This is a rough draft. I have no time to edit something this big.
Polymachus is a reader who has such a big brain that if you put our brains in an aquarium and he had a thought I'd stroke out. I therefore move that he be heroized and beautified in one stroke and hereafter called Polynimbus. I will attempt to keep up with his examination of catholic thinking, which a lot of readers must regard as an oxymoronic proposition. I should state that I am onboard with the doctrine of transubstantiation, which—I think was arrived at during a Lantern Council in A.D. 1214, which states that when eating the consecrated wafer and drinking the wine at the Eucharist ceremony, you are actually chowing down and sipping the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ. I suspect that this ancient pagan doctrine, seemingly derived equally from Egyptian and Nordic theology, preserves the ancient Arуan knowledge that civilizations are essentially cannibalistic and physically and spiritually devour their citizens...
My comments will be in italics.
Catholic Neo-Platonist Thinkers
Sep 12, 2019, 12:50 PM (8 days ago)
This is a big one, for your investigation.
-Polynimbus, Ascended
The Good
This is Aristotle's central concern, being "the good" and we should member that his name, like other ancient Hellenic names, having meaning by contrast to our empty labels, means "Best-Purpose." "The Philosopher, was, in many ways, the father of medieval Christian scholarship.
•Catholic thinkers are interesting to talk to / listen to
when they are drinking beer or wine.
•They have good categories
◦Categories I would never think of
◦Categories that capture the essential difference between things
◦These categories are really good at catching bullshit (logical equivalent of dividing by zero): making sure that everyone is on the same page, talking about the same thing, not eliding terms when convenient
◦Totally believable this thinking comes from a belief in a single universe / objective reality mediated through God's law
The logical categorization and the ideal of a unified cosmos under the stewardship of an "Unmoved Mover," is purely Hellenic and has the footprint of Aristotle who was the great categorizer. Also, the virgin birth of Jesus has Hellenic mythic parallels and not Hebrew parallels, such as Herakles, Euthymus, Glaukos, Achilles and Theogenes [though these are more profound in Germanic and Egyptian theology]. Additionally, the sacrifice and ascension, while more explicit in Egyptian and Germanic lore, is prefigured in Greek myth by the ascension of Herakles and Euthymus and the sacrifice of Sokrates, whose name meant Body-Taker. Recall that some of the original gospels were in Greek.
•If you follow a Catholic thinker's argument from start to finish, it's usually pretty good
Well, they have 2,000 years to sort their worldview.
•It seems that I'm actually talking about the Neo-Platonist influence on Christianity, but I'll just say "Catholic thinker" for short
This is obvious to the reader of ancient Hellenic and Latin texts.
Ok, But
•When you come at a Catholic thinker's argument from the side, they usually say "sorry, the only starting point is where I started"
Catholicism is a universalist Faith accreted as a civic, military and international mind control mechanism.
•The arguments why one starting place is better than another aren't always that convincing
They would be if Saint Bernard were strapping on his hand wraps and preparing to blacken your eye between sermons.
◦Often just restate the reasons for their preferred starting point
◦Don't have a reason why your starting point is no good other than to say it's not their starting point
◦For people that hate circular logic it's rather circular
This is at once a reflection of the pre-Christian belief in cyclic macro-action in nature, the cosmos and human affairs. They took Aristotle's work, retarded it with Plato's forms and left enough for people with brains to discuss so as not to go mad behind monastery walls while the peasants sweated and drooled and the nobility butchered and bled. Remember, just like today's international corporations want no intellectual honesty, yet recruit the brightest minds to their nefarious cause, the catholic church was primarily interested in recruiting the smartest men so that they could defend their inherently untenable worldview. Catholicism, is, at its core, a social system for sanctifying human suffering and exploitation—essentially like taking Aristotle's search for the "Cause Uncaused" and turning it into dungeon porn. That's said, Catholicism has great value in that it compromised with paganism—as did all Christian forms until the Reformation—and therefore preserved much of true Arуan myth and social form.
