Pascha, the Original Gift
“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but thow away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,” he said and his voice had become almost a snarl.
“Maybe He didn’t raise the dead,” the old lady mumbled, not knowing what she was saying and feeling so dizzy that she sank down in the ditch with her legs twisted under her.
“I wasn’t there so I can’t say He didn’t,” The Misfit said. “I wisht I had of been there,” he said, hitting the ground with his fist. “It ain’t right I wasn’t there because if I had of been there I would of known. Listen lady,” he said in a high voice, “if I had of been there I would of known and I wouldn’t be like I am now.”
Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
The world is not the Creation. The world is what William Desmond calls a second ethos, a kind of inevitable second skin, cultural shaping of the original gift. This is signaled in the Genesis account, where the dual unicity of the Adam, the he and she, discover their nakedness in perception that follows upon the ingestion of forbidden fruit.
Now, the mythic account is not history. History is too shallow, not yet real enough, though bearing the wounds of the Fall. Myth is bigger than history, contains history, if you like, but cannot be comprehended by it.
A people who still reside in a wisdom tradition will know this in their bones. They will understand that The Fall itself is manifest everywhere. It is dust and death, fractured being.
But to the spiritually obtuse, it is otherwise. There is no Fall, just as there is no Gift of Creation. There is only surd existence. That’s just the way it is.
The humorless kitsch, the murderous moralizing and bureaucratic contempt for life we currently endure, the zealous and proud despair is what Hans Urs von Balthasar called “the kingdom of enforced immanence, reigning in an amputated nature.”
Becoming is not self-generating, but the world in its hubris forgets. Or rather, pride and despair are two names for the singular forgetting.
In reality, we only have the barest palimpsest of a story. Vast ages have come and gone, leaving no enduring marks. What we know of the great civilizations is hardly to be dismissed, but it is no more than a trace. How many lost works of Aeschylus or some unknown genius have faded into oblivion? Perhaps when ancient Egypt was young, there were already kingdoms that had risen from the depths of time, only to sink back into the abyss. Perhaps what we know is enough, as a candle is sufficient to light the path from the stairs to the bedchamber, where the soul adventures in dreamtime.
In the high dream, we may touch upon realms lost to the control of instrumental reason. The house of mnemosyn requires such a journey. And sleep, in the ordinary parlance, even the dims can sometimes see it, bears analogical resemblance to that solemn door, Death.
Modernity, let us say with Descartes, though of course, it goes much further back, into the many cycles and civilizations, is a form of spiritual progeria. A society afflicted by this disease is youthfully ignorant, adolescently arrogant, and hopeless with febrile age in a rapidly progressing pathology. One can read William Ophuls’ Immoderate Greatness in the ease of a warm afternoon. It isn’t quite true that there is nothing new under the sun though; being remains unique, irreplaceable, even if the utile categorizes and types are comfortably helpful, and have their place. Yet this non-identical repetition may be a spiral, a circling that returns, but displaced, altered by the trajectory of what is called Past.
The recurrences echo, the collective humanity has been here before, even if it differs in particulars. Déjà vu is not merely a glitch of individual neural feedback, but also a form of ontological memory, a morphic resonance, Rupert Sheldrake might say. So where we are will have been anticipated, and probably has been experienced innumerable times in somewhat altered, different circumstances.
You might discover patterns, and the vatic poet is a prophet, because the poet feels these patterns, lives in the flow of Being that carries the melody. Nature bears this connatural knowing that is perhaps synonymous with Maritain’s cardiognosis, the “eye of the heart.” Aquinas said “where there is love, there is an eye.”
All this, of course, is very different from the surveillance state, which nonetheless apes, degrades and renders obscene the intimacy of care and attention. The world is brute power that may wear a mask of compassion. It will adopt and speak in whatever modal rhetoric is opportune. Worm tongue is shameless in its mocking cynicism, though it can never actually achieve beauty; the puerile, the pornographic, bombastic rage and sentimental cruelty, yes, but not beauty.
Beauty is the radiance of Being, uncontrollable, innocent – those who claim it is a false duessa, untrustworthy, are conflating an appropriation of the second skin with the searing light of original gift.
Something strange comes out of that. Balthasar follows the insight of Bernanos, who understood that Creation is above all “an act of love” and not of reason and justice. Bernanos says that whoever would approach creation with its “moaning of universal suffering that is not silent by day or by night” on the basis of reason or justice must necessarily founder and become enraged. “Revolt, despair, absolute negation” is all that will come of it, for “only love can understand love.”
And here’s the mark of that Beast no nature of creation has ever made. It does not love, though it speaks of love. Josef Pieper acutely remarked the instrumental sadism behind the trick in his discussion of Plato’s Phaedrus in Enthusiasm and Divine Madness, just as Flannery O’Connor unmasked the soft flattery that leads from altruistic bromides to the gas chambers. There’s nothing different from the language of individual rights today and care for woman’s health that stipulates infanticide as the objective measure of its truth.
