Behemoth: The Gospellers of Leviathan

 In Revelation 13, St. John sees two beasts rising. The first beast emerges from the sea as a global imperium:

Then I stood on the sand of the sea. And I saw a beast rising up out of the sea, having seven heads and ten horns, and on his horns ten crowns, and on his heads a blasphemous name. ² Now the beast which I saw was like a leopard, his feet were like the feet of a bear, and his mouth like the mouth of a lion. The dragon gave him his power, his throne, and great authority. ³ And I saw one of his heads as if it had been mortally wounded, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world marveled and followed the beast. ⁴ So they worshiped the dragon who gave authority to the beast; and they worshiped the beast, saying, “Who is like the beast? Who is able to make war with him?”

⁵ And he was given a mouth speaking great things and blasphemies, and he was given authority to continue for forty-two months. ⁶ Then he opened his mouth in blasphemy against God, to blaspheme His name, His tabernacle, and those who dwell in heaven. ⁷ It was granted to him to make war with the saints and to overcome them. And authority was given him over every tribe, tongue, and nation. ⁸ All who dwell on the earth will worship him, whose names have not been written in the Book of Life of the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.

⁹ If anyone has an ear, let him hear. ¹⁰ He who leads into captivity shall go into captivity; he who kills with the sword must be killed with the sword. Here is the patience and the faith of the saints.

The proper hermeneutic for Revelation requires not only a deep knowledge of Jewish symbols (found throughout the canon of scripture), but a level of historicism. What St. John sees is not simply a metaphor for an invisible battle. Spiritual realities are manifest empirically because there's no radical ontological distinction between the physical/visible and the invisible. It's whether we have eyes to see. Being literate in the registry of Jewish-Biblical symbols opens the key to history. This knowledge only becomes clear to the saints when Christ our Lord opens the scrolls and seals. Preterism is only partially true: the things of this Apocalypse (literally unveiling) of Christ would happen soon and continuing on until the Eschaton. Revelation is a church book of history, what will happen until the End.

Hence, it's right to see the Sea Beast as the Roman Empire. The sea is the realm of chaos and of the Gentiles. It is the realm God has dominion over, yet His people constantly struggle with (e.g. Israel locked in battle with the Philistines). The Sea Beast is none other than Leviathan, the monstrous entity (which may or may not be some sort of crocodile of dinosaur proportions) which rules in chaos. Rome certainly represented a kind of Leviathan. Peoples of the world were subordinated or bought in. The Empire had many heads and made of many animals (a successor power to Persia and Greece in Asia Minor and the Levant). The Leviathan slaughters the people of God and blasphemes His Name (Jesus Christ), manifest in Rome's varied persecutions of Christians. Rome was a goddess, along with many her emperors. Loyalty meant offering incense to the genius of the emperor, which faithful Christians resisted and refused.

But to reduce Revelation to preterist dimensions is to miss its full impact. The spirit of Leviathan would live on. I would argue that, generally speaking, the spirit of Leviathan left the Roman empire as it split and molded a new Leviathanic entity: the papacy. The bishops of Rome seethed with jealousy as Constantinople took prime place among the old patriarchal sees. When the west collapsed, Rome was alone among the victorious Germanic nations. It returned to the Empire for brief periods, and it remained in communication with the Capital, but Rome had become a faded memory. While a century of Greek-speaking bishops kept the peace, the aristocracy eventually gained control of the see. And this aristocracy became a kind bedrock for a new order of things. Rome's power and privilege were asserted increasingly against the eastern bishops. Roman pontiffs sought to clear out the kind of bureaucratic corruption, making Rome into the throne of angels (which doubly meant clerical celibacy became a norm). However, to make it voice heard it needed allies. Rome had much symbolic value for any upstart kingdom or empire, and so many flocked to kiss the papal slipper. Charlemagne played ball, though many of his successors chafed under continued claims of Roman dominance over imperial politics. The Normans became a vicious battering ram for papal interests out east. The degradation of the Roman empire was complete in 1453. The Christian world seemed open to complete unity through the unifying factor of the pope (who, since the 14th c., had proclaimed his office as a necessary factor in salvation).

Of course, on paper this reality was always tenuous. Popes and emperors bickered and fought. However, the result of these conflicts was almost always papal victory. The Investiture Controversy ended with the symbolic victory of Canossa. The Babylonian Captivity was less of a defeat of the papacy as a temporary transference. The Conciliar movement ended in failure, as pressure from the Turks meant unification under the papacy even more important. Nevertheless, Christendom was considered to be a seamless whole. Princes could ignore the pope, or even quarrel with him, but it was all under a single order. Fights were often not about disrupting papal power, but claiming it for one's self. Hence, Henry VIII (as far as his own reign is concerned) was not exactly a break with the doctrine of the papacy. He had embraced some Lutheran doctrines temporarily in the Ten Articles, but the key to his "reform" was to transfer papal powers to the monarch. The reversion to Roman doctrine in the Six Articles (which saw the execution of Robert Barnes and two other "Lutherans") was a pivot, but still continuous with Henrician policy. The key goal was ecclesiastical supremacy, a monarchic papalism, a rex sacerdos. Edward VI functionally reversed this policy, as the Somerset Protectorate advanced a new kind of monarchic-republicanism. Elizabeth cemented it, refusing the title "head" of the reformed Church of England and opting for "supreme governor". This change might seem simply like semantics, but it impacted the role the monarch had within the church (and the greater society). The Elizabethan church saw itself as broadly Reformed, linked to other churches, aware of England's own limitations of society. The major tell for a Leviathan is whether it's possible to really imagine a world outside of one's own. The Henrician reforms were a pale shadow, showing the major crackup happening across Europe. But for Medieval theologians, such was simply the world.

Thus, if the Papacy exudes a certain "spirit of Leviathan", as the supra-state entity that claims absolute power over the nations, then its advocates represent the "Land Beast" of St. John's vision:

Then I saw another beast coming up out of the earth, and he had two horns like a lamb and spoke like a dragon. ¹² And he exercises all the authority of the first beast in his presence, and causes the earth and those who dwell in it to worship the first beast, whose deadly wound was healed. ¹³ He performs great signs, so that he even makes fire come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men. ¹⁴ And he deceives those who dwell on the earth by those signs which he was granted to do in the sight of the beast, telling those who dwell on the earth to make an image to the beast who was wounded by the sword and lived. ¹⁵ He was granted power to give breath to the image of the beast, that the image of the beast should both speak and cause as many as would not worship the image of the beast to be killed. ¹⁶ He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, ¹⁷ and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.

¹⁸ Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man: His number is 666.

 In the preterist reading, the Land Beast is faithless Israel, the Behemoth (perhaps some kind of Mammoth-type of Elephant) of Scripture. Israel was the Land, the orderly and peaceful place of prosperity (man can't live on the waters). Faithless Israel sold its soul (viz. the Temple) to the Roman Leviathan. Priests and scribes aided Rome in its over-lordship over the People of God. Christ and His Apostles did not advocate violently overthrowing Rome, but there was a reason why Zealots (like Judas) found Jesus as an attractive preacher and advocate. Of course, Jesus refused the overture for violence and Isacariot sold him for a bag of coins (to recoup the losses of his money-grubbing revolutionary days with his Master). 666 is perfect imperfection, the heavenly triad without its totality. 7 is the Kingdom of God's number, the perfect marriage between Heaven (3) and Earth (4). 666 is a fraudulent claim to be the kingdom of God. Pax Romana was a lie, built on corpses and oppression. The Behemoth brings about this loyalty, pretending to godliness but defining piety through the Leviathan. Submit and subordinate, or be destroyed. The Mark of the Beast is how you do business, requiring a selling of your mind (forehead) and strength (right hand) to the regime of the Beasts.

However, the historicist would take one's view towards the sanctification of this universalist regime of conquest. While the above may seem anti-Catholic, it's not. While papalism is a devilish doctrine, many western/Latin Catholics did not see the papacy as definitive of their faith. They may have simply rejected his pretensions to grandeur. Roman Catholicism would progressively center on the authority of the pope as pope, not simply an ancient and venerable episcopate. However, allies of the papacy would promote this doctrine to the four corners of the Earth. Papal legates, inquisitors, and tightly allied monastic orders promoted this doctrine of universal dominion as far as they could. After the Reformation, as papal power shrunk, the claims ballooned. Jesuits exhibited the worst of this ultramontanism, which only intensified over the centuries. Vatican I was perhaps a highpoint, even as the papacy ceased to be in any real sense a Leviathan. Nevertheless, the papacy would eventually contribute to a new Leviathan, aiding it as part of a new Behemoth.

It's important to not have a flat symbolic register. The sea is not simply a code for the Gentiles or chaos. The sea itself imports a kind of meaning. Peoples defined by sea-faring often become imperialists, not simply confined to the geographic limits of their own lands. Self-possession (empire) is a political good, but mutates into domination of others (imperialism). And the most effective way to open up this possibility is the ocean. Look at a map. If you look at land as the main thing, the world seems broken up and disconnected. There are many islands and continents that are apart from one another. However, look at from the vantage of the waters. The whole world is connected and single unity. In the Heavenly vision of the New Jerusalem, St. John sees the waters like glass. They had become stilled. Earth and ocean became peacefully wedded, one in order and harmony. But that's the reign of 777, not 666. Instead, maritime empires often become imperial Leviathans. Rome's shift into imperial overdrive was when they assumed Carthage's role. The Mediterranean was the Roman Mare Nostrum. And as this Leviathan appears upon the coast to swallow up the world, Behemoth calls all to kneel down before him and worship. It is this synthesis between Leviathan and Behemoth that reboots the Babel project, to build a tower to storm the heavens, to create a gate of the gods, to make the demoniac haven of Babylon. Together they make Hell on Earth. Yet, this prophecy is in God's hand and it is part of "the patience and the faith of the saints". History is part of God's judgement.

