Wrestling with Powers and Principalities

       

How did we get here, into this medical tyranny, this morass? There are a number of factors at play in terms of how this begins; it seems to me that, first, there has been a long-term "education" into individualistic "buffered realities," to use the same concept that Charles Taylor uses. This is the slow-growing divorce of human political communities from the criteria of the natural law and Reality, and then this divorce filtering down, as is natural, into individuals willing to live for the "freedom from" rather than "freedom for" reality, as D.C. Schindler argues particularly for the American political development out of the Enlightenment: the poisonous "first principle" that political laws, akin to Newtonian physical laws, are constructible by humans for humans aside from theological reality came into full flower in the mid 20th-century, just as mass media began in greater force than ever before through the advent of the television. As Chris Hedges argues in The Empire of Illusion, our political system (in my own understanding, that which disposes us towards Ends, towards God or towards ourselves) has become nothing more than consumer images, that which panders to the desires of the populace. Thus, the Western polity lost its true role as the disposing agent for human flourishing, in principle around the time of the Enlightenment, but in reality in the 20th century as Christian values were subsumed under hedonism glorified. 

Another key to this "education" is the "dumbing down" of the populace in the sense that most people no longer have strong, developed faculties of critical thinking, and especially not the kind of critical thinking that is Aristotelian and Thomistic in nature: the thinking which sees itself, again, in a larger, beyond-self, beyond-culture, teleological cosmos. Tyrants don't want people to think that plants, environment, sexuality, human life, etc, all have a telos which reflects the creativity of God; this implies moral, spiritual, and rational responsibility and limitations. Instead, the tyrant's "education" wants infantilized, isolated, human beings who think that their actions are good but in reality are mis-directed virtue, human beings who cannot adequately critique themselves or, more importantly, their government. 

The meaning of Snowdon and Assange as whistleblowers in the previous two decades comes into stark relief in this situation: Anyone who paid any attention knew, at that point, that governments and cooperations like Google, different banking systems, etc, were already in illegal working relationships to harvest personal information from billions of people--in their own countries as well as others. However, of course this goes two ways: if one can get information at that level, one could also give it, which is a much greater opportunity for power, attractive to those who began to see themselves, a la the Big Tech crash and bailout of 2008, as above the law, beyond it, entities of such great importance that "they cannot fail." These elites also have mechanisms of bribery, blackmail, and control of each other, as the Esptein case only just hinted at. The "spider web" of control, as documented in the film of the same name, leaves little to the imagination about how inter-connected and powerful the hidden elite economy and power-structures likely are. Those creating these structures, in a human sense, do not necessarily have to be totally conscious of the Big Picture of growing power and control and inter-connectedness; only, truly, from a spiritual point of view does this all start to fall into place: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places" (Ephesians 6:17 KJV).  

However, not many are putting the pieces together, either in the spiritual, the political, or the cultural realms, and certainly not the pieces of the Whole. There seems to be a general blindness, a drowning in cross-fire information and rhetoric, an apathy, a rabid sheep-like response to the growing litany of darkness and warped "virtue." This, I think, is largely tied to the mis-education, the mis-catechizing, the slowly rising heat of the cultural waters, which is now almost at the boiling point.

Once there is a frog-like global populace in compartmentalized, isolated buffer zones of reality, a populace slowly boiling in their choices via Big Tech proffering, a populace of people who think they have absolute choice over their own version of reality, but who are, in Reality, tightly tied together in one pot over the flames of technological companies and Deep State platforms, there exists a situation of potential total control. However, there are a few problems with this: one, you have to get them all from attention to their own virtual realities to hyper-attention to the reality you want them to coalesce around. You need them to jump all together out of the pot and into one you have fashioned for your own purposes. This is a difficult magic trick and requires, as does all nefarious persuasion, the creation of two things: a desire to pay attention and follow directions, and a pathos that creates less critical thinking. 