•Sometimes it feels like they are reciting someone else's arguments than actually thinking; the tell is the weakness of the arguments against your starting point relative to the strength for their favored starting point
Despite its appeal on many counts, and the fact that the most brilliant minds for 1500 years were Catholics, The Church is a hierarchal social organism based on violence, shame and guilt and might therefore be suspected of less than objective standards of inquiry. However, medieval and ancient Catholicism stands heads and shoulders above modern materialism and postmodern relativism in terms of a platform for human inquiry, not to mention extra-human investigation. Demonology and exorcism are certainly more legitimate courses of study than feminism and transgenderism, for instance.
•The categories that Catholic thinkers use are really good for discussion; you can walk away with a clear sense of what was actually talked about
◦This is not the case with Marxist intellectuals
◦If they can't convince you with their opening barrage their next step is to convince that what you're saying is really what they're saying
◦They'll say the clearest expression of your ideas is... their ideas
◦This usually requires opaque language, long arguments where objects are far removed from descriptors
◦They tend to interpose definitions so the same word is used for opposite meanings when convenient
◦It's very tedious to read Marxist intellectuals because this interposition of meaning may occur dozens if not hundreds of pages apart; in politics, years and decades apart
◦Length plus boring writing is part of the strategy; its argument through attrition
◦You have to be vigilant to spot these traps; I don't blame people for avoiding 20th century writing altogether
◦Your level of mistrust is so high by necessity that you can't even take simple statements at face value
Catholicism is a system of social control, dedicated to directing the minds of all classes of people on courses that have a higher purpose. As such, that system of religious mind control serves as a good, if flawed, platform for investigating the reality of God's universe. Conversely, as yet another demonstration of the inferiority of the modern mind over the ancient and medieval mind, Marxism, and also secular humanism and all forms of modern and postmodern socialism are nothing but systems for controlling human bodies by compromising human minds, for no greater purpose than to provide a tiny elite a comfortable doom as a rotting meat-puppet. The papal attribute of Catholicism is directly Pharaoronic. At least the Egyptians suffered in their millions to send their God king into the cosmos in The Boat of a Million Years so that he could touch the ultimate Divinity. Socialist nations such as the United States, and their civic religions, with every school and college and university and day care program a temple to The God of Things, seek only to farm the suffering of our tens of millions so that Bill Clinton can fuck 138 virgins on Epstein's nihilistic altar and Dick Cheney can get bigger contracts.
•That said, I rarely walk away from a discussion with a Catholic thinker with a sense of insight
◦The argument which is convincing in discussion is not useful in action
◦There always seems to be a lack of accounting about the degree to which we are trapped in our own minds
Catholic thinkers have generally been superior to protestant thinkers—who evolved into atheist theologians over a few hundred years—because there is a tacit recognition in a religion based on priestly intercession, that the individual's internal mental space is his certain avenue to direct divine contact. Conversely, in many protestant denominations from 1600 through roughly 1800, it was regarded as a crime punishable by death to harbor private thoughts, even about subjects not directly associated with faith, but with civic obedience. Puritans would burn you at the stake for not disclosing your inner mind in public. Catholics generally burned you at the stake or ripped you apart in a dungeon for what you did, said and wrote.
Where I part ways with Catholic thinkers
•Change / Movement / Process
◦I tend to be more interested in verbs than nouns, process than essence
◦A Catholic thinker is going to have a great definition of a duck. He will capture its essential duckness like no one else. You will know, forevermore, if you're talking about a duck or a not-duck
Again, this is because Catholicism is largely based on paganism and heathenism, and is therefore reality-based, as it adapted to account for demonic forces in the world, the evil that men do and the truth that there has always been—in human scale—more than one supernatural power effecting human life, where other "more advanced" philosophical systems are obsessed with such fantastical entities as rights and such idiot notions as equality.
◦For all the rigor that goes into the definition of a duck, it isn't all that helpful when the thing you're talking about is so small that it's practically interchangeable in how it contributes to the duck, or so large the duck is practically interchangeable in how it contributes to the thing
◦Similarly, if you're talking about a spectrum of duckness, in many situations its less important to know the exact moment something becomes a duck than the process by which not-duck becomes duck, or vice versa, especially if you're trying to put knowledge into use
We are definitely on the spectrum here.
◦I prefer definitions that limit themselves to a particular stage on a process
In combat arts this is called situational functionality. Would that more thinkers fought.
