What follows is indebted to the fierce anti-monism explicated in The Spirituality of Friedrich Von Hugel by Joseph Whelan SJ, my spiritual mentor of happy memory.
Modernity, post-modernity, secularism, liberalism, progressivism, atheism, agnosticism...whatever you want to call it...is excruciatingly boring. Boring...is the worst! I prefer pain, tribulation, combat, tension...to monotony. Hell itself, I imagine, as unending, infinite boredom. The monotony comes from the monism: Everything is the same, uniform, unvaried, repetitive. The worst thing in my entire life was the boredom of my childhood. I would not wish that on my worst enemy!
Monism is pantheism: everything is divine and the divine is nothing. All of reality is monotone. There is a "depth" to being; there is a "horizon of meaning;" there is a "force" but it is neither good nor evil but simply power; there is one level of reality, nothing more.
There is no "creatureliness" since there is no Creator and no creation. Rather, everything is just there: random, mechanical, void of purpose or finality. There is no yearning for the Creator, the eternal, the Holy. There is no humility, intercession, hope, contrition, gratitude, adoration. There is only an absurd, unending, meaningless universe; and a lonely, naked Ego.
There is mathematical consistency; measurement; statistics; probabilities.
Descartes founded modern philosophy upon the systemic isolation, skepticism, and detachment of the naked, lonely Self. Could anything be more monotonous?
Kant posited that the human intellect finds the real, the "noumenal" unavailable and is doomed to construct its own "phenomenal" reality. Could anything be more monotonous?
Hegel denies any real transcendence or supernatural and traps us in the relentless dialectic (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) of history and a "god of becoming." Could anything be more monotonous?
For Darwin, there is survival of the fittest, for no good reason. There are random mutations. There is no reality above this one so everything is just a senseless pattern of change. Evolutionary psychology everywhere! Could anything be more monotonous?
For Marx there is only power: one group against another. Everything comes down to that. Could anything be more monotonous?
For Freud everything is sex, a crude, materialist, reductionist version at that. Could anything be more monotonous?
Nietzsche is more interesting. But at the end of the day, all we have is a world of "supermen"...male megalomaniacs like Hitler, Putin, Trump and Biden. Could anything be more monotonous?
Men and women are the same, no real difference. Isolated units of achievement, production, consumption and pleasure. Transgenderism is a good option. The lonely, unhinged, unrooted Subject or Ego can be whatever it wants to be."
There is no hierarchy of Being as in: Divine, angelic, human, animal, vegetable, mineral. "Hierarchy" is a bad name. There is no paternity or maternity, no filiality, no spousality, no fraternity or sorority; just individuality. "Patriarchy" (as in "Our Father who art in heaven") is a bad word: oppressive, misogynist. "Misogynist" itself becomes an incoherence as there really is no essential femininity.
There are no angels (I write this on the feast of the Guardian Angels), no devils, no heaven or hell, no eternity, no reward or punishment, no transubstantiation or Incarnation, no final destiny, no spiritual combat, no agony and no ecstasy, no free will, no eternal soul, no logos of the human intelligent and no Logos of creation and within the Trinity.
Consider, by contrast, Catholic reality:
As Creation, our world is enchanted, aspirational, dramatic, eventful, asymetrical, diverse, mysterious, exhilarating, ecstatic, agonistic. The finite, temporal, historical, and creaturely...all that is...points beyond itself to the eternal, all mighty Creator. Everything that breathes...everything that exists...echoes the Love that is eternally, expansively, explosively, eventfully exchanged between the three Persons of the Blessed Trinity.
In all its splendor and magnificence, and its agony and tragedy, Creation is gratuitous, generous, surprising, free, intelligible, purposeful, organic, coherent, and mysterious. Beauty bursts upon us everywhere! Combat...spiritual, cultural, political, familial...is our path to destiny. Heroism, holiness, gratitude, generosity, virtue, intelligence...all invest our identity as made in the image of our Creator.
Freedom is our essence: it is for us to assent to our heavenly destiny, or not. At our core is a heart that loves, an intelligence that understands, a will that decides, freely.
We are joined to each other in the Body of Christ; we belong to each other; each of us, whatever our status or competence, is a very, very small part of a very, very large thing; each of us has a specific mission assigned only to us. No one else can perform it.
Everywhere, within creation but much more so within the creating Trinity, there is difference, dissonance, complexity, nuance, depth, creativity, eventfulness, novelty, serendipity, synergy, agony, passion, delight...all in Holy Love.
Catholic life is a tragedy, as death, evil, sin and Lucifer retain a certain dominance within history until Christ returns. Short of heaven, we are in life-and-death combat.
Catholic life is a comedy: ironic, surprising, humorous, light and free.
Catholic life is above all a romance: a falling in love, with the Trinity of Holy Love and its expressions in all of radiant Creation.
Praise be to God the Father, in Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit. In Catholic life, there is no boredom!
No comments:
Post a Comment