While Christendom ruptured, many powers sought to fill in the gap. The Renaissance/Reformation shattered this dominion, but many nations scrambled to fill in the gap. Henry VIII's fever dreams of rex sacerdos are pathetic, but it was the goal of not a few. The repeated early modern fear was of "universal empire". Spain seemed poised to become the successor to papal Leviathan. Then the Dutch and French poised to claim the mantle. All of these nations found incredible wealth and power through the seas. However, it was little England who would become dominant. At first, the English had perfected a self-possessed empire under the Whigs. It's perhaps a fit of irony that it was the Tories who advocated a Blue-Water policy of naval domination, not the Whigs (a term usually associated with future liberalism). However, the British Empire rapidly shifted from an empire into imperialism. George III had reinvited Tories into power, exacerbating tensions (rather than pursuing synthesis) with American colonies. The resulting shatter realigned the interests of finance and commerce (which bankrolled and managed the manufacturing interests in the country). The aristocratic landlords who ran finance had at least a public spiritedness, being the same men who ran Parliament. Now, with the flood of European capital into London after the Napoleonic Wars, Britain shifted into free-trade empire. The idea of an integrated, autarkic, state gave way to corporatization (a Tory philosophy). The troubles with the East India Company metastatized. By absorbing India into the empire, the empire was absorbed into the merchant company. Britain exerted power over the world through market-domination. The Leviathan broke down all barriers. Latin America became a British colony, flooded with cheap manufacturing goods and London capital. Foreign ministers knew English better than Spanish. The British Empire dominated the world with a comprehensive, universal, secular Christendom: liberalism.

America and the nascent Germans feared this turn of things. They pursued a land-based empire (a mix of good development and abusive conquest). However, both were tempted to the same spirit. Ultimately, America embraced this Anglophilic tendency, as the concern for national protection fused to an internationalist free-trader outlook. J.P. Morgan and Rockefeller helped unite the interests in the New Freedom of Woodrow Wilson, advancing the ideological matrix of the "new liberalism". The 20th c. saw a shake-up as the early modern quest for Leviathan-hood repeated itself. The Anglo-American alliance, fusing London finance to New York, was an evolved Leviathan. FDR had set the stage for the transmuted new liberal global dominion.

But these Leviathans (whether British or Anglo-American) required emissaries. It's here that the double-faced nature of evangelism appears. Such is not to condemn all missionaries. The Moravians advanced the gospel and the kingdom of God on their own terms. The British Empire had not yet become Leviathan, and the need to manage/corrupt/direct evangelism was weak if not non-existent. Per the nature of this beast, the power is almost magnetic or gravitational. Many "conspiracy theorists" assume these sorts of degenerations only happen because a central committee is directing things. It is true that power-players do involve themselves to advance their own goals and that of the dominion. However, the pull of legitimacy, symbolic potency, and access to resources brings many in. The relationship between Leviathan and Behemoth is synthetic and mutually reinforcing. The sea-wolf Normans sought symbolic power and legitimacy from the Papacy, and the Papacy sought wealth, soldiers, and a political shell. The same operated within the British and Anglo-American imperium. Men came with bibles and deeds, they mapped out territories as they evangelized the nations. Conversion meant submission to the Empire and obedience to its ruler (over one's own or through one's own). It's not that there wasn't anything worthwhile in the deal. The British were at least an alternative to some of the despotic and corrupt princelings that dotted the land. The East India Company may seem more fair or even-measured than the Mughal emperor or the Marathan princes. The point of this analysis is not so much a utilitarian comparison between maximum good versus necessary evils. The point is the construction of a demoniac system where the world outside becomes unimaginable. The world-system becomes confused with the world as it is. Liberalism became, simply, the rational and "common-sense" way of things. There was no alternative.

And thus the evangelists did not simply preach the gospel (if they did), but liberalism. Free-trade became a mark of civility, which sold many peoples on the idea of Christianity as a means to an end. The preachers may have looked like a Lamb, but they spoke with the voice of a dragon. They performed miracles, even of fire from the sky. Perhaps in papal times this referred to real wonders, but perhaps it referred to alchemical knowledge. Certainly "fire from the sky" is a shocking wonder when coming from the barrel of a canon or from the cargo-hold of a bomber. Drone strikes seem almost like divine wrath poured out on a people. It's the reign of 666. And preachers embrace and advocate it. The gospel is devotion to the Anglo-American imperium. The United States became what it feared and now simply marches towards its own pseudo-Zion, synthesizing Leviathan and Behemoth to build a Tower of Babel. Vehicles like the IMF, the World Bank, NATO, and a whole host of other funds only advance the cause of this world-prison. Weber was wrong to analyze things from the perspective of industrial capital. It was not on the verge of creating a prison of iron, but financial capital built a ghostly prison. Like the movie They Live!, the ideology is so thick that our eyes are useless to see it. And worst yet, the materialist spirituality of this regime makes not a few hostile to its overthrow. If not for God's grace, even the elect would be deceived and worship the Leviathan.

It's a dark reality to reckon with. Some missionaries snapped out of these paradigms. Some others did better than they knew. As St. Paul recognized: even those who preach out of jealousy to cause trouble will advance the Kingdom of God. The attempt at domination is never complete and never self-contained. The Lord can harpoon Leviathan (as He did, mortally, on the cross). Nevertheless, despite making good from evil intentions, it's sad to think how many missionaries are simply parts of Behemoth. Whether its Evangelical NGOs who spy for the imperium or the papacy as a vehicle for Cold War propaganda, both are part of worshiping Leviathan (even as they resist corrupt or oppressive princes). Pope Francis has embraced "ethical capitalism", siding with global capital firms and Rockefeller money. He is not a radical advancing "liberation theology" (a mixed movement whose softer edges gelled with center-left capitalist interests), but part of Vatican 2's embrace of the Anglo-American dominion. If this argument seems hard to believe (considering how critical Francis is of the United States), one only has to see the MO for CIA operations. The CIA (which worked as a network for many Anglo-American financial interests) often supported regimes mildly critical of the US to hide their own influence. The CIA usually bankrolled center-left parties (Labour in UK, Christian Democrats in many Catholic countries, etc.) to gain effective loyalty, but superficial opposition. Hard rightists tended to misunderstand the CIA's more complex maneuvering. As degenerate as Joseph McCarthy was, he was allowed a lot of leash until he began attacking the Pentagon and CIA as red-infested agencies. Rightwinger movements that emphasize American nationalism are stooges, often oblivious to how empire actually operates. They are often useful battering rams for oppositions, but become liabilities when given too much latitude.

International and ecumenical Protestantism engaged in widespread evangelism at behest of its neofeudalist liberal corporate overlords. The East India Company bankrolled not a few evangelists (High Church, Evangelical, and Anglo-Catholic) to preach in India. British finance aided evangelists to spread throughout Asia and Africa. However, these efforts were small-potatoes when compared to the Rockefeller money that basically built up a Protestant supra-church. Often siding with the "modernists" (though not exclusively), the Rockefeller Foundation aided efforts to send missionaries to China and abroad. Combining evangelism and social science, these preachers brought the gospel of new-liberal civilization. Believing in the Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man, these evangelists emphasized the applied social gospel of medicine and social planning. Many had good intentions, but the result was uplifting foreign nations into fully compatible market economies. Labor would become available for corporate interest, natural resources would become available for investment, and infrastructure would move these goods to the ports for the World (Anglosaxon) Market. London set the gold prices until the Bretton-Woods synthesis, where New York would have a says as the senior partner. The shift away from the Gold Standard meant a more open dollarization of national economies. But the point is that the modernist evangelists were to save souls through their bodies. The exclusivity of the gospel was too polarizing (and could engender missionary opposition to imperial policies). The Behemoth of Modernist ecumenical Protestantism (crystallized in the World Council of Churches) would give way to the secular religion of Humanism, where NGOs replaced churches and missionary agencies. But it doesn't really matter how markets are opened, resources made available, and nations are given the Mark of the Beast. Modern science seems like a wonder from heaven. Sometimes they need some "fire from heaven" to remind the people that Leviathan is god. Either way, whatever works.

Hence, "conservative" missionaries have also played a part. Many Evangelicals were rabid liberals, seeing free-trade as a necessary belief for true Christianity. Some Evangelicals of course turned on the imperialist vision. Missionaries at time opposed imperial policy if policy was better severed by liberalizing non-Christian groups (such as Muslims in Africa and Asia). Somtimes missionaries realized the game and sought to turn these indigenous churches into autocephalous entities, with their own leaders and without dependence on metropolitan agencies or evangelists. Nevertheless, the interests of the imperium were not always clear-cut. As the book Thy Will Be Done makes clear, the conservative (even fundamentalist) Summer Institute for Language (part of the Wycliffe Bible Translators organization) provided logistics for the Rockefellers in the Amazon. These missionaries inadvertantly marked out where the indigenous people lived and how strong they were, clearing the way for mercs (working for Rockefeller allies in Brazilian government) to slaughter them. Is it any wonder that Putin's Russia fears foreign missionaries? Putin is not an Orthodox supremacist (he praises the "historic faiths" of Russia, including Jews, Muslims, and Lutherans). He simply wants to protect Russia from any more intrigue. Thus Jehovah's Witnesses and Baptists are often prosecuted and fined to drive them away. Similarly other nations fear or welcome American-influenced missionaries based on their posture to neoliberal globalism. They either embrace or reject the overtures of Behemoth.

It's really depressing to realize these features. I don't think a church being allied with a particular state is necessarily damning. Perhaps unwise, but not disastrous. However, the threat of Leviathan will often turn such churches into allies of the Beast, a constituent for Behemoth, a polluter of the gospel. Most of the globe lives under the spell of TINA, the technocratic management of all things for the sake of Freedom. Free markets means anything at any price. Goods, ideas, bodies, souls. The Mark of the Beast gives access. The past and future are erased into an ever recurrent present, the same way the amillenialist of the Medieval era was a negative infinity. The looming shadow of the future ceased to be, as heaven and hell coexisted temporally with Earth. It's this view which has become "common-sensical" in literature and film. The idea of an End is gone, simply unimaginable. St. John's vision, the Revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ, ought to shatter the illusion for Christians. However, many who claim this name, who are "of the Land", become elements of Behemoth. God damn these beasts and the Babel they seek to build

Levianthan: Walter Lippmann and the technocracy of New Freedom

Walter Lippman is name rarely heard popularly, yet is a pillar of the current world order. An American scribbler who helped pioneer "journalism" as a social science, his Public Opinion remains a textbook for the disciple. His Good Society forged the basis of the "new liberalism" that he advocated, reflected in Woodrow Wilson's "New Freedom" as well in the trans-Atlantic Lippmann Colloquy and a successor/sub-division, the Pelerin Society (which had such free-trade luminaries as von Mises and von Hayek). My first acquaintance with Lippmann came obliquely through Chomsky/Herman's Manufacturing Consent, a book on the media-complex that takes its title from a Lippmann phrase. However, reading his opus Good Society is like discovering the key to the current order of things. Lippmann's theorizing remains a helpful lens to understand the phenomenon "neoliberalism" which is bandied about to the point of meaninglessness. Yet the term should not be abandoned. It has a historical provenance to explain why the Anglo-American order has come about and remains so powerful.

