A speculative post on discernment, temporality, God, and how the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and Sorathic evil fit on the ontological hierarchy. Plus Dante
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Our last post was a long look at Dante’s Divine Comedy inspired by some recent encounters. The problem was that like a lot of big posts, it took time to set up. We probably did a better job introducing Dante than answering the question of why to read him. This post is more metaphysical - here's a rough outline before committing.
It's a bit of a journey, but we are working through a number of things at once.
Organic culture, creativity & the beast system
Ontological limits of discernment & temporality
The Good, the Beautiful & the True & Logos
Semiotics & metaphysics
Culture, tradition & inversion
Sorathic evil, abstract reality & the bottom of the hierarchy.
And the Truth of Dante.
It's not just that he's good. It's that he's culture cornerstone good and that gets into bigger things. If we cut to the chase, it comes back to an old Band distinction - nationalism and globalism. Which are subsets of bottom-up, organic, inductive thinking & top-down, inhuman, absolutist thinking. Which are subsets of acknowledging our limits in reality and the satanic inversion of being our own gods.
Top-down orders fail because the "ultimate" authority never is. Unless it's Ultimate reality known by faith. But that's not what the beast is peddling. It's easy to see the comparison.
Look at the picture. There's a whole world around and beyond the Prince of this World. Even if he wanted to rule wisely, the gulf between him and all there is beyond him makes it impossible. There's always more. Top-down "authorities" are too small - so they deviate from reality until they invert totally.
Bottom-up orders recognize our Fallen finite natures preclude pure abstract Truth. There's always more means we always keep going - our short lifespans ensure that won't be far on our own.
They are more honest because they start with what we really are and not false claims and bravado. And they are more truthful because they build from what is, not what we wish.
Obviously this is an extreme distinction - most people combine them and either can be lied about. Think general direction - how do you prefer to proceed if all else is equal? Do you try and understand what is happening and figure out the best way forward? Or do you look for the nearest authority with an inclination for listening? The problem with number 2 is that all unchecked, top-down, totalizing impulses reduce to satanic inversion in the end. Making it easy for posts to get out of hand.
Stepping stones.
Globalism is inhuman
Meaning to succeed it has to erase that which defines us as human. Individuality, bonds, family, kin, creation in God's image - and our own creativity. It's visible now as animate husks quail over blatant contradictions and hasten their own demise. Because a glowing screen frightened them. The narrowness of the gate is front and center.
But the creativity part is critical as well - just less in your on their faces at the moment.
You don't have be Christian to see that the beast is incapable of creation. That the further into luciferian globalist gray goo it sinks, the more bankrupt its feeble offerings. Ever wonder about that? How for decade after decade the system keeps doubling down on the policies and moves that are clearly problems? That's social and moral entropy. What a Fallen world in Christian terms looks like materially [click for a speculative post that we rank among our most personally transforming ideas]. And hold on to the idea that if logos is real, there will be material "echoes" of metaphysical truths. We're going to keep transforming it. Because you'll note the Band never becomes a one-note show.
The big post-Enlightenment epochal error we're seeing the end of is secular transcendence. A form of self-deification. Click for the most recent secular transcendence post if curious. It's another of our bigger ideas. Vanity and pride in sin terms, hubris and pride in classical. But just like logos on the human material level, it opens a path to a metaphysical place.
Do enough pattern recognition long enough and the existence of Evil is obvious.
Do some more and it's obvious that it both dominates this existence and is weirdly limited in ways. Like a satanist retard with an upside-down cross - evil lacks creative originality. Because their existence is predicated in inverting reality. Without that, they wink out of existence. Or humanize.
What we are dealing with is the connection between human wickedness and something more abstract We called this something passive and active evil in the Land posts - Christian metaphysics encompasses it under the Fall [click for a link]. Active evil being Satan the entity - original archetype of inversion and ruler of the material. Passive evil being moral and physical entropy, decay and finitude - the actual Fall of Adam and Eve. Same satanic inversion registering differently.
The alternative is Logos, and that starts with smallest "l" logos - ignoring beast lies and appeals to vanity and dopamine and living in reality. We may not have access to absolute Truth - but we do have honesty. Big difference between unexpectedly wrong and lying. And the simplest material truths - there's a rock over there there - leads us to logic - add another rock and there are two. And that leads all the way to the necessity of Creation and the Fallen nature of the world.
The logical empiricist can't look past inference, but can see where the patterns point. Causality and temporality infer a starting point. Unless the laws of physics aren't uniform. Then we're back in faith.
Both our observational and logical perceptions point to the necessity of a Creation of some sort. Basic formation of complex order in reality as a pattern. If truth implies consistency, then the necessity of creation is logically and empirically true.
Now consider that the morality of the West is based in truth - that's the the Good, the Beautiful, and the True trio of values that have guided Western morality and aesthetics since Plato. Before there was a "West". Dishonesty isn't "alternative morality", it's immorality - the inverse. So the lower-case material versions - the good, the beautiful, and the true - are qualities that echo Truth with a capital T in imperfect material ways. And Truth is the essential nature of what is - of existence. And ditto the sister-concept of the good and it's ideal counterpart. This isn't just theorizing - it's verifiable. Good can create life and beauty over and over and never exhaust and evil can't. It's hardwired into Creation.