Enter a "pandemic." Along with climate change fears, this concept seems to tick all the boxes: at once, it reaches into the individual buffer zones in the same way, drawing immediate attention, via the emotion of fear (which of course shuts down critical thinking if it is already weakened and habitually dominated by the passions, a la a Bernaysian/Freudian consumer culture). A populace dependent upon mass media, a media more and more tightly controlled by influences outside such as government and private interests, and also dependent upon the maintenance through consumer culture of one's "private universe" in first-world countries especially, is, in a terrible irony, a populace ripe for control. A virulent pandemic could just provide, at the least, an opportunity for multi-national agencies and corporations to create a whole new system that does away with their perennial fear of being displaced by social or religious revolutions, by the incursion of Reality, God, into the construct. Ever are human constructs, Augustine's City of Man, attempting new ways to prevail, on their own power, against the gates of heaven.  

Enter Reset 2021, 2030, etc., all openly looking for catalysts of control. 

Do these catalysts, either climate or viral or bacterial, have to be fake? Not necessarily. Of course the kind of elitism that produces the swathes of unnecessary famines and waste and toxic products and food and weapons will be destructive; of course there are disease consequences for globalism (similar to the advent of the Black Death, a consequence in part of more connection between nations via widening trade routes). The twist is that the elitism does not fare well with widespread competition, by definition, and to be on the top of the world requires a certain imbalance in usage of the world's resources. Does this mean I am a communist? No. Communism and capitalism are a false dichotomy. There is subsidiary distributivism, there are many other models of political and economic life, much more organic ones, ones better in line with reality. However, in a situation of unhealthy, imbalanced systems, systems buffered against Reality in some respect, the coalition of control is a logical consequence, because their very imbalances and lack of cohesion with Reality--natural, eternal, divine law imbedded in creation--mean that they must be propped up, kept up, controlled; this, in turn, in a fallen human construct, like Babel, will mean opportunity for the will of the stronger (whether human or demonic) over the weaker to come into play. All these wills need to complete the circle of power is the right, ubiquitous control mechanisms. 

Of course, we have had iterations of endemics and pandemics over the 20th and 21st centuries, especially as global travel and trade became more interlocked; the oddities, though, associated with the advent of this particular iteration of a corona virus, are suspect at a very new level, and mirror, perhaps, the exponential growth of technological tools and dependence upon them. 

First, there were the questions about the virus' origins. Investigations like the Plandemic films raise questions about patents taken out on the very virus to pop up soon afterwards and any treatment of it. Investigations are ongoing about the spider's web of laboratories and Big Pharma corporations that transcend representative government (what is truly left of it), who were pursuing "gain of function" tests which strengthen viruses, even after government oversight prohibited these (albeit superficial, non-enforced prohibitions). Tests and protocols were introduced by NGOs and corporations, many with leaders at the top either having conflicts of interest or having been propped up financially by god-like foundations,  protocols that either did not work, or actually, it is beginning to be revealed, have caused a medium-level flu or cold-like virus to linger, preventing true herd immunity and driving populations toward remedies that made NGOs and corporations and their monetary masters enormous amounts of money. Definitions were changed in media res, such as the definition of "pandemic" and "herd immunity," to fit the narrative pushed nearly lock-word-step by the mass media. Doctors and scientists who began to see good results from early treatments with well-known, inexpensive medications or natural means were brutally suppressed, their reputations destroyed and their livelihoods taken, silencing many others who might otherwise have spoken. 

The censorship alone, with all the concomitant buzzwords like "misinformation" and "disinformation" and "conspiracy theories" and "anti-vaxxers" and "covidiots" and "covid deniers" (a term loaded with the very weaponized 'denier' which instills its own special kind of fear), should raise questions, but a fearful populace, isolated now beyond the constructs of "buffering" into actual isolation through lockdown and masks, terrified not only by death but by the death of economy and social life, even if these were compromised and deeply unhealthy, is not a population, of course, thinking critically or able to even see the difference between fear-mongering, fact-checking, and the raising of legitimate, necessary, debate. The philosophical art has long been relegated to a few liberal arts outposts and renegades, as Solzhenitsyn said prophetically in the late 70s, and even in these places there are many who have been more-or-less tied to the political or scientific "consensus" and are not willing or able emotionally or psychologically to engage in actual debate. We are a population that is a far cry from the robust debaters that de Tocqueville praised in Democracy in America, those who were living on the foundations and vestiges of the robust education of Christendom. 

