Let the nations who have fallen against Thine inheritance and defiled Thy Holy Church be assailed by Thy tempests and shake them with Thy wrath; fill their faces with dishonor; let them be put to shame and troubled forever; let them be disgraced; and by the power of Thy judgement let their pride be destroyed. — “Molieben to the Lord God Sung in Time of War Against Adversaries Fighting Against Us,” Book of Needs vol. 4, General Calamities.
The problem with a primacy of academics is, aside from ushering in the revolt against and fall of the imperial epoch at the behest of the evil bastard, we usually go straight from the womb through cushy home-life while attending school for around twenty-five years, and “plop” into the world where staking a claim of informed experience is advanced unawares (if unwieldly) — advanced through one’s thoughts, which happen in speech (and not in some always pre-existent vacuum of brilliant order and correspondent calculation like some antediluvian Lemian brain-in-a-vat become A.I. ‘borg), and which thus have a significant aspect of being exploratory.
And this “graduation” from an institution about a century out from its fledgling collapse into the piles of utopian Marxist entrailia and its reactionary Logical Positivism and Western Analytic (and all they usher in), and now at best a sauntering zombie of such applied “mass-grave aesthetics” and other flavors of self-lobotomies. Such portent constituted for me — when it came about somehow that I was to continue beyond college (before which I worked for ten years) where I de facto witnessed the putrefaction first-hand — the condition for the main criteria for my carefully selecting an institution.
The department had to consist of more than a couple of professors who supported the only area in philosophy not co-opted by these leeching mainstreams of the discipline, but rather who worked in areas that account for the inexhaustible, irreducible uniqueness of the human person and the possibility of working through the banal objectification of such by the larger problems of the world. This criterion consists of work based in experience, philosophy as a way of life, and only remained possible in 20th Century Existential and Continental Philosophy.
The only institution within a relative distance to the metropolitan area (given Dad’s exacerbated MS) that did not exclude these altogether, or at best have one potentially supporting professor but who would require you jump through Thomistic theoretical as well as Western Analytic hoops on the dissecting table (cf. SLU, which my spiritual father, a former provost, absolutely lamented), was about 100 miles away (i.e. SIUC). Four supporting professors were on staff, so truth would perhaps not be packaged and redistributed en masse there to proliferate careers (yes, all of these are tenure-track, actual professors at a real university, not one that recently changed its name to that to stay hip (cf. about 15 wannabe teachers’ colleges in the STL metro area lol). Plus, as I would soon find out, the department overlaps with the Classics and Religious Studies departments (although the latter was soon thereafter liquidated for lack of “assessable results”).
Once in, it became apparent that the students were mostly professionally active scholars (according to the market pressure of the day), had all gone directly in from undergrad (which they entered right out of high school), and were substantially given over to riotous living and petty, malicious infighting. The latter was not wholly in isolation of similar examples given by more than a couple of their superiors, as well. During my residency, there may have remained one genuine scholar who (despite adapting well to the prevailing “changeling” ethos) had any experience in the world having come from a meager background, or who at least had open-ended yet solid scruples in everyday life.
Through it all, it remains that the void between those of even a common approach or area is immeasurably vast — not to mention the quality of people both moral or otherwise: your stack of published papers is neither here nor there if neither you nor the world are transformed thereby.
And as I found out somewhat reluctantly at first, including God and matters of the Spirit at every level of inquiry pushes rather than limits everything possibly discovered. So after the first residency and defense, and a few courses into the second, doctoral residency, I knew that this realization was very expensive, but that rather than complete more expensive mistakes, only disavowal of the discipline (nay, institution) as such was needed.
It became theology in practice or bust. No more sitting on clouds with spoiled brats talking about the philosophy of experience they have never had (and may never get, heh). No more Jeckll & Hyde when after the weekly paper presentation you go to the bar and witness the most petty insult-hurling and malicious threats between changeling colleagues now that no professors are present (even with cut-throat funding competition aside). No more diploma-mill of 100 students per TA 95% of which buy assigned papers online (or today likely use ChatGPT) for your required courses as they chose to remain largely illiterate both intellectually and otherwise when selecting to attend “the party school” as far from Chicagoland as possible (and where the professor who makes $200/unit on his annually revised textbook would require TA’s not give less than a ‘B’ to keep “production” numbers to par–despicable to say the least).