Lippmann's political affiliation explains a lot of neoliberalism's flexibility as a term. Lippmann as a young man was part of Norman Thomas' American socialist party, reflecting a more radical edge of Progressivism's social gospel politics of mastery, technique, and uplift. Lippmann floated into the progressive wing of the Democratic party, supporting Wilson from his perch at The New Republic. However, Lippmann was never a party hack and seemed quite flexible. He was an early critic of the Cold War. He had a dovish interpretation of George Kennan's doctrine of containment. Unlike later theories of detente, Kennan saw Russia as a political rival with the US in Europe. Kennan feared Soviet totalitarianism as brutal, but he did not see the USSR as an ideological competitor for the soul of the world. This shift would mark both pro-Europe Democratic containment theorists, as well as pro-Asia Republicans. Communism was not simply the doctrine of a regime, but styled as the only alternative to American capitalism. Lippmann never wavered from his belief in this project, but he could easily be construed as a peacenik. He believed the Soviets should have their sphere of influence in eastern Europe (even interviewing Khrushchev in 1961). Lippmann remained a stalwart within DNC politics, although he criticized Johnson and the war in Vietnam. Lippmann's views reflect the far more conciliatory, "global", positions later advanced by Carter, Clinton, and Obama. And yet, how could Lippmann inspire the Austrian/Chicago economists that so eagerly supported Reaganomics? Socialist and liberal, free-trade and Keynsian welfare, all of these pieces are part of a single whole that represents Lippmann's "new liberalism".

It's important to note that Lippmann didn't design neoliberalism, as if he somehow came up with a system that was later adapted. Nothing of the sort. Lippmann offers the clearest conceptualization that had gripped the mind of not a few corporate progressives in the late 19th/early 20th c. He represented the interest of the new masters of mankind, the vulture perched in Wall St. imagining how the American empire could create a new order of the ages. It was the age when New York was becoming the new London, and America's antagonism toward the British Empire moved towards synthesis. Lippmann was simply one of many who realized that a new order was necessary to preserve and advance the goods of liberalism, which had become racialized as "Anglosaxonism" that united the often antagonized peoples into a "cosmopolitan" global power bloc. Rothschilds and Morgans had far more in common than the frothing rage from a Joseph Chamberlain or a William Jennings Bryan. Capital was the bond of a new order, cementing peace and stability.

Reading The Good Society, one might be tempted to appreciate this order. But under the shroud of freedom and peace lurks a more devilish, ensnaring doctrine. The rest of this essay will explicate what Lippmann theorized and its significance. Hopefully, by the end, the reader will understand that the real root is neither capitalism nor socialism, as these have become ideologically-charged terms that simply play off each other. The vision goes far deeper.

 In short, Lippmann was a liberal in defense of liberalism. Lippmann believed the ideal society prized freedom (hence liberal). But what was freedom? Freedom from what or to do what? Beyond the stupid characterization of Isaiah Berlin, Lippmann saw freedom as fundamentally a freedom of exchange. In the realm of ideas, men should be able to debate any position. In the realm of goods, men should be able to buy/sell goods at the best price/quality. Thus, a world-order is necessary to uplift and protect these mechanisms. The Pragmatist valorization of "the market place of ideas" was key to this vision: all things could be bartered, debated, questioned, bought, and sold. However, as any keen analyst will quickly realized, there's a certain limit: the market itself could not be questioned. Freedom itself could not be turned against the matrix of freedom. This position is the most basic criticism of liberalism, that it still depends upon a metaphysic and justification for its own view. Liberalism may have emerged mainly as triage in relation to intractable social divisions, but it needed stronger foundations than simply temporary tolerance. Freedom was the natural virtue and position of man. Markets were the natural activity of man in freedom. Thus, free man would gravitate to free markets which was the "natural" (and rational) state of things. The Marketplace was, in now secularized theological parlance, nature's god. And it was in such a framework where men could flourish.

However, Lippmann worried that classical liberalism had failed. The theory of laissez-faire combined with Darwinian/Spencerian evolution into a rigid dogmatism. Some liberal statesmen adapted Malthusian political economy to justify the most brutal regimes. They would argue, with a straight face, that it was the duty of the rich to let the poor die. Artificial sustenance through charity was only prolonging the inevitable. The strong grow and survive, the weak cling on until their doom. Spencerian Darwinism not only categorized the peoples of the earth in a racial taxonomy, but even classes within society. Not only were the negros and mongoloids inferior races, so too were the poor an inferior race. Eugenics emerged from within this harsh reckoning of things. But for Lippmann, as for many Progressive liberal reformers, this approach was awful. It was not simply the inhumanity of it, but it simply lacked vision. Liberalism had become rigid dogmatic orthodoxy, obscuring the fact that men had to protect Nature from other men. Had lord Palmerston not capitulated to this logic when gunboats blew open Argentine markets and kept the Qing from prohibiting opium in China? Had Gladstone not given in when he occupied the Suez? In theory, this dogmatism seemed impeccable. However, as Progressivism fused scientific technique to the human efforts of politics, trade, religion, and culture, the "social sciences" renounced this rigidity. Did not engineers need to constantly adjust calculations and calibrations to real world flux? How could these "scientific" racists simply ignore the data? While a Richard Cobden may lament the failure for truly free markets, Gladstone had to act contrary to his master. The anti-imperial "Cobdenist" Grover Cleveland was quite willing to blow open markets to keep them open to the world-powers. Thus, while Cleveland (unlike his rival James G. Blaine) would not annex Hawaii, he would use gunboat diplomacy to keep the island as an international port of trade. Lippmann knew that liberalism, if it were to survive, needed to adopt a new level of flexibility.

The old model of liberal dogmatisim in service of capital seemed destined for collapse. Exploitation of workers and resources had a breaking-point until revolution would consume the land. Thus reforms needed to be implemented. The social-sciences fused with postmillenialist ecumenical protestantism into a new kind of secular theology of humanitarian global liberalism. Compassion and concern drove many activists, but efforts were to remake the world into a fundamentally rational, free, and market-oriented world. Rockefeller money flowed into churches, parachurch missionary agencies, social scientific departments (University of Chicago was basically a creature of Rockefeller money) became a means to realize this goal. It was cosmopolitan in the sense that it had a global vision of unity, however it was through remaking the world into the vaguely Christian modernist protestantism. Some missionaries did indeed seek to convert the heathens to the faith, others saw "conversion" more in terms of adapting Anglosaxonism and its technological bounty. To be Christian was to act Christian within one's own traditions and religions. And, of course, this meant banishing superstition, embracing technology, and socially organizing to link capital to the poles of power in London and New York. These charitable NGOs were not simply an effort to bring relief to the destitute, sick, and degraded peoples of the world. They were also part of building a global network that could adjust to market conditions. 

The old dogmatism that saw a Liberal India exporting grain during a famine (following market orthodoxy) needed to be scrapped. In its place, governments operated as technical operators to manage a nation's affairs according to these scientific readouts. Lippmann is quite clear that the defense of free-markets meant government intervention and welfare were necessary props for a free-trade regime. It was precisely how Woodrow Wilson emerged as successor to the Bourbon Democrats, who often languished in old laissez-faire orthodoxies that many Americans found repugnant. The New Freedom was the way to instantiate liberalism within the American political economy. It was a shift away from the old American System or from its progressive corporate/Bismarckian socialism of Teddy Roosevelt.

Some of these new liberals, like John Dewey, believed this system was possible through a kind of national populism. Let a hundred flowers bloom, so to speak, and the best way forward would emerge. Lippmann famously disagreed with Dewey. Per many Progressive theorists and social scientists of the era, Lippmann thought democracy had failed. The Jacksonian ethos that motivated the support for Eugene Debs' prairie socialism and the Farmer Alliance's support for William Jennings Bryan (who had taken over the party machinery of the DNC for a decade) was a sign of sickness. What did an unlettered farmer from Kansas know about monetary policy? He could easily doom the nation's well-being in a fit of xenophobic economic protectionism. Yet, unlike some would-be aristocrats, Lippmann believed democracy had a role to play. The new social-science of journalism could become a mechanism to wield democracy as a support for administrative policies. The electrical energy of popular mobilization made a nation far more powerful than an oligarchic clique sitting over their dominion. People needed to believe, but believe the right things. 

 Journalism, as it had been, was quite easily dominated by demagogues, profiteering muckrakers, and unlettered villagers. If journalism is controlled by interests (whether corporate or parochial) why not control it for the good? In other words, if journalism became a "science" to distill the news into popularly digestible symbols, then people would have the enthusiasm of making their own choices, but these choices would be guided. Lippmann saw journalists, along with the other social scientists, as a new clerical class. He did not believe they should make decisions, but determine the parameters of decision-making. Politicians and the electorate should not be allowed to come to any random conclusion, that would be destabilizing and dangerous. Instead, the clerical social-scientists would guide outcomes through learning. Although Lippmann does not see it in these terms, it was a new secular clerical class, cosmopolitan in the same way the clergy of Rome saw beyond national boundaries. Unlike the unreliable theology of mystical experience, watching omens, and pouring over ancient texts, the new clergy would apply the rational methods of the scientific method to human endeavors. Politics, economics, social policy, all of these could be mastered as part of a technical discipline and applied in service of Freedom. As an aside, this kind of technical mastery is not in itself a bad thing within limits. Hatred of Stalin emerged not so much from his brutality, but because this technical mastery took a turn towards national autarky within a communist paradigm. Stalin, cunning as he was, rode this fence to lure investors. His shock at Hitler's betrayal of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was because the USSR was not ready to go its own yet. It still depended on foreign capital (like Henry Ford's manufacturing) and foreign technique (German industrial technology). But I digress.