Having rendered the child a malleable, inchoate ambiguity that awaits the decision of arbitrary will to determine its status of being, the state has gone on to rectify other rigid fundamentalisms. Once the child is born, it must be taken from the narrow fascism of its home to be liberated into the entire gamut of voluntarist delusions. Freedom guided by teleology rooted in the Good is not refuted, but despised as a threat to the spontaneous, purely elective affinities that are ultimately synonymous with absolute indifference and nihilist despair.
If you want to know what is behind the mental anguish or soft cowardice that coincides with the totalitarian desire to entangle the earth in a mesh of legal prescriptions and calculated enforcement, it is not a failure to condone an ever expanding discovery of oppressed perversities. It is the flight from Mystery, the flight from God. Adam and Eve discovered a nakedness of flesh that was never Created. It is not a silly prudery announced in Genesis, but rather the blindness of a certain kind of perception which manifests as a body of death.
And all this, because, as Bernanos noted, “intelligence is crueler than nature.”
What does he mean? Lots of folks, the remnant humanity, not given up fully to the lusts of the intellect, intuitively recognize this reality. The thirst for the local, for the wilds, for touching nature, for slowness, and community, all that is protest, and loyalty to the earth. Blake wrote “the cut worm forgives the plow.” Forgiveness is robust, and patient. It is patient because at some level beneath the shallows of reason, it knows the tenderness of the God.
It knows, if you want the truth of it, that Creation did not begin aeons ago, or with a putative Big Bang. Maybe you can’t think this thought. You might be too caught up in a narrow, univocal linearity. The real Genesis began in a Cenacle on Maundy Thursday, that was like the Transfiguration on Tabor, a proleptic taste of the victory that began in earnest on Golgotha, and in the tomb purchased by Joseph of Arimathea. The seed of the universe was buried in that tomb, and the first flower of its might was announced to the women who came to finish ministrations to the dead Lord.
Time, in the fullness of time, only ever comes from the risen Christ, and that is why the superior sensibilities of those who seek to demonstrate liberality by BCE and the like are just another iteration of the perpetual imbecile.
The insidious evil of artificial intelligence is little more than the technological working out of a satanic logic of rebellion. “In reality, the intelligence does not grow indignant over suffering; rather it rejects suffering just as it rejects a badly constructed syllogism.” Bernanos accuses the mass of mankind as incapable of genuine revolt against evil. The anguish, too, is ersatz, easily grasped as a tool of ambition. The protests are insincere, “looking for a more or less sly justification for their own indifference and selfishness in the face of those who suffer.”
In our current cycle of despair, it is impossible to say if it will bring about apocalypse in the way the early Church anticipated. It’s quite possible, on the other hand, that they were right, only lacking clarity on the long history of humankind, so unaware that even now, two millennia later, it is yet a sliver of spiritual history, and may well be a swift movement towards that end which is both translation and revelation of the story we now glimpse in shadows.
This, however, is unknown to the Machine, that blithe, indifferent spawn of men who have forgotten that they live in the forgetting. These men sought a mode of society that would ameliorate suffering, and conquer nature, ordering it towards ends more attainable than the dream of that late, never appearing kingdom of the God. However, it does appear. The child sees it, and the child-like. Wonder happens. The event of beauty breaks through, even if in shards of broken light, glimmers that sparkle as stars amidst the anguish of night.
The economy of Love is the flourishing of persons. It is the discovery and revelation of true names, which are infinitely rich with ever greater revelation. This is the joy of Spirit, the impossible fusion of the blush of the ingénue and the companionable long friendship of enduring fidelity. And how does it happen?
F. X. Durrwell writes: “It is not a question of reconciling God with us, but us with God, and of submitting to his will to save us. Man must return again to childhood, the childhood of Christ who is begotten by his Father and receives everything from him.” The human heart beats in Christ, and only there is desire truly found. All our striving is made comprehensible by this dynamism, the horizon of the Good that makes of any act a proper action.
Only here is true justice to be found, to be joined to the new creation that is in Christ.
Night and Silence, the No Thing, is also double. Milan Kundera tells a tale about the devils, that they cannot create, but perpetuate malice by ironic laughter. There is never in them the laughter of delight, of sweet and mutual celebration, only the superiority of the sharper, destructive, and cynically seeing-through everything to the foundationless void. The demons indulge a corrosive huffing, abortion of a laugh, a queasy, evil bark escapes from their diabolic gullet. In the same way that the devils emulate the genuinely comic, a false and beguiling fakery can only pass itself off as verified fact when the enchantment of the Gift is repudiated.