But, as said prof often chanted to his 300-full auditorium after demonstrating in a 4-line syllogism that the gestating embryo has no rationally defensible moral property, “you can certainly do the same quality of work here as anyone at my alma mater Yale!” Yes, and you can certainly get a Frankenstein brain-transplant if you succeed in analytic philosophy, where they continue to chart the brain pathways of the “spiritless” bundle of nerves they claim us to be (cf. Cognitive Science/Philosophy of Mind programs anywhere, especially Wash jU).
Speaking of rationally defensible moral property, what is the moral to all of this fuss and formative funbuckets?
Perhaps the same one sorely lacking in the global woke mind virus now hopefully increasingly under quarantine: resistance to evil by force.
Just as Met. Philaret of New York of blessed memory once wrote in “Living According to God’s Will,” “Only some dreamers far removed from reality and some narrowly one-sided sectarians can pretend that war can be omitted from real life” (114), perhaps not so uncannily do only the same pull-off much of what “passes muster” these days even in the wonderful world of practice I entered (not to speak of the Church herself, which remains impenetrable, of course).
Let us in the following amplification of the foregoing “analoguery” qualify it in the same fashion, which will undoubtedly prove to be a breaking of a favorite taboo dear to both the zealous simpletons and the analytwists alike by leaping unwarrantedly from the global to the particular level and back — for is globalism in its latest ever-self-reinventing woke mind-virus and all of its household PR psyops not the very ubiquitous and univocal insurgent of “the spirit” itself that we must face at every turn in the modern tyranny of the passions?
For if they can incessantly keep up their non-sense of “thought experiments” and “quandary ethics” of relative “moral virtue” — all of which are never either here or there when it comes to actual struggle, or even the vapid “doing and undergoing,” of actual transformation and growth from failure in experience — why can we not follow the “transductive” logic of the day right over the edge of its own liminality by saying one more thing that they will just laugh off as yet more crazy jibberish from the only true local whom the self-declared elite (for whom “smarter” means merely having a command of the most information) cannot rid itself of but who cares enough to stick around until the end? We will proceed in the child-like form apropos of the heuristics of the true bosses of the day: the babies and mama bears (or for the crunchy, “mama gayzelles,” who without lifting a finger, whip their hubbies into big “cathlick women” at once (bare plucked-chickenface or amishmug alike), lawl?).
We begin:
Resistance to evil by force, as Ilyin intended, includes for when the sovereign existence (i.e. existence at all) of the nation (allowing the Church to operate) is called into question by murderous faction, alien invasion, etc. In so doing, the Church rightfully supports its armed forces and even blesses them going into such resistance. Just as the Archbishop of Istanbul Chernibart blessed even Muslim troops from Turkey going into battle in Syria just a short time ago, so also did His Holiness Kyrill bless his own patriots going into the SOP which to this day remains at a careful snail’s pace for maximum avoidance of civilian casualties (not to be dismissed as betrayal for not leveling the Mother of Russian Cities, Kiev, as viral vic’s endemically attest). And for the nearly-dogmatic status of the absolution of brothers laying down their lives for their anointed kingdom we need not only recall Ven. Sergii of Radonezh on the battlefield at Kulikovo. In his 1552 letter to Tsar Ivan IV, St. Macary of Moscow says the same, as Fr. Georgy Maximov pointed out in response to the tirade against the patriarch led by the hare in this race, self-declared “First Without Equals” Chernibart, with his hypocritical olive branch-waving for Turkey and his entourage of Latin heretics and the desperately petty UOJ (after press-time, we learned from credible sources that their previous russophobic statements were less than genuine, and a wonderful US edition has since emerged!)
In fact, the entire tradition of the Eastern Orthodox Church is for war justified as the lesser good in such instances (cf. Fr. Alexander Webster’s early 21st Century study of just this in his portion of “The Virtue of War” (Salisbury: Regina Orthodox Press, 2004). Just as in Church, we do not wear jeans or sneakers, unless we cannot afford dress shoes and slacks/skirts–or chat in groups in the narthex during the Liturgy or party in the Altar or reduce Church to an elite social club–we take necessary measures to prevent the brutalizing and murder of our mothers and children, unless we are clergy for whom it is not permitted to wield a weapon.