Hence, Lippmann believed the journalist's objective was to "manufacture consent", to sell the policies in a way to constrain the form democratic action would take. On the surface, maybe this doesn't seem so bad. The social-scientist would replace the pulpit, the village demagogue, the party bosses, and industrial propaganda. Freedom to follow curiosity and abandon superstition would replace old and musty orthodoxies. Framed in these terms, many would embrace this method as the hallmark of civilization and progress towards a better world. But the question remains: at what cost? Do these social-sciences really work any better than other regimes of knowledge and hermeneutical interpretation? Do ethics simply reflect the dynamics of the market? Should any idea be open for debate? Should any thing be up for sale if the parties are willing? Does human rationality operate at this linear rate of information collection/collation? Is man homo economicus, even if he deals in spiritual/ideal wares? And truly: is man's telos to be naturalized or nature's goal to be humanized (divinized)?

Lippmann's vision sees beyond the crudities of capitalism/socialism, just as most financiers saw it. Henry Ford and Koch Sr. dumped money into the Soviet Union. Wall St. profited handsomely from Nazi Germany. These regimes were ostensibly against the decadence of liberal capitalism, yet they gained a kind of niche in a budding world-order. Anglosaxonism had become more dynamic than a temporary rule of barbaric conquest and absorption. It had become a new religion. It defined the axes of the political compass. It balanced dictatorship and parliamentary democracy. The ideological polarization allowed both Keynsian socialism and free-marketeer anti-government. It's not so much a question that neoliberalism, like a ghost in the shell, could corrupt or possess either of these moments (as partisans both left and right might complain). Rather, it defined them. Welfare represented technical adjustment, which could operate as a temporary salve to eventually privatize and return to the market. Unlike the rigid dogmatism of laissez-faire liberalism, which left the streets of London covered in the scabbed and starved, the new liberalism would hospitalize them. In other words, market adjustment was to keep the order functioning. It did not require an all-or-nothing war. Rather, these changes could be done incrementally in response to pressure. It's this technical methodology that informed British Fabianism, which could adopt to any condition (tory-ultra, liberal, and eventually labour). 

This ability to adapt several masks may seem like a sheer negativity: how can neoliberalism exist as both socialist and capitalist, authoritarian and democratic? Because the ultimate purpose is not any of these regimes but the telos of Market freedom. Regimes that threaten this arrangement are often targeted for destruction. However, this ghostly framework can possess most forms, reorienting them for market-integration. Regime adjustments simply reflect the on-the-ground demands. The threat of Chilean Allende needed harsh course-correction: Pinochet was a battering ram, whose brutality was a means to ease the transition of the social democracy of the Christian Democratic party. The Strategy of Tension (a term coined from Operation Gladio and its Years of Lead in Cold War Italy) is in full-effect: create instability to service a more subterranean instability, keeping people on their toes as a regime remains in control. The illusion of choice ends up cementing power dynamics as much, if not more, than brutal crackdowns. Neoliberalism isn't just free-markets, as if Reagan/Thatcher were paragons of that (which, in someways, they weren't). It's about management of a complex system, a hyperbeast named the Market, who is the enhypostatization of Nature. All religions can flourish in this environment because they're all equally meaningless, or, perhaps better phrased, all equally meaningful through their shared enshrinement. Liberal theology open embraces worship of the shrine, while parochical (yet subordinated) exclusivist creeds involve a cryptic guidance into the light.

Evangelicals in the United States are the primary vehicle. Vatican 2 Roman Catholicism has embraced this role for itself. Political Islamism (whether pan-Turkic, Salafist, etc.) has served a similar role. All end up supporting liberalized markets and privatization, while also advancing levels of social conservatism. The Moral Majority kulturkamf was part of negotiating how the market-share would be divided, but not fundamentally questioning the regime itself. The Gospel Coalition provides a platform for these adjustments within the mainstream. Bircherite Trumpists denounce TGC as leftist, but they play a part as well. Often rightwing and leftwing idealogues are put on the payroll as a battering ram of access. Militarization and open imperialism become mechanisms to justify a certain regime to access new territories, only to shrivel up when they're no longer necessary. Moral Majority were half of a dialectical process to make "the bedroom" a marketable commodity. Now that it's open, not only is sex sold (as porn), but sexual lifestyle is sold. But the market-place ideology, whether to sell the traditional American family or the transgendered liberated anarchic liberalism, remains. It's hard to even imagine people thinking outside of this box, where everything is part of a public-relations coup to manage every aspect of life. It's not totalitarian in the sense of 1984, but in the sense that the Market demands complete access. Everything should be bought and sold. This is man conformed to Nature. This is man enthrall to the Market. This is freedom. 

 As an aside, I think Trumpism is a double-edged phenomenon. On the one hand, it operates as the Birchers did, which is a controlled opposition to agitate. It produces the psychic criminals which prove the wisdom of liberal clerics, the way inquisitions helped justify the Roman church's expansion into more spheres of life when they found heretics. However, Trumpism has also opened up the possibility for some to begin to question this entire regime. Trump's open criticism of the Bushes and the Republican party has made some Evangelicals hostile to this Anglosaxonism. For most, it will amount to nothing, being a means to roll people back into a Trumpist Republican party that will adapt this rage-against-PMC to get votes. Such was how Reagan revived the GOP after Nixon and Watergate. This kind of management of dissent is an imperfect process, and so I always have hope some will wake up (the same way some Bush-era liberals woke up, instead of falling back asleep when Obama won in 2008).

This is a very loose and skeletal sketch of neoliberalism. It's an elusive and powerful order. It exudes, just as the Medieval Roman church did, the ethos of TINA (There Is No Alternative). It demands a comprehensive transnational obedience, invisibly present as simply the divine/natural order of things. It holds together fractious and competing nations, various corporations, and many peoples under a cosmopolitan umbrella. It manages dissent, it can hold several contradictions, as long as the fundamentals are not questioned. But unlike the papacy, it is far less rigid and polyvalent. It lacks any single head or any outward face. It is submerged, with institutions operating and acting in accordance with a gravitational pull. It is Leviathan.

Veteran of the Psychic Wars: Bonhoeffer versus Secular Methodism

Without making this essay too personal, I am someone who has had existentialist tendencies since a young boy. Death scared me and I was aware of life's fleetingness. When I was 10, I cried when my family bought a new dog because I knew one day I would have to bury it. Thus, as I got older, I was attracted to existentialist philosophy. Not that I read deeply in it, but I sympathized with it. Like many Christians, I liked the idea of Kierkegaard (reading a few of his aphorisms) without really reading his work. When I became a Christian, like many Evangelicals I was consumed with the question of conversion. As a good Christian, I wanted to see salvation brought to all. But as a good Evangelical, I believed that this process needed to shake people into reality. I was not particularly interested in the "Four Spiritual Laws" conversion strategy that was normative. I didn't want to go around trying to convince people they were sinners on the way to eternal judgement (especially as I had a brief universalist phase early in my walk). Not only did I not like this approach because it was confrontational, I also thought it didn't really work. The category of "sin" does not really register and many people of my generation generally shrug at it. "Where will you go if you die?" did not seem to have any punch behind it.

However, there's an existentialist version of this approach. The problem is not so much sin and salvation, but the self-awareness about life itself. Death and taxes, as the expression goes, are the only guaranteed things. Thus, people wandered through life like a daze, unaware of their imminent fate. In his Pensees, Pascal noted life was like a gaggle of prisoners sitting in a dark hallway, waiting for their turn to get butchered in the Coliseum. Life meant impending death and people needed to be awoke to this nightmare. I gave an existentialist spin on Ecclesiastes: life is empty and meaningless. Of course, my suspicion about this approach began when, having pitched this to a friend, his response was a smirk. Life was empty, but hey, you can scrape some pleasure together while we're sliding into the pit. I was mortified, but I was also in a despondent mood myself. Years later, the lesson of that encounter started to take. The point of Ecclesisastes is not despair, but weariness. It's a love of life, not haughty contempt, that gets the Preacher to shake his head. Wisdom indeed is better than a dissolute life of pleasure, but the wise tragically has the same fate as the fool. If there's hope, it's from God's hand, hence the conclusion.

It's from this vantage that Bonhoeffer really nails the problem with this approach. The following was from a letter he wrote while imprisoned:

"Thus we live, to some extent, buy these ultimate questions of humanity. But what if one day they no longer exist as such, if they too can be answered without 'God'? We have of course the secularized off-shoots of Christian theology, the existentialist philosophers and the psychotherapists, who demonstrate to secure, contented, happy mankind that it is really unhappy and desperate, and merely unwilling to realize that it is in severe straits it knows nothing at all about, from which only they can rescue it. Wherever there is health, strength, security, simplicity, they spy luscious fruit to gnaw at or to lay their pernicious eggs in. They make it their object first of all to drive men to inward despair, and then it is all theirs. That is secularized methodism. And whom does it touch? A small number of intellectuals, of degenerates, of people who regard themselves as the most important thing in the world and hence like looking after themselves. The ordinary man who spends his everyday life at work, and with his family, and of course with all kinds of hobbies and other interests too, is not affected. He has neither time nor inclination for thinking about his intellectual despair and regarding his modest share of happiness as a trial, a trouble or a disaster" Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters from Prison

Bonhoeffer is rightly ruthless. Psychotherapy is this existentialism applied in a secular theology. It is, as he says, "secular methodism", this kind of evangelistic approach to conversion. Don't get Bonhoeffer wrong. He opposes the worldliness of the contented bourgeois, the "busy, the comfortable or the lascivious". His point, rather, is about the idea that grace only comes to the one who is patently shocked into life. Bonhoeffer is a relatively faithful Lutheran and he has contempt for this kind of fanaticism. In another letter, he defines repentance in these terms:

"This is metanoia. It is not in the first instance bothering about one's own needs, problems, sins, and fears, but allowing oneself to be caught up in the way of Christ, into the Messianic event, and thus fulfilling Isaiah 53. Therefore, 'believe in the Gospel', or in the words of St. John the Baptist, 'Behold the lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world.' [...] This being caught up into the Messianic suffering of God in Jesus Christ takes a variety of forms in the New Testament. It appears in the call to discipleship, in Jesus' table fellowship with sinners, in the conversions in the narrower sense of the word (e.g. Zacchaeus), in the act of the woman who was a sinner (Luke 7), an act which she performed without any specific confession of sin, in the healing of the sick (Matthew 8.16, see above), in Jesus' acceptance of the children. The shepherds, like the wise men from the east, stand at the crib, not as converted sinners, but because they were drawn to the crib by the star just as they were. The centurion of Capernaum (who does not make any confession of sin) is held up by Jesus as a model of faith (cf. Jairus). Jesus loves the rich young man. The eunuch (Acts 8), Cornelius (Acts 10) are anything but 'existences over the abyss'. Nathanael is an Israelite without guile (John 1.47). Finally, Joseph of Arimathaea and the woman at the tomb. All that is common between them is their participation in the suffering of God in Christ. That is their faith. There is nothing of religious asceticism here. The religious act is always something partial, faith is always something whole, an act involving the whole life. Jesus does not call men to a new religion, but to life."

