of his pay check services that debt. Suppose that someone then pays off Frank’s debt. Is Frank grateful? Check with a bankruptcy attorney and you’ll learn that most people just go into debt again.
In the symbolism of the cross, the vertical bar has a twofold effect. First Christ descends into Hell, purifying all the lower elements. This initiates the process of regeneration that restores the human race to its purified state.
In the opposite direction, Christ opens up the way to ascent to God to everyone, not just a few initiates.
Chastisement
Divine chastisement is the punishment of the human race. As such, it is the opposite of salvation. This may sound contradictory or even harsh from the viewpoint of explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge, on the other hand, comes from actively contemplating the notion of chastisement.
The Hermetist Eliphas Levi explains it this way:
Man is himself the creator of his heaven and hell, and there are no demons except our own follies. Minds chastised by truth are corrected by that chastisement, and dream no more of disturbing the world.
In other words, truth itself is the chastisement. If one rejects the Logos or Cosmic Order, he will experience chastisement from that folly. Of course, God is also the True, the Good, and the Beautiful, so in a sense, it is God who chastises through his willing the cosmic order.
Valentin Tomberg makes this claim:
Is mankind therefore solely responsible for its history? Without a doubt — because it is not God who has willed it to be as such. God is crucified in it.
The world of everyday experience is anthropogenic, not God created. The crucifixion is the result of man’s rejection of God’s appearance and influence in the world. This is the result:
Man is from now on alone, hopelessly alone, left to himself, at the mercy of other men! Thus, it is vain to expect a further chastisement, as the absence of God is the true and supreme punishment of our crime of treason. God’s Justice is exercised with just reason. As man in his mad arrogance has shown to God his will to do without Him, man’s terrible punishment consists in being granted what he has asked for. Without God, man rapidly becomes the slave of his own pride and passions, a beast that lives only to satisfy his instincts. ~ Chastisement and Punishments
Post-mortem States
Pace this bizarre rant Debunking the myth of hell, hell is not an arbitrary or cruel punishment inflicted on the unwary. A person who has no interest in God, or the things of God, in this life, will have no interest in God after death. We have all we need to be saved; take it or leave it as you choose.
Hell is the absence of God, and man is the creator of his own Hell. It is not a punishment, but a matter of justice. As Dante points out, the souls willingly take their place in Hell. They blame each other for their predicament, but not God.
The Religion of Europe
We wrote previously about the Religion of Europe as envisioned by the New Right. While claiming the desire to “save” Europe, they reject the notion of Logos, cosmic order, and the true religion of Europe. Moreover, not to speak ill of the dead, the West cannot be restored by rejecting its real past and promoting a mythical unreal future.
By rejecting the religion of Europe, they necessarily reject the Tradition of saints, doctors, philosophers, poets, artists, knights, and so on, who created the West. They embody the eternal truth of “Catholicism”, not the Curia whose corruption today is no different from the Curia of a millennium ago. Whatever is of value in other Traditions can be found at home. Read the essay Acres of Diamonds.
Cultural Marxism
You can love him or hate him. but Marx was right in many of his predictions. There can be no dispute that the technological and material changes in society have altered social behavior and mores. For example, better hygiene and cleanliness have made oral and anal sex more acceptable than what it was when bathing was infrequent. The wide availability of mind-altering drugs has had its consequences. And the mass media has made propaganda easier to promulgate to vast audiences.
The term “cultural Marxism”, although popular, is certainly redundant. The Communist Manifesto asserts:
The Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.
Hence, it is not merely a question of a new economic system, but the overthrowing of every hierarchical order. Don’t we see that today when every alleged hierarchy is under attack? If the question is why that is, Marx had anticipated the answer:
A spectre is haunting Europe—the spectre of Communism.
He could see the evil spirit of communism and its long-term effects. Even those who deny being communists nevertheless work to implements its programs. Lenin was incorrect in his belief that a violent revolution is necessary for the communists to take power. Remarkably, we see the advanced liberal countries voluntarily accepting the communist tenets. A voluntarily chosen democratic socialism is hardly superior to socialism imposed by force.
