Forest Poetry

In a sense, to say that something is true is redundant. The words “is” and “true” essentially signify the same thing. Thus when we say that God is truth, we understand that we are predicating of God absolute being. We leave aside for the present the final, or, perhaps more properly, primary distinction between God as pure being and God as completely transcendent and not receptive of any predication. Our current subject of discussion is not the absolute transcendence of God but God’s relation with creation. That God is truth and that this truth is one, not many, follows logically; for as truth, God is the objective measure by which all other things are measured. There cannot be two separate objective measures of truth; for if these two measures agreed on every occasion, then they would be not two but one, and if they disagreed, then at most one of the measures could accurately be said to be such a measure. A statement that claims that an individual creature has a given quality is true only insofar as it reflects the existence (i.e., the being) of that quality in that creature. This existence (being) is derived from God. Thus the existence of all qualities are granted by God, and it is true that a creature has a quality only if God has granted existence to that quality in that particular. On a fundamental level, even a mundane assertion is true if and only if God has granted it existence.

Keeping this in mind, we move on to the perhaps controversial statement that all men believe in God. That is, all men believe in objective truth, even those who refuse to admit it to themselves. Men of course vary in the accuracy of their belief. We can give a graded list of these different types of belief. The list is in no way exhaustive and merely represents a few examples. We begin with those who have the most perfect belief possible for men, belief that God is one, good, and transcendent. This is the traditional view. Next we have what we may call the scientific view. Many of the proponents of this view vigorously deny God, but yet they do not explain what the one measure of objective truth is. Sensing this problem they claim that they are merely attempting to approximate reality, but this just pushes the problem back. There is still one objective thing (truth) at which they are aiming. If they are aiming at truth, then truth must have existence, or else they might as well be aiming at nothing. This brings us to the root of the problem: there can be no ontological distinctions without metaphysics. Try as they might to denounce metaphysics, it always lurks in their psyche whenever thy make an assertion in speech or thought. That is why we say that they believe in God, only in a very distorted and degenerate form. Even lower than the scientific view is the extreme pseudo-dialectical view of the Marxists.

We say pseudo-dialectical because what the Marxists regard as dialectic is in fact an inversion of the dialectic of the ancient philosophers. For the latter dialectic was a means of removing contingent truths from the psyche as a means of reaching the one unqualified principle of all things (God). For the Marxists dialectic is an insane process of constant and radical revision of theories, a removing of current beliefs but not to achieve transcendence, only further and constant removal of ideas. There is a desire for constant flux and movement, never resting on one theory. For example, there are Marxists today who reject modern science, despite the fact that the their world view was partly based on it. They do this because they claim that modern science developed in a chauvinist, feminist, oppressive culture, and is therefore suspect. By so doing they undermine the very basis of their philosophy, but this does not bother them, for they care not for foundation, only revolution. How can we say that such men believe in God? Because in their frenzy of theorizing and revision, even they wish to assert the truth of a particular theory. Their understanding of truth is so poor that they can claim that a theory is true for now, subsequently abandoning it. But nevertheless, in promoting a theory they are implicitly making a claim about its existence, about it having a relationship to what really is in the world, to the truth. Of course their claims must be taken for the nonsense that they are, for they have no solid ground to stand on.

Only a consciously and proudly metaphysical system can legitimately make claims about truth.

Traditionalists frequently criticize the current state of Western intellectual life and culture, arguing that our civilization lacks a genuine spiritual dimension. This fact is painfully obvious to many, including more moderate conservatives. But we can occasionally run into some difficulty when explaining that we believe this decline to have begun during the Renaissance. For many conservatives eras such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment are the high points of Western civilization when great scientific discoveries and artistic achievements were made. In order to explain our position it is important to emphasize that for us the main goal of intellectual activity (reason) is closeness with the divine, or transcendence. We value many intellectual pursuits, but for us a modern mathematician is not as important as an ancient Pythagorean mathematician. They might both be equally capable of solving a particular mathematical problem, but the modern sees nothing beyond the numbers and the their relations with each other, while the Pythagorean sees the numbers and their relations as a symbolic language for theology.

