All Saints Day
It is very late in the game, as most of us know, and my work has drawn to a close, everything set in place. Reflections, though, are in order. In the frame of the books of epic-criticism I sounded a few things about the time and the end of things, and what I perceive as the current situation of the church and the world will be my starting point for what I will now write. Postmodernism has been a time of the seeming attempt to restore traditions, a conservative time politically and theologically, but also a corrupt time, morally and financially. I think we need to look back a few decades to solve the puzzle. Heidegger said that Nazism was great because it was about the confrontation of man and technology. And I believe this was somewhat correct. Postmodernism is founded on the fascist. It is both politically conservative, morally nihilistic, and technologically adept. The Third Reich did not cease, but was transformed post 1945, and lives on in the anti-liberal, anti-enlightenment forces that are stressing freedom and covertly preparing totalitarianism, at the same time. The Berlin-Rome axis did not die, and I mean this in the sense of the unfortunate Catholic Church, which is a means of the magical projection of fascism to our world today. It was a kind of alchemy. The more Catholic the country, it seems, the more corrupt. Mafia in Italy, drug cartels and death squads in Latin America. As I said, conservative, immoral, technological. It is a fascinating matrix. To this we add magic, from Harry Potter, to Borges and Garcia Marquez, to the atrocities done in Juarez, sacrifices to an evil god. A magical, technological, conservative and drastically corrupt world. Deconstructionists try in their texts to say, well, it was always this way. Perhaps. But I think the modern world that once was was in principle opposed to this fascist en-framing. The net seems inescapable. Even friends criticize me harshly for not setting-up my voice mail on my cell phone, for wanting to be
incommunicado. There is tremendous pressure on all sides to conform to the paradigm of fascist fashion which is now technological. I do not think most people realize that technology is the implementation of the fascist. And I do not define fascist narrowly, to the tea party, for instance, but broadly to include the whole of culture and politics, finance and technology. I believe all of this bears down on the church and the world as an overwhelming attempt to destroy not men and cities and nations with armies, but the souls of individuals, by the annihilation of faith, hope and love. The “they� by this I know not whom or where or what. True tragedy cannot be pinned on anyone in particular. That is what makes it a tragedy. Tragedies are different though from case to case, play to play. Hamlet succeeds where Macbeth fails. Lear perhaps succeeds despite appearances, being reunited with his daughter, in love, despite the pain. We, too, must love, despite the pains, the cares, the pleasures, all the temptations that would lead us not to believe, not to hope, not to love. Be ready. As Hamlet. Be ripe. Like Lear. The tragedy cannot be averted, but it can be overcome, transformed, and love still triumph. The modernist was nothing if not critical. That makes me modern. The postmodernist is theoretical, but not very critical. Epicriticism means to discern. I hope the work has helped you to discern your time and place. I did this in an indirect way, reading old books, reviving an old idea like dialectical thinking, while juxtaposing pieces written on my own life, creating a work on my life and times, at once both historical and critical, sometimes almost scholarly, but at the same time prophetic and apocalyptic. If these are indeed the last days, my work may be too little, too late. But what will be we do not know, except that scripture says that God will defeat all his enemies and that the saints will make it to the New Jerusalem, if they remain written in the book of life. I hope you and you and you are, that we all may be, when God is all in all. On behalf of my wife, Marinela, I thank you for taking the time to patiently read this. We have prayed for all of you, and we have
worked together for all of you, that some of you may still be saved. The rest is God’s. That God will not lead us any where he will not provide for us, that God does the impossible, but that God requires something from us, perhaps something different from each, or perhaps the same, has been my guiding thoughts in this year of completion. Whatever our vocation is, it is God-given, and we must do it. Each of us has a vocation, whether we know it or not. In a sense, it may simply to be alive today. Though we come at the end, we may still reap what others sowed, and receive the same just, generous reward. Do not doubt God’s mercy or His heaven. And do not doubt that if you hold out to the end you will win.