Survival of the Species
Evolutionary psychology seems to have become the latest craze, even if it appears at times to be little more than a collection of just-so stories. One of the most recent goes by the name of the Jolly Heretic, although he has co-authored a book with Bruce Charlton. His hedgehog idea is that religious belief has a survival value for evolution. Obviously, then, the cultured despisers of religion are at an evolutionary dead end.
The Jolly Heretic asserts that behaviors that are evolutionary imperatives are then attributed to the Will of God, giving them a moral force. Here, in brief, are some of his main points:
- Believers have, on the whole, better health than the irreligious.
- Religion teaches that life has meaning, which has better survival value than the beliefs of secularists that life is random with no absolute meaning.
- Religious people have an in-group preference, unlike secularists. For example, marriages with someone of a different religion are discouraged.
- Reproduction and family are encouraged, unlike secularists who promote abortion, contraception, and infertile sexual activity.
- The more religious a society is, the more ethnocentric it is.
- One of his more startling claims involves the role of the Executioner. He claims that up to 2% of the population was executed for various crimes in the Middle Ages. This had the salubrious effect of eliminating psychopaths, sociopaths, and other reprehensible types from the gene pool.
The atheists and agnostics of the alt-right, with their love of genetics and evolutionary psychology, should take heed.
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I’m only going to assume that Arthur Konrad has a particular “message” he wanted to present via his reply rather than to authentically claim that Dante’s poetry was motivated and inspired by personal rather than superpersonal considerations. Surely, his comment was simply weaponizing a single line and not an actual attempt at contradicting the obvious and intuitive fact that Dante’s Hell is populated by those who willingly wish to be there. Surely this is some kind of strange and purposeful reading of his.
Still, I can’t help but be nauseated by the idea. Assuming for a moment that Arthur Konrad as a person doesn’t exist and merely the idea of “Dante places [the damned] in Hell according to his own personal grudges” is presented by some bystander: this is actually useful to examine. What kind of reaction is this? Is it not a purely superficial reaction? It is as if one were to read the Bible literally and only literally. It is the lowest and most primitive of readings.
Again, this has nothing to do with Arthur Konrad, but to simply examine what this comment might mean if we take it at face value.
The beauty of Dante’s poetry is that it speaks of the universal in light of the personal. It is the very act of alchemically synthesizing the PERSONAL with the SUPERPERSONAL. It is an imitation of the Incarnation for it is in the Incarnation where we have the UNIVERSAL assuming a PERSONAL character. It is in the Incarnation that the infinite decided to be one gender, one man, one race, one place in time. He baptized the personal.
But look at the comment. It assumes that Dante makes arbitrary and personal choices. What this demonstrates is that the speaker of this comment *would not have recognized Christ*. What I mean by that is that the LOGOS became a SUBJECTIVE person and made SUBJECTIVE decisions and teachings. His parables, His examples, His miracles, His healings were all meant to be understood not *just* ‘his’ own decisions but HIS decisions as well. They had universal import and relevance. The curing of the blind was not just his pity on the blind man, but His saving power on those who seek to see.
To be unable to recognize the universal and ideal in light of the imminent and personal is to fail the “test” of the Incarnation.
It is to fail the “test” of the Eucharist.
“Surely that’s just bread.” “Is this not the son of the carpenter?”
Dante speaks of lofty Florentines that we have never heard of nor perhaps have never been interested in. And yet to dismiss that as “personal” is to miss the very mode of God.
To be unable to understand this is akin to listening to old stories about a small race millennia ago escaping the much mightier Egyptians and wandering through the desert and saying, “I should not be interested because this is just a personal account of Jews” and “there is no value to be learned from the Exodus because it is purely the subjective grudge of the Jewish race.”
The simpleton thus doesn’t understand that it is also the story of the soul coming out of the slavery of sin. Again, I am not calling anyone a simpleton in any demeaning way. There are indeed people who possess the intellectual “dharma” of a simple person and that is totally fine.
For those who are not intellectual simpletons, there is a hidden and majestic universality to the intensely personal accounts of Dante’s closest associates and rivals. Dante expresses fidelity to God’s mode in that THE REALITY AROUND HIM WAS PLACED FOR HIS DISCERNMENT. The men and women placed in his life were not “random” but represented an EDUCATION given to him by God.