And truly we must agonistically maintain our focus on achieving this lesser good (lesser because invariably all war as such always implies even a bit of civilian casualties), as our love for our brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers, children and the Church, is strong and true. Hence the importance of ceaseless conviction and commitment to circumspection, which ought not hide forever in an obsequious outward self-consciousness of “passion” for the lack of one iota of actual struggle and experience like the feverless hippie corpse of the world’s injunction of “peace.” Such all-too-familiar quietism and idolatry of humanitas would miss the de facto soft-totalitarian trees for the de jure luxurious self-care forest of today’s homogeneous/globalist “normie” culture of vultures.
“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John the Theologian 15:13).
The opposite of that would be something like raising up one’s life for oneself – not unlike over 90% of young affluent wealthy people today who would be nowhere without their moneyed parents’ laying the path to guarantee the status does not change hands. Add to that the nearly universal non-confrontational and non-assertive preference schema of anyone born after 1985 and you’ve got a bubble of repressed disingenuous tyranny afloat betwixt the gestalt and the given.
And to this end, along with the requisite lack of the patristic agonistic phronema, we sadly today end up with self-announced worthiness to take holy orders by acting as if such constitutes one’s ownmost vocation all the sudden, as the norm. And “discernment” becomes nothing but the redoubled Latin scholastic reflex toward academic universalism. The bad air a-wafting from ivory tower to ivory tower masquerading as stylite pillars which will of course result in the the “sweet smell” from even partially incorrupt relics (expensive dental work notwithstanding) will perhaps eventually divulge the problem inherent to such legalist reductionism.
Or maybe not: God knows. And how relative shall we turn the phrase “real people.” Sure, we are all real people with real problems in the hospital that is the Church, but does that license us to allow the chipping away of the decorum at the very center of the body’s integrity? To favor above what is genuine love that of mere credentials? To allow the American hero complex to prevail another minute reducing all to a de facto primacy of priest-worship (not to mention the longstanding general devaluing of those ordained first in the Scriptures (deacons) and sometimes fast-tracked to bishop after a healthy stint (viz. Athanasius the Great) as but a stepping stone to presbyter or otherwise rendered useless and incompetent?
Yes, you may brush your teeth the morning of Communion, and if you think otherwise, you may be a fledgling vic of a former legacy family cult parish. But you may not, if a servant of God, give my child a mint that morning to see if he knows the rules like a cult member. And you may not, likewise, joke since he was once on an ADHD medication that he is a meth-head, thereby introducing temptation into that which will later be a simple interaction and individual choice. And you certainly may not, being a slave in the One, True, Church, hold him down and force Splenda packets into his mouth, or play soccer at the temple and have a Melrose Place Mixer there on Great and Holy Friday evening. Millstones and rotting bones become seashells and personal hells in a world that corrupts its youth and vigor. But it will always be okay for you, torturer unawares, here and now. You’ve got it made. Just as the minority scholar who got the free ride through nine years of higher education with whom I shared an office at graduate school has it made. You have all the instant purchase power on a show of piety the world could contain. The kids rode in singing your superiority, while reducing us to a pity party. Thank God, we are worse! And thank God true, primordial (and long since wholly unavailable) Classical Education has naught to do with the hippie, humanitarian, rich normie vacuum of doctrinaire currently in fashion to ensure one’s entire generation never has to do any real work or encounter confrontation and struggle.
And if you are to serve the Church in any capacity, you certainly cancel this sacrifice out wholly when you roll your eyes and giggle with the girls at a cleric’s mistakes in the service, or at his not being born knowing the arts of the hierarchical service. It is not a performance, and you are not royalty if you are in a cleric’s family. “For when the wind pass over it no longer will it know the place thereof…” The Church belongs to the Ages, not your family. Do not any longer let the Lord’s blessings be lost upon you.
The truth of the world is a ruin, from which not a one may hide. The Truth of the Universe, our Lord Jesus Christ, bears a sword which all who defend the great saving power of His Church, the true and only source of moral, nay ontological, acumen, may perhaps someday wield in taking the Kingdom by storm. Therein lies the essence of loving the Law of God such that others may also find the Kingdom open.
Christ is Risen!
D I A K O N I A 