I want to speak at the last, really after time ended, about modernism and postmodernism in terms of the man who is perhaps the greatest modernist, Immanuel Kant, and the man who is perhaps the poster boy for the postmodern age, John Paul II. In that collection of homilies known as the theology of the body, in the long introduction to that work, it is said that the Pope, sitting at sumptuous table with guests in the ornate and extravagant Vatican, would exclaim upon hearing the name of the philosopher Kant. I think with good reason, which I hope to elucidate. For the sake of argument, we could say that modernism was a most pure philosophy, and that postmodernism is a most impure philosophy. For reasons I refer to all that I have written hitherto. The opposition of Kant and John Paul II is essential. I have heard a religious who was teaching at a catholic university, without question and I think with deliberation, misrepresent Kant’s philosophy, twisting it all out of shape. When I attempted a correction, I was stopped by the fascist force the nuns use sometimes against anyone who questions them or opposes them. The same is true of the Catholic hierarchy. They will not allow dialogue, criticism, or any difference of opinion. But, time brings correction, as Benedict once said, and thank God, we may
still have a little. How are we to understand the Kantian project in terms of today? The philosopher made a critique of pure and practical reason, eliminating the transcendent as unknowable, but founding morals on the categorical imperative. The religious I spoke of denied the basic principle of Kant stated in his theory of the transcendental, that we all have certain forms we all think in, and therefore we are similar and able to communicate with each other. We are not similar to God, as the Catholics claim in the analogy of being, but similar to each other, in our existence in the categories and in space and time. To continue Kant today, by my renovation of Hegelian dialectic and the refutation of Derrida’s deconstruction, I have presented a new kind of critique of reason, not one of the pure and the practical, but of the general and the particular, and this as early as my writings on Wordsworth in the 1990s, when the poet denied the destructive analysis in favor of what he called the grand and simple reason, what may be called the imagination. In my logic I have shown the particular reason as having become completely fragmented and destructive, completely contradictory. I think John Paul II would say this is a direct result of Kantian modernism, and perhaps he would be right. But Wordsworth was more right, in arguing forward into the high ground of imagination, not back into dogmatic retreat, which was a cover for a subterfuge. The reconciliation of the great fragmentation in particular reason, seen prominently in the American politics of the last thirty years, and incorrectly blamed on the media, which is but a mirror, not the cause of the contradiction, comes through a theory that is grand and simple and imaginative in a general reason that forgives contradiction, that affirms all, not by perpetuating conflict, but like Kant, through a prayer for a reasonable religion and an eternal peace. The way up is the way down. All is one. God alone is. Be perfect, which means not to set no limits to love, but rather release judgment and the power to judge, giving to God what is God’s, and letting the world be as it is, and the church as it is,
forgiving all particular sins and errors, the mistakes of an impure logic, by a general attitude of love and forgiveness. We see this in the imperative of Kant, which says, basically, perform your actions as if everyone would repeat the actions you make. Which is very different from Nietzsche’s repetition. It is an imaginative forward moral thought. In all, it is the rule of the symbolic life, which you and I both lead, though you may or may not recognize it as I do. Since these things have been: Would that all God’s people were prophets, as Moses said. And as Joel said, God will pour out his Spirit on all people, the old men shall dream, and the young men shall see visions. And as Peter quoted the latter on Pentecost, the Biblical footnotes say it is accomplished, the thing Moses and Joel and Peter said. The Spiritual life is a prophetic and symbolic life, and what we do is, I think, truly repeated by others in a way we know not. Charles Baudelaire spoke of a mystical correspondence as does the Kabbalah. At any rate, what we do, what we say, and what we think, matters in ways we do not know, but which is commented on in theories in physics, the so-called “chaos” theory, and in psychology’s so-called “synchronicity.” Everything belongs, as Richard Rohr said. Everything belongs in the theory of general reason, and everything then respires with meaning, as Wordsworth’s mystical and moral poetry stated in a sentiment some mistakenly thought was natural. The postmodern deconstruction of meaning, that took place through the proliferation of the text, is overcome by an acceptance of personal responsibility for our actions that will reverse the corrupt financialization of all aspects of life which is the value of technology. Meaning is not purchased, it is made, and we make meaning through our actions, which some wish to be meaningless, but which in the eyes of God, are all infinitely important, as the Kantian categorical imperative said in its own terms. He saw us in relation to everyone else, as our explication, while postmodernism implicates us in its tainted love, sin without sense. “Sin without sense” is the violence of the age, the fruit of fascism, in a