The fraudulent magic of the ideological sorcerers is predicated on victims divorced from reality. The more virtual the day-to-day existence of the people, the easier it is to gull them.
The behemoth State is brutalizing. It is a liar, vicious and imbecile all at once. It has a form of Power, capable of ruinous acts. It may imprison, torture, and kill. All this, it does, as a function of its desire to acquire and maintain power, of which its appetite is insatiable. No amount is sufficient, and nothing can satisfy. It is a demonic hunger. There are many images of this rapacious void, vampiric gorging that only results in living death. These are the preta in Buddhist cosmology, hungry ghosts, tear-dropped, ravenous, with narrow necks and bloated stomachs. Or Ovid’s Erysichthon, “this voracity, this bottomless belly” translates Ted Hughes.
And so, the vampire intellect of the archons, manifest as corporate greed and contempt for human beings, the litany is tiresome to repeat, the gutting of virile, masculine virtues, of feminine beauty and nurturing grace, the devastation of innocence and childhood -- all that is diabolic ineptitude. I’ve quoted this before, but Isaac of Nineveh diagnosed the end of it fourteen hundred years ago in the deserts of Iraq. The demons possess keenness, but lack light. “Keenness is one thing, light another. The first without the second brings its possessor to destruction.”
Predictably, what they do is ridicule what is holy. The Cross to them is foolishness, though secretly a terror. The Suffering of Love can only be an oxymoron to the imbecile. The Great Work, the Father’s Incomprehensible largesse, the Creative Spirit that weaves in this Night, escapes their dunce, impaired, virtually non-existent imagination. From out of Holy Saturday, the images of Paschal light spill forth from an inexhaustible spring, the torrent of divine Love.
Some folk worry that heaven might eventually be boring. This is equivalent to saying the God is comprehensible, a reachable limit. Living apart from Imagination, unable to see in that great elemental power anything more than a useless adornment, impractical escapism, in no way a necessary mode with which to approach truth, which nonetheless they confuse with positivist facts, these do not begin to recognize even in Fallen Nature a gnomic key. Being is naturally metaphoric, each creature is semiotically expansive, bearing a secret that can only be read in the light of grace.
This is the work of wisdom, but it is also simple. Simplicity, alas, is very hard for sinners. The Original Gift is that simplicity. It is that flourishing, infinite beauty that T. S. Eliot says we will recognize as the home we both journey towards and come from. Octavio Paz says that it has this double promise, having both the taste of the immemorial and also of the novel, not as tension, but wondrous unity.
One can only know this in the God. “The vision of God is the truth of what man is,” says Bernanos.
The fully real can only be seen in Paschal light. Everything else is preliminary, or a lie, no matter how insistent to fragile mortality. St. Paul calls those who refuse vision “carnal men.” This is not primarily a designation of hedonists or ordinary, vulgar humanity which rarely strays beyond conventional thoughts and prosaic paths. Carnality is more perfectly realized in hyper-intellectual rationalism. It may thrive particularly as an aspiration towards a digital, disincarnate eternity.
Those who worship at the altars of this demon are the priests of artificial intelligence. Virtuality is an ersatz heaven, promising a spurious infinity, lacking the capacity to anticipate the fecund powers of the Resurrected Body. Rather, the artificial intelligence is a practiced mimic from which nothing new is possible.
The possibility of the Machine is a reshuffling of innumerable cards. The deck may be considerable, but it does not contain the gift of surprise, because it is a faux becoming. The Becoming that is Creation comes from En Sof, that no thing, Emptiness coincident with Plenitude, the God who dances, the Triune Bliss who is not bound by finite antinomies.
In short, the heart of love, that glorious freedom of the Holy.
All the propaganda in the world, the hydra-tongued worm, never escapes the eternal return of Ouroborous. It is still an immanent prison, and it is always coercive, and cruel. Google will determine what you should think about. It will select the headlines, and make certain the correct interpretation is presented for your edification. The Enlightened are so kind, seething with disdain for the souls that are rendered servile.
But these masters of technology are just the bailiffs of darker powers, so dim as to mistake the garnishing of their persons for demonic maws as social approbation, fame, and the approval of prestigious institutions, all of which have less metaphysical weight than the leg of a flea.
On this Easter, the heathen rage. They proscribe joy before the God. They would not have David dance before the ark. No decorative eggs shall bear the sign of the Cross. No prayer, no rejoicing that the Christ has defeated the ancient Enemy.
A grifter like Joe Biden renounces the goodness of Creation, and asserts a vile and arrogant refusal of Charity with the zeal of a prophet of Baal. He celebrates a different kind of feast, an infernal sort.
As I said, they’d like to put you in prison for painting an Easter egg. One day they might do it, but victory over Death, the Suffering Knowledge of Love, no, they can’t do that.