◦For instance, I like this definition of form (not mine): form is the recognizable continuity of a process
◦It's hard for me to treat the stability of forms as the primary matter of philosophical importance when the change that flows through them is equally important to decision-making
In the combat arts, forms are regarded as necessary for excellence of expression but are known to retard any fighter who clings to them.
◦It's more helpful to think of a duck as a stage of evolution along a path of genetic continuity, or a temporary network of bio-chemical processes, or an energy input / output of an ecosystem
•Logic / uncertainty
Faith is the act of counterintuitive certainty and bestows great power on the actionist who disciplines himself according to the precepts of faith, which are necessarily outside of the field of logic. Christendom was wrought by elite theologians who were also the little brothers of fighting men, and required meaningful occupation for their minds, which resulted in wonders and horrors aplenty and the foundation of modern knowledge systems.
◦In some sense there's a pure logic where a thing can only have one cause and one effect
◦But sometimes there are multiple causes and multiple effects
◦Yes, what this really means is we're talking about randomness and uncertainty; but to engage with the real world you have to account for it
No thing is more uncertain than combat.
◦I bet this is what probabilistic thinking is (haha get it?)
No, I don't get it—you know I've been hit in the head more often than you've read with yours.
◦I don't see Catholic thinkers account for this so their ideas feel more up in the air than on the ground. In other words, "great, but how do I actually use this?"
This thinking system developed in monastic forums, where the only thing that was really used was the ink quill, the bible, the beer mug and the greased palm.
◦The world is really clear when you close one eye
•Perspective
◦Sometimes you can't see something from all sides at once
◦Sometimes the best you can do is describe the apparently contradictory views of something
◦There is an art to using the right view at the right time
◦Some may call this wisdom
◦I wouldn't say Catholic thinkers are bad at this, but I can usually dish up an unaccounted-for perspective and come from an argument from the side
◾Then I'm not dealing with their best arguments anymore, so I'm not so sure what to think
◾Sometimes they get pissy
Because their pacifist prohibition on violence prevents them from fighting and experiencing ever-altering fields of perception. Turning the other cheek empties the human brain.
•Fallibility
◦I like to remind myself every step of the way that my perspective, senses, memory, and logic are limited - and so is everyone else's. Catholic thinkers - not so much.
◦Our brains are capable of the bare minimum for survival, and little more
◾This is proof that art and contact with the numinous are required for survival
◾God is not made in Man's image
◦It's hard for me to think that I can look over God's shoulder
◦Yeah, maybe God operates through laws, but I doubt what humans can see of them are more than glimses
Protestants and Catholics can all agree that you need to burn at the stake for the six statements above, all of which I agree with.
•Trapped in our minds
◦Related to fallibility, but distinct
This points up the importance of art and fiction and poetry as forms of non-absolute expression.
◦I don't actually see definitions and logic as real things; they are tools to be taken out of the box when useful and put away when not
◦There's no angelic cloud, no perfect world where logic reposes in perfect form
Drug heads would disagree.
◾Logic is a tool for getting closer to reality but is is not reality itself
◾Logic is an emotion, actually, and a subtle one; its when the mind is happy with itself
Okay, the scientists will also want to throw some gasoline on the fire at your feet
◾I take it on faith that reality is real; but I have little faith that our logical fumblings get us very close to God
Closeness to God was not a common yearning in the ancient and medieval world, when life was so brutal that notions of God fell far short of our general perception that God would be something like Marry Poppins' celibate sugar daddy.
◾It's still one of our best tools
◦Definitions are useful tools but only in light of actions we plan to take
◾There is no world "out there" where things exist in their pure, essential form only
◾If there is a Platonic reality, it exists even deeper inside our minds, even deeper in delusion; not outside, and not closer to reality
◾The definition you use for something changes based on the kind of decision you're making***
◾Because we can't take every action at once, we can't have every definition at once; hence the Platonic world is inside our minds only, and only in abtract contemplation
◾This is why the Platonic world feels so static; the instant you try to make a decision / take action, it all falls apart
Sounds like combat.
***On definitions
"The definition you use for something changes based on the kind of decision you're making."