One must read Solzhenitsyn's address at Harvard to understand, in part, this de-evolution of our rational faculty and the fundamental loss of courage; CS Lewis also prophecies about this in The Abolition of Man, and Lewis goes farther than Solzhenitsyn: perhaps as a Westerner, Lewis saw the advent, as did Huxley, of a medical tyranny (see Lewis' That Hideous Strength). This is prophetic for our particular situation because Lewis saw that the loss of faith, the loss of rational faculty into silos of individual realities and, at the university level, ever-specialized, esoteric disciplines without checks from the Tao, the Whole, the lack of courage born of unnatural comfort and brutal usage of the material world, and untethered, dogmatic scientism, would provide a wide-open door for those who wish to take control: a global medical emergency, the threat of death in a world that no longer has connection to eternal life or well-trained rational faculties creating the opportunity for elites to cooperate in making vast amounts of money on 'treatments' that can lower "baggage populations" (see Gates' TED talk on lowering populations via vaccines), creating the chance to become "like gods" in terms of managing the health and bodies of the world's population, is a recipe for medical tyranny. 

If this is anywhere near on-target, will it work? Just as in That Hideous Strength, the human agents of this tyranny may find to their dismay that they have let off a nuclear reaction that may play into the hands of the Prince of Death, that entity wishing above all else to maim God's work, that gnawing, writhing legion of hatreds. What we are seeing now are outlying scientists and doctors who are warning that the very intervention touted to solve this feardemic may be instead fueling it, drawing it out for more time and more virulence (see Vanden Bossche, Wakefield, and others). If some of these doctors and scientists are correct at any level, millions of people are compromising their own natural immune systems, a trade for synthetic, man-made help that cannot possibly battle against mutating strains...again, the hubris may be our undoing, the old story repeating itself once again. 

In the end, because of the enormity of this, affecting the entire global population, these potentially dire consequences may be the door for a person, probably a scientist and philanthropist, to provide a solution that "amazes the world." Like the present vaccines that tie health and corporate economic benefit to the abortion industry, this solution will have at its core a compromise with God's law. Or perhaps I am jumping the gun here. I do not know; reading the spiritual signs of the times is not normally an individual exercise. 

What is the solution? God. God's intervention. God, it seems to me, works through subsidiarity most, through nature, through His people. His Church. This, though, has been yet another sign of the times. With a hierarchy crippled morally and rhetorically by years of scandal and mismanagement, and turmoil in the wake of divisions after Vatican II, a hierarchy often mis-catechized and mis-educated in suboptimal seminaries since the sixties and seventies, bishops who think it more important to maintain public approval to the point, some of them, of compromising with the world against even the natural law, many of them recommending even as a moral obligation experimental, abortion-tainted medical technologies, persecuting and allowing persecution of those who try to clear up the corruption, a pope who is at best ambiguous about the very doctrines and teaching that we need to defend ourselves against the new Babel, the laity is of course "sheep scattered without a shepherd" (except a few courageous, more clear-sighted bishops). 

What is left? Prayer and martyrdom, at least now the white version of martyrdom. Prayer and martyrdom to bring the grace of God's intervention. 

Misplaced Desire Revisited

Evelyn Waugh's masterpiece, Brideshead Revisited, is a poetic image, a sub-creation which allows us to feel the desires of a man and the disappointment of them. Charles Ryder is that man, and he is a seething, writhing mass of misdirected desires, for moments of strawberries and champagne with the "right" person, for acceptance, popularity, wealth, status, Sebastian, Julia, recognition of his worth, the leaves in the jungle...a spiral of crescendoing and descending desires, some more lofty than others. If we think of Plato's Ladder of Love, Charles is not ascending neatly, following the philosophical prescription of Diotema, through love of material bodies, to thoughts, to thought-structures, to Truth and Beauty; he ascends and descends wildly, buffeted, a reed in the wind, and gets more and more bruised in the process. His--and our--soul is at stake.

