1.19.22

Salvation (continued)

I.

I will never live in a mansion of honors nor command an ounce of respect whatsoever for anything I’ve “accomplished” in the spiritual, intellectual, or literary domain, not in this life anyway. For I, having not undergone the proper indoctrination into those various systems, am as filth to these systems, and all my work no better than offscouring. Not that I have come to entrust my worth with them anyway – for the wilderness of thought is my home and always has been: the uncivilized, unmannered, and uncouth of mind and unruly of disposition. In truth, I would just as soon raze and pillage the hallowed walls of the academy and seminary than hang its “credentials” upon any gilded wall. If I am to ever haunt those halls, I will indeed be an enemy within the gates: a great Trojan Horse given as a sacrificial offering to infect the fine and innocent people of the city with a disease that will not be easily rectified by merely casting me out and burning my remains.

Indeed, I live my life in such a way that those closest to me often either forget I am a writer or have never realized I have ever picked up a pen to compose anything beyond a transactional form of communication at all. When one does inquire beyond the fact that I do, in fact, write, and spend many daily hours doing so, it is typically met with: “Oh? what about?” When I proceed to tell them “mostly philosophy and fiction,” the conversation either ends abruptly or diverges to more worldly, frivolous concerns. I can literally count on my fingers the number of times someone has endeavored, once I told them the subject matter of a given work I might be currently composing, to delve any deeper into the nature of my thought or even summarize the “gist” of its disparate entails.

Less than ten times in eighteen years as a serious writer.

Such is the nature of my isolation and alienation as a thinker, that which most certainly causes me to consider whether the things I am writing have any value. For it is only the perception of value that anything has “value” in the domain of “what-is”; that “value” which is always arrived at by general consensus; that consensus which is first introduced and later concretized by the so-called “promoters” of supposed works of genius. For, do we not realize that without the promoters of genius, genius – so engrossed as they will inevitably be in their work – would never have nor would ever be discovered by any nascent consensus in the first place? The consensus, after all, does not and cannot think “for itself”. How can it? It does not have a proper sense of “self” in the first place, for it is merely an amalgamation of interrelated “personalities” that satellite around the most charismatic personality who might be numbered among the group. It is this person who thinks for and speaks on behalf of the whole.

Without the patronage of the Medici’s, or the various up-and-coming, newly well-to-do principalities of Late Medieval Italy, or certain worldly-minded leaders of the Roman Catholic Church, could the genius of the Renaissance have even been “discovered”, let alone allowed to flourish with a modicum of artistic freedom, at all?

The answer, unfortunately for “producers” such as myself who scorn the very existence of promoters – they who have no more right to be the arbiters of taste, quality, and value than a common peddler of flea market rubbish – is unequivocally no. Promoters, in fact, create “genius” through the wizardry that they entrance their audience with, which, to me, is little different than witchcraft or sorcery; sorcery which is primarily intended to safeguard their monetary interests in having financially invested in the fledging genius from the start.

Perhaps most troublesome is the fact that the world rewards the promoter of genius far more than the genius himself. Yet, this comes as no surprise.

For man, above all, needs to be fed his values and entrained in the way he ought to go, and also be told who he might become, lest he be a sheep without a shepherd and thus not really a sheep but raw mutton vulnerable to the ravenous wolves who do not feign to don the wool of sheep in the “real world” but come as actual wolves to exploit and feed off the vulnerable for their own power and gain; the sheep – whether whole or mutton – who are nevertheless everywhere happy to oblige either shepherd or wolf with the “resource” of their life, ideas, time, and efforts.

II.

The Will to Power operates within and submits to the edicts of Reason and all the many machinations of its ceaseless activities. As such, all that “is” and otherwise “exists” in the domain of Reason and is communicated, as only it can, through Language is the Will to Power and “nothing more”; “life” itself which, shorn of the sentimental trappings that man might seek to drape over its shoulders, is also Will to Power – that Will which I have, perhaps crudely and unceremoniously, transmuted as “Spirit” – not Hegel’s Geist but the actual Spirit of God alive and working through all things to either bring men to a knowledge of Himself and the truth of their own vanity, or to utterly obliterate their self-awareness and their reliance on the expression of the nominative “I”, obliteration which will ultimately leave them to their own devices; obliteration which always comes by way of the teleological exhaustion that the relentless life of Reason – or else simply, “life” – will inevitably force a man to confront; Reason which will not rest until it discovers that impossible-to-find, lone, irreducible Value by which all things might be denominated.

Reason will, however, never find this Value in and of itself insofar as such can only be expressed through an individual man who is himself a mere part of a larger whole. No “mere part” of anything can ever gain the proper perspective to transcend its own part-ness so as to witness the totality of “what” it (or anything for that matter) actually “is”. In short, an individual member cannot separate itself from the collective of which it is part long enough to recognize and thereafter bestow and attribute what might be considered “universal” or “transcendent” value upon itself or anything else that it might perceive. Indeed, “Value” of a universal, irreducible, and immutable kind can only be bestowed by that which exists outside or beyond the collective. For, while “things” might have some sort of “essence” or “eternal” quality to them, such apprehension is kept from man who, as a member of the domain of Reason and in no way the cause or sustainer of it, cannot in and of himself also transcend Reason so as to bestow anything ultimate on the things he perceives.