•This requires elucidation
•It might be more accurate to say "the relevant categories change based on the decisions you're making"
•The thing is, does something's definition change in view of one category or another being relevant?
•As far as functionality goes, yes, I think. But now we're talking more about drives than ideas.
Drives were understood better by pre-modern and pre-civilized folk, with ideas unworthy of FAITH tending to be regarded as worthless idles for the effete. The Arуan worldview, in particular, was one of driven peoples, migrations, explorations, outreach, keen insight, avid religious FAITH and conquered plight.
◦Is there a meaningful difference between drives and ideas? Do ideas really just sit there with no drives behind them?
◦For me, I don't think so
◦If they do for other people, that would be really interesting
◦Keep in mind we don't always notice or understand our drives
•What is a definition?
1.The qualities a thing must have, without which, it would be another thing
2. A tool to make sure we're using the right tool
You're hired, Kid.
•#1 irks me because my next thought, every time, is "from what perspective?" It doesn't feel complete, and doesn't account for trapped in our minds.
This is why the best warriors are nomads, in sports and in war, and why our sissy, high IQ society, with all of its university educated think tanks, cannot figure out simple situations that 75 IQ thugs from Baltimore take as common knowledge.
•I like #2 better - every time I get a useful definition its tied to one purpose or another. So, what is a tool?
◦A tool is something we can reasonably expect to help us accomplish a task.
But we have to remember not to get caught up in a tool-using perspective or we blind ourselves visually and experientially as our tools become crutches. This is axiomatic in combat thinking.
◦So, a definition is a mental object that helps us select the mental and/or physical objects with the necessary sameness required for a purpose.
◦Oftentimes the unstated purpose is to impart similar thoughts which can be different from taking action
◦Maybe I would be sympathetic to an abstract view of definitions if stillness was a functional transcendent value for me, and all I wanted to do reside in the World of Ideas, enjoy Being, and take Each Thing As Itself
◾On the other hand, if this stillness was independent confirmation of the Buddhist ideal that would be interesting, but I don't want to conflate superficially similar ideas
◦If this is what someone wants, #1 is better. More power stillness to them.
◦As for #2, it might be interesting to define things in light of the purpose God may have for them
◦To be clear, in many conversations there is no difference between #1 and #2, but there are critical moments where the argument that resonates with me uses #2. For logic to work you want to be consistant with your definitions throughout an argument but you also want to select a definition that keeps the focus on the purpose the argument means to serve.
◦Selecting tools to address "Is this true?" is a good starting point, but not sufficient if Truth is more than a word-game, but a blueprint for action, or an ongoing action itself.
This is one of many reasons why I prefer presentation of facts, observations and possibilities instead of debate.
◾Actually, if one cannot meaningfully seperate ideas from drives, then morality - the nurturing of truthful drives - is the foundation for apprehending truthful ideas
Once a culture abandons its tribal identity and becomes civilized it starts to die and lose identity, which requires a priesthood to replace drives with ideas and work a transmogrification rather than preside over an identity funeral.
◦It seems like a weird quirk to restrict truth to mean "correct words."
This is the foundational perversion of Modernity, and the dominant force in postmodern life, the end phase of faltering civilization.
Problems
•It's very difficult to discuss the necessary fluidity of definitions / perspectives in light of action without sounding like a Marxist playing the word-swapping game
•It's very difficult to express skepticism of the human mind without sounding like a nihilist or a solipsist
•The weariness developed towards these behaviors creates emotional minefields
•It doesn't help that some Catholic thinkers are extremely arrogant, especially when discussing The First Cause
Faith is the assumption of supreme arrogance. Expect this from any decent theologian. Cortez had faith, a man so arrogant as to defy his superiors and conquer an unknown world to satisfy his "sickness of the heart." In many ways Cortez is the most highly evolved Arуan warrior and will be studied in the third volume of this series closely.
Ways forward
•I want to develop productive ways to talk to Catholic thinkers
Question them like Socrates/Jesus did the establishment thinkers of their religions, BUT, recall what happened to these two do not argue or debate. You can get more from them by fishing than splashing.
•A lot of my criticisms could be said about anyone who roughly adheres to a doctrine but is not its originator
◦No, you're not going to get the doctrine's best arguments
◦Yes, people are going to get annoyed if you ask too many questions
◦No, they probably don't understand it forwards-and-backwards as if they developed it themselves
•I like their definitions and categories; at the very least they make great starting places on a topic
They are a valuable and ancient repository of many things. Pillage their scripted minds rather than try and challenge their doctrines.
•When they engage in abstract reasoning, meaning, not overtly concerned with a decision, my job is to figure out what unstated decisions they are concerning themselves with
◦There may be default modes of concern
◦These default modes may be cultural
•Apply Catholic thinkers' categories through this understanding
•To restate, when Catholic thinkers aim at pure truth, I need to take it as a particular notion of truth. What ongoing decisions concern them?
Not burning in everlasting damnation. This is not just a system for making sense of the world, but also and primarily, the engagement of a promise that faith will bestow everlasting bliss, and you don't even want to imagine the alternatives. Any religion must abandon observable reality and human instinct at some point.
•It's too easy to say "to have power over me / to look smart." Be wary of that. It may be case, but you want to account for other possibilities and your own lack of imagination
•There's no need to tell a Catholic thinker I'm doing this, but I don't have to lie if asked
•It may be better to take this sort of Christian Neo-Platonism as a meditation regimen, not a method for making decisions in the world
Amen, Catholicism was developed as a way to chain the Arуan soul to a plow, and as such has much truth, horror, wonder, wisdom and absurdity to offer, but is not an operating system for the man seeking Truth or God, but a regimen for consoling the faithful for not finding either in this sorrowful life. Remember always that the central tenet of postmodern meat-puppet existence came directly through protestant distillations of the quintessential characteristic of Catholicism, which is Ancestral GUILT, the assumption of everlasting condemnation for something you did not do. This simple ideal of a primeval taint upon our souls is the most direct assault on the central Arуan ideal that our ancestors were better than us and is currently expressed as the media-drive and academically justified thirst to extinguish or replace the Arуan races, wallowing pale and wan in their current perceived lack of distinction.
◦Wtf don't they say that!?!
◦This could explain why Catholic thinkers get so pissy; when you introduce too many concepts of motion to their stillness you're harshin' their vibe, man
Understanding that Catholicism was envisioned in Late Antiquity and medieval Christendom as a chain of faith to weight the limbs of then proud nomadic races, just like Zeus tethering Prometheus to a rock to be pecked at by a bird or prey, and was sold to those very races' chiefs as a tool for mass mind control, one can hardly fret over the purveyors of such soul chains for desiring stillness.
Cultural Consciousness
•A stable category implies an ongoing concern, a decision made repeatedly, an objective yearned for but never grasped, a transcendent value.
•I may have some stumbled on to Spengler
◦There might be something to be learned about a culture's foundational worldview by considering how its essential categories accomodate certain types of decisions
◦Maybe this is why Spengler saw the Classical world concerned with stillness
When you are a slave girl awaiting the cruel rapine of the conqueror, stillness does not seem so bad from the comfort of one's doomed and cushioned couch.
•If I was to channel my inner James LaFond, I might say that the urge towards stillness reflects the concerns of a society that had only recently settled in place
Yes, like the boxer that just won the title yearning to experience a year on top before he has to risk it all again in the ring.
•If this is true there is a lot to be learned comparing the vestigial wandering ideals of the Illiad and the Odessy to the stillness of Plato and (much later) Platonus.
All Arуan epics are concerned with wanderings of mind and hero and people, and the soft beneficiaries of their deeds concern themselves with dissembling the results in self-fulfilling wise.
-James
If you have any yeah. I have this nagging suspicion that "The definition you use for something changes based on the kind of decision you're making" needs work. I'm going to keep that in the back on my head, wait for situations to rise, and see if those words reflect what I see in the world.
I'm an intuitive guy and a lot of what I do is share observations. you know? Oftentimes I have shapes in my mind and the words are secondary.
Also, this is half about thinking and half about talking to people you sort of partially agree with.
Whatever time allows, thank you!
-Polynimbus
Under the God of Things
Masculine Axis: A Meditation on Manhood and Heroism
