Mont Saint Michel explained

 I’m reading Augusto Del Noce’s ‘The Problem of Atheism’ at the moment. One of his essays distinguishes between natural atheism and irreligion. The one is the old timey involvement with the god question as though it were a serious issue that needed to be resolved  and required careful consideration; the other is the ‘what’, ‘yawn’, ‘is that still going, is it a thing’.  The latter eye roll is the triumph of empiricism.  

O.K. you know all this so why am I bringing it up? We got on Sky recently. My excuse for this is that the ash trees have grown so tall and so ivied that signal from the satellite is impaired most of the year. So Sky. Tonight we were flicking through the program list and spotted a documentary on Mont Saint Michel. That could be interesting. It was as an example of the dismal worship of science. Nothing much was mentioned of the religious origins of the world heritage site merely that there was a legend of the founder Bishop  being touched on the head (or in) by St.Michael in a dream causing a hole to appear in his skull. Sure enough in a reliquary a skull was found with just such a hole. Then we had an expert in this curious condition explain it to us as a result of a cyst. This was accompanied by 3D graphics. Then there was the age of the bricks which are examined for magnetic orientation pinpointing the time of laying within ten years. More explaining coated in the white alb of science, graphics winding through the compass of reality.  

There was no mention of the fact that Mont Saint Michel was a Benedictine foundation given to them by Edward the Confessor or that after a couple of centuries of absence they returned in 1968 or that they were replaced by the Monastic Fraterneties of Jerusalem in 2000. Maybe they could have used a few graphics from a Knights Templar movie for that. Nothing but the design of the sluice gates that keep the island from being silted up and losing its unique isolation from the mainland. An engineering marvel, awesome hydraulics, cams opening and closing.

 Its possible to know everything and understand nothing.

Maybe I’ll fire up the chain saw. 

Augusto Del Noce and Scientism

 I have been reading in, or letting my mind dapp (fishing technique with dry fly) on ‘The Crisis of Modernity’ by Augusto Del Noce.  How right he is on scientism and the denial of transcendence but it is ironic that the agents of stupidity Marx, Freud and Reich that he castigates are now utterly exploded.  Was it that they had their work to do and having done it they and their works and pomps were dragged down to Hades among the gibbering shades that require footnotes?  Scientism is still dragging its sullen explanations around but during Covid their inadequacy became patent.  True Science should be full of contrary positions but the Follow the Science sort of Science with its one true position must now be seen as foolish.  Of course those clothed in the alb of scientism will never admit that they were wrong and it may be the case that they haven’t realised it yet.  Even philosophers, those village explainers, have been duped or else rendered fatuous by the fear of death.  When this crisis has passed the rump of the mandate friendly thinkers will find their other hand.

Kathleen Nott's Original Sin (The Emperor's Clothes 1954)

You will have been told if you are on the conservative spectrum - ‘I am surprised at a person of your intelligence holding such views’. The imputation is that your apparent intelligence is merely the surface sheen of education and that beneath it all you are as thick as a short plank. This of course is a variant of the ‘No True Scotsman’ fallacy.

I, for my part, am not in the least surprised at Kathleen Nott in her book Emperor’s Clothes (1954) carrying the banner of the Church of Reason like St. Joan of Arc against the perfidious neo-scholastics. And who were they? Graham Greene, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers amongst others and all of them bemused by the doctrine of Original Sin. She writes:

The writers whom I discuss and whom I call neo-scholastic, because they are reverting, at various speeds and from various directions, to a pre-scientific philosophy, try to do just this. Chief among the dogmas which they try to import into our intellectual outlook is the dogma of Original Sin, which is certainly the psychological foundation of Christian orthodoxy. This dogma implies, not that we do not or are unwilling to use our reasoning powers upon our own natures, but that we are incapable of doing so.