Thus, to extol and valorize–to purify and elevate the intensely subjective until it painfully reveals the universal is the intellectual participation IN THE BLESSED SACRAMENT. For the secret of the universe is that God has made this reality as a sacrament: that with the eyes of faith, we can see the miracle of God consecrating the world and accepting upon the tongue and tasting it imminently if we are properly disposed. Dante’s proximal relationships and his milieu were placed there by a guiding Hand and not a matter of chance. To be faithful to this “school of community” demonstrates whether we truly worship the God of order or if we secretly admit to being concubines of Chaos and Chance.
@33, there are certainly resources.
For example, I’ve made this available: ESSAYS ON CATHOLICISM, LIBERALISM, AND SOCIALISM>
Years ago, I wrote a series on economic systems for a forum that is not longer online. I’ll try to dig it up if I still have it.
Here is an article I translated: Economics and Spirituality. I have a few other translations on that web site.
There is a recent book, which I haven’t read, that may be relevant to your concerns: Why Liberalism Failed, by Patrick Deneen.
Then there is the obvious option. If no one is doing a necessary task, they you could take it on yourself.
Many people have looked foolish by failed predictions of the end of the world. Science has predicted the end of the world in the past. E.g., Malthus, DDT, the population explosion (I can’t remember the guy’s name, but he was influential in the 70s), global cooling, the ozone layer, the book On the Beach, not to forget the heat death of the universe.
If you truly believe the world will end relatively soon, what exactly do you think I can do to prevent it? Or perhaps I am not even opposed to the end of the world. The end of one world is the beginning of another.
“People laugh and joke about burning in hell and draw cartoons about it, but almost no one takes it seriously.” -debunker
I know what people takes seriously though.
That modernity is in the process of destroying itself is no news. Doomsday cults of climate-change alarmists is pagan superstition, entirely devoid of interest to those who have learned to think. The public is force-fed with made-up or exaggerated dangers to keep them in a state of fearfulness, which is all in line with modern political theory. Society is based on fear and contracts, you know. And when things turn ugly? Add more fear, add more contracts! Preferably combine the two.
Climate Contracts ought to do it; There’s your commie salvation.
Is it getting hot in here? I have not even begun with the heresies yet.
Money is a unit of measurement, like an “inch”. Capitalism recognizes that money is not capital, and this tends to anger those who are challenged by reality, since it means that they cannot simply dream up money and have it correspond to real goods in the world. If we instantaneously removed the extant circulating money, all the world’s goods would remain as before, with only commerce rendered more difficult as a result. Capital outlasts the end of commerce.
The quantity is in the measurement, not in the inherently qualitative capital – and communists/socialists are usually the ones having difficulties in grasping these concepts. That is why their regimes usually fail to feed even their own populations, despite receiving assistance from the outside. The reason for such a sorry state of affairs is the quantification of capital, or in other words, the destruction of capital. -Free “inches” for all! Come and get them. To say something nice, Marx was in any case a superior thinker compared to Marxists.
In order to square the interests of those of low- and high time preferences, there needs to be established parallel currencies, tailored to fulfill those conflicting interests, and for distinct functions within the overall economy. The same currency for the sheep and the lion is tyranny. Harmony is only possible with a multi-tiered economy.
I apologize for my polemical tone, Cologero. When I visit you on your premises, more courteous manners are due. Any future comments will be better thought through.
But if this is not a sign of the times worth talking about, and urgently so, nothing is. From a Catholic perspective, it basically confirms in terms of scientific prognoses the most dire warnings of the Marian revelations regarding imminent catastrophes.
I wasn’t more specific because the lack of attention this receives from the Traditional camps is general. I find this inexplicable unless it is explained as a blindness to this particular area of research. Are we not told to watch the signs so that we are prepared for what is coming?
Such knowledge necessarily affects how we decide to act, plan for the future, and our whole spiritual attitude to this life and this world. Young combatants in the spiritual war need to be informed about the world situation, and the public is largely kept in the dark and massively uninformed about the degree of danger we are in collectively.
