I have both active blogs open at the moment, as I am downloading photos for the other. It appears that there are now 1480 posts here and 360 posts there. Everyone is getting ready in the USA for winter and All Saint’s day (Hallow’even) but over here the spring is coming in and the wild flowers are out:

Vox is one smart man: he quotes another very smart man (Tolkien) on the nature of chivalry, and its underlying faults: since that time, when the Lady decided to step down from her throne after she had shattered religion, she was left hurt, for the knights will not worship a fellow survivor of a shipwreck.

There is in our Western culture the romantic chivalric tradition still strong, though as a product of Christendom (yet by no means the same as Christian ethics) the times are inimical to it. It idealizes ‘love’ — and as far as it goes can be very good, since it takes in far more than physical pleasure, and enjoins if not purity, at least fidelity, and so self-denial, ‘service’, courtesy, honour, and courage. Its weakness is, of course, that it began as an artificial courtly game, a way of enjoying love for its own sake without reference to (and indeed contrary to) matrimony. Its centre was not God, but imaginary Deities, Love and the Lady. It still tends to make the Lady a kind of guiding star or divinity – of the old-fashioned ‘his divinity’ = the woman he loves – the object or reason of noble conduct. This is, of course, false and at best make-believe. The woman is another fallen human-being with a soul in peril. But combined and harmonized with religion (as long ago it was, producing much of that beautiful devotion to Our Lady that has been God’s way of refining so much our gross manly natures and emotions, and also of warming and colouring our hard, bitter, religion) it can be very noble. Then it produces what I suppose is still felt, among those who retain even vestigiary Christianity, to be the highest ideal of love between man and woman. Yet I still think it has dangers. It is not wholly true, and it is not perfectly ‘theocentric’. It takes, or at any rate has in the past taken, the young man’s eye off women as they are, as companions in shipwreck not guiding stars.

Within the faith, this is not a problem. We are fallen, yes, We are imperfect, yes. And the more we know about ourselves the more aware we are of our sins, and how they move beyond the sins that are so roundly condemned within and without the kirk. For if we are looking to Christ, we can love each other truly and fully: we are not making our spouse our God. That is part of the Hindu-ization of our society, that self esteem is all; and that we worship ourselves.

For that is at best make believe and at worst a grievious error that only those made enough to have delusions will be innocent of. We are not fit for worship, and we never will be. God is: for he created us: God is, for he redeemed us at great cost to himself: God is, for he is active and intervenes. And it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

Fritz Eichenberg, illustration from Jane Eyre & Wuthering Heights, 1943. pic.twitter.com/Z63Ir2qrl4

— ? Bibliophilia (@Libroantiguo) October 18, 2014

Which brings us to the issue of post modernism: that of nominalism: if we define it this way, so it is. Which only makes sense if there is no science, indeed no shamanism: the shaman is in error about many things, but he knows that there are things that are real, and that he must placate them: to him it is not myth or metaphor, but reality. But we have lost that basic wisdom.

The modern crisis all goes back to nominalism. The modern muddlings of clear definitions, confusions of really and essentially different things, and denials of essences or definitions in the first place are all outworkings of the nominalist turn. Once suppose that categories are merely conventional, that universals are merely nominal, that life is never simply black or white, but rather only shades of grey, and you find yourself on a steep and slippery slope to chaos.

We see this with marriage, lately. Once you budge from the idea that marriage is the permanently binding lifelong commitment of total loyalty between a man and a woman, you open the door to all sorts of insanity. Likewise with sex: once disagree that the only properly licit sex is the sort that married people can have with each other, and the whole social order begins to deliquesce.

Likewise also with abortion. The whole idea that abortion is not murder depends on the premise that the embryo is not a person. But this notion is wrong. Nature herself distinguishes quite clearly between a woman’s own cells and those of her children. Their chemistry, their proteins, are just different, and foreign to each other. The new and foreign person begins inside the mother when the new and foreign proteins of the child appear at conception, from the new and foreign combination of parental DNA. Immunologically, there is no confusion about this distinction on the part of nature. The cells of mother and child are cells of different animals. They apprehend each other quite clearly as foreigners, invaders, and potential threats, and elaborate mechanisms must be employed to stifle the immunological war that would otherwise pit them against each other, so that the pregnancy may proceed.

Once you decide that abortion is not murder, then other forms of murder become thinkable: infanticide, euthanasia, genocide (not so much, these days, of peoples inimical to one’s own, but certainly perhaps of the sort of “low men,” knuckle-walkers, and mouth breathers who love and honor her patrimony), eugenics, and so forth. It is but a step, then, to the thought that assassination is a proper tool of politics, business, or relations among families; to feud, vendetta, rapine, kidnapping, slavery.

Discriminations and discernments, limits and ordinations, laws and rules are the foundation and infrastructure, the skeleton and immune system of society. Without them, men have no way even to talk to each other. Society per se could be characterized as a set of agreements about what is what, and what is not. Muddle or vitiate the popular recognition of the real limits between things the least little bit, and lethal trouble must then soon follow. For, the limits are simple, clear, stark, and consequential. Depart from them, and all is muddied, and confused, and weakened. Nature abhors such weakness, and deletes it as quickly as may be; for nature herself is quite clear, and unconfused. It’s definitions, or death.

A sane society allows one to argue from nature, to test a policy by the results of it. But that is unacceptable, for the progressive policies have been tried of the last fifty years… and have failed about as completely as the Stalinist experiment did fifty years previously. And, like the latter Soviets, they are retreating to theory, for real life contradicts their ideas and policies.

And this is why I don’t particularly fear for the church. I do worry about those under attack from modernists — at the moment it is the Romans — but over time the liberal led branches of Christianity have died out and one is left with only believers. Who turn to the word of God, for in that teaching is life, and truth, and health. The current forae on the family the Romans are having is the last gasp of the liberals, who are seeing their time on this earth ending, and who want to cement a liberal polity in place.

The church needs to remain close to Christ, which sustains it: that is the lesson of the vine and vineyard. If we deviate from the gospel we die, as surely as if we walked through the Sahara without water. It is an ecclesiastical version of the Darwin award, removing your error from the meme pool.

For in the end, the church is not for us: it is for Christ. To do his work in this life, and to be his bride in the next.