Iosif Krachkovsky, Spring Blossom, 1905, oil on canvas, private
Like the beauty in the perpetual rebirth of spring. And that mirrored when an artist small-c creates in God's image and likeness. We respond instinctively.
When you extend from small-g conditional goodness up to the capital "G" objective version - The Good - you move from blurry, fallen, human judgments to abstract ideality. Abstract absolutes have an infinite perfection that can't materially exist. It's why any objective morality has to extend from the abstract nature of reality. A fixed standard is needed that doesn't change.
This is Truth - what is. What we just described as the essential quality of existing. This is Creation as the foundation of the possibility of Being - of having an existence to have qualities. The abstract, objective Good that the morality is built on has to describe the essence, nature - "personality" - of that essential nature of Creation. What is as the moral anchor to the small-g good's "should be". The thing they strive to reach but never can.
Mathematical analogy.
If material good is relative, it can always improve. As a quality, good is adjectival - it has to refer to something. Absolute goodness is a theoretical construct that can't exist in a world of constant temporal movement. Like a limit.
But "limits" are only binding if we accept the arbitrary parameters of the function. There's nothing stopping someone from drawing any line they want. Because relational things are always based on the relation of two things that someone picks.
Zeno just had to give Achilles a different point to measure their distance against - start halving his distance from the turtle + say 1000 m.
There's a non-trivial chance Zeno was a gamma...
Then the Good is the absolute measure against all goods are judged - at least theoretically. An abstract relational point that can't be "moved" because it's not "agreed on" or "let" be equal to something. It's not adjectival, it's a proper noun. Hence "the Good".
That doesn't mean some asinine "greater good" dreamt up by a person. This is something ontological prior to people or their dreams. If this concept eludes or escapes you, it's your limit of discernment. Subjective to objective, material to abstract. Morality gets an objective root, but like any abstraction, it cannot be directly perceived. We see material temporal things that come more or less close to it, but not It Itself. We have to figure it out.
Jehan Georges Vibert, Sermon on Abstinence, 19th century, oil on canvas. private
So on the one hand pure subjectivity launching the beast system of do what thou wilt...
Adriaen van Utrecht, Vanitas Still Life with Bouquet and Skull, around 1642, oil on canvas, private
...and on the other you have subjective applications of an objective standard - moral reasoning.
And the only standard that can be objective has to extend from Creation - because everything else has to be relational. Relations require individuation and association - temporal sequencing and ontological extension. And neither of these stop until you get to the source - when being and time begin
And if that sounds like the ontological hierarchy and vertial logos' music...
Well, it is, but with some hubris and crow mixed in. No sooner do we sum it up then we're pulling it apart. Although we did admit that these are new ideas to us and will change like any work in progress. And summing it up is how we see the problems. It's one reason why we walk through our thinking visually and verbally - if readers see where we're coming from, it's easy to follow why and how we course correct.
Here's the original with ontological level and epistemological mode connected by vertical logos. There are breaks between levels that look like limits of discernment. We likened them to observation and the Fall, but that's not quite right. Hence the crow.
Consider...
The necessity of time-sequencing for even the potential of thought of any kind - temporality - is the latest obsession around Band HQ. We can conceive of infinity as a concept because it is an endless something. But there is no before and after, no next... anything, no forming, no not stopping, no sequencing of ANY kind without time. A-temporality is totally conceptually opaque. We can describe it with adjectives, but there is no possibility of mentally simulating it because it precludes the necessary conditions for simulation.
Otto van Veen, OCVLVS NON VIDIT, NEC AVRIS AVDIVIT, (Vulgate), "What no eye has seen, nor ear heard" (1 Corinthians 2:9), engraved emblem, Antwerp, Balthasar Moretus, 1660
In Christian terms, God qua God. Or God the Father in a Trinitarian sense - more on that later.
Now if we were blinkered, we would then blurt out "time and thought are the same thing! We make our own universe! That would be inversion. Satanic inversion, to be exact, because it is placing the human mind as god.
Time has to precede us chronologically because chronology doesn't exist conceptually - even in potential - without it. We are all born in time. And we precede our thoughts. Any Moebius magic where a subset of a subset somehow creates the superset would require hard empirical proof of existence. And not because of a faux maxim whose truthiness evaporates like desert mist like "extraordinary arguments require extraordinary evidence". Because it contravenes the empirical and logical causal order of reality like a miracle - only with out admitting faith in divine origin...
Right.
For "Ultimate reality" to be a-temporality, the upper limit of discernment cannot be the Fall. Because Adam in Eden was already temporal. Genesis begins with the creation of time-space before putting things in it.
The first limit of discernment isn't the Fall, it's Creation.
This where an Ultimate Reality pre-Creation a-temporal God creates the time sequencing that makes comprehending Him even possible. Where the relations can exist to make awareness "of" something possible.
Beyond that it's an ontological black box. An unmoved mover. Or impossible demands and erratic behavior of the Old Testament. There's no getting past that limit - even metaphorically - alone.