time when the words “crazy” and “evil” are used with free substitution to describe what has happened from Hitler to Juarez, 1945 to 2010. Madness, which Plato said was sometimes a very good thing, is implicated with evil, which can never be good, through the taint of the postmodern logic, eliminating the possibility of great love and what may be called the great divine love that is the madness the saints showed, in order to destroy love itself, which, to be the real thing, must look to all the world just plain crazy. This confusion of “madness,” which my logic may be pejoratively termed, with an “evil” not crazy, violates the principle of principles of the general reason: The pure must be preserved, without a trace of the other. The Immaculate Conception, the IC, as Derrida uses it in Glas, is purely opposed to the taint of it, IT (and it may well be summed by “information technology”), as Epicriticism shows in the title of the work, in which IC surrounds IT and limits it, through a different kind of repetition, one may say of the prayer of the heart, or as my wife says, by devotion. The two ways of repetition are thus disclosed: The rosary of supplication against the replication of the replication alone; one mindful of devotion, the other one devoted but to mindlessness. With so many of us paying so much attention, how could the end of things happen and go unnoticed? It is an old saying, we could not see the forest for the trees. With the flood of information, somehow this, combined with the lack of prophetic insight, as opposed to historical or scholarly, or political and financial, wisdoms, has led to the situation. The triumph of wealth, the triumph of technology, the return of triumphalism in theology, the triumph of life, as the poet would say, in all its glare and would-be glory, a great vehicle crushing all opposed to it, or even just caught in the path of the career of it, all this really Roman and essentially Empiric triumph, spectacle, done for show, for semblance, and not really fooling anyone, but gladly welcomed as the escape from reason and reality, has been the recipe for the disaster of the evacuation of faith, hope and love, for the eclipse of the light of the world,
the opposite of the preparation for the gospel some thought it might be. My work is written in antithesis to this, attempting a synthesis from the debris. That I may be wrong in my elucidation of the time, I must admit. That the logic I have found may not work, I must admit. But that the world is in deep trouble, I think we all must admit. I hope you will concede that we all have the responsibility, given the opportunity, to suggest a solution to what has become a global problem, involving the fate of all. That my solution involves great contradictions, and yet is simple, is the strength of it. Against the complexity of the Gordian knot of postmodernism I use a gospel sword, the word of truth, and built my work, after its false, but fortunate, start in the abyss, by adhering to scripture and synthesizing it with what I found in the best and most useful aspects of the wisdoms I have read and known and lived. This dialectic may yet provide a way out by not the use of force against the knot, nor yet by yielding to the seductions of complexity, but by patient description and explanation, and even, I hope, a telling disclosure of truth. Having over the course of time, with patience, in my search for truth, straightened-out both dialectic and deconstruction, and finally turned to Kant and reconstructed the first two critiques, of pure and practical reason, along the lines of the general and the particular reason, I now wish to turn to the third critique, that of judgment. Kant writes of the beautiful and the sublime, and of teleology, so it is appropriate to say the matter concerning judgment in the context of the end of things and our finality, that is, the Day of Judgment, the great day, the awesome and terrible day of the Lord. Having transposed reason from the pure and practical to the general and particular, let us likewise transpose the critique of judgment into a clear and precise, up-to-date definition of what in Christian theology are known as the particular and the general judgments. It may be the former is what we all expect, that we will be judged according to our works, our words, what we did and did not do, what we did for the least among us and what we did not, what we did for
Christ, and what we did not. Scripture says it is so. According to our torturous particular reasons it could not be otherwise, as human thinking shows. But the Lord has said plainly again and again that He does not think like we do. The general reason that I have suggested is the closest we can come, at least that I can come, to understanding the absolute Mind of Christ, reconciling oppositions, forgiving enemies, justifying sinners. And so I believe the general judgment will be according to the general reason. It will be pardon, amnesty, forgiveness. Though we as individuals may have been sunk deep in the abyss of sin, the whole man, the human race, will stand united as one on the Day of Judgment, and we will all be forgiven, as one. It is the unification of the beauty of holy forgiveness with the terror and sublimity of the infinite power of God, together with a true understanding of the telos. With this prophetic hope the logic ends. Thus, the logic ends, pointing to something over the horizon, while within the world and within the church the task of love remains. What is this task? Paul said that faith, and hope, and love, these three remain, but that the greatest of these is love. I appeal to hope in the resolution of the logic and the working through of Kant’s critiques of reason and judgment, but what of the thingin-itself, that is, criticism, as such? For what we know is the way we know. If we know dogmatically, and if we know critically, these are very different things. In the work now ending, I argued for a faithful criticism and a critical faith. I think both dogmatic catholic theology of the postmodern era and the dogmatic theory of deconstruction are more like each other than has been supposed, because both are equally far from criticism, and deny it in practice, not tolerating it, nor dialogue, nor the inviolability of the conscience, but rather insisting on the necessity of the positions held by popes and professors. The conscience in its integrity preached by the Second Vatican Council must be critical, so as to be faithful to the message of the gospel, just as the philosopher must be critical in order to be faithful to the commitment to truth above all else. In