Bonhoeffer goes over a laundry list of heroes in the NT, people Jesus commends/blesses for their faith/faithfulness. In few of these cases is there any explicit psychic self-exploration. Bonhoeffer's point is to emphasize the total definition of persons with Christ, which marks out faith. There is no probe about whether they really believe, or what kind of inner turmoil they feel. Such is not to say that inner turmoil does not exist, but this kind of suffering is ancillary to the act of faith (or faithfulness). It reorients the totality of one's life. In the case of many of these people, they literally turn around and literally follow Christ. It's this that is the essence of Bonhoeffer's "worldly" Christianity. Faith is not simply super-added to an otherwise normal existence, but redefines that livelihood. How? Bonhoeffer struggles to speak about it in his later letters. Nevertheless, he wants to emphasize Christ's transformative glory erupts at the center of life, not its fringe. While the gospel is for the sick, the sickness does not need to be manufactured. We are cut off from life and Christ is the life, and inherently attracts in His presence (made known in the preaching of the Word). The gospel should be preached to the world at its strength, not its fringe. It is not for the edges of life, but its center.

But it's on the "edge" that psychotherapists and existentialists dwell. They feed on human despair and discontent. The centurion did not feel dead and then look for life, he simply saw life and followed. In contrast, the psychotherapists (as professionalized secular methodists) seek to sow doubt in the simple pleasures of men. We're not really happy, our discontent and despair is suppressed (hence our lapses of judgement) and thus it must be excavated. You are not simply sad, but homo vulnus, a creature defined by his wounds who gains a sense of being through overcoming. And life is subsequently retooled to revolve around these wounds: several councilor appointments, medication, the need for "me" time, and other new secular-ascetic practices. 

It's this reason why Bonhoeffer calls it "secular methodism". The success of revivals, like Billy Graham, is the emotive attraction of the carnival, the haunted house, and the roller coaster. You watch a scary movie, get you thrills, and then go back to life. You're broken down and lifted up, and then on you go. Most converts in these crusades rapidly slunk back into the normal dimensions of life, perhaps with some new ideas and new practices. They might read their bible and pray, and perhaps have a stronger opinion about the moral state of the country. But the methodist not only sought to convert but to reinvent a new life. The classis provided an opportunity to go over, again and again, failure striving towards perfection. This approach mapped onto the secular-existential psychotherapy regime, which fed off men's discontent. Rather than seeing the cosmic disequilibrium of a world under judgement, man was turned inwards. Certainly, I'm sure, not a few psychotherapists turn people towards community activism as a way to positively enforce "healing", just as methodism did similarly. However, this becomes a self-help construction project. You're not freed to simply live, a self-awareness that has snapped into self-absorption, but plunge further down. In other words, you don't become aware of yourself in relation to the crucified Christ (self-aware of yourself as witness of the Truth) but collapse God into the state of self. There are divisions about how to understand Luther in relation to this phenomenon. Some critics blame Luther's reinterpretation of faith for this fundamentally anthropomorphic faith. Others see Luther as objectively rooted in the Word to prevent this lapse into self. Bonhoeffer, as a Lutheran, is in the latter camp and thus opposes this secular methodism.

Again, this approach can only speak to the fringe. It only has words for those at the edge of life (the dying and despairing). It cannot speak to those who are not so worried and thus must sow seeds of discord. Christ's word that "only the sick need a doctor" is given a psychological spin. Rather, this declaration should be understood eschatologically: Israel's sin and degradation could only be ignored as if a paraplegic justified that man really only needed one leg. The vocation of the People of God was in the dumpster and this elicited little substantive response from either the scribes/priests or the Pharisees. The latter simply thought they could rally, not seeing Israel's cursed exile still remained over their heads. But none of this required some inward turn. Rather, interiority is a kind of God-of-the-gaps argument. It is what fundamentally marked the liberal project: save the faith by gutting the objectionable parts. Bonhoeffer hates this project (which he sees Bultmann as part of), since the faith comes as a whole. Faith in Christ is faith in the Christ of history, the only place we actually live. Phantoms, whether of reactionary-romantics or from liberals turning inward, will simply leave most people. As Bonhoeffer rightly says, only well-off degenerates will give themselves to this project of interiority.

I think he's right. I confess I was this kind of degenerate. And I am exhausted, a veteran of these insane psychic wars and (to quote Blue Oyster Cult) "we've been eating up our brains; Please don't let these shakes go on". Sometimes good things come from crimes nonetheless (such as a rape producing a baby who grows up to care for his mother and live a righteous life), but it does not justify the crime. May God end these psychic wars and heal all the degenerates. May the Word of God be made manifest, drawing the people to the King on the Cross, where forgiveness flows and man is made perfect in righteousness. In the blood of the cup and the body of bread, life is given and received. From thence may we participate in the Crucified Christ, the lamb slain before the foundation of the world and worthy to open the scrolls of history. Glory!

Language is Freedom: Ephraim the Syrian and the Maturity of Reason

"For the Deity gave us Speech that is free like Itself, in order that free Speech might serve our independent Freewill. And by Speech, too, we are the likeness of the Giver of it, [Ov. p. 22.] inasmuch as by means of it we have impulse and thought for good things; and not only for good things, but we learn also of God, the fountain of good things, by means of Speech (which is) a gift from Him. For by means of this (faculty) which is like God we are clothed with the likeness of God. For divine teaching is the seal of minds, by means of which men who learn are sealed that they may be an image for Him Who knows all. For if by Freewill Adam was the image of God, it is a most praiseworthy thing when, by true knowledge, and by true conduct, a man becomes the image of God. For that independence exists in these also. For animals cannot form in themselves pure thoughts about God, because they have, not Speech, that which forms in us the image of the Truth. We have received the gift of Speech that we may not be as speechless animals in our conduct, but that we may in our actions resemble God, the giver of Speech. How great is Speech, a gift which came to make those who receive it like its Giver ! And because animals have not Speech they cannot be the likeness of our minds. But because the mind has Speech, it is a great disgrace to it when it is not clothed with the likeness of God ; it is a still more grievous shame when animals resemble men, and men do not resemble God. But threefold is the torture doubled when this intermediate (party between God and animals) forsakes the Good above him and degrades himself from his natural rank to put on the likeness of animals in his conduct." -Ephraim the Syrian First Discourse to Hypatius

Human beings are unique among creatures because they have language. While animals have levels of perception and intelligence, they do not have rationality. Animals can communicate signs through sensory data, whether noises, scents, or motions. But these actions are nothing but data transfer. This is why AI seems to be fundamentally stuck (and I think always will be) because computers lack the capacity for language. Computers can, when programmed with the right algorithms, problem solve. But gorillas can do the same thing, learning to match certain visible symbols to accomplish the task (yet one that requires reward/punishment based conditioning). But gorillas never learn any language. I am not sure about the Chomskian "language device", but I do think that language is what fundamentally make humans unique.

The rationality of language is not simply in data swaps (as if language was a crude suitcase for information). Language is discursive, meaning it invites (and requires) a multitude. It is public, as it is the means of sharing experiences. Without language, we would lapse into solipsistic insanity or animal grunts. But it requires a fundamental dialectical approach to reality as well. Such does not necessarily mean conflict. But language is how contradictions are addressed. Language is how creation has distinction, and not simply exists as indistinguishable whole. To be a man is to fulfill man's original vocation: to name the animals. Without language, man would be unable to commune with God in any priestly way, but simply subsist as the animals, tree, and rocks do. They too receive their blessings, but they do not rule. Contrary to pagan cosmology, humankind is a race of royal priests, to mediate the entirety of creation. Man does not simply rule over man, but over flora and fauna, eventually even over spirits (1 Corinthians 6:3).

Language is the means to engage in this rule. It is the process of Law, of knowing this from that, to discriminate and judge according to what things are. And knowledge of things can only be gained through dialogue, the critical awareness of the gap between mind and world. It is in this movement, of stooping down and lifting up, that mankind fulfills his priestly task. It is in this process that man has a free-will. History is not deterministic, as if everything happens according to dominoes falling one after another. Rather, history is dialogic, in both the confrontation of contradictions and the peaceable conversation between friends. Spiritual warfare is acknowledging both an original good and a present evil. It is to recognize both nature's night and nature's rebirth. Man is often the slave of the greater forces around and above him, as well as the works of his hands. But this corrupts the original vocation, one that carries into the Christian life. The dominion mandate has not ceased, but transfigured in light of sin and redemption. Reigning from the tree, so to speak, Christians offer judgements, they name the animals, they spread garden. But the work of sacrifice, of making holy, is cruciform. It is a life of dying, of laying down your life for your friends. It redeems the shattered dust of the earth to yearn for the revelation of the Sons of God. Christ conquers the world through His cross, not otherwise. Those who either embrace or reject the dominion mandate often fail to see the logic of the cross in God's task of reigning and ruling. The cross becomes a means to an end (either present now or deferred until later), rather than at the foundation of the world. Eve's birth from Adam's side and the Church's birth from Christ's side reflect the similar logic, though under different circumstances. The Christian is to conquer the world, with Christ, through martyrdom, a bearing witness to the truth.


As the above quote from Ephraim the Syrian highlights, the Christian's matyrial existence is manifest through language. The hackneyed Francis of Assissi quote ("preach the gospel always, use words if necessary") is deployed for satanic inversion: language is denigrated for action, even as action has no rational basis without language to frame it. Man has dignity and freedom because men and women can speak. They can reason together, judge together, and uplift/praise together. Freedom is possible only through this way. Without reason and language, man would simply be a ball knocked about by other balls. But in language, mankind may see alternative paths, may be able to make course corrections according to the logic of the engagement between man and the world and man and man. Free will isn't a naked decision in the abstract, it is a decision made in media res. Freedom is ultimately responsive, neither unfettered nor reactive. It is the ability to say "Yes" or "No" to a given set of affairs. It is the ability to come to know alternatives through a description of one's surroundings, one's problems, and one's hopes.