Hence Logos as vertical chain. With the comparison to Genesis to follow the Fallen-finite-limits of discernment pattern.
The Word in Creation brings the incomprehensible a-temporality into time. The opening of time is the ultimate limit to any possibility of discernment.
The Fall is the lower limit of discernment - within time, but outside the darkling glass and the valley of shadow. The world of unchanging virtues, mathematical perfection, and in Genesis terms, Adam's true knowledge of God and Creation within temporal thought and words.
That secondary barrier puts God hopelessly out of reach by our own powers. We can't maintain the abstract-level consistency of the Law. How to we attain Eternity? This is the metaphysical situation of the Land when Covenant enters.
Empirical then logical limits require a multi-valent conduit. Otherwise evil rolls.
We can reason abstractly. Logic takes us up the logos chain causally. Until we reach the point where faith is needed.
Ontology chains back to ultimate reality and a-temporality before hitting the objective limit. That is, the point of Creation - when the a-temporal starts time and all that comes with it. Epistemology is temporal and time is sequential in material reality. Both sides of deontology begin in Creation. That is, the nature of Creation as the measure against which moral judgments become possible. "God is good" is describing "good", not God.
The latest hierarchy with epistemology, deontology corresponding to ontological level. Now with the proper limits of discernment
To sum up. Temporality necessitates the Good be essentially linked to the nature of Creation. and the nature of Creation is the Will of the Creator. That is, Providence. So basically,
The Good is Providence at the limit-point where God-ultimate reality becomes thinkable.
This is where it becomes possible to conceive of an objective Good linked to a will of God known by faith.
Secular transcendence inverts things.
We realize it is annoying to ask, but picture for a moment the retards that point out that God fails the niceness test. That's backwards. No concept of "good" that we come up with is even applicable to God ontologically. It's more retarded than believing that the movements of the fish in your goldfish bowl influenced your initial decision to consider a pet.
John Martin, The Seventh Plague, 1823 oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
If Creation is by definition the manifest will of the Creator, then the nature of that reality is the moral compass. And our small-"g" goods are not only irrelevant to God, they are only good to the extent that they correspond to Good. That is, His manifest will. What He "is like" or "wants" as much as words like that can be applied to Him. Reality. Observation, logic, and faith in harmony - epistemological parts - in harmony,
See how objective morality works?
Once you've got a Good, there's a theoretical measure. Any relative concept of "good" can be assessed for truth value against that. In theory.
The practice is knottier. But speaking 100% theoretically - God or ontological equivalent is necessary for objective morality to be possible. And there does have to be a logos-logic-empirical truth conduit for one to apply to the other. The rest is faith.
This raises another question. Assume the reasoning for how an objective moral order has to unfold is sound. Why must there be an objective moral order? The reasoning doesn't matter if morality is relative and there is no objective start to ground the deontological chain.
The answer is simple pattern recognition. Everything has an optimal order or level. Time is directional and sequential. Heavenly bodies appear to be moving apart. Closer to home, Christian and beast-huffer agree that human reality is teleological. Moral progress towards salvation for the Christian. Survival, evolution, techno-utopia for the huffer. Real eschatological progress and Progress! both value movement and growth. One being fake doesn't change that both are sequential - meaning they require a starting point. And that starting point has to be both external to and preceding whatever is started. Since this is time - external to and preceding time. A-temporality.
Gustave Doré, Creation of Light, 1665 engraving
Absolutely beyond conceptual access of any kind qua itself. Absolutely ontologically distinct from any-thing in Creation.
Unless, of course, you can physically demonstrate non-relational simultaneous progress. Or creation ex nihilo.
Start with Creation. Let's call it Reality - the point is that Christian metaphysics are necessary from the bottom up - even without Christian dogma. And that Christian dogma is consistent with reality. That is, the absolute total of all that can or can't be. Limitless.
We obviously can't list or describe it all, but as a concept we've set up a perfectly comprehensive set.
Now see the problem?
Our reality-concept is supposed to be all-encompassing. But we've just defined it. And all definitions require relational ground - even reciprocal ones ground in each other. And their reciprocity is defined against something else less figuratively symmetrical.
The problem we are running to is a limit of communication, discernment, or thought. This omni-reality encompasses within it any concepts we could postulate as a relational ground at this magnitude. Any eternity, infinity, limitless dimensionality - literally everything is already within it. Like infinite number lines in different directions, reality goes forever - even if the material universe doesn't.
But we're still defining it.
M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands, 1948, lithograph.
It cannot be included in an endless expanse of all that can or cannot be. Think about that for a moment - "It" neither is nor is not. A non-concept. The not-ground against which that primordial reciprocity - is or is not - can be conceived of as reciprocating.
Something exterral to any conceivable state of being. External to spatio, temporal, words, or abstract thoughts. "It" cannot be even expressed in terms of "existing" or not. There is nothing we can say about it at all beyond there has to be a <<not Reality>> in or against which "reality" as a concept is meaningful.
Not without switching to faith...
Gustave Doré, Creation of Light, 1865, engraving
Even faith doesn't tell us about God qua God. It can't. It's written, learned, and taught with words and symbols - temporally. What faith does is give us a temporal accommodation of whatever the a-temporal fullness of the Creator "intends".
