In an effort to understand Hieronymus Bosch, I have been reading about the “movers and shakers” who first conceived of our modern world. Bosch presents the fantasies of these heretics, I think, without being entirely a heretic himself.
It is easier to see a heresy from a mile off than when it is right up your nose. Or if you are an ingenious, astounding artist, like Bosch, you can examine it closely.
In his book, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch (translated, 1952), the author Wilhelm Franger reconstructs that past age by visiting the episcopal courts, and in particular their records of former hippiedoms and heresies.
Especially in the XIIIth and XIVth centuries, they were the paradisal, gnostic cults that flourished across what would become Germany, the Rhineland, and the Low Countries, being known generally by some variation on the theme of “Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit.”
These self-proclaimed “Homines Intelligentiae” met literally underground, and were the “Woke” or “Wokists” of that time, believing themselves incarnations of the Holy Ghost, and very devoted – to their own esoteric and changeable notions.
But they were not truly creative. Their “paradise” would always, always depart, generally through corruption and lust, from what exists in a true paradise, or in the witness of the real Mother of God. They strayed from reality, just as modern communists compulsively dictate a parody of the Christian faith.
A violent and evil parody, but an assurance nonetheless that there is an order to this world, and nature. Each deviant movement falls back upon the same cosmic or spiritual shapes and volumes that, I believe, are inevitably representations of immortal things.
This is because we are in a world and nature that is, and thus was constructed, from reality. There is no alternative, in effect, to being a copyist, if there is only one reality to copy, vast and complex as that reality may be.
And one may depict it accurately, in art and in science, or try to improve upon it, and thereby produce something that is definitively wrong.
We thus discover alternative realities, but on close investigation we rather unearth a zero, a form of Nothingness.
The mediaeval scholastics realized that this Nothing is like extreme cold. It is not really an alternative thing, but rather it is the absence of a thing, in this case heat or light.
It does not add, but subtracts; and when it has taken everything away, everything is, as it were, frozen in darkness. And as heat is added – a little or a lot – we begin to see all of nature’s effects coming to life, or being spontaneously exemplified.
The same happens when we turn to theology, or even to politics (to present politics in its religious form). As heat is removed – the heat of the divine – everything instead begins to resemble everything else.
To use the commonplace analogy of deep space, there is no such thing as taking a spacewalk, unless for a very short period one is supplied with warmth and everything else one will need within a hygienically sealed and fitted suit.
Curiously, it is the same on moonwalks, or if one visits Mars. In practical terms, the expense of supplying everything we need to flourish upon earth is, and will always be, very, very expensive.
The same goes if, instead of spacewalk or starwalk (even if we could get to the neighboring star in less than an eternity), we decide to replace our religion, and invent a new one more attractive to ourselves (and not just attractive to an ever-absent God), we get to the point where we are freezing.
The Adamites and other heretical cells, from centuries ago or just the other day, found that they were dealing with a world in which there are two, and precisely two, “biological” sexes.
And after one has decided on the quaint, nonsensical principle of making them equal and interchangeable, or inventing some others, or putting clothes on them or stripping them bare, and calling, for instance, nudity by the words “chastity” and “purity,” and making everything else quite equal, one will get a bit chilly.
Eventually, you get to the point where there is nothing else you can do; you have “run out of other people’s money” as the late Mrs. Thatcher liked to say. You will need a bit of heat even to have an economy as the climate cult activists are learning.
And with warmth returns shame, and the “free love” of innocence means returning to shamefulness.
The orthodox of most religions understand this, and Catholic Christianity understands it best of all. By giving new meanings to old established terms (think “gay,” for instance), the world isn’t changed. It is merely a more fashionable form of the same, old-fashioned depravity, like ice on the road to Canada.
The progressives, both in the XIIIth and in the XXIst century, sneer at such reasoning. The Adamites and their mediaeval “Brothers and Sisters” were striving upward, whereas the respectables then as now are always trending down.
I well remember, back in hippie days, how the moral order was being reversed, as the “enlightened” are always doing, before embarking on spacewalks. But it is cold, and gets colder.
People must be made to feel good about being bad, must feel superior about being inferior, must feel right about being wrong and wrong about being right.
This happens as every “social revolution” is advanced. The Devil – that great cosmic Nothing – is patiently waiting to inspire us. We find another lie when the old one expires.
For he (or she?) is in the escort business. He will escort the individual, or the whole society, to Hell, where Christian orthodoxy won’t exist anymore.
The truth will be replaced by a lie, but always it is like the old lie in which we freed ourselves to follow strange new gods, and find strange new rules to degrade by.