Theology is ultimate language. Experiences of God may be difficult to explain, but they require language to be real. Despite superficial analyses, it's what separates St. John's apocalypse from many mystic visions. The former paints a colorful truth through the highly charged symbolic language that Scripture uses. The mystic's vision is often a poorly contrived synthesis of folk symbols and whatever other material the mystic happens to come across. The more well-traveled the mystic, the more complex the vision's symbolic registry. However, the registry does not mean coherence or intelligence, only opacity. Even St. Paul's reluctance to speak of his own vision depends upon a Jewish cosmological reference; he knew what he saw even as he would not speak it. From the Christian view, the more esoteric and cryptic the vision, the less likely it is to be true or authoritative. Many contemporaries may find the visions of Ezekiel or St. John difficult to comprehend, but that is from ignorance of the language. Difficulty is not the same as opacity. The baroque grandeur of biblical visions does not mean it is confusing, only we lack the mind to seek out the meaning. God likes to talk in these riddles, to both reveal man's prejudices and offer a way towards the truth.

It's sad that many Christians embrace emotivism, fideism, quietism, and irrationalism. They simply believe the world is unintelligibly complex (besides a given revelation whose veracity must magically be assumed). Pascal reflects this paradigm, which superficially seems profound. Of course, one may press Pascal as to why one ought to believe Roman Catholicism (specifically its Jansenist strain), and not some other form of Christianity (or any other faith). All he would have is the radical Augustinian fideism about election: some people see the truth and others don't. Yet how would one ever know if one was on that path? Experience perhaps, but it's precisely the point of how Scripture articulates experience. It only comes in the form of language, in rich symbols potent with meaning and communicable to others. Dialogue is what creates intelligibility, even as interlocutors play the accuser or skeptic. Nevertheless, there is but a child's faith. Such is not bad in itself, but God calls mankind to eat meat and not simply drink milk. The mature seek wisdom without crippling doubt or throbbing confusion. God speaks to man (in the various forms He does) so man may mature. Language is the means man becomes rational, possessing a rational nature, physis Logikon, a "Wordly" nature. And this rationality is to become God-like.

Sadly, this ability is bent in all sorts of directions. Man uses his faculties to become animalistic. He describes the words that are fundamentally unintelligible through babbling. Additionally, in engaging in false descriptions and lies, man also snaps the connection between language and rationality. Sadly, such is the current condition of "post-modernism", which is better described as anti-modernism. The modern was very much an effort to advance in wisdom, an awareness of past and future to uplift the present in creativity. The antimodern calls the entire rational project into question. It used crude forms of the modern (material empiricists, positivists, Cartesian rationalists) to create an antihuman whiplash. Nietzsche is not about saving humanity, but destroying humanity. His project is to save men from themselves, and degenerate mankind to apehood. Language becomes utilitarian to constructing myths to live valiantly like the most noble, and predatory, beasts. The crude modernists lapsed into a kind of human idolatry, where they did not speak but commanded. It was a twisted mutation of Adam's command. But the result of antimodernism was to drive mankind into a kind of animalistic existence. Truth and lie were relative, confusion was normative. It's no wonder why the CIA spent time translating Fouccault and Gramsci. There is no truth, all is power games, and the world reflects the winner. To believe in this darkness not only breeds apathy, but the cruelest operators imaginable. They abuse God's gifts into fiendish engines of war and rapine.

The glory of the resurrection is present in the man who learns to rightly reason and speak, to see the world's redemption in the blood of the lamb. There is freedom in understanding. There is praise in judgement.

Psycho Killers: A Review of 'The Hunt'

The Hunt got a lot of mixed reviews before it was out because of its outrageous subject material. In short, the movie involves stereotypical liberals hunting/murdering stereotypical "deplorables" through an elaborate (though bungled) set up. The rage about the movie was due to this superficial read: Hollywood slaughters Middle America for entertainment. This reading is, as stated, shallow and does not get into the real good and bad in this movie. The Hunt operates at two levels: a critique of the psychodrama of contemporary politics, but also a perverse valorization of hidden forces that drive the plot on wards (many times unintentionally).

The movie is a thriller. After a doctor, feminist, and urbane liberal murder a redneck who "woke up" on the plane, the plot begins in the middle of things. Various Trump voter types (e.g. "Yoga pants" white girl, white nationalist, redneck, trucker, wanksta) wake up gagged in the woods. Soon they find some weapons and come under fire. The movie screws around with you through some throwaway subjectivities (i.e. you follow one character for a few minutes before they're shot or blown up, transferring to the next character). Over the course of the next hour, nearly all the "deplorables" get wiped out through gruesome kills. One character, however, stands out: Snowball. Unlike the others, she is neither panicked nor incompetent. She anchors as the movie's main subject, following her as she tries to find out how to escape. She becomes the heroine.

But before we return to "snowball" (or what her name means), let's return to the main cast of characters. On the one side, there are the hunted "deplorables". The movie mocks their aggressive bravado, but indirectly complements their decency. The hunters give their prey access to weapons, with an implicit assumption that the liberal killers are using the same "stand your ground", second amendment, logic. Yet they're not competent killers. Most of them get wiped out in the first barrage. Another group gets tricked by trusting an elderly couple (Ma and Pop) running a fake Gas station. Being told they're in Arkansas (an ambiguously"friendly" territory: a red-state that produced the Clintons), the elderly couple shoot and poison the hunted. Armed to the teeth, they simply could not countenance they had wandered into the spider's web. Throughout the movie, many of the "deplorables" die because they have a naive trust in American authorities, whether it's elderly small-business owners in flyover country or (later) the American embassy. The irony is that while the red-staters take to their guns quickly, they are not apt to survive an actual tactical onslaught.

The liberals, in contrast, become hardened killers overnight. The background, revealed over the course of the movie, is that this group of friends had joked about killing "deplorables" in the wake of the 2016 election. The joke riffed off the fact that there had been a rumor about "Manorgate", where elite liberals hunted regular Americans for sport. The friends participated in this joke and, these texts being leaked, ruin the careers of all these liberals. The NGOs, corporations, and foundations that hired these people removed them because of bad optics. The leader of this gang, Athena (played by Hilary Swank), decides to punish these people. If they're so afraid of liberal elites murdering them, then why not make it a reality? Athena rents a space in rural Croatia to execute her plan, unleashing the slaughter at the beginning of the movie. She hires a "professional" (who turns out to only have been in the National Guard) to train her and her friends in combat, tactics, and firearms. The liberals engage in stereotypical conversation and speech tropes. One man gets called out for "gendering it" when he says "guys". Ma and Pa engage in self-criticism when, as they clean up corpses, Pa refers to "black people", with the justification that NPR said it was ok. And Athena, when getting fired, condemns the "academically challenged" and "toothless rednecks" as evil. In a not so subtle nod, Athena's name reveals her fundamental character: she's the brains of the operation and she prides herself for her intellect and smarts. The liberals are the smart ones getting dragged down because of "deplorable" rednecks and the selfish.

The kicker, of course, is that ressentiment drives the blue-staters as much as the red-staters. They lose their jobs because of insensitive comments. They train themselves in a rural compound to kill the people ruining the country. They are all white, with the exception of one guy who exiles himself to play a "crisis actor" embedded among Middle Eastern refugees. The liberals think they're the good guys, getting even with the degenerates electing a degenerate. All in all, the set-up is a nod to the climate of the 90s: militias, election of Clinton, government accusations of rightwing terrorism. The moral is that American politics is an obscene psychodrama, driven by ressentiment on both sides. "Deplorables" think liberal elites are murderous (and are shocked when they find themselves in the middle of their conspiracy theory). Liberals decide to become so to own the "conservatives" (there's nothing particularly conservative about rightwing American politics). Both think they know more than the other. Both think they're saviors of the country and representing what's good in America. The tropes even blur as one "deplorable" fantasizes about reporting this crime and getting on Hannity like "those two jew boys [Woodward and Bernstein] who did Nixon in". Both sides are equivocally deluded, idealistic, and full of raging resentment. While the "deplorables" don't come out looking too moral or smart, the liberals are even more vindictive and depraved. They're the ones that use their resources to actually hunt people for sport, self-consciously becoming the monsters they're accused of being. American politics makes people into murderous sickos.

Here enters "Snowball". She is a John Wick style waifu: quiet, stable, hyper-competent in combat, and a little crazy. She appears like the others (originating from Mississippi with a southern drawl), but never acts like them. She meets up with a pseudo-Alex Jones podcaster (Gary) and, later, a redneck (Don). Both men are loud and big, but are constantly confused and outmatched. Snowball saves Gary from opening a truck rigged with explosions. Don celebrates the US embassy rescuing him and Snowball from Croatian military-police. He is blind to the fact that he (bribing the foreign police) is part of the plot. While Snowball ruthlessly kills the envoy (kicking him out of the car and running his head over), Don is bewildered and freaks out. Snowball proceeds to kill the rest of the liberals and their military advisor. She even gets goaded to kill Don when Athena acts as if he's in on it. Yet she only shoots when Don, wild-eyed and scared, raises his gun against her. Ultimately, Athena and Snowball engage in a final "boss battle", with Snowball surviving and Athena dying.

The movie has a good ironic sense for metacommentary. The various characters operate according to tropes. Snowball laconically remarks that she was remiss to interrupt Athena's villain monologue. See, Snowball explains, she's not the woman Athena thinks she is. She's not the Crystal Creasey (her real name) who accused Athena of being in on Manorgate and as an evil liberal elite. Rather, she's a crazy combat veteran from Afghanistan who is not interested in the psychodrama. Athena names her "Snowball" because she's a pig (per Orwell's Animal Farm). Yet Snowball corrects her: she doesn't fit the character of political idealist Snowball. Athena is dumbfounded that a hick knows Animal Farm, to which Snowball gives the punchline: Athena is snowball (and her revolutionary idealism put her in the grave). This dialogue climaxes a point made repeatedly throughout the movie: the liberals aren't as smart as they think. The embassy rep has a map of the compound in his trunk (which Snowball uses to kill them all). Athena picked up the wrong woman, screwing up her research. She doesn't even understand the meaning of her own snooty symbolism. Athena also expresses bizarre levels of materialism, diving to save a priceless bottle of champagne and begging (when Crystal is about to throw her through a glass-door) "no more glass". Part of the comedy is that Crystal grants her request, opening the door before throwing her. Respect for property and the fine things lingers even as Athena is literally in a battle for her life.