A way to make the inconceivable actionable.
Beauty and Truth are likewise - characteristics of the [a-temporal Creative impulse] - of God the Creator - at the outermost limits of our conception. Temporal approximations of the Eternal. If the Good is a term for the nature of God as He registers in time, Beauty and Truth would be his characteristics at the same point. These become theoretical objectives for relational adjectives like lower-case beauty and truth to chain down from.
This is a bit Neoplatonic, but here's the difference. The Neoplatonist is top-down - he claims knowing deontology is necessary means he can dictate what's materially true a priori. The Band recognizes limits. God qua God is unknowable. Even using terms like "He Himself" limits Him to a temporal thought sequence - when He is external to time. Accommodation, so that we can think.
Avoid theology for logic. Any concept of God is a limited accommodation. It's all I can do ontologically. God Himself is like the Kantian noumenal or the Prime Mover - a metaphor for something that by necessity it must "exist" but that's all we can say without faith.
The ontological category or concept called ultimate reality is is a-temporal. So discernment begins where God brushes against temporal conceptual possibility. Where the true timeless meets time - like the geometric encounter in the Flatland book of the 3D shape that touches their world was actually endless. It's a poor metaphor because God subsumes rather than touches up against us, but He touches us too. Plus we're limited to what we can conceive of.
Bringing us right back here.
The "interface" where the unknowable Creator becomes knowable is the final limit of discernment. We already know this is interchangeable with the Good.
If the Logos is the Word is how we conceptualize the Creative impulse of atemporal God qua God, then the Good is it's nature.
A note on faith as epistemology. It isn't declaring obvious lies true then burning down cultures over it. That is a form of faith, but to be meaningful "knowledge" has to correspond to external realties. This isn't a word game - it's inherent in the concept. To have knowledge is to know some something. Faith in lies isn't knowledge because the things believed don't exist to be known. Note how totally inverted the beast dogmas always are.
Christian faith recognizes that there's no other epistemological access to the wishes of an unknowable God. But unlike postmodernism or other elements of the beast system, it is compatible with empirical reality, not contradictory. It is logically necessary, not impossible. It extends from logic as logic extends from observation. Compatible, but opening entire knowledge dimensions that the lower epistrmological form has no access to.
Ricardo Colon, Today You are with Me in Paradise, 2013
Epistemological analogy across the ontological hierarchy.
Your eyesight : refined statistical analysis
::
logic : Christian faith.
Analogies and continuities between appropriate forms of Logos across levels of reality. Not "they're the same". Unfortunately, semiotic consequences of ontological shifting passes a cognitive ceiling for most and can't be explained.
The faith is that Scripture accurately translates that necessary Creator's will in terms we can understand. We can't vet them any other way - if we could, faith wouldn't be needed. But we can ask if they are consistent with observational or logical realities. The way the Incarnation accounts for the problem of active and passive evil in what is observationally a Fallen-finite world. The lower mode can't verify the explanation the higher mode offers, but there is no contradiction.
For example...
Daniel Gran, Glory of the Newborn Christ in the Presence of God Father and the Holy Spirit, fresco. 18th century, Annakirche, Vienna
There does have to be an operant principle connecting a temporal accommodation of the a-temporal Creative impulse - the interface, the Good, Providence - and Creation. The point "when" a-temporality opens temporality and time begins.
The faith is that this self-evidently necessary interface is the Logos of the Gospel of John. Jesus, God the Son - the Word made flesh.
As a rule, the Band avoids theology because the questions exceed us. At worst, it's a category error - misapplying abstract-level epistemology to ultimate-level ontology. And at best it's just logic - reasoning hypotheses and conclusions out of a material accommodation of an a-temporal unknowable accepted as True on faith.
The Christian concept of God is traditionally known in three ways or hypostases. This is the mystery of the Trinity - linguistic symbols in place of something we can't temporally conceptualize but know on faith.
Andrei Rublev, The Trinity, 1411 or 1425–27, tempera, Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
There are three main patterns by which we perceive Him. The noumenal Creator, the operant Logos, and an active Will that seems an independent agent at times. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are names that have been traditionally used in Christendom and they work fine.
With one caveat. The names refer to the Godhead, the Godhead isn't constrained by the names. Is there enough in the Bible to declare without a doubt that three form a co-eternal, co-equal One? What does this even mean a-temporally?
The Rublev saves having to point out that it's not actually an old dude, a young dude, and a pigeon. It's how He signifies in time - His time-signature. It's why rules of three are so pleasing. But anything more is only knowable on faith.
And threes bring us to two concepts that could team up with the Good to spark a counterculture with a little Help - the Beautiful and the True. Like the Good, the most perfect, abstract conceptual forms of these ideals. That's the Platonic-sounding part. This isn't...
We can say nothing "of" the noumenal God because even "existence" is a subset of Him. The Beautiful and the True - like the Good - shine in at the threshold of conceptual awareness.
Once the capacity exists for temporal-based thought awareness of God, we can also become aware of His traits.
Think of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True as God's qualities or traits at the limit of our discernment of Him.
