Reactionary Metaphysics I: Faith vs Knowing

We’re entering a new and exciting field of inquiry with its own jargon, assumptions and lore. There are volumes dedicated just to debating proper etymology and epistemology within this field. Questions like: what is a soul? A spirit? And so on are still a matter of debate and definition. But I’m going to side-step all that as best I can and endeavor to use the people’s vernacular in this series to convey basic concepts and speculate within reason about things that, by definition, can’t really be logicked out entirely. It’s a tall task and I’m not doing myself any favors by critiquing, even mildly, ideological dogmas that are meant to be taken on faith. To make matters worse, my primary audience - people on the dissident right - are by and large materialists who generally do not see the point in speculating on metaphysical matters at all.

Furthermore, this is a constant point of contention within the broader right-wing ideological coalition and it really rears its head whenever the topic of race/ethnicity is brought up. Race-realists insist that race is a biological and material reality while Christians struggle to embrace the concept because of the dogmas of their faith that insist that one’s faith must be their primary form of identity - one that transcends such trivial categories such as race/ethnicity. Some Christians, of course, are able to render unto Caesar, as it were, and accept the material reality of race, but still insist on the metaphysical equality of all souls in the eyes of their god. As a result, an uneasy detente exists between the race/ethnic nationalists and the people of the book within the right-wing coalition. A sort of don’t ask, don’t proselytize position.

That’s where I come in - with my unique ability to upset both groups by first proposing that there is indeed a metaphysical higher reality that is worth exploring and speculating on and thereby offending the secular materialists. Then, to offend the Christians, I insist on pointing out that some of the metaphysical dogmas of Christianity are worth re-examining as well. Such is the lot of the Heretic, I suppose.

Anyways, let’s dip our toes into this swamp with an examination of the old Believing vs Knowing debate. This may seem like a debate between religion and science, but in actual fact, it is a far older debate about the correct way to approach religion and spiritual matters. In other words, is it enough to trust religious experts who have done the research for you, or is it necessary to test and check for yourself whether the holy men and their holy books are telling the truth? Is this even possible? And, if anyone can check these matters of faith for themselves, what is the point of having a dedicated caste of experts to pass down articles of faith to the masses in the first place?

Take early Christianity where the primary debate was about direct knowledge/knowing/experience of higher realities and a more rules/faith based approach. As we know, the Knowers (Gnostics) lost out and were systematically purged and forced into hiding in esoteric orders in the centuries that followed under the hegemony of the Believers (Orthodox and Catholic and to some extent the Protestants). For centuries, the Faith-based school enjoyed almost total hegemony, until they were beaten out by even more anti-mystical schools of thought brought about by Enlightenment and Materialist philosophers/thinkers.

Actually, I regret even having to mention the Enlightenment because I’m really trying to stay on track here. Believing vs Knowing. Let’s talk in some more detail about that first before we get side-tracked into discussing the Church of the Latter Day Philosophers and its effect on the development of European civilization.

So how is Faith understood? Well, put simply, Christians have to have faith in the metaphysical claims of Christianity because that that is what the Church and its priests require as a sort of membership fee for entry into their organization. These include metaphysical dogmas like:

• the God of the Hebrew Bible created the world (in seven days).

• Yahweh/El is a good God and the only true God (there are multiple gods mentioned in the Old Testament, but whatever)

• There are angels (El-ohim) in high places that advance God’s agenda

And on it goes. You get the point I hope. These are metaphysical givens that the Church asks its flock to accept on faith. With these givens a whole theology is created using logic. In the same way that you need to know a few variables in an equation to solve for X, so too do you need a few metaphysical priors to speculate about the nature of reality. Only, in school, the teacher tells you that X equals 2 and off you go solving for Y and Z.

But where did the Church and its ideological missionaries get their givens from in the first place? Well they come from the holy writings, texts that were selected, edited and curated over centuries by the Church, declared dogma and then taught to the masses. Or literally written by God himself, if you prefer. Faith then, extends down the causality chain to include the holy writings. One needs faith in one’s priest to interpret the holy writings correctly, which must be accepted as holy (on faith). This was the truth-discovery process of Christianity in a nut-shell.

But let us go further in our inquiries and ask what inspired the original claims that were then written into the holy texts?

Well, some of the holy texts are clearly mystical in nature. They were written by mystics who experienced (or claimed to) revelations from some entity or spirit whether it be the Christ deity (Paul), the entity that Moses spoke to on top of a volcano in Saudi Arabia (Yahweh), or older gods like those found in the pagan pantheon (Zeus, Odin). I don’t think that this is a particularly controversial understanding of Scripture. After all, how else are we to interpret the prophecies of Jewish mystics like Isaiah and Ezekiel, who spoke of supernatural visions and made predictions about the future based on their visions?

If we eschew the mystical vision thesis, then these are just evocative lines of poetry written by people who may have been a bit touched in the head. This is the materialist view on all holy writings, in any case.

Another rather straight-forward point to make: direct experience of the supernatural is the goal of the mystical arts, whether you believe it is possible to achieve such a feat or not. All mysticism boils down to an attempt to make contact with the world above (or below) our own. This is achieved by mastering different states of mind/perception. This can be done through the mastery of various spiritual techniques, use of psychedelics or the result of an extraordinary situation that causes a great shift in perception in the individual (usually a near death experience). Collections of techniques become part of a mystical tradition that is then passed down by religious orders. One may consider the whole thing to be bullshit, but it’s only really bullshit if the fundamental assumption of a higher metaphysical reality is rejected. Having accepted it as a possibility though, there is an internal logic present in mystical practices that has to be acknowledged.

In the West, these traditions have largely been expunged and purged. Modern mystics like Rene Guenon went so far as to write an appeal to the Vatican to reincorporate mysticism into the religion, and by doing so, breath new light into Catholicism. His proposal, if it was even considered, was soundly rejected, leading Guenon to seek a mystical tradition elsewhere. Within Sufism, which appears to be an offshoot of Gnosticism that had to go undercover in Islam to survive, he found traces of a still-living mystical tradition. However, in Orthodox Christianity, there are also still traces of mystical practice in places like Mt. Athos where the Hesychasts practice a form of “Christian Yoga” that involves breath retraining, mantra-chanting, extreme asceticism and so on to achieve the Christ-state. Eastern Orthodoxy has always had a closer relationship to its mystical roots, inspired as it was by Paul far more than Peter. If you’re interested at all in Hesychasm, I recommend reading the mystical bible of the monks - the Philokalia.

In short, Hesychast monks go through 3 stages of metaphysical leveling up: Praxis (physical preparation), Theoria (mystical initiation) and Theosis (becoming Christ). This is in stark contrast to the ritual-based approach of the