In the domain of what-is, however, man alone is “the Bestower”, but who or what will bestow purpose upon man but He or That who might “reside” outside the influence of the Reason of man? Such a “He”, such a “That”, has been generalized by Western metaphysics as the person “God”, this can be little debated. What can be debated, I suppose, is whether the feeble notion of “God” is fitting and able to describe this omnipotent Entity.

In sum, whoever or whatever might or might not “reside” outside of man’s Reason in the “domain” of Faith is He or That which alone has the power to bestow and attribute meaning and transcendence to the creature “man” – not by man’s will or his reason or language but by the irrationalities and unreasonableness and anti-linguistic “expressions” or “impressions” of Spirit who is the paradox of Faith, who is Reason’s impossible to fathom opposite, who is boundless and encompassing and is, in fact, no “thing” at all, at least not that which man’s Reason might be able to comprehend in Its totality.

III.

Every word I might employ to describe the “domain” of Faith (which is no “domain” at all, but a Person), and also the power that might “reside” there is, at best, a wild approximation and most probably an outright delusion, no matter how well-meaning such a delusion might be.

IV.

Only one who believes he is no longer under the tyranny of the dominion of “what-is” but has, in fact, surrendered to Nihilism and through the Spirit “overcome it”, can see Reason for what, in fact, it actually is, or at least what it appears to be.

V.

It seems to my reckoning that Nietzsche’s so-called “Eternal Return of the Same”, his “Eternal Reoccurrence”, is the Will to Power’s unavoidable collapse back into Nihilism from which it sprang, that collapse which – insofar as Reason’s perception of the Will to Power is life, which is to say “finite” and thus limited in its ability to always and forever increase in a straight line – will inevitably and teleologically be unavoidable, not that the meteoric ascent must return to that particular level of power from which it came, but that it will ultimately find no other purpose for its ascent than “mere ascent” despite how euphoric the height and lofty the vantage the Will allows one to attain. As such, the “Eternal Reoccurrence” is perhaps a non-literary way of saying “the Tragedy of the Greeks”. I do not simply agree that the Eternal Reoccurrence means that “given a long enough span, all events, thoughts, and actions will and must be repeated in form and substance” but, rather, that the essential expression of life – which is the teleological or “narrative” arc of the unfolding Will to Power – will resemble a more a less similar – if not exact – pattern from man to man, nature to nature, action to action, and desire to desire given a long enough timeline, and further, that this resemblance will – insofar as man continues to persist within the domain of Reason as only he can – will be repeated ad infinitum, the realization of which Nihilism arouses to condemn all of man’s actions in the domain of Reason to inescapable purposelessness.

VI.

If the clothing or residue of the Will to Power is, therefore, ultimately finite insofar as it exists within the “closed system” of Reason, how could it be said that the Will is also the transcendent Spirit of God?

If Christ and His Spirit are One as God is One, then Christ and His Spirit will, in the domain of Reason as in the domain of Faith, have the same mind, Christ’s mind which, “though He was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself by taking the form of a servant,” that Servant who, after His ascension, came to man as the Holy Spirit (the “Paraclete” – i. e. “helper, advocate, advisor”) to continue Christ’s work in the material world. If the Spirit has us, then the Spirit working in us and through us will demonstrate the same relationship that Christ had and still very much has with the Father, the Spirit which is omniscient in His essence but yet voluntarily limited in His foreknowledge so as to be able to express the genuine emotions of the Godhead, emotions which can only be “emotional”, like man’s, if absolute knowledge is not present in one or both parties. In His limited foreknowledge, Christ (as He always has and will) allows God to mourn, joy, anger, and above all, love. In short, because Christ willfully limited Himself to the complete foreknowledge of the divine will, the Spirit also – though He is power “as such” – limits Himself, at least in part, to the bounds of Reason so that He, as the only entity who could carry out such an act, might save us from it.

Christ is God though also a man. The Spirit is God though also acts in and through the Will to Power, each member of the holy family who willfully choses and continues to choose to empty themselves within the domains of Reason so as to think and do within man’s limited horizon of possibilities, with the apparent intent that God might experience the joys and pains of man though He is all-powerful, everywhere, and at all times. Yet, since the Godhead is One, both Christ and His Spirit are also God and therefore make possible for the ungodlike the Godlike, which is: resurrection from the dead, forgiveness of and freedom from the bondage of sin and death, liberation from the tyranny of Reason, and salvation unto the domain of Faith from the vanity of the domain of thought, the senses, and futile human actions.

VII.

“Power” cannot be an “end” in and of itself, at least not one that bestows transcendent meaning and purpose beyond itself if its expressions are divorced from the Will of the Spirit of God. For power is the totality of the machinations of Reason and it is that which delimits the bounds of Reason insofar as such power is holistically expressed in the finite body and mind and life of man.

For power is “what-is” and can never be “what is not” insofar as power is understood to originate in and be the most irreducible expression of life which Reason and its sensual capacities as well as the mind and all else that “is” might be capable of intuiting.

Only by the paradoxical working of the Spirit of God, if He in some way appears to manifest as the Will to Power in the realm of Reason, can man be transmuted – in perhaps a counter-Incarnational manner – from “what-is” into “what-is not”.

For if by the Spirit a man can embrace the Truth of the Incarnation, it is not much of a stretch for that same man to embrace the belief in its opposite: the transmutation from matter into immaterial, of the comprehensible to the incomprehensible, of Reason to Faith, and Will to Spirit.