And once we have this, we have the objective foundation for moral judgment. At least in potential. There's no guarantee we get it right. But what it does mean is that objective qualities are necessarily intrinsic to the ontological necessity of an a-temporal-temporal interface. Intrinsic to Creation.
So not Platonic. There's a little more Neoplatonism in the thought structure, but not that, either. Then why use the Platonic triad for a Logos-based moral and aesthetic culture? The short answer is that they are familiar. They do go back to Plato so are part of the Greco-Roman heritage of the West. And we just showed that they are compatible with Christian metaphysics.
This shows us how words can be confusing when the same thing is being described from totally different frames. Logos - as used in the Bible - doesn't really get used with the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. But they both refer to the interface of Creation - where God touches temporality.
One is a Creative aspect that chains through temporal reality. The other is the trait set that forms an objective standard set by Him.
So Creation, Logos, Truth, Beauty, and morality - woven together in the essence of reality as it can be known. Beauty is that the a-temporal Creator "looks like". Truth is what He avers. Creation is what He wills. And Goodness is what He's "like". Creation morally aligns us in God's image. Christian metaphysics gives a coherent explanation that accounts for... all of it. Consider the inability of evil to do any more than invert and twist. And the animus for Christianity among all religions that drives the beast system.
The split between the Good , the Beautiful, the true, Logos, creativity, and spiritual uplift on one side and the beast system on the other gets more obvious as things degrade. When things are generally healthy and moral a society can survive elements of secular transcendence. The West did for a long time. But like a creeping illness or termites in the foundation - it can survive... until it can't.
And it is a split. Instead of looking up logos towards Heaven it wallows in blind stupidity and animal pleasure. A dancing clown leading a crowd of NPCs is pitch perfect - all that's missing is the looming abyss. Because it is a decline. We broke some of it down in posts on beast media glamour.
There's de-moralization - removal of God and spirit. There's dis-honor - removal of personal merits or virtue. All on the way replacing real human being-in-the-world with fake scenarios that are dyscivilizational when implemented.
Looking back over the last century or so you can see the downward slide. Compare the moral standards and assumption of personal responsibility in the popular culture of the early 20th century and today. Not the secular transcendent inversion in elite or intellectual culture - that runs back to the Renaissance if not sooner. Popular culture in say the electric age - about 100 years or so - is a more manageable span.
More accessible too - a lot more people can picture it because we can still watch or listen. Radio, phonograph, and movies into t.v. and hi-fi, into digital recording and storage, into the fully integrated infotainment omni-platform, beast system.
But as we are seeing, the path is culturally terminal. Logos has no endpoint. Well, the a-temporality of God qua God - so no endpoint. This is significant. Because if evil is the inversion and perversion of the order of Creation, destruction has a completed state. The inverse of anything is nothing. The inverse of everything is nothing.
But all this is subsumed within the all that can or can't be of temporal reality. It doesn't have the a-temporal Eternal depth. It unfolds within time and Creation - rebelling is reactive. It needs time sequencing by necessity. So where as the divine is necessarily without limit, evil is necessarily bounded by temporality - the potential to rebel ends when the conditions that make sequenced action meaningful do.
J. B. and Dominikus Zimmermann, Last Judgment, Pilgrimage Church of Wies ceiling fresco detail, done by 1754.
Evil ends with time and Creation, but that's the only place it ends. As long as one second follows the next, it is potentially possible to resist the will of God. Such is the nature of Fallen reality. Like the limit in a calculus function, it is impossible to attain utter destruction - the absolute nihility - in Creation. So beast culture circles the bowl until the End - with nothing of virtue or truth left to debase or banish, but still existing. Ever approaching but not reaching self-erasure.
In practical pop culture terms, this means wallowing in death and orifices - cortisol and dopamine - pumped non-stop into the sanctuary of the home by the dancing lights.
What gets missed is that this is inherent. Not the exact way the secular transcendent myths of modernism degenerated into the beast system. Run it back and the specific details play out differently. But it still degenerates - that's the inevitable part. There's no way to "fix" this because top-down systems are a category error. Attempting to impose fallen finite human-generated inadequacies as universal can't work - any more than we could bubble-wrap space-time. It's that retarded - Utopias always fail because we're infinitely too stupid and small to cover reality's eventualities.
When we've been moving positively, it's bottom-up. Organic community forming into cohesive community. Nation is an extension of that - of our being-in-the-world as organisms. Put aside all the powdered wigs and mass slaughter that give the European nation-state its deserved rap. That's a demented fusion of contradictory things - a state is a legal agreement with coercive force. A nation is just a family extended.
Willem Koekkoek, Dutch Town Scene with Figures, 19th century, oil on canvas, private
Historically, the West is a complex of smaller national and sub-national cultures within a Christian and Classical umbrella.
This means very strong distinctions with common basic sociability. In theory, things rise up from the local and carry as far as their appeal takes them.
For a successful author, this arrangement can mean local, regional, national, or international-level fame. Dante started as a medieval Florentine success and went all the way to the outermost limit - read pretty widely even beyond the West. A true world author as much as there are such things. Others build on him in different ways - the further removed, the more he is filtered through other considerations.
In Italy and especially his native Tuscany, Dante is a literary father.