Charles, a needy, emotionally-abandoned child inside, first desires the world that Sebastian inhabits; Sebastian desires Charles' love. In this fundamental tension of desires is the the true heart of this novel, and I believe the deeper poetic image of this book is found through this lens Waugh gives us. Through Charles, through our being dragged maddeningly up and down the Ladder of Love, the desire for hierarchical beauties, through this kaleidoscope of seething desires, and their disappointments, one-by-one,  Sebastian comes into true focus, and finally, Sebastian is lost in the light that is revealed in his suffering, and Charles finally ascends the Ladder to Beauty Itself, at least as close as we can get in this life.

We are led first to desire the "halcyon" Oxford, that repository of knowledge and youth, the youth of the world before the Great War that seared the very conscience and heart of humanity; Charles is all aglow with ascent through study, through art: he is an idealist; his desires are abstract and it seems that he has skipped over the "material bodies" rung of the Ladder and is hurdling after Socrates. However, this is, somehow, not enough; Sebastian, of a different kind of beauty, a wild and very sensuous beauty, literally breaks into Charles' tidy existence, vomiting on his tidy expectations: the only reason this has happened to Charles, our lens, is because he has "unwisely" taken ground-floor rooms: he is lower on the ladder than even he realizes, or perhaps there is some part of his soul that must be fundamentally open to the material world, that ground-floor of the body...perhaps he cannot skip this step, though he tries to, though he sees his "art" as his own means to interpret the physical world in a cold, rational, technological way that distills its beauty in lines and color, flattened on a canvas. He is one step removed from the visceral, changing, dangerous material world by his art. And then Sebastian vomits on this artful world, and he can because Charles has, perhaps on purpose, perhaps subconsciously, perhaps inadvertently, taken ground floor rooms with windows open to the courtyard. 

Sebastian then fills Charles' ground-floor, vomited-upon rooms with flowers; the rooms become a cacophony of sense, a further incursion into the artful, breaking beyond it all like a wave that breaks over the sea wall, and Charles is invited to Sebastian's rooms and here begins his journey, and our journey, into Sebastian's soul: it is, first, his soul we must know more clearly. Through the lens of Charles, we see again the irony: Charles desires Sebastian's world, a world of mystery and myth and war, grand desires on a scale that further break into Charles' soul; Sebastian desires, simply, love from Charles. We see this terrible irony and this is, underneath, the first rung in the ladder for us: Charles' love for the material appearances is not even on the first rung of real desire, and though Sebastian is at least searching for human love crowned by sexual union, it is tragically misplaced, disordered, ill-formed. We see fairly early that Sebastian is like a tree growing sideways, but growing, attempting to ascend nonetheless, while Charles is simply desiring whatever he cannot have, a sterile love, a gnawing, envious desire for possession and acceptance into a chimera: he does not, at first, see the real situation. 

Sebastian does. 

Sebastian sees, clearly, that he is sinful, that his soul is warped, somehow, and that an ascent for him is, in the real world of Truth and Beauty, a descent. Sebastian, as we begin to see through Charles' failure to see, understands the Truth that calls him from the chapel; he hears that Voice calling even through the flack fire of his mother's programmed, unknowable, controlled religion, and knows that, against his own material desires for bodies, Charles is a love denied him because it cannot be a true ascent (that ascent to Beauty a grounding and source of real love), knows that there exists a diamond-hard wall of Truth, and that he will be inexorably broken upon it. Sebastian is a mystic, of sorts, who hears, always, hears the Truth calling, but is broken on the wheel of his own warped desires; he is prevented from ascending the Ladder of Love by some deep deformation, some desire that takes him sideways and down. He sees clearly the cross given him, one of the hardest crosses given; in response, he tries to drown himself in many ways, and we lose sight of him, just over the horizon, as Charles also pursues his desires sideways, horizontally through his own chimeras of beauty: first, Julia as another, more acceptable doorway, or "brideshead"; when this fails, though a wife who simply admires him, children he doesn't even see in the end; we meet him again as he searches again for that wildness, that first step which is also a temptation; he searches for the genuine, real wildness he once found in Sebastian by escaping to the jungle: again, though, he simply paints it and we see life around him through his glass box of art and distance. A sort of theophany again is needed, a breaking through the window that is his art, his glass box. This time, it is Julia on the ship at sea. 

