A Brief Rejoinder to "Words of Encouragement"

Well, anyhow - as I'd hoped I'd succeeded in putting into the mouths of our fearless Western leaders - I find this to be a boldly adventurous Age. 

In fact, if I didn't know better, I'd say it was almost recklessly, heedlessly adventurous. (Not that that should matter either way, right? I mean, so what if we Westerners often end up leaving things an even bigger mess than we found them - so long as we make them more interesting, and challenging?)

But if there's one notion more than another that, for me, embodies the Spirit of this adventurous Age, it is the notion of Knowledge as Work. And Love as Work. And Reality as Work. 

It is as if we Global Moderns have made, not so much Man as created by God, but rather Work as created by (workaholic) Man, the measure of all things. Meaning, to get to the heart, the essence of anything, you've got to WORK at it. To the point, indeed, where work itself may seem to become all-but-indistinguishable from one or another mode of productive violence. Or sometimes even destructive violence. Again, no creation without destruction.

(Meanwhile, certain rather ancient traits and exercises that we used to call virtues: patience, vigilance, forbearance, humility, awe, rapture, contemplation, even prayer itself - well,  these once may have been useful enough for creating amusing or distracting fictions about reality. But they're utterly useless for getting at the core, the inner workings and outward effects, of any truly real thing. Any truly real thing - including God, assuming there is a god.) 

The whole point of Modern Work, thus defined, being that you must seek out whatever there is in anything - and ultimately anyone - that is "workable," i.e., reducible to something else. And then you change it, or reconfigure it, or otherwise put it to some good use or pleasure by making it wholly unrecognizable. Much like turning a tree into paper. Meanwhile, whatever there is that seemingly can't - yet - be reduced, you either ignore, or find some way of overcoming, or breaking through its wall, so to speak. In short, there is only way to be truly objective about anything, and that is to objectify it.

But now imagine something else. Suppose that the only unshifting, abiding objectivity we can ever attain - concerning any one or any thing - is to see that creature, not for what we can make of it, but for what it is. And that the only way to see it fully for what it is is to see not just its "objectness", but also that in it which is (so to speak) subjective. That in it which is, as it were, irreducibly its Self - such that we can only make into something else, by either killing it or taking it apart.

But now let's go a step further. Suppose we can only fully, sympathetically understand this Self - we can only get into the heart of this or any living creature - so far as we let its Maker get into the heart of us? I.e., not merely to command us, or exhort, or threaten, or coach, or exemplarize or didacticize us: but get into our very soul, and bone and marrow and sinews (and all those other things that only the soul knows best). And all for the purpose of so loving us, in fact, as to make us One - not merely by knowledge or by will, but by nature - with Himself? Even as He is One with His Father and His Spirit?

And now for something really unbelievable: What if this one small further step is, in fact, both the key to, and the heart of, all our truly good work?