The tropes of "deplorable" and liberal operate to obfuscate the characters from themselves and their situation. Snowball, as the accidental outlier, simply destroys the liberals and outlives the red-staters. At one point, Snowball tells Don a bizarre version of the Tortoise and the Hare. Per the fable, the jackrabbit loses after arrogantly dozing off. The moral of hard work and perseverance pays off. But there's a twist: later that night jackrabbit shows up at Turtle's house with a knife and murders all of them. To a stunned Don, Snowball explains the real moral: power is power and the Jackrabbit always wins. The point plays out in her conflict with Athena, when she kills her because Athena simply is not a survivor but an idealist. She follows the script, in both living and dying, and does not simply act to live. Crystal Creasey may superficially appear as a hick (accent and all), but she simply doesn't care. Conservative myths and liberal myths are still myths, just-so stories that comfort one faction against another. The reality is that those who can will, and Crystal's self-possession guides her gracefully through survival. The last scene, after reaping the fruits of her victory (eating Athena's grilled cheese, wearing her dress and heels, and taking her dog and privately chartered jet back to the states), she simply drinks the priceless champagne from the bottle. Winners win.

All in all, the movie is an excellent attack on the idealism that fuels the ressentiment on both sides. It really twists the knife in the liberal side, that they're even sicker than the "deplorables" because they have the resources to brutalize the mud people they hate. They're not any different than racists lynching a black man and having a picnic (as if it's a kind of sport). But the movie also unintentionally promotes a hyper-ideological ethos through its unreality. Crystal Creasey, or Snowball, is not a real character. A completely competent and sober waifu killing machine is no more real than John Wick or Rambo. But the movie doesn't seem aware of the unreality of its own protagonist. As the National Guardsmen is dying, Crystal gives some of her background: she is a combat vet from Afghanistan who's been in "the shit" (unlike the Guardsman). Of course, there are no female infantry (let alone special forces), so this backstory does little to explain her competence in tactical infiltration, weapons expertise, and hand-to-hand combat (let alone her survivalist instincts). It would have made more sense (just barely) to tell a story about her dad teaching her these things in the Mississippi swampland. Of course, her ruthless drive to survive comes from her mom, the one who told her the modified Tortoise and Hare fable. She is a male fantasy of feminine power, talented in war and straightforwardly feminine. Though the movie does not draw the parallel, if Athena is really Snowball than Snowball is really Athena (ending the movie in her garb and with her goods). Yet the movie does nothing with Crystal's unreality, and as such it only feeds into the hyper-ideology of the movie's background.

Besides a subtle valorization of the military (who've been in "the shit"), the plot turns on the liberals losing their jobs. In a flashback, Athena is fired for her and her friends' dark sense of humor. The reason is that these jokes (seeming to confirm red-state hysteria about Manorgate) are bad optics. They look bad to the company (or NGO or foundation, depending on the other characters' stereotypical jobs) and investors. While the movie shows the liberals as a fountain of psychopathic cruelty and resentment, it does not develop the larger corporate element. Not a few elites weather criticism for atrocious things they say and do. The thing is that Athena (and her friends) are wealthy liberal elites, but they're not really running the show. They are simply political agents, dependent on the democratic mechanisms of voting like red-state hillbillies (an equivalency which drives their psychic discomfort and rage). At the end of the day, they're cogs in the machine (though, ones with better resources and more plugged in) just as much as "deplorable" voters are. The movie deplores the insane psychodrama of blue-state and red-state, but it does nothing but presume the edifice of financial control and military dominance. Power is power, after all, and the string-pullers remain without criticism. This assessment is true to a degree, but deserves critique. Whether its the invisible forces of corporate-media pressure or the unreal war goddess, the movie does little to reveal the engine of American psychodrama. The resentiment did not originate itself, as Athena jumped fully formed out of Zeus' head, another myth the movie subtly leaves untouched. In the end, violence and money are the way of the world. The plot guides the viewer to celebrate Crystal's victory as she enjoys the spoils of war.

That's the dark lining to the movie. It is true that the psychodrama of blue-state vs. red-state weaponizes people into insanity. The movie embraces an average, working-class, heroine (Crystal at one point reveals she works at a car rental). But the dark forces that lurk in the ground remain without criticism. The viewer might believe that power is power, and simply become cynical about moral categories of right and wrong. Crystal has little obvious moral compass (besides expressing some concern for a refugee baby when Gary is about to open up on the "crisis actors"). She simply survives. Such is a basic trope for the horror-thriller movie. Right and wrong dissipate as you grip your chair and desperately want the protagonist to make it through the ordeal. The movie leaves this impulse untouched. The real problem of the red vs. blue psychodrama is that morality is weaponized for manufactured political consent. While The Hunt rightly mocks the insanity of American politics, it only treats a symptom and not the source.

Let Us Reason Together: A Theory of Dialectical Immaterialism

 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the Lord: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool. (Isaiah 1:18)

The problem of knowledge begins with the relation between universals and their concrete instances. Whether the universal is real (per Platonic forms) or nominal (a synthetic category of customary use), how do you know what "it" is? Cartesian rationalism dealt a severe blow to the dominant Aristotelian science of the day. Form became increasingly difficult to conceptualize, even as an empirically observable element to any concrete, hylomorphic, entity. In other words, Cartesian philosophy introduced skepticism about whether "form" even existed. And if it did not exist, what was it, precisely, that man knew? And how?

A classic Cartesian example is a piece of wax. You can touch it, smell it, taste it, and all sorts of empirical observations to figure out its properties. But then you put it in fire, and all such properties change. Yet we still call it a piece of wax. How do you recognize it as such? Descartes believed that we do so through a process of pure intellectation, where we refract the image of the wax into our mind, stripping it away of its sensory properties until we get to an unimagistic concept of wax. It is this pure thought of this thing that gives us the grounds to speak intelligibly of wax as wax, whether hot or cold, hard or soft, solid or liquid, with fragrance of honey or not, etc. Such depends upon the existence of matter and the mind's capacity to grasp a hyper-sensory category that we can call, simply, 'wax'.

But this project seemed to assume formal existence when such was hard to prove. Locke rejected this effort to preserve natural categories. Per his tabula rasa theory of the mind, wax has a bundle of properties that are impressed on the mind (the various sensory experiences we have interacting with said wax). From these experiences, we can abstract an average notion of "wax" with the properties we normally associate with it (likely, we imagine wax as a solid, not a melted semi-liquid). But why do we do this? Why not say that melted wax is not wax anymore, but something else? A major element of Locke's epistemology is humility and human incapacity. We intuit that wax is still wax even if it went through the fire (especially if we let it harden back). It's this process of experience, through time, that grants a commonsense, even "noumenological", access to reality qua reality. We sense the reality, the extrasensory substrata to "wax", which we intuit to mean a material continuity. There's a thing behind the aggregate, and contradictory, properties of wax. The human mind can invent various categories to explain this continuous identity, but these are our limited (and perhaps faulty) ways to approach reality. Nevertheless, sensory experience actually grants access to reality. We don't need to close our eyes and enter the confines of our mind to aniconically imagine the Real, the wax behind the wax, the pure abstraction of "matter" as the Cartesians would do.

Locke is trying to defend empirical sensory knowledge as real knowledge. He does not exactly reject Cartesian dualism, mind and matter, though he undermines it. Matter is, basically, all there is. The existence of mind is a divine miracle, the superadded quality which appears in the human animal. George Berkeley, also an empiricist of a kind, rejects this approach. Berkeley believes Locke and Newton (as well as Cartesian philosophy as a whole) will lead to materialism and atheism. Man's mind is simply an empty slate, operating primarily as a video-camera set to record. Cogitation, for Locke, involves a reflection on the material recorded. Mental activity is fundamentally reactive and reflexive. For Berkeley, such an approach fundamentally undermines the concepts of empiricism, the human mind, and God's providential governance over all things.

Berkeley begins with a radical move. He rejects the abstract concept of "matter". It might not seem obvious, but matter is not an empirical concept. One does not see, touch, taste, or smell matter. It is posited as the pure potentiality that subsists beneath all our sensory experiences. One rapidly subordinates empirical experiences to an abstraction that is literally unthinkable. Berkeley rejects Locke's distinction between primary and secondary categories. The former refer to material reality (e.g. space), while the latter refer to human experience of material reality(e.g. color, which depends on human eyes). But how can the human mind abstract anything without particularities like color? Can you imagine a triangle without color? Additionally, what is space to a mind without body? What about an eyeless creature? How is something like a flower experienced by a worm in relation to a man? The idea that this category is universal, while color is not, is simply ridiculous. Berkeley rejects this distinction to make the point that everything, from an actual flower to a flower in your imagination, is "idea".

The "idea" is fundamentally passive. It is something one experiences in the world or thinks about in the mind. But all of these ideas are mind-dependent. They don't exist without a mind to experience them. Hence Berkeley introduces a new dichotomy: "spirit". While the idea is passive and inert, the spirit (the willing intellect, the mind) is active. Locke screwed up the relation between mind and reality because he considered the mind as primarily passive. Yet it is the mind reaching out, through seeing and listening, which makes reality visible. It is not enough to have rods and cones in your eye to see color. There must be a mind present looking (even if this action is done subconsciously). Ideas are not out there doing things to you, per se, it is the mind interacting with a world available. While this approach might seem to undermine the existence of the world for solipsistic insanity (i.e. there's no world out there, but the only thing you can know is your own mind), it does not if you take Berkeley's Christian theology. Since only minds are active, we experience a world of other minds. You might get surprised when someone shouts your name. The experience is not simply sound, but intelligence. Of course, you could get tricked. You think you hear your name, but it's the sound of a bird or a car or something else. What grabs your attention, when you hear your name is the intelligence behind the call. You experience, indirectly through the series of ideas, another spirit. When it comes to reality as such, the divine Logos is "speaking". It is this Mind (the Creator Mind of all minds) that sustains our public world.

Our various experiences of the world have coherency through this divine mind. It's in this way that Berkeley eliminates the non-empirical abstraction of matter. We consider wax as "wax" because we notice a, divinely given, pattern of things. Wax is the "ideas" that constitute its sensory experience (even if seemingly contradictory). Wax is hard, cold, fragrant, soft, hot, etc. There's no metaphysical thing under these ideas. The aggregate our mind puts together as one thing, and not several, is the wax. The thing is the thing because we perceive, and reckon, it so.