Thanks for your reply. I know your critique of that “label”, but I could think of no more convenient descriptor to refer to metaphysically orientated writers sharing the common ground of principles outlined by Guenon in terms of civilizational critique and esoteric understanding of Tradition.
I am not “disturbed” by anything you or others have said. Rather, I commend that work in general. It is what you have not said which I find remarkable. After looking into this scientific research and beginning to understand how perilous the situation is, already in our lifetime, I am just very surprised that you and most other writers in this current (even though apparently you disdain being associated with them; perhaps because not all are Catholics, but neither was Guenon, and Evola was something quite unorthodox to say the least) have not shown any interest in talking about it in light of principles, when this is immensely vaster than trivial things like that hedgehog idea of Jolly Heretic and Bruce Charlton, which is related in terms of evolutionary survival.
This to me suggests a certain lack of proportions.
I didn’t infer that you have supported capitalism, only that it deserves more attention in line with the argumentation made in the linked article. I said capitalism is “the more fundamental and primary”, not “the most”. Nor did I imply that you lack an interest in science as such, nor did I deny that it is only esoterism/gnosis that is the supreme science (or discipline of knowledge). There are many wrong assumptions in your reply; if there were problems in my comment, which I admit there may have been, your reply is no better. Again, I am only surprised so few in this domain of esoteric science are concerned with the hard scientific fact that modernity is in the process of destroying itself in the near future: we are talking of our lifetime, at latest our children’s. Is this not a matter that overlaps with so many things discussed on this blog? It is the elephant in the room. The fact that your quest for knowledge has been unusually wide-ranging means it would seem likely that this interests you. It is not that I don’t appreciate your topics, but this great question demands our attention, as it affects everything on a worldly level, including the prospects of short-term sustainability of humanity, civilization and Tradition in this world.
Perhaps I misunderstood everything, but it was always my impression that you actually suggested a program for Traditional restoration in the West, related to Guenon’s earlier agenda of esoteric Catholic reform. There has been talk of the possibility of establishing something analogous to what existed in the Catholic Middle Ages. If this was a false appearance, then my mistake.
Now, if we look at the facts of inevitable collapse of modern civilization a relatively near future (due to the end of cheap oil, environmental and ecological catastrophe, and all the implications), this is the only scenario that might even make the founding of a new, Traditional order possible, for the accelerating technological race today will prevent it perpetually. The problem is that human life may no longer be sustainable given certain likely conditions. That would truly mean the end of this great cycle of human manifestation, and the advent of a new world, horizontally discontinuous with the old.
#33, you are like a runner who gets lapped by everyone else, yet believes he is in the lead.
A marker of intelligence is specificity, and you have not been specific.
I certainly don’t know which so-called traditionalists who are speaking about nor what they are saying that so disturbs you. I am not a “Traditionalist”, and have criticized the very idea, quite recently in fact. Do your homework.
I have written dozens of posts on science, so you can hardly claim I’ve ignored it. Unfortunately for you, science as the study of empirical reality is necessarily a matter of opinion (doxa), whereas we are interested in gnosis. If you think science is the disinterested search for truth, then you have walked into the wrong bar.
Moreover, we agree with Guenon and do not expect this world to be reformed in any political way. Nor have we proposed any such program. Tradition is concerned with the world of being, not the world of becoming. This world will end, and we don’t need any scientist to reassure us of that fact.
Capitalism is a symptom not the etiology of the decline. Where exactly have we praised capitalism? Actually this is what we wrote a few days ago:
What exactly do you think is meant by the “liberal countries”, if not the advanced capitalistic states? The spectre of communism seems to be welcomed in them, even if not acknowledged as such.
If I am not writing about the topics that pique your interest, then you should move on.
«Survival of the Species»
How about this?
https://guymcpherson.com/2018/11/extinction-foretold-extinction-ignored/
Perhaps it is time to admit that Guénon was right in his conclusion to Reign of Quantity: this age of the Kali-yuga is not going to be reformed, we have passed well beyond the point of any possible Traditional remedy. It is going to get destroyed, annihilated, and that sooner than we think, according to Science. Martin Lings was right: we live long into the Eleventh Hour. It is time to face the hard reality, that this world is soon going to end. Can Tradition endure in this old world without the habitat and environment needed to sustain human life?