A moment to think about the daring nature of Waugh's vision, of the lens he gives us: Waugh's "break-through" elements are, themselves, temptations. Sebastian breaks through, Julia breaks through, like theophanies, but how can we call these "theophanies" when they are themselves bodily temptations, potential gateways into disorder? This is the lens Waugh gives us, and many readers simply refuse to acknowledge Waugh's unorthodox idea of a "theophany" by claiming that there is no homosexuality in the book, or that Julia is simply a temptation, and Charles' journey is about overcoming temptation. Perhaps the book can be read on this level, but it does not take into account the full impact of Sebastian's role in Charles' life, or the depth, in my view. These views do not take into account real experience of desire in the material world for sinful humanity, for a warped humanity, or the full humanity of Sebastian and Julia, or how the cosmos is, still, even in a sinful state, a wild-ness of theophanies. We are all warped and thus all potential temptations, and yet we are all potential theophanies for each other at the same time. It is daring. Waugh is nothing if not daring. Additionally, Waugh gives us a clue about this through Charles' experience with Lady Marchmain: she is the paragon of overcoming temptation, of climbing ladders through religious desire, and she is no more a theophany for Charles, for us, than Rex, King of Death. Why? This too is daring. Perhaps it is because she is too far up the Ladder; perhaps it is because she is more like Charles than he realizes; she too has created an art, the art of religious manipulation, and has also ascended sideways into her own glass box which must be broken open. 

So is Waugh really showing us wild, imperfect, even warped instruments that are potentially theophanies, namely the two that do look alike: Sebastian and Julia? They are both, at first, for Charles, material bodies, beautiful physically and materially, inhabiting a world of material beauty that is Brideshead; they draw him out, one by one, into the challenge of a real desire, albeit dangerous ones, warped and wild, but real passion, uncontrollable. Charles cannot control it, or them, just like Lady Marchmain cannot control her husband, who is living out desires on the material plane, on the rung of the ladder, that rung that in the Symposium Alcibiades inhabits, that Dionysian desire that goes sideways if banished outside the rational city (see the Bacchae). Charles, in Sebastian, Lord Marchmain, and Julia, encounters Dionysius breaking into his neat world and drawing him out to the world of desire; in this sense, they are theophanies, albeit only reaching his pagan sensibilities. 

However, all three also inhabit a Catholic world, or rather are misfits in a Catholic world, all three broken upon the higher rungs they cannot reach by nature alone. Charles must, perhaps, through them, both acknowledge Dionysius like Pentheus of Thebes, as a breaking into a tightly woven, humanistic, artful, rational world, and yet surpass Dionysius by seeing him, in them, submit to a higher Beauty. 

If Waugh had allowed us to see Charles saved by Sebastian or Julia through a natural, Dionysian love alone, then Waugh would have written, simply, a pagan book, but Charles' desires are disappointed here, as are Sebastian's, as are Julia's. Waugh does not stop with the pagan theophanies, that first rung on the Ladder of Love; before she dies, before Charles meets Julia at sea, Lady Marchmain, in experiencing the theophany of disappointment of desire for a neat, correct, Catholic family world, nevertheless breaks into Charles' dreary glass box one rainy day, like grace falling, and humiliates herself by asking her enemy to help her find her lost son Sebastian. This "breaking in" leads us to one of the most profound moments in the novel: Charles' encounter with Sebastian in Morocco. 

Sebastian is in a monastery hospital, dying; he has descended to the bottom of the upside-down ladder, deeper into the disorder, and yet he begins to serve another more selfish than himself, and eventually, through sickness and weakness brought on by his lifestyle, ends up at the monastery. Charles asks Sebastian for forgiveness, a real desire for the good of the other first entering into the heart of Charles; Sebastian's reply gives us a glimpse of his later holiness: "I asked too much of you; only God can return that kind of love." Charles leaves, saddened, but he has experienced a certain kind of ascent through Sebastian's suffering, and we see another irony parallel to that we experienced by looking at Sebastian through Charles' lens in the beginning of the book: Sebastian loves in a more pure, or focused way, and we see that Sebastian knows, has always known, that all love, to be satisfied, must end in God; like Augustine, perhaps, Sebastian may see but may not be able to ascend yet. But he sees, and Charles is given this sight through the juxtaposition of Sebastian's suffering and his deep desire for God.

