“The only thing unintelligible about the universe is its intelligibility.” - Albert Einstein
Eric Voegelin says that the faculty of our souls that perceives and participates in this intelligibility is nous, a Greek work that the philosophers used to connote this correspondence: the correspondence between the perceivable structure of Being and our perception of this perceivable-structure, living our lives according to it. The Christian use of the Greek word logos comes close to this concept.
But Voegelin talks about the flipside of this. Although these lines were published in 1966, they can very easily be applied to Trump and the Christofascists among us in 2023 …
For Plato, as for Heraclitus, the philosopher is a man awake, who communicates to his society the knowledge of its right order, while the tyrant is the sleepwalker who gratifies his lusts in public and commits crimes that come from the dreamworld of fantasies.
This is why it is so ironic and indeed horrifying that those who make the loudest noise about being “Christian” among us also tend to be the people who support the Tyrant, the “sleepwalker who gratifies his lusts in public”, who rapes in more ways that one.
Jesus Christ, by contrast, embodies Aristotle’s spoudaios, the mature man who lives connected to God …
As we recall, for Aristotle the spoudaios is a man who is in the highest degree permeable to the movement of being that proceeds from the unmoved mover; and ethics acquires its dignity as a human creation in which the ordering movement of being is articulated for the human realm. Thus the accord of the image of God with the image of man is to be understood as a symbol expressing the human experience of attunement with the divine ground of being.
That’s what a Christian ought to be: a Man who lives ethically in accordance with God, who lives out “the human experience of attunement with the divine ground of being”.
But a Tyrant is the opposite of this: any tyrant is an Antichrist and to extol a mere tyrant as the goal of all society, as the apotheosis of social order, as a man who is above the law, is to deify the “public gratification of lust”; it is to destroy ethics, it is to sever the link of God to Man, it is to desecrate communion and community, it is to hail naked power, base desire, rape and rapine as the “source and summit” of our existence.
Last week I wrote about those among us who try to call the tune, who lament, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we sang a dirge, and you did not weep.’ But there’s a wider context for those words. Jesus, in quoting such spoiled song-makers, contrasts these whiny children or child-men with John the Baptist who, far from playing a song to make the monkeys jump, is heralding the coming of the messiah. The Baptist is pointing toward the Truth, toward the incarnation of the Truth. He sings the songs of the true prophets. The would-be Pied Pipers, the wanna-be puppetmasters, however, are not at all pointing in that direction. Their tunes are self-serving; or worse, their songs are mere cheerleading chants for the Tyrant. They are heralding not the messiah, but the coming of his opposite.
Here we have the mugshot of one these petulant puppetmasters, one of these whiny child-men whose songs mature men will not dance to, John Eastman, one of the chief orchestrators of Trump’s seditious conspiracy to overthrow the government.
Eastman is currently being disbarred. He faces nine felony charges for Election Fraud in Georgia that could very well result in his spending the rest of his life in a state penitantiary. He is still playing the tune of the Tyrant’s Big Lie, helping the Tyrant to force himself on America even after she said no (as Trump has been legally found by a court in New York to have done to at least one human victim). And, I imagine, he still prides himself to have been involved in the National Organization for Marriage, which failed utterly in its attempt to influence the Culture Wars.
But so far there is still enough of a rule of law in our society to punish such people who give their skills and talents to estabslishing tyranny, to undermining democracy, the betraying America and to breaking the law. So far we still understand that one of the law’s purposes it to enshrine the “ordering movement of being” as “articulated for the human realm,” that the law is for grown-ups, for the spoudaios; that the law is heedless of the tantrums of the tyrant-lovers, that the law (ideally) will not dance when such children pipe or weep when such children pout.
And yet I remain astonished that my most ostentatious of Christian friends are devoted to lawlessness, contemptuous of the intelligibility of Creation that Christ, the Logos, embodies. It still amazes me that this provocative little meme is, symbolically at least, quite true …
"And yet I remain astonished that my most ostentatious of Christian friends are devoted to lawlessness, contemptuous of the intelligibility of Creation that Christ, the Logos, embodies." I think its helpful to move beyond our (mutual) astonishment, into intense curiosity, and then on to ways we can each help rescue our brothers and sisters in Christ.
Leah Libreresco Sargent, in a quite different context, investigates why someone might prefer chaos to order and intelligibility: https://otherfeminisms.substack.com/p/earthsea-the-power-of-perturbation
I do think it is something we need to look at and consider. While the leaders may be mostly corrupt grifters, many Americans are true believers in Trumpism. Why? Is it because its chaos is not a problem but an advantage? Is it because destroying an unjust order via disorder is more important to them, and seems more just, that the current unjust order? If so, why is that for many Christians? Why do they feel and believe that?
The tendency in public statements regarding American imperial foreign policy is that all of our enemies are insane, crazy people who, inexplicitly, oppose the benevolent American order. I doubt it. Even our enemies are acting for apparent intelligible goods. And of course, our State Department and intelligence agencies have numerous professionals who are extremely focused and curious about the reasons and motivations of our enemies.
So too should we be in understanding how so many of our fellow Americans, who are more importantly our brothers and sisters in Christ, ended up where they are.