A modern Indian academic or dancer inspired by Dante will relate him to their own frame of references.
That's how traditions and influence work.
You'd think that given this, forming a canon around authors at or near that level would be a no brainer. "The test of time" is a truism for a reason - it's real. Many popular books resonate with their time and place but fade with the season. Others appeal to generation after generation despite the surface differences. These have proven organic significance and let us plug into a cultural mainline. Or it would be a no brainer - if the self-appointed stewards of culture weren't really its enemies.
The problem now is that the beast system is too advanced for repair at the institution level. There is no "going back to" mid-20th century life and more than we're reconstituting the actual Holy Roman Empire. This isn't doom-saying, it's temporality.
It's simple - to return, you need a fixed point to return to. The West has been on the cultural downslope for over a century. What's the point of moving a foot back up the slide, even if you could?
When the globalist system collapses, new organic culture processes will follow. How closely that adheres to the West that was depends on the legacy that we leave. But it won't be the same. It's easy to despair over the enormous potential wasted, the immeasurable costs - but that is perpetuating beast thinking. The world is fallen and finite. Secular transcendence was doomed to crash and the Aegean Stables are overdue for a sluicing. This is also an opportunity. The beast can't create and there is always culture. The world to come will be made by creators. It always is.
Thinking about this means considering what of the West is worthy of preserving? One big beast myth was that Liberal Arts/Great Books hokum where 'whatever beast institutions were pimping at the moment instead of logos' defined greatness. Liberal is a retard word - a granting of largess vis a vis the world that you don't have power to grant.
Remember that "the West" also contains all the masturbatory self-deification & infantile "reasoning" that gave us "the Enlightenment". And all the epistemological drain-circling that's followed. There is no Rousseau in the Band's heritage library.
Big picture – cultures come in different scales – start with your family’s quirks and in-jokes all the way out to “the West”. But at any size, certain things are necessary. Anchors and tentpoles that reflect shared values while creating room to grow. From common stories to local heroes and all the way to canons of art and literature - all mark boundaries that define that culture.
Then those boundaries move in time.
The temporal aspect of cultures get less attention than the spatial ones because they're harder to see. Dress, physiognomic traits, art and architecture styles, cuisine, etc. stand out, They make it easy to keep track mentally of which is which. But they're just pictograms to organize data. They don't determine reality.
The reality is that culture is always changing. It has to because of the temporal nature of material reality.
This may be one of the most common ways where the secular transcendence myth cycle screws people over. Physically, the material world is entropic and fallen. Complex order naturally falls apart, life ages and dies, and all models predict an effective end of the world at some point. Nothing is static. Thought experiment - build anything that will last without maintenance, change, or inputs forever. Where for a literal infinite string of years there is absolute zero change in any way.
If you can't, you've conceded that temporal change is inevitable in the material world.
But we know that...
Edwaert Collier, Vanitas Still Life with a Jewelry Box, 1688, oil on panel,
It's even more obvious in the social world. With each day everyone is older and a bit different - as people are over time. Birth, death, and aging ensures cultures change because the people making them up do.
The nature of abstract reality is that it doesn't change. Mathematical relations are the same whether there is a world or not - so long as time exists to sequence them. The same angels that appear at the start of the Bible are there at the end. The Good, the Beautiful, and the True are constant moral polestars whether or not anyone follows them.
Harmony of the World from Ebenezer Sibly's Astrology, in A New and Complete Illustration of the Occult Sciences, London, 1806
Engraving of heliocentric universe with zodiacal signs, vision of heaven and biblical passages at the bottom. Including Psalm 19:2 The heavens are telling the glory of God; and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day to day pours forth speech, and night to night declares knowledge.
Our concept of the material universe has changed many times. The error the ancients made was assuming metaphysics were material. The relationship is ontological - the ideals are abstract. You can't see them.
Temporal change doesn't apply to abstract reality. Abstract absolutes are conceivable in temporal terms because abstract reality is still relational and sequenced. But they can't exist materially.
Now, which one applies here...
It's just a narrative convention - but it reflects a dangerous mentality that infects the modern world. The potential for earthly perfection. Set aside that this flies in the face of all we can know about physics and metaphysics. Faith in something contradictory to logic and observation, not complementary. The problem isn't that couples don't find happiness together - of course they do, and it should be encouraged. It's the notion of 'get through this one crisis and it's all good forever'.
Imagine thinking you've saved the world while laying the foundations of satanic globalism and the destruction of the West.
More than a few self-fluffers didn't end up going through the gate they thought they were...
The reality is the metaphor of the farmer or the gamer - get through this challenge, enjoy a moment of accomplishment, then brace for the next one. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The same flawed thinking is there in the "back to the whenever" retro movements. This is the find a fixed point problem. If time is continual, any point in the near past is infected with the fake faith and internalized lies that lead right here.
William Powell Frith with Thomas Creswick, An English Merrymaking a Hundred Years Ago, 1847
Organic cultures don't transform radically from decade to decade.
The Band would argue that obsessing over the state of culture or pining for nostalgia are signs of a sick society. Perhaps a terminal one because it's given up on the future for the present or past. If your culture is healthy, healing or escape aren't even on the radar. Because organic culture isn't self-conscious. It just is. So culture is always changing and has a positive organic identity...
