Roots in Heaven: Are We Savages by Nature?
(Videorecording at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VEaCwt-uzE)
We are raised to adhere to the evolutionist’s belief that we are savage by nature, having evolved from what Thomas Hobbes called a “state of nature” in which our primal, naked fear is that of violent death. Our classics—both ancient and medieval—respond that we are savage against our nature, or that, to speak with Plato, we are originally trees rooted in eternal heavens, but that we are also fallen into a condition of savagery, which is our Earthly City, as St. Augustine called it. No matter how much we try covering up our condition, we must tackle it. The more we pretend that savagery is merely external to our society, demonizing anyone who is not integrated in it, the ruder our awakening will be. So then, how do our classics suggest we respond to savagery? By facing our fundamental motives, by retracing barbarism to our First Mover as divine good we return to unconditionally in the vehicle of courage, prudence, justice and wisdom—fairest petals of the flower of Lady Poetry.
Our classics teach us to live “backwards,” to live valiantly a life of restoration, letting go of the modern dream of empire, of the progressive illusion that savagery begs for evermore savagery, as opposed to a heroic, selfless effort to restore moderation—an effort to open savagery to the providence of thought divine; an effort to expose savagery to a speech in which God himself speaks—not under the assumption that savagery can be overcome by mere words (if only where these are backed by arms), but with the unfaltering confidence that speech can raise some of us out of savagery, thus fortifying us (and what better deterrent against savagery than strength), by mirroring a common voice speaking silently at the bottom of our soul.
We are here at the antipodes of the modern appeal to “universal ideals” to which our nature
is supposed to conform mechanically as if our return to the good were a mere metaphor for the progress of homo faber, “the industrious man”. Against the modern imperative to be rational, our Platonic classics moderate our deeds so that we may expose ourselves immoderately to thought; they ask us to do less so that we may achieve more; they do not call us tounleash and control immoderate passions so that we may safely moderate thought with secular blinders and so within the strictures of the demands and expectations of a society ruled by mechanically imposed values.
If we are not originally savages destined mechanistically to become autonomously-rational animals, advancing towards a society where everything is rational so that nothing truly is, that is because we are naturally open to reason partaking poetically in the mind of the universe. We are originally and necessarily dangerous beings, beings of danger, who beg for an education preparing us to face the greatest possible danger: the permanent communion of thought and love.
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