Here, Berkeley develops new concepts to bridge the seemingly impossible gap between spirit and idea. First of all, if the Spirit is interpreting various ideas into bundles, what are these bundles? They can't simply be ad hoc products of individual minds. Wax is single thing, not several things (one which is yellow, one which is hard, one which is fragrance, etc.), and not because someone forced all to believe wax is such. Secondly, if "spirit" and "idea" are fundamentally different, how can spirits produce ideas? How can the active produce the passive, if there's no "stuff" beneath either acting mind or inert experience (rational or sensual)?

For the second question, Berkeley revives a neoplatonic concept of "energy" (or "fire"). To summarize briefly, neoplatonists synthesized Aristotelian notions of energeia (working) and Stoic notions of "fire" to produce an account of how the higher realm of intellect interacts with the lower realm of matter. While developed in many different directions, in the Latin-speaking West and Greek-speaking East, among pagans and Christians, this basic schema reaffirmed the good of material (empirical) reality through its subordinate place beneath the realm of the intellect. A recent essay ("Gregory of Nyssa's Bundle Theory of Matter") has even argued that the great Cappadocian pursued a similar strategy to Berkeley, rejecting the abstraction of "matter" beneath experienced qualia. Nevertheless, Berkeley's metaphysic argued that the activity of the mind, through thinking and doing, left "ideas" in its wake. Thinking is not simply passive reflection, but action and action requires a metaphysical base (i.e. being and doing are real). Thus, our ability to interact with other minds depends upon our positing this activity through the experience of strings of ideas through time (a given which has reality according to the Logos' ordering of the cosmos). In short terms, we see action through successive actions and must posit the existence of an active element, namely a "spirit" or mind.

But this raises the first problem again. What is this stringing together of several ideas? Why does the mind not instinctively treat every idea as its own thing? Berkeley introduces the concept of "prejudice" to explain this mental activity. Not a negative or pejorative term, prejudice is the way our mind patterns the world. It's a product of mental activity, the string to hold together several ideas. Thus, it's not a yellow, a hard, a cold, a fragrance, but the singular bee's wax. However, and this point is key for the major argument of this essay, this process is constantly revised through experience in the world. As Berkeley knew from his efforts at monetary theory and evangelizing, people can create bad prejudices. As one example, Berkeley's bank project was a process of national re-patterning. Gold was not wealth, but industry was wealth. Parliament, as the mind of the Irish nation, had to create the patterns to didactically instruct people. This process was gentle and discursive, not brainwashing or interrogative. It was a process of conversation, between the individual mind and the world around, a conversation that the national Parliament (as the public, and legitimate, authority) guided. This task reflected how God communicates to people in the world. The Logos does not violently rip open souls, like a machinist with clockwork, to reprogram or fix. Rather, the Logos appears, speaks, dialogues, and makes certain empirical observable facts. The Logos instructs the individual mind about the cosmos, preserving the dignity of the mind as an active element engaged in constant patterning. In Christian form, one either patterns things towards saving knowledge of the truth, or towards ultimate destruction.

It's the above that I want to conceptualize as "dialectical immaterialism". It is Berkeley, I think, who offers a great way to approach the problems of German idealism. Like Hegel, the mind pursues objectivity through its own subjectivity. There's no way out from the human mind to some rationalist paradise of reality simpliciter. Instead, one is always in time and bound to time. Berkeley was not as radically historicist as Hegel would be (a product of romantic counterattack against Kant and his philosophical heirs). But Berkeley's empiricism produced the same set of problems. The real world remained the very basis for knowledge, yet it was also a kind of trap. You could not simply step outside and posit what the world looks sub specie aeternatatis. It is from the very patterning that man gains insight into things as they really are. The goal is not to achieve objectivity per rational positivists. You can not see the world from nowhere because you are always a subject and the world is fundamentally mind dependent. But like Hegel, the goal is to find objectivity through the absolute subject (and not get lost in the relativity of the always historically conditioned). For Berkeley, the absolute subject was the Logos, the creator mind who is constantly speaking to creation.

Per Berkeley, the Logos has a myriad ways of speaking. Naturally, the Logos speaks through the givenness of created experience. The wind and the rain, the snow and the sun, the trees swaying in the wind and the rabbits nibbling on grass, all of these are part of the Creator's speech. Our very bodies and souls are part of this speech as well, the existence of their varied faculties that we (as mind-spirits) use constantly. Additionally, God also speaks in unique ways that Christians call revelation (or special revelation). Hence, Berkeley recognized that many pagan philosophers recognized the Logos. Revelation involved the history of the Logos' work to create a people to save the world, ultimately manifest in Christ Jesus.* The Logos speaks in many different ways. Sometimes in peace and sometimes in wrath, sometimes with clarity and sometimes in riddles or parables, the Logos is not simply a sublime reality but the creator (and savior) Mind. Thus reality was either fundamentally God-based or matter-based. One theory would subsume the other. Per early modern definitions, atheism was not the non-existence of God (a relatively stupid claim) but the lack of providence from said God (or gods). Epicureans believed in the gods, but were atheists because the gods didn't bother in the affairs of the world. Baruch Spinoza, the Dutch-Jewish heretical philosopher, was called an atheist because God was reality; God had no separate existence from nature or history. Aristotle posited God as an explanatory cause, but the Aristotelian god is not active in the world (but dreamily enraptured in his own contemplation).

While Hegel was not an atheist in this sense, Marx certainly was. Reputedly turning Hegel on his head, Marx embraced dialectics within a materialist (and not idealist) framework. It was the contradictions from material reality (not the social ideas through time) which fired history forwards. Marx's Aristotelian tendencies (whether his teleological definition of man and nature, as well as part of his concept of value) fits well with this materialism. Unlike the crude rationalists or positivists before, the dialectical process is absolutely necessary to explain how man is not simply a product of his times. If radical historicism is correct, then relativism easily grabs control. Knowledge of the past is not an objective vision, but a subjective construct (per Lessing's ditch). We learn, perhaps, things were not quite as they are. But the Enlightenment quest for universal reason was dead in the water. Both Marx and Hegel reject this irrationalist turn in their own way, and dialetical theory is necessary to pursue universal (meaning publicly accessible) knowledge of reality.

What Berkeley contributes is how this dialectical relationship is construed. Berkeley's theory of ideas encapsulates both sensory and mental (even socially mental) experience. Berkeley's empiricism even privileges the sensory as primary, often determining the shape of our mental ideas (i.e. we must see flowers before we mentally imagine flowers in all shapes, sizes, colors, etc.). Yet this form of dialectics is not simply man's engagement with the material world around him. It is an engagement with the minds that produced reality, and most importantly the Mind which creates all reality. For Hegel, history is the drama of God's self-realization. For Marx, man becomes "God" through actualizing nature in the drama of history (leading towards communism). Man becomes a masterless and self-mastered in the cosmic drama. For Berkeley, history is God's self-disclosure towards man's actualization (rebirth) as sons of God. The biblical drama is the Logos' plan, the pattern for individual humans and human societies. Dialectical immaterialism (or dialectical empirico-immaterialism, or something else ugly but explanatory) aids to make this point clear. We simply don't have access to the world, the process of patterning is how we gain knowledge, and the process of dialetics (the conversational back-and-forth) is how we achieve true knowledge of the real. But this process is, ultimately, not one of progressive gains, but apocalypse. Per Berkeley, the Logos takes flesh and dwells among men. Per Hegel, the world-spirit appeared on horseback. And so on.

It's this anachronistic analysis of Berkeley, a kind of post-Hegel reassessment, which offers a strong way for Christians to give an account of metaphysics. Lest one be overcome with anxiety, this way forward is not a rejection of tradition. As stated above, Nyssen seems to have discovered a similar set of problems (even if his lack of empiricism did not motivate a better theory of history). The quest, as it had been for Hellenic neoplatonists, was to see the real. This quest, whether it's ancient Greece or ancient China or India, is shared among most philosophers. It's the quest for reality as rationality (and rationality as reality, per Hegel's remark) that supports any substantive account of society, ethics, even eschatology. Lest we simply believe the myths given to us (whether myths of autochthomous tribes with their gods, or myths of progress and infinite perfectibility), there must a be a vision of the whole. Yet this sight comes to us through time, amid the rapid flux of all human experiences (both directly experienced and indirectly experienced through testimony/faith). To historicize Berkeley's empiricism, all our ethics, social organization, and ways of life depend upon knowledge of the End. Kant's categorical imperative is flimsy for this job.

In short, the rational-real project must go on if we're not to become animals (with a Nietzschean fantasy of being a Homeric heroic ape-man). Yet its success depends upon a dialectical approach, an awareness of limitation and human subjectivity. Berkeley, as a radically Christian philosopher, has a vision of the New Jerusalem, an alternative to a Marxian eschaton of communism. A dialectical approach would also ratify the revelation (in individuals and social organizations) of the gospel, the new way of life revealed in Christ's death and resurrection. Such an approach ratifies certain views of what's possible and impossible, but only through dialogue with the Logos. In this way, Berkeley (as much as Hegel and Marx) serves as a way to think beyond the neoliberal prison we all exist within. The myth of infinite progress out of infinite complexity, a metasystem of non-systems, can be abolished. A Popperian claim for universal science (and progress) can be rejected for the absolute subject. One sees the end proleptically in a solitary vision: Christ on the cross. Power, authority, law, righteousness, and flourishing find their definition in this epicstatic movement of mind to Mind. This is the way.



*This accords with very early Christologies, where Christ (as Logos) is the God revealing/revealed. No one knows the Father except through the Son (Mt 11:27). None have seen the Father but the Only-Begotten (Jn 1:18). Many more verses share a similar claim. As the Wisdom and Mind of God, the Logos many times revealed God through prophets and wonders. But in the flesh, the Logos makes God known through His Name: Jesus, the Christ. Irenaeus and Justin Martyr continued this tradition, and many others, emphasized this traditional interpretation. Christ is the key to the entirety of Scripture, the main agent that knits the whole of Israel's history together. It was not until Augustine's age, where trinitarian concerns altered this theology. Now it was God-as-trinity who appeared in the OT. While not untrue, the primacy of the Logos as revealer/revealed dissipated.