The England of Chaucer had it's differences from the England of Shakespeare. But it was still English - you wouldn't have confused it with Monaco or Botswana.
Continuity means just that – not rigidity, because the future is unknowable. But where the trajectories of past and present set course for future. For organic flow, the old is always implicitly present, even if surface fashion changes. Change too quickly and break continuity. Change totally and lose past completely.
This is how the cultural stewards let us down. Their one purpose was to preserve cultural legacy for posterity. That came with a life of privilege - freedom to read, think, teach, and craft new insights - just protect and tend the cultural flame. That was their only reason to exist. All the perks and marble halls, comfortable living for one simple purpose.
Marco Battaglini, Reality Leaves a Lot to the Imagination, 21st century, mixed media
It's why we generally ignore official culture. We'll point out good initiatives when we come across them, use library holdings as data, but otherwise they betrayed the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
Like cutting ballast or flushing the toilet, the whole fake monstrosity has to be cast off.
Breaking away can be psychologically difficult because we have been so conditioned to look deferentially to "lofty" institutions. You start by turning away from their hype and fake expertise. Trust yourself to like what you like. Listen to the case for why something is good, but if it makes no sense, ignore it. If the authority is lying, it’s the authority that goes. And once you’ve blocked the buzzing from your ears, clarity comes quickly. At perverting as the beast system is, we are naturally disposed to healing.
But it isn’t our choice. In reality, opposing the Good or Beauty is instant disqualification for cultural stewardship. They’re evil. Bury them. We have. Meaning…
...we have to take responsible for our own patrimony.
For the Band, this means the Arts of the West. And that means techne + episteme
Eugène Delacroix, The Barque of Dante, 1822, oil on canvas, Louvre, Paris
Dante is a cultural anchor to the maximum level. There is no heritage project that the Band will be part of that doesn't include him. The techne is self-evident. The episteme is a mix of vertical logos and human nature. Some may find the poem too Scholastic to relate. That medieval world-picture can get in the way of appreciating the deeper truth. It shouldn't. Here's why.
It is true that Dante wrote the poem as an allegory – it is set up as a dream but presented as if accurately depicting the afterlife as a real physical place.
The Band is more open to alternative histories than our strict adherence basic evidentiary standards might suggest. What we have to stand on in the blog is different from things we entertain IRL. But a giant Mount Purgatory soaring miles over the Southern Hemisphere opposite Jerusalem is a bridge too far. Dante's world building no longer works as historical fiction.
But the truths that the allegory was trying to convey still hold. The eschatology, wages of sin, psychological insights, logos - they all apply. And that last word is the key here - Dante's fantastic world moves from alternative geography or history to fantasy, but one that is extremely applicable to reality in the Tolkien sense. Where Dante's medieval cosmology doesn't have to be physically accurate to present Truths about our world more clearly than we can see them. It needs the internal consistency of real metaphysics. And if it has those, we should be able to pick up some echoes materially.
This is one of those places where we really can't talk to many people outside our circle. But one of the things that irritates us about fake Christians churchians is that they profess to believe Christian metaphysics and eschatology but live their lives as secular materialist Flatlanders. We believe that if our account of ontology is correct, we will see echoes of higher truths resonate in material reality. Not literally "illustrated" like Dante's Purgatory as an actual mountain, but parallels between things in different frames of reference.
This isn't just speculation. It's the Allegory and Entropy posts that really drove home the reality of all this [click for link].
Secular transcendence pretends "the real world" and speculative thinking are completely separate. Something like the ontological hierarchy and vertical logos are fun thought experiments to be set aside to dance for the beast.
They aren't.
Once you understand how reality chains down through Logos, the material world makes total sense. The problem is that the ontological crossings that we started this post with don't exist in the same realities. They aren't visual analogies like a picture, or a real mountain for the progressive purgation of tainted souls. They're accommodations within a medium of things external to that medium. Limits of discernment can't be seen. They're applicable.
Cristóbal Roja, Dante y Beatriz a orillas del Leteo, 1889, oil on canvas, GAN. Cararas, Venezuela
Wrap it up with the point. We recently came across a piece that took up the concept of Sorathic evil that we mentioned recently and made a sharp insight [click for a link]. The outline is that evil can be classified in different categories with Sorathic being the extreme - "the principle of evil at its purest". He compares it to Goethe's "spirit that negates" - "anti-Creator, who opposes all creation". The insight is that total negation includes self-erasure. Such an "entity" can't exist other than as a theoretical abstract.
And Sorath is an artificial creation - not a religious or mythic being. It's a neologism from Biblical numerology - Rudolf Steiner made it up from the Hebrew numerals for 666. And numbers leads to this:
"Sorath should probably not be thought of as a person at all, but as the hypothetical limit to which evil converges."
"...the devil of all devils is an abstraction, a mathematical limit which none of them can quite reach. And the name we give to this limit, this outer darkness, is also mathematical: Sorath".
This jumped out at us because the idea of an unreachable absolute limit is the material reality - abstract reality divide.