The next theophany is through Julia. Julia herself must experience a profound theophany as her father returns to die. In this moment, a prayer is answered, God breaks into the soul of the old Dionysius as he dies, and grace is given for him to ascend, leaping through death towards Beauty Himself. Julia witnesses this and ascends through her father's deathbed ascent; Charles, still on the first rung is beaten and battered, yet the glass is cracked. 

During this period with Julia, Charles meets Cordelia again, another Flyte (Marchmain) sister, who is the messenger of yet another Sebastian-theophany: one of the brothers in the Moroccan monastery tells Cordelia that Sebastian eventually "wanted to become one of us" but that the toll of addiction and a lifetime of misplaced desire has prohibited his living a full religious life; instead, Sebastian becomes the lowest of the low, and is the under-porter at the gate of the monastery. Gone is the physical beauty, gone is the status, the mysterious and beautiful world of Brideshead and upper-class life; gone is the Oxford golden boy; Sebastian has long eschewed them all in his search for love; in place of the chimera that Charles desired is Sebastian, full of arrows, dying slowly as the porter at God's door. This position marks Sebastian clearly as a "gateway," one who opens the gate to the garden, the true house of God, the place where men give up the material desires, move past them, and who serve the sick and the poor in the bywaters of the world. He is, indeed, holy, and from far away, across the world, across the ladders of physical beauty, the beauty of thought and architecture, the beauty even of decorated and ensconced and habitual religion, beyond the "artful" painting, wedding gift of a broken marriage, beyond the procession of Brideshead, Sebastian's ascent calls to Charles, just as Julia was called from beyond through her broken father at the gateway of eternity. 

In a profound conversation between Charles and Julia in Book 3, Chapter 4, Charles calls Sebastian a "forerunner" of his love for Julia; in turn, she wonders if she herself is another forerunner to another love, and Charles uses the language of signs, those elements like theophanies that point to ever-higher, more Real Objects, and says that perhaps all loves are merely symbolic of other loves not yet known. He is more right than perhaps he knows, but it is the first real glimmer of understanding on Charles' part of the Ladder of Love.

Sebastian and Julia, theophanies and symbols, disappear into the light of the Beauty to which both are finally ascending through their suffering in the face of more and more insistent theophanies in their own lives, the "twitches of the thread," and Charles is finally left alone, "all loves dead" in the midst of the war, and Brideshead is overrun by the stamping of boots; as he revisits it at the end of the novel, Brideshead itself disappears into the material, human constructs that end inevitably in conflict, descent, and destruction. The material, the human, is disrobed and revealed as dust; however, within that casing, a flame is lit, a tiny, single flame before the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel. It is, physically, a small beauty, but it is the sign for Charles of the Beauty he has been seeking all his life; it is the quiet step for him up the Ladder of Love, and this Love has been waiting for him all along, calling him beyond the desire for bodies, for great thought, art, human constructs, beyond his own narrations and art. 

So it is, perhaps, that the greatest obstacles to a real ascent are not, after all, those deep and human warpings that are yet still desires for the Real, found by embodied souls in climbing, painfully, through disappointment, failure, and suffering, the rungs of the ladder; perhaps the greatest obstacle is the desire to possess the Real as I desire to possess it, in the neat and tidy package I make for myself, the conditions upon God I place before I will accept His love; like the Pharisees unable to see God in the Flesh, perhaps we create the greatest obstacle to ascent by requiring Him to be what we expect or desire in the small, provincial frame we've created. Instead, He waits for us like a flame we can extinguish: or not. He is the small, humble door of the tabernacle marked by the tiny flame that requires us to lay down all burdens, expectations, pride, especially, perhaps, religious pride, to enter through the small gate.