Why are almost none of you Traditionalists seeing this or talking about it? Not interested in the science of the matter? Not fearlessly detached and objective? Or is it some kind of ivory-tower compartmentalisation of knowledge syndrome and tunnel vision? What of the disinterested search for truth?
This knowledge helps to strip us of illusions, so that we can concentrate with even more energy on what is most central and essential in our task here and now. May God give you all the strength you need.
This crisis is, apart from the spiritual dimension of the problem, caused by capitalism, so it connects with what I shared in my first post as well, without anyone having responded so far.
The final part in particular piques my interest. To say that our ethical principles are tied quite literally, to the matter of our biological survival, is probably true, but not in the way that author intended it. God is hard working but not so hard working as to not let nature run its course once in a while. In fact I would go so far as to say the universe is designed in such a way as to not tolerate certain possibilities from coming about and persisting in a stable state. With that in mind, much of the moral compass of modern society depicts a road to ruin equally from the standpoint of judgment-detached science as that of a religious morality. I wouldn’t consider it at all anti-traditional to contend that the two aren’t necessarily opposed to each other. Perhaps we did not know how this could be possible 200 years ago, but now we do.
The problem of course is that having come to accept (or argue from the standpoint) that nothing has meaning and substance beyond a hard code ingrained by nature in DNA, it would be very difficult to ensorcell ourselves to believe in any solution that directly contradicts this assumption. No matter how much he’s convinced in the veracity of this causal relationship, he can’t be one to partake in it.
Interesting theory, Mr Konrad. I’m surprised that you have associates who are concerned about my postmortem well-being.
“As Dante points out, the souls willingly take their place in Hell”
Not really, Dante places them in Hell according to his own personal grudges.
For example, I condemn you Cologero, to Hell for disagreeing with what I hold to be true. Later on, I discuss your verdict with my associates – “Hell is disagreeing with me, and Cologero therefore willingly took his place in Hell”.
“Ironically, modern rightists assume you are a communist if you say that.” – 33
That’s because ‘capitalism’ is a Marxist designation which already stems from a lobotomized, politicized worldview. I don’t know anyone who identifies as a ‘capitalist’, nor have I met a worker who considers himself a slave–that is only the college leftists and reactionary Internet warriors, neither of whom work. People who sell smut and vice to their neighbor know they are doing wrong and if they blame ‘the system’ they are only showing their hypocrisy. If human beings feel threatened by artificial intelligence and machines is this not a poor reflection on them? As far as I can tell the most anti-Christian sentiment in society comes from the very people who disdain labor or are concerned with ‘social responsibility’–the family business on the other hand feels no need to conceal its actions or donate to ’causes’. It may be true that people do not look for fulfillment in their jobs, but then again, who is responsible for severing religiosity from daily life? Is it not those most concerned about ‘race, class, privilege, victimization and social action’ rather than those who are gung-ho for profits? There are plenty of communists and George Clooneys out there but where are the so-called ideologues of capitalism? Randians, perhaps? I wager they have done much less damage to Christian society than the socialists and revolutionaries and have yet to meet one personally. If by capital-ism you mean those who hold capital above God or worship Mammon in the form of ‘capital’ and ‘exploit’ their neighbor with it, again, I have yet to meet such a person–but people who hold communism and equality above God can be met with in abundance.
«Clearly, not much has changed in the past thousand years. The Church today, as an institution, seems more concerned about air conditioners and immigration than spiritual enlightenment. However, that has no effect on the Tradition itself, which is solid.»
The Tradition may be solid ideally, but there is a fundamental difference between the Vatican order of today and what it was in the past. The personal moral character of many of these authorities may not have changed much, but what is radically new is the compromising of dogma, traditions and the sacramental order. For you surely do not deny the well reasoned and documented thesis of Rama Coomaraswamy in ‘Destruction of the Christian Tradition’?
As to the spectre of communism, would you not agree that the spectre of capitalism is the more fundamental and primary problem of modernity, without which that other spectre would not emerge at all? I subscribe to the view put forward by the following writer on Tradition:
http://www.sacredweb.com/online_articles/sw14_blackhirst.pdf
Ironically, modern rightists assume you are a communist if you say that.