Three months before his death in 1274, Thomas Aquinas had a revelation that so affected him that he stopped his writing, leaving his great work the Summa Theologiae unfinished. He told his friend and secretary, “The end of my labors has come. All that I have written appears to be as so much straw after the things that have been revealed to me…I can write no more.”
Never mind that he had assembled a philosophical superstructure that would change the world with a comprehensive and impeccable treatment of the human experience. Like other tortured geniuses, whether it was solely the vision that frightened him, or that in combination of being old enough to have gained perspective on the profound oddness of life and what can seem to be the futility of our efforts, Aquinas believed his labors fell short and were so inadequate that he was a failure and asked his works to be destroyed.
None of us are on the level of Aquinas. And yet, his black-pilling is something to seriously contend with. When the diary of Mother Teresa of Calcutta was found after her death, it showed how for most of her life she was in what St. John of the Cross (1591) described as the dark night of the soul, a type of spiritual dryness that delivers little, if any, consolation. In secular terms, it mirrors clinical depression. Through her own words and accounts, it is not unreasonable to conclude that given the nature of her work in the streets of Calcutta and her extreme contact with some of the most desperate people on earth, that their brutal existence didn’t force an extreme examination of just what the hell is this all about?
Alabama born Walker Percy frequently explored this theme via characters who develop a startling sense of reality that force them to confront not only their limitations but the silliness of human endeavors: all the effort, all the handwringing, the plotting, the bloviating, the murdering. For what? In the end, in the still of the morning, even the most black-hearted soul knows a confrontation awaits: an all-consuming fire or an all-consuming love. One in the same, terrifying or unspeakably beautiful.
The older I get, and as the miles rack up on the experience meter, the more I see patterns already beginning to repeat. Maybe it’s the beginning of wisdom, but with it comes the weight of knowing, of seeing reality, not unlike a Percy character.
Sisyphus and Pyrrhus Walk into a Bar to Start a Fight, Again
We are creatures with amnesia. We are stubborn, foolishly dismissing the advice and insight from the generations before us. We enthusiastically go about reinventing inferior wheels and ignoring grandpa’s tips and bang together lopsided tables we nevertheless take vainglorious pride in.
Daily, I become less sure of anything, my understanding of things, my confidence in anything other than my most intimate relationships. And even then, if I’m being honest, I wonder about basic assumptions there as well.
It is unnerving but also relieving, even freeing. You can accept just how insignificant and powerless you are compared to the titanic forces of nations and events, principalities and powers. They are glaciers slowly grinding toward their own mysterious end. We are pebbles stuck in their frozen immensity.
As it relates to Ukraine and Russia, there’s an instinct to cheer for any people fighting, however quixotically, for their freedom and desire for self-determination. But these people are not fighting to be part of the administrative leviathan of the EU. It’s for simple honor and ethnic allegiance, blood memory of centuries-old sentiments against “The Other.” What do the elders in Kiev and Moscow think about this? Has anyone bothered to ask them?
It is also likely that those fighting are experiencing real cognitive dissonance: the primal need to resist an attack but knowing that, in doing so, your people are once again pawns advancing the mission of an evil and vile vision for humanity driven by agendas and forces that you can’t even really name. Would it really matter what labels are put on the glacial forces? The Elites, the Cabal, the NWO, Globohomo, ZOG, the Managerial Technocratic State, the Great Reset.
So, what does one pray for…peace? What is peace? The illusion of the cessation of fighting?
To be sure, maiming, destruction, and death are terrible. But for two centuries, the goals of the dark forces have advanced further during times of peace than open conflict. The real war for souls and temporal control rages on in quiet bureaucratic comfort where there is never a single second of peace.
The institutions entrusted to protect their people, from the Church to the State to the very idea of the family with husband and wife as the essential archetypes and the last bulwark…all captured and compromised long ago. The heads of our institutions are little different than kapos.
To see reality, what is really taking place, is to recognize that peace treaties are a deception and never bring security or victory.
Modern peace leaves unresolved the hidden real war, the quiet and more deadly one. Fumigate the room but the termites behind the walls keep chewing. Peace today is a time for scurrying about in the lulls, finagling, conniving, and for self-serving deal making between the wardens and kapos.
And so, the shocking reality dawns on the awake man, a man who has seen it before and recalls his lessons from history. The modern age’s false peace and false wars, by design, are never meant to achieve the stated goals but only to assure the unending victories for Legion.
No, there has always only been one path for extended authentic peace, one that doesn’t tolerate external threats nor internal vibrant democratic dissent, and that’s the barbarity of total war. Cortes and the Aztecs knew what the stakes were. The Khans, the Cossacks, and Alexander the Great knew what it took to secure their vision of peace. So, too, the Comanche and Sherman. Within, traitors and their entrenched minions are removed not with regime change and election cycles but with enraged mobs, the firing squad, and the guillotine.
These are the rules of the game set by the Lord of the Fallen World.
I’m tired of trying to pretend that the arguments matter, that the version of peace being peddled is effective or even desirable. So many words. So much straw.
‘Cause down in Alabama, you can run, but you sure can’t hide.
Asking as a lapsed Catholic raised on the Angelic Doctor, what was his revelation?
He never explained and died shortly after. Most believe it was a beatific vision, the glory of heaven, and that it so far exceeds what we can imagine that all our attempts to explain what it might be are inadequate to the point of being embarrassing. The danger with this is thinking, “well then why bother?”… and people checking-out of the still practical necessity of logical and reasoned thinking about the human condition and the complicated (and messy) task of doing good, resisting evil etc…
The fist step is to face the unpleasant reality, then begin to work out a vision and strategy from there. Anything less is kidding ourselves and wasting our lives.