In another swingeing blow at ‘original sin’ she states:

The disparagement of scientific method, and the refusal to admit that its applicability is potentially unlimited, express themselves among those who are not yet wholly convinced by dogma in general statements of the type—"Our moral progress has not kept pace with our material progress"; and among those who have become converted, in statements about Original Sin. The belief in Original Sin, the belief that human beings are born essentially 'bad' and cannot become 'good', except through supernatural assistance, generally implies in practice that we cannot become better by knowing more about ourselves and about the nature which we share with others.

She frequently reverts to the subject, tirelessly:

All dogma, in fact, including, and especially, the dogma of Original Sin, divorces us from real and natural morality, which can only be taught us by personal and individual love, generally experienced early and unconsciously. If we cannot learn out morality from that reality, we shall learn it from another: hate.

An initial faint grasp of the scope of the doctrine gives way to journalistic distortions. What is the doctrine of Original Sin when it’s at home? The Maynooth Catechism put out in 1951 has a succinct definition:

Because of Adam’s sin, we are born without sanctifying grace, our intellect is darkened, our will is weakened, our passions incline us to evil, and we are subject to suffering and death.

In 1954, nine years after the disruption caused by the pleasantries of the Third Reich you would have thought that the sense of a propensity to evil that could overtake a whole nation might make the suffix Q.E.D. after that definition seem a given. No, no, it was the Prussian father or mother or inflation or something, anything; oh, make a cup of tea.

Nott studied philosophy at Oxford taking her degree in 1929 so the bright ‘vorpel’ blade of verification smites right fiercely. (Oh Vienna, it means nothing to me, this means nothing to me: Ultravox)

 Thought that is concerned only with truth and is confident of its capacity for verification, for instance a scientific theory soundly based on investigation of observable facts, looks on criticism as an aid to development, a welcome corrective. In the Albigensian Crusades and in the Inquisition, the Church, we lament to recall, 'defended' its dogmas only too vigorously. 

That could have been written yesterday. Did the gates of ‘Vienna’ withstand the neo-scholastic horde? Basically they died off. In 1957 Harold Macmillan told the British - “You’ve never had it so so good”. Then came the 60‘s and so on and so forth.

No Kathleen, I’m not surprised at a woman of your intelligence espousing scientistic doctrines and shabby distortions of your opponents views. That maybe is a sin but it’s not original.

The Emperor's Clothes

Chalk Circle

Reading Helen De Cruz’s lucid post
mystical perception
(crossposted at Prosblogion:
mystical experience

I was reminded of the Caucasian Chalk Circle in Gurdjieff’s Meetings with Remarkable Men.

 I was deep in my work when suddenly I heard a desperate shriek. I jumped up, certain that an accident had happened to one of the children during their play. I ran and saw the following picture:
In the middle of a circle drawn on the ground stood one of the little boys, sobbing and making strange movements, and the others were standing at a certain distance laughing at him. I was puzzled and asked what it was all about.
I learned that the boy in the middle was a Yezidi, that the circle had been drawn round him and that he could not get out of it until it was rubbed away. The child was indeed trying with all his might to leave this magic circle, but he struggled in vain. I ran up to him and quickly rubbed out part of the circle, and immediately he dashed out and ran away as fast as he could.

Such is the case with De Cruz - a scruple of chalk is mighty powerful ju-ju. ‘Chalk’ here represents the secular academic world view in which the naturalistic criteria of what counts as data apply. This is readily seen in the comments on New Apps which would be her home planet. For them subjective reports even if consistent and community wide cannot be the basis of a rational assessment particularly when other communities with different practices and different fundamental beliefs also achieve states of gnosis. These are classic rejoinders from within the redoubt of scientism and induce what in the tales of the Fenians was called a ‘magic sleep’ (suan draíochta). On Planet Prosblogion, very very far from this one (sorry!) there is an attempt at rationalist engagement which is worthy but has to fail and not just because the judge is wearing a lab coat.

In the end someone has to rub out part of the chalk circle to release you.