A good analogy for this idea can be found in the realm of morality and personal behavior. A religious man and an atheist can share a moral belief, for example, that adultery is wrong, and they can both succeed in avoiding adultery because of this belief. But the moral belief and the associated behavior has an extra dimension for the man who acts in this way because God commands it, a dimension that is absent from the man who acts in this way merely because he does not wish to cause any distress to his fellow human beings, or whatever his mundane reason might be.

For the religious man, avoiding adultery is a spiritual exercise, a manifestation of God’s will in his own psyche and activity. Something on a higher metaphysical plain is gaining mastery over something on a lower plain (the human individual). In the case of the moral atheist there is no interaction between metaphysical levels, no transcendence. Rather there are two things on the same level interacting with each other, the desire for adultery and the desire for not causing distress. Both desires are concerned solely with mundane actions. The actions of the atheist are purely horizontal, while the actions of the religious man have a vertical dimension. The latter’s action exist on several different levels, and that which is viewed on this physical level is but a small part of the entire action. They are unified across the different vertically ordered hierarchical levels, and the part of the action on the lower level serves as a symbol for the corresponding parts on higher levels. Thus it turns out that the two actions, that of the religious man and that of the atheist, share a goal, avoiding adultery, but that the action of the religious man has the added goal of following God’s will. In the same way intellectual activity can have two goals, effecting a mundane change and making a connection with a higher level of reality.

It was during the Renaissance and especially the Enlightenment that Western intellectual life began focusing too much on the former goal and neglecting the latter, and in more recent times the latter has been vigorously attacked and deliberately removed. For this reason many see the decline of the West beginning at a much later period, when vociferous and explicit deniers or God became popular, but it is important to keep in mind the true root of the problem, for that is the only way to find an effective remedy.

Knowledge does not come to us in details,

but in flashes of light from heaven.

-Henry David Thoreau.*

Knowledge is generally defined, at last nowadays, as facts integrated by the mental faculty. True knowledge is in fact a total integration of Truth into the whole being, so it is not only the mental faculty but every other human faculty that must participate in the act of knowing. It is for this reason that we say ‘to know is to be’, for in the final analysis what we know is what we are.

Now most men would claim that they do not in fact know all that they are, for example that they do not have perfect knowledge of the physical body. What they mean by this is actually that this knowledge is not grasped by the mental faculty, precisely because it exists on a more contingent plane than reason. If then, extent of the mental faculty is what most men call knowledge, how much greater must be the Knowledge of the Absolute Reality, given that it is all encompassing. This is why we say that God alone possesses pure Knowledge. The knowledge of man is limited and fragile, but the Knowledge of God is unlimited precisely because He is unlimited.

The knowledge of man, insofar as he is limited to reason, is a distant reflection of divine Knowledge. Reason is capable of grasping facts only because it is illuminated by pure Intelligence. Reason is like the moon, the intellect like the sun. Now when a man has harmony within himself, reason is like a pure mirror, light can illuminate and cause it to reflect. On the other hand, when a man is spiritually unstable, the rational faculty is like a crude mirror which distorts those things which it reflects. In this case the rational faculty may still be able to grasp facts, but it will distort them and twist them towards false ends. This is the case with the rationalists of our day. Both of the previous scenarios assume that man does not have direct access to the divine Intellect itself, which is not necessarily the case. When it occurs that a man actively realizes his non-separation from God, his knowledge is no longer his own, but that of God. In this case rational intelligence can contribute nothing to what that man knows, but then serves the function of formulating that knowledge to display it to the world. For man, the realization that he is not other than God shatters the illusion of the ego, which at this point is seen never to have existed, this is why it is said that “an undelivered man is actually a delivered man who does not know it”.

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*The Thoreau Reader. Annotated works of Henry David Thoreau. Life Without Principle: http://thoreau.eserver.org/life2.html