an age when people deny that any truth still exists, or that the dogmatic position of one pope or professor or party, people or nation, economy or religion, is the one answer, the whole truth, it means that our time has dissipated thought in particular reasons, better known as rationalizations, rather than reach and take hold of truth itself, that is to allow oneself to live in it, abide in it, love it, instead of manipulating it, for politics, advertising, money, power, prestige and the appearance of the glamorous which is not glory, but is the death knell of beauty, good and truth. That we had a glamorous pope is a shame. That the destructiveness of the death written of by deconstruction became the definition of glamour is a shame. Faithful criticism stands outside the circularity of dogmatic positions, all particular, and stands in relation to the general reason, which is not to be seen in terms of the so-called general economy of postmodernism, opposed to restricted dialectic, but which is simply the standpoint that faith-criticism reaches by patience, love and hope. It is not a hopeless contamination and juxtaposition of any and all, but a discernment, beginning with the basic moral opposition of good and evil, which leads truly to the mystical love dogmatism promises but cannot deliver, because the dogmatic man is a tyrant, and loves no one in truth, but his own. They stand in particular against all the others, whom we know we are to love. Catholicism and Christianity to fulfill their mission must give up the special for the general, and love everyone. That political parties do not do this is perhaps understandable, but that the heirs of the gospel do not do this is a sin, not to mention the many particular sins of which many now stand accused, even at the highest levels. That capital will not give itself away is perhaps understandable, but that the riches of the church, which are not found in the Vatican but in the Bible and on the altar of the heart, have not begun to be disclosed after two thousand years, what are we to make of this? You say, but the gospel is preached to all nations. Dogmatism is theory, but faith-criticism is practice. The church and the world criticize each
other, but only from their particular points-of-view, that is generally not in good faith. They act like political parties, who agree to disagree, and profit off each other in a mutual economy of implication. In order to hold on to faith in the church and the world today one will need to learn to think, discern, be critical, and be faithful to the one thing necessary. Call that one thing what you will, it matters not, but when He calls, you must respond faithfully, even if it breaks you, breaks your church, breaks your world. As bread is broken, be broken, too. To not be too sentimental about this breaking, let us lay it all on the head of that one man Nietzsche, who was broken, as perhaps we all must be. There was Nietzsche, simply, on the square, and then dogmatically, we would have an anti-Nietzsche, which most good people since 1900, if they think about it, must suppose themselves to be, and then there is Nietzsche-otherwise, the Heideggerean, Derridean, postmodern appropriation of Nietzsche. But you know my logic. What is Nietzsche in the fourth place? How does Nietzsche arrive? His basic doctrines, Heidegger cogently said, were the will to power and the eternal recurrence, which Heidegger made into “the will wills itself.” But this is not Nietzsche as fourth, rather Nietzsche returned. What is the arrival of the will to power, of the will that wills itself? Not that willing of power, and nothing besides, but rather, and I might say merely, a willingness. Willingness. It is more “other” than the Other, than will to power itself, than an anti- or an otherwise-than-Nietzsche, and is his proper breaking, the breaking of the postmodern, through a simple, humble thing summed by that word “willingness.” Not by assertion or negation. Not by reason, either dogmatic or skeptic, or even critical. Nor by indifference, the position of the amoral most congenial to Nietzsche, but by the willingness itself. Willingness to let go, to suffer, to be humiliated, to be broken. Christ did not will his crucifixion, but accepted it willingly. And there is all the difference between Christ’s practice and Nietzsche’s theory. Therefore, you may confidently hope that if you are
willing, yes, you may yet be saved. Willingness is not the same as obedience, though it is often confused with it. It puts the glory of another ahead of itself, not as commanded, but out of love, out of confidence, in a courage that destroys even death, overcoming it not by willing nothingness, nor by not willing at all, but by willing as one is willing to love and be loved. It is our marriage. Blake spoke of the marriage of heaven and hell, while Derrida spoke of perfecting the resemblance of Dionysus and Christ. I choose neither option. I do not choose the one offered by the poet. I do not choose the one offered by the philosopher. To choose these seems not to reconcile oppositions, but to entangle all things in webs without end. It would be a violent yoking together of things that must be kept discrete. Discretion recommends a better course. Let us say there is a marriage, to which we are all invited. It behooves us to attend the wedding of the Bride and the Lamb. We cannot feign important engagements elsewhere. On the day the world ends, if it has not already ended, there is only one place to be, and that is at the wedding. But recall, many were invited, but one did not have the proper attire, and so was cast out. I think we better bring an offering of some kind at least. I think it a spiritual truth that God has given gifts and talents to all, and that he expects us to not neglect these, but to increase them, as one might these days strive to enhance wealth. However, I believe, the gifts of God are not always known to us, and we spend our whole lives searching for the thing we are to do. I was lucky. From an early age I was born to write, and that was about the only thing I did. I loved and was loved, prayed, and made friends, held a few unsteady jobs, piled up great unpaid debts, all the while I wrote. It frightens me to think God in his absolute freedom may tell me that I got it all wrong, that I was really meant to do some other thing, ordinary or extraordinary, and that I missed the boat, missed my chance, do not get off the merry-go-round, but must go around at least one more time, if I am to be given an additional chance. God has mercy on whom He will. We work out
our destinies in salvation history with fear and trembling, but also with joy and hope, as the council fathers said, and it is the union of these contraries that are the attitudes we bring to the wedding day, tomorrow, for which we may be shown mercy.
Michael Bolerjack