We already touched this in the Land posts - Lord Foul is a metaphysical abstraction in the material driven to endless pleasureless destruction. But the Land externalizes. Ontologies are shown as material narrative. This makes us aware of the relationships but hides the reality where the abstract principle of evil isn't visible.
Think in terms of movements and limits. The vertical in vertical logos is a metaphor because the hierarchy it's really a priority order, not a sequence. But that still implies direction. Moving from the material towards an the threshold of an unreachable a-temporal God.
Mathematically it's the move from finitude to true infinity at the limit of temporal reality. God - ultimate reality, a-temporal Eternity - is external to this sort of progression or sequencing. The theoretical "upper" limit is the interface or what we can call the Good.
The lower levels of the ontological hierarchy encompass temporal Creation. Ultimate reality holds a place but is not mentally accessible in accommodated form other than faith.
So we have an upper abstract limit - an "infinity" that we can endlessly approach but not reach - as long as we are in Creation.
The absolute, unreachable, mathematical nullity of Sorath is opposite this. We haven't thought of what's figuratively "below" the hierarchy since our focus is on celestial things. But if you kept trending downward...
There's no Logos to elevator you down - not necessary in a fallen world. All that's needed in a Fallen world is to turn away from the Good, the Beautiful, and the True.
You won't hit the floor in Creation, any more than you hit the ceiling. It looks that way on the graphic because the graphic is finite. In reality you can approach absolute nullity like absolute infinity - forever.
Have to think about this more because it's a new idea. But it is sound in the big picture for sure. Sorath and the Good are the abstract limits of temporal ontology. The Logos or Word at one limit of Creation and complete erasure of everything as the other. The best part is that it doesn't wallow in fake Manicheanism because the poles are constrained temporal reality where relations and sequencing are possible.
True a-temporal God qua God remains utterly beyond this by necessity and it is all His larger plan. Here's what Creation looks like ontologically, epistemologically, and deontologically.
How does Sorath as an inverted ideal of Creation relate to active and passive evil as we've been working with them? Active is willed malevolence - rebellion against the Good or the Logos for any number of reasons. Satan is the immortal archetype of what we all instinctively recognize as "evil". In actively opposing Creation, one orients away from the Good and towards Sorath.
The passive shows up materially as entropy and limits of discernment. We've noted many times - including the start of this post - that entropy and degeneration invert the essence of Creation. Breaking down rather than building up.
Now what's the material end point of entropy?
Heat death. Endless expansion and dilution towards absolute zero.
Translate the semiotics of physics back to the semiotics of Biblical figuration and that's pretty much the extreme endpoint opposite Creation.
This is the most empirically credible projection that the secular transcendentalists have to offer. The Band considers entropy the material sign of the passive side of the Fall - that it moves opposite Creation gets no argument from us. We obviously have no disagreement with Arrow of Time theories - they conform to empirical reality as well. Without a metaphysical component, the secular really isn't transcendent. And this ontological difference from infinity is an inexorable temporal death sentence.
It seems that this finality is too much for the materialists - there has to be some kind of secular eternity. It can't be terminal. We agree - it isn't, but that requires taking yourself off the altar of self-worship and accepting your limited place in the valley of shadow. Of course, there's always make-believe. No shortage of numerological massage where all sorts of magical changes in the empirical order will just happen so that the universe will be reborn. The law of thermodynamics reversing is a good one. Dark matter and/or energy are currently in vogue.
Dark matter photos are the best - they're cartoonishly contrived to freak out the sort of upper-tier moron that buys into beast popular Science! The sort of high-functioning retard that shoots themselves full of experiential genetic therapies because they're too stupid, mentally lazy, and gullible for self-preservation.
The point. Without number magic or new jack phlogiston, material reality expresses empirically what Sorathic evil as opposite endpoint to Creation expresses metaphysically. Read that again. Yes metaphysics are real. Yes Evil exists opposite the Logos of Creation. Sorath opposite the Good. And unlike the magic of the secular transcendentalists, you can see it.
It looks like this.
And feel free to ignore the numerologists.
The useless of their blather is apparent in how wildly they can deviate from each other with no practical or professional consequences.
The epitome of the lowest possible stakes. Almost Sorathic in value.
Now back to Dante.
A lot of people are struck to find a frozen wasteland of the Ninth Circle of Hell. We are so accustomed to Hell being associated with fire - the Italian name of the book is even Inferno. And there is plenty of fire, but the abomination at the core of the earth is frozen in ice.
Satan isn't the inverse of God. Hell shrinks to a material endpoint spatially and climatically. Approaching but not quite reaching Absolute zero - where all movement stops - because it's within material creation.
The Truth of Dante is the Logos of Creation and the entropic gelid nature of the Fallen world. His grasp on reality is such that his over 700-year old poem better accounts for the sterility of popular cultural than anything in the media today. It's Sorathic. And the firther it sinks away from the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, the more perverse, inverted and ontologically empty it gets.
The lesson then - as always - is to create and to support creation. Those who move with a spirit of destruction, of critique, of chaos choose the path of erasure and serve evil, knowingly or not. That's a loser's game. If you can't find something of the past to honor make or support something new that shines Truth in a Fallen world.
