readoldthings

The Use of an Enemy

Some writers make a habit, others a whole career, of writing about things they disagree with. This sort of thing constitutes most "political writing" in the present time, which upon closer examination turns out to be largely the verbal equivalent of pointing and shrieking. That said, it can sometimes be useful to look at what you aren't, as a means of clarifying what it is that you are. And it is for that reason that I'm going to talk about the Roman Catholic Church.

Of course, anyone familiar with traditional Roman Catholic theology that the differences between my views and those of the Magisterium are considerable on a considerable number of matters. But today I just want to talk about two, and how these two stem from one common origin.

Two Stories

I have to drive a lot these days. This has its obvious down sides, but the upside is that I get to spend a great deal of time listening to talks and audiobooks. Occasionally I run out of things to listen to, or my phone dies, or I forget what I had planned, and I turn on the AM radio. In my area we have two Catholic stations, Relevant Radio and the Guadalupe Radio Network. Their perspectives are slightly different. Relevant Radio seems to cater to the sort of audience that thinks Catholic Answers is high theology. Guadalupe is more intersting; a priest on one of its shows made the only on-air reference to Plotinus that I've ever heard on any radio station-- and it's worth noting that he was citing Plotinus favorably and as an authority, in order to explain something about the nature of God. The same priest then, paradoxically but perfectly in keeping with Church tradition, went on to describe the "great disaster" of the "re-awakening of the old Celtic and Germanic Gods." That said, any God is better than no God, and so I'm grateful for these stations and the discussions they field. Frequently there are call-in shows, where a listener calls the station with a problem which the show host, often but not always a priest, tries to solve for them. And it's here that I'm reminded of exactly why I'm not and never again will be a member of the Roman Catholic Church.

Story 1. Yesterday, on one of the shows, a man called in to ask why he sometimes gets a strange sense about certain people, that they seem to have an evil "vibe" or aura about them. The host answered that many people have that feeling sometimes. He then went on to say that sometimes it's God intervening with a message directed at us that we should avoid a person or a situation, but that most of the time the other person is just having a bad day. And so his message wasn't precisely that we should ignore our instincts, but that we should certainly downplay them. And, critically, if we do have a sense or feeling about a situation that turns out to be accurate it isn't an accurate sensation on our part but rather a deliberate intervention, by God Himself, into the course of ordinary events.

Story 2. An Irish woman living in Baltimore called in to ask about a strange practice at a church she attended in her girlhood. It seems that, unlike most American churches, in this church the bread used for Communion was baked by one of the parishioners. And so instead of little round communion hosts, they had pieces of actual bread for communion. The woman, with great exasperation, described the constant presence of crumbs on the floor, and asked whether or not such practices are actually acceptable. The priest replied that while it is technically okay to have bread for communion baked locally, most churches prefer to order hosts specially made by companies set up for that purpose. It's much more expensive-- he went on-- but they're more convenient and you never have to deal with crumbs. The originally caller hung up the phone satisfied with her answer.

Connection and Disconnection

What unites these two stories on seemingly disparate topics is what I think of as a theology of disconnection. In the first story, anyone who has had any experience with these things can tell you that it is simply the case that we can learn to both perceive and to act on planes of reality other than the physical. This is what is meant by the various "planes of being" of Occult Philosophy and the worlds or levels of classical Platonism. The planes or worlds are not metaphorical; they are real levels of being, ontologically distinct from one another. To develop spiritually-- and mentally-- is to become able to function-- to act and to perceive-- on higher levels.

Many of Plato's works are structured precisely to produce this sort of spiritual-mental change in the reader. If one reads the Republic as a work of "political philosophy," as many modern people are trained to, one encounters it as a series of propositions which one can either accept or reject. What do you think of justice? Can it be best defined as a right relationship between the different parts of the soul or city? Would it really be a fine thing to be ruled by philosopher kings? (I answer: We've tried the alternative, and the idea looks increasingly appealing.)

But the text of the Republic makes it clear at the outset that the description of the ideal city is meant as an image of justice in the human soul. The work of constantly keeping the image of the soul and the city simultaneously present in the mind forces the reader to come to see the pattern which underlies both, and thereby to begin to function at the level of patterns.

According to this way of looking at things, if one has a "sense" about somebody, it isn't that it is necessarily correct. Often our psychic senses (the word "psychic" refers to "psyche," which means "soul") are clouded. It is, however, an indication that we have begun to function at a level higher than our individual mind, and this is something that we should pursue. The mainstream of the Catholic Church doesn't have room for this. Having been taught by Aristotle, rather than Plato, it sees minds as confined to brains just as do the materialists it opposes. It therefore requires regular "special interventions" by God in order to account for human psychic experiences.

There's nothing wrong with special interventions by God, of course; we should all be grateful for such things when they happen. The problem is precisely that this is a fragmented worldview, in which atomic individuals exist unconnected to one another and to the life of the spirit. The fragmentation is so complete that any exception to it requries a special intervention but nothing less than the Lord of the Universe Himself-- even great saints and archengels can't talk to you without God lending a hand. The alternative point of view is not a fragmented but a holistic worldview, in which each of us participates collectively in the many unfolding layers of reality.

The example of the communion hosts may seem rather removed from this, but it isn't really. In the case of the parishioner baking bread for communion, everyone knows what they are eating, what it is made out of, and who made it. The parishioner himself or herself is given a special role in parish life, and every member of the congregation can say to themselves, "This bread was baked by one of us." In the usual way of doing things, the hosts simply come from "somewhere"-- like most things in American life, they are made by some large corporation somewhere out there. In the example of the "locally made" hosts there is, in other words, an awareness of the whole which is also present in the layered ontology of the Platonic view, and absent in psychic Aristoteleanism.

The Reality of Connection

The truth is that we are always connected; there is in this Universe no fragmentation. God is absolute unity, and also absolute reality; it follows that the opposite of God is absolute dis-unity but also, therefore, absolute unreality. Therefore disconnection is always illusory, as the defining feature of the unreal is that it does not exist! The Devil Himself-- Cythraul, in the Druidic terms I've been using-- is precisely this, the tendency toward nonexistence.

We are always connected, via all of our actions, all of our words, and all of our thoughts. The question is-- To what are we connected? To a local baker and a local family? Or to a distant corporation-- however well-intentioned-- which we do not know and, critically, cannot love? To a short walk or drive across town with freshly-baked bread, or to an international transportation system and a system of industrial agriculture which requires massive inputs of petroleum and toxic fertilizers and pesticides? To the souls of our neighbors, or only to ourselves? This is our choice.