Musing in late January USA

The COVID pandemic has been used to justify the implementation of a global biosecurity strategy

Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò “The Great Reset” is an expression coined a few years ago by the Masonic elite that dominates the world. It means a sort of global revolution that has been decided on by this elite in order to “reset” the entire social fabric, imposing a series of changes on the masses that are intended to prepare for the reign of the Antichrist, which in the absence of calamitous events would be difficult to have democratically adopted with their consent. The ideals of a better world, respect for the environment, fraternity between peoples, and inclusivity are only a hypocritical and deceptive way of delivering this revolution and cloaking it with an alleged nobility of purpose which in practice hides the true ends of the elite: by their own admission, “nothing will be as it was before.”

For Berdyaev, the technical and economic processes of modern civilization turn the person into their own tool, they demand from man an incessant activity, making use of each moment of life for activity. “Modern civilization negates contemplation and threatens to completely shove it out from life, to make it impossible. This will mean, that man ceases to pray, that he will no longer have any sort of relationship to God, that he will no longer see beauty and unselfishly know truth. The person is defined not only in relation to time, but also in relation to eternity. The actualism of modern civilization is a denial of eternity, is an enslavement of man to time. No one instant of life thus is of value in itself, nor has relationship to eternity or God, every moment is but a means for the one following, needing all the more quickly but to pass away and be replaced by another. The exclusive actualism of suchlike a sort changes the relationship to time -- there occurs an acceleration of time, a mad chase. The person cannot hold on amidst the flooding current of time, in this actualization of each moment, it is unable to think about matters, it is unable to conceive of the meaning of its own life, since meaning is always revealed in relation to eternity, and the flood of time is of itself incomprehensible. Indisputably, man is called to activity, to work, to creativity, he cannot only meditate. The world is not merely a stage-show for man, a spectacle. Man has to transform and organize the world, to continue on with the world-creation. But man remains a person, the image and likeness of God, and will not be transformed into a mere means of an impersonal animate and societal process, only in this instance -- if he is the point of intersection of two worlds, the eternal and the temporal, if he acts not only within time, but also contemplates eternity, if he inwardly defines himself in relation to God. This is a fundamental question of the contemporary actualist civilization, the question about the fate of the person, the destiny of man. Man cannot be only an object, he is a subject, he possesses his own existence within himself. Man, transformed into the tool of an impersonal actualized process within time, is already no longer a man. “

Lebensphilosophicially, organicially, impersonally, unfolding out of the seeds of life increasingly complex organisms arise by means of the competitive interplay of its individual nutritive forces.

The ‘Bildungstrieb’ does not cultivate change or alteration so much as intensification—‘Steigerung’—of what was originally there at the outset. In the healthy organism the creative forces of life must be guided, trained, and restricted, so that in place of something wild and ungainly a proper Bildungstrieb places a balanced structure which achieves its full intensification in beauty. And the same is true not just of nature, but of any science that would endeavor to be true to nature. Such a proper science is what Goethe names “morphology.” As the work of the botanist is to trace the morphology of an organism according to the intensification of its type through all its living forms, so does it fall to the proper historian to account for the great archetypes within past individuals and cultures and to attend to their intensification by means of both their immanent competitive life forces and their struggles against one another. One way that history serves this Goethean model of life is by offering a morphology of the growth of historical individuals worth studying. In fact, Nietzsche’s affirmative model of historiography will reflect precisely this Goethean ideal: history as the battle ground of competing forces for the sake of the intensification of an individual’s most healthy qualities.

In Vico the historical course of civilizations within a providential order is that “Men first feel necessity, then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance” Thereafter, when a society at the last stage of development in its “barbarism of reflection” fails to heal itself by taking responsibility for its history, the Vichian ricorso takes place, i.e., the return to primitivism and barbarism which restores simplicity, religion and poetic wisdom It is that ricorso which saves Man by preserving his humanity.

Vico’s concept of Providence, God is the prototype of the thinker in as much as he creates being by thinking it. Vico points out that thinking and making are one and the same for God. Therefore, in as much as God has granted his own Logos to both being and the organs of knowledge, “created being” is “thought being” that bears traces of the divine intellect. Vico patterns this convertibility of thinking and making to man’s artifacts and shows that Man is capable of truly knowing only what he himself has made. He will never comprehend fully either nature or its Maker, at least here within time and space.

And here lies the root of contemporary Man’s cultural malaise: in the presumptuous conviction that the human mind can and in fact will in the future encompass God’s mind. At that point Man will be a god of sorts. Vico describes thus the last stage of deterioration of a whole civilization: “And finally they go mad.” What brings about the madness is the delusion of being a god which is nothing else but the worshipping of one’s cleverness and its derivations; what the Bible calls idolatry. This is the real original sin: the stubborn refusal to be a creature and the arrogant attempt to become a god. This is the secret wish of Adam surfacing in Hawking who boldly declares that “then we shall know the mind of God.” In other words, then we shall narcissistically worship ourselves as the creators of the eighth day of creation.

Dawson argues in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture that Western culture had as its lifeblood “a living faith which gave Europe a certain sense of spiritual community”. This lifeblood also gave it a “dynamism” which manifested itself in the “indirect and unconscious influence [Christianity] exercised on the social and intellectual movements which were avowedly secular.”

Dawson further points out that there never was a single unitary organization which held sway over all of life in the West. And yet the most dominant institution, the Church, contributed substantially to the spiritual vitality and spiritual unity upon which the culturally dynamic West relied. Rather than being politically domineering, Dawson asserts that the Church ensured there would never be a unitary power to override all other forms of social existence. For Dawson, Christianity fought against stagnant uniformity and set the foundations for a vibrant Western culture.