Merry Christmas
Most every year in the days leading up to Christmas, in the midst of the commemoration of the physical birth of Jesus Christ, by some mysterious process I re-experience the spiritual birth of Christ as our true self, in the sense of I John 4:9:
In this was manifested the love
of God toward us, because that God
sent his only begotten Son into the
world, that we might live through him.
To me this is the essence of the Gospel—living through him. Not belief in a soteriological (i..e. pertaining to salvation) doctrine, but living through him.
In that spirit, I wish everyone
Merry Christmas!
At the same time, given that this lovely and comforting picture represents an ideal not always realized in this crazy world, I also like Laura Wood’s Christmas message:
May the miracle of Christ’s birth fill you with wonder and may it grant you the confidence and strength to battle the forces of darkness.
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Alan M. writes:
Amen seems like the only appropriate response to your Merry Christmas post.
God bless you in this most blessed season.
Ed H. writes:
God Bless, with good hope and continual spiritual renewal through Christ in the coming year.
Richard O. writes:
Merry Christmas, Larry.
You are an immense pleasure to read each day. I treasure your gift to see what is and your courage to describe what you see.
These are such strange times where we are awash in wholesale delusion and deception. More so the former. Delusion and deception are part of the human condition but these days it’s a constant challenge to understand the “wholesale” part. It’s utterly fascinating to witness and to try to comprehend.
If one burns one’s finger in a candle, it invariably imparts a lesson that the injured owner understands and remembers. The previous century of grisly political disease and slaughter, plus almost 1,400 years of Islam’s presence on the planet, however, have not been instructive in the least to millions—indeed to our entire civilization. And now we will all experience the catastrophes of economic collapse, population convulsion, internal war, and full-bore jihad. The least prophylactic measures are unmentionable.
So clarity in any corner is appreciated.
Warmest regards for a healthy and productive new year.
LA replies:
Thank you very much. I would add that the ability to see and articulate the nature of what is, is closely connected to Jesus Christ. Christ is the Logos, usually translated as the Word. But the deeper meaning of logos (lower case) is the principle of intelligibility: through words, through logical thought, we articulate the nature, the structure, of the things that are. God through the Logos (upper case) created a world in which the things that exist have the property that they are intelligible, that they can be made sensible. And it goes both ways: through the logos (lower case), the things of this world are intelligible, and through the Logos (upper case), God, the creator of the world, is made intelligible. Even as Jesus Christ, the Logos, through his person, reveals the Father to us, makes him accessible to us, Christ is also the principle through which all things are made accessible, intelligible, to us.
When we are making sense of things, we are using the ability that was imparted in us by God through his Word, his principle of intelligibility.
So, to return to your comment, what does it mean that the West seems to have lost the ability to see and articulate the nature of the things that exist—particularly the grossest, most palpable, and most evil things, such as Islam, the religion of conquest and slavery, or Leftism, which has resulted in poverty and tyranny wherever it has been tried? It means that the West has turned away from God, turned away from his Logos, and as a result has become hopelessly blind.
Further, it’s not just that the formerly Christian and now liberal West has turned against God, the source of being, and thus has lost the ability to understand things. The liberal West has specifically turned against the divine Person called the Logos (upper case), and against the divine property of things called the logos (lower case). The logos makes accessible the nature of reality. As I discuss here, part of the nature of reality is that all things in their various respects are closer or less close to goodness than other things, in what I call the vertical axis of reality, and that all things and classes of things are in their particularity different from other things and classes of things, in what I call the horizontal axis of reality. Because the highest principle of liberalism is equality or non-discrimination, liberalism denies both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions of reality in which things are differentiated from each other.
And that is why liberalism, in its very core, consists of willful blindness—willful blindness to the difference between good and bad, willful blindness to the differentiating particularities of different things and different classes of things, and thus, ultimately, blindness to the massively evil and alien things that are destroying our civilization.
LA continues:
At first I wasn’t going to post Richard’s comment here, because I felt that his introductory compliment of me made the comment inappropriate for this “Merry Christmas” entry. But then I realized how Richard’s praise of clarity and his lament for the West’s suicidal lack of clarity were highly relevant to the Christmas message.
December 25
Larry T. writes:
Well done, Larry!
Your Christmas day teaching about the Logos was a nice gift to your readers on this blessed day.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 24, 2012 06:45 PM | Send