The Logic of Radix Fidem

(See the “Radix Fidem” tab above for an explanation of the label.)

The mystical mind need not be impractical.

I just wanted to offer a quick review for all the new subscribers to this blog. One of our biggest problems is the Western intellectual tradition. It is dominated by Anglo-Saxon cultural assumptions about reality, with a healthy dose of Greco-Roman logical reasoning. That these two major influences overlapped in some ways would be obvious to a historian. That they are fundamentally wrong is well nigh impossible to get Westerners to see. Today, virtually everyone you encounter whose mind was shaped by current Western thinking simply assumes they represent the human default, or at least what ought to be the default.

You cannot reason with such people. Every day I have to wade through mountains of blasphemous intellect that sings the praises of Western Civilization: “Finally, God got it right!” I’ve asked questions of some folks who pump out this sewage and their response is more or less to the effect that it’s simply not possible for a thinking person to not fall in love with their particular brand of Western ideals. I’m referring to likes of Lew Rockwell and his associates, some major names in evangelical church leadership, and even some folks who weren’t born in a Western country.

On top of this is the vast ocean of nonsense about what it means to be a Christian Mystic. I have no quarrel with folks who realize that their story is their own, and that it’s more a matter of comparing notes. But from those who love the West, we struggle against a major Straw Man Fallacy regardless of what they think mysticism is all about. Part of the problem is that the average writer who bothers to think about it at all assumes that the psychobabble and gobbledygook chattering from Westernized mystics is a fair representation of the rest of us. Mysticism is not violating grammar and language as a cover for mere subjectivism and empty emotionalism.

The essence of mysticism is a distrust of one’s intellectual capabilities, and a search for a better source of understanding for reality (see this and this for a fuller explanation). Needless to say, that distrust applies to all human intellect, but it starts with the mind in the mirror. Superficial abuse of language is not mysticism. I’m sure you’ve read your fill of silly babble pretending to be deep and profound, upon which some fool has stuck the label of “mysticism” while giving us the airhead happy dance. More than once I’ve concluded some websites were just being smart-assed, and in one case I came to a sure conviction the site was intended to make genuine mysticism appear stupid.

Mysticism is not a departure from logic; it’s a departure from Western logic. Rather, mysticism is a different kind of logic. That’s where I get the business of yakking about quantum reasoning — we reduce reasoning to it’s fundamental element. You take input and process it. Mystical reasoning is symbolic, not analytical. Mystical language tends to be indicative, not descriptive. By the way, those explanations also describe ancient Hebrew and biblical literature, not to mention almost the entire range of Ancient Near Eastern cultures and civilizations. It is also the whole point behind several things Jesus said. For example, Jesus told the parable of the Sower and Matthew ends it with this:

“He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

And the disciples said to Him, “Why do You speak to them in parables?”

He answered and said to them, “Because it is given to you to know the mysteries of the kingdom of Heaven, but it is not given to them. For whoever has, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance. But whoever does not have, from him shall be taken away even that which he has. Therefore I speak to them in parables, because seeing they see not, and hearing they hear not; nor do they understand.

“And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which said, ‘By hearing you shall hear and shall not understand; and seeing you shall see and shall not perceive for this people’s heart has become gross, and their ears are dull of hearing, and they have closed their eyes, lest at any time they should see with their eyes and hear with their ears and should understand with their heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.’

“But blessed are your eyes, for they see; and your ears, for they hear.” (Matthew 13:9-16 MKJV)

Naturally, Jesus is using parabolic language to explain parables. The Twelve had some inkling of it, but it was fading fast in the sense that for some three centuries their leaders and teachers had been trying to replace the Hebraic symbolic thinking with Hellenized concrete thinking. The shift was slow, but among elite segments of Judean society, symbolic reasoning was nearly gone. Among the peasants it took a little longer because the leadership was contemptuous of them and excluded them from a lot of things. If you weren’t an activist and hung out at the synagogues every spare moment to rub elbows with the politically connected, you were nobody.

This elitist segment of society was the target of Jesus’ comment quoted from Isaiah. They had closed their souls from hearing with the heart. In so many words, Jesus was telling His disciples that He was training them to think from the heart, not trusting the limited perception of the intellect, which could only handle concrete analysis and literal language. The heart could process non-literal moral reasoning just fine. Parables are the language of the heart, the language of moral perception. Those whose hearts were awake and seeking the truth would hear it in the parables, picking up on the symbolism. Those who relied only on their intellects would miss an awful lot.

This was part of the problem Isaiah and other prophets faced, as even back in their days, the Israeli intelligentsia rejected humility and heart-led living, preferring their own human capabilities and demanding things be subjected to concrete analysis. Even if we go with the idea of abstract reasoning, it falls short of heart-logic. Abstract thinking simply abstracts the concrete details of things that can be compared and related. Just because you can interpret the symbols we call letters and numbers doesn’t mean you understand symbolic reasoning. It’s two different uses of the term “symbol.”

Abstraction has its place, but it’s not a very important one. Moral symbols do not yield to abstraction in that sense. Surveying sensory data for rational processing only gets you just so far. God seldom addressed humanity on that level; virtually all of God’s communication was on the moral level of the heart. Only the heart-mind could process what God said. The intellect is not only part of our fallen nature, the intellect led the way to the Fall. To give the intellect primacy in decision-making is itself the essence of being fallen.

Barring a solid background in reading on the subject, it’s pretty hard to help folks understand where we are coming from on all of this. Rather, we do a lot better simply demonstrating how it works. People who are already capable of processing genuine faith like that will then begin asking questions and you can explain. This is part of why my books are free, and why I make it a point to advertise two of them on the blog page itself. Those two represent a sort of minimum academic explanation for what Radix Fidem is all about.

A religion is simply the practical expression of faith.