In the Library with the Lord

“There are truths that are beyond us, transcendent truths, about beauty, truth, honor, etc. There are truths that man knows exist, but they cannot be seen – they are immaterial, but no less real, to us. It is only through the language of myth that we can speak of these truths”, J. R. R. Tolkien.

    Just as there are “true myths” or rather truths that are revealed through myth, there are “false myths” or lies that are revealed through myths. In the beginning there was The Word and now there is the Anti-Word or that which passes for knowledge or truth and inundates us daily flooding us with false impressions, deceptions, “double-speak” and both specious and egregious lies. The Nazis believed “Tell a lie long enough and it becomes the truth.” There is the joke about the man sitting on a bench next to which is a dog. A passer by stops and asks the man if his dog bites. The man answers “No”, so the walker tries to pet the dog and is immediately bitten. “I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite” yelled the man, to which the sitter replies, “He’s not my dog”. What obligation to truth did the sitter have? Michael Novak reminds us that, “Thomas Aquinas wrote that civilization is constituted by conversation. That is to say, civilized peoples persuade one another, and argue about what is true, in the conviction that there is truth in every little event and detail, even though the whole truth is not yet known by any one human being. This belief is the root of intellectual and scientific inquiry and provides the strong motive for enduring many hardships to encounter as much of the truth as one possibly can.” Today we suffer the loss of truth through: PC (politically correct) speech; “Double-think”; false definitions (Humpty Dumpty, in Through the Looking-Glass, says: “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.”) conduct considered genetic thus eliminating personal responsibility; The State as god; Western Civilization and Christianity viewed as the true enemies of the World; Judges as god; arrest and or fines for “hate speech” (note Geert Wilders’ upcoming trial in the Netherlands for speaking out to save democracy and the case of Canadian minister Stephen Boissoin who was, thankfully, just acquitted.); absence of critical thinking; a ubiquitous frustrating ignorance; a ubiquitous wearying apathy; the individual as god; a corrupt culture; a bottom feeding culture; a disconnect from history; the iconic anti-social figure as god; the rejection of God. Michael Novak notes that “There can be no liberty without virtue, and no virtue (at least for most people, most of the time) without God.” I opine that there can be no virtue without truth and therefore no liberty without truth. As we suffer the loss of truth we suffer the loss of freedom, democracy, indeed our Nation. Made in the image of God, man without truth denies his very humanity. Yevgeny Zamyatin, in “Tomorrow” writes: “He who has found his ideal today is like Lot’s wife, already turned into a pillar of salt…The world is kept alive only by heretics: the heretic Christ, the heretic Copernicus, the heretic Tolstoy. Our symbol of faith is heresy…. We call the …intelligentsia to the defense of man. And of human values. We appeal, not to those who reject today in the name of a return to yesterday, not to those who are hopelessly deafened by today; we appeal to those who see the distant tomorrow – and judge today in the name of tomorrow, in the name of man.” Let our appeal be in the name of The Man, Christ Jesus. Today those who speak truth are considered heretical. Jean-Francois Revel notes that, “To totalitarianism, an opponent is by definition subversive”. If today we may not speak our truths– then tomorrow we must renounce our truths. Theodore Dalrymple “met a man, in Albania, who had been sent down to the mines for 15 years for refusing to renounce his religion. Even private prayer was considered a serious offense, as was any attempt to escape the atheist paradise. And if a man did escape, his entire family was punished, down to the children: in other words, the entire population was held hostage.”

    The Anti-Myths of our time are: This generation is smarter than all previous ones (therefore the Bible is ignorant); man is good and perfectible not fallen; there is no ultimate Truth, so Man knows better than God; there is no Sin just accidents; the world is overpopulating (thus abortion and limiting reproduction); “sexual orientation” is genetic; Science is god; Nationalism is evil, globalism is good; separation of Church and State means expelling the Church from the public square. These are just the tip of the metaphysical iceberg. These and other fallacious myths define our lives. They define our souls. Pull the imaginative dystopias one by one off the shelf: We, 1984, Brave New World, The Time Machine, Fahrenheit 451, A Clockwork Orange and in each the message is clear, There is no room in the future for truth. St. Paul in 2 Thessalonians 2:10 and 11 states: [The] “perishing… perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. For this reason God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness.” Where there is no room for truth there is no room for God’s man – thus the ghettoization of Christianity. A dystopia is Satan’s Utopia. “Through me the way into the suffering city, through me the way to the eternal pain …Abandon every hope, who enter here”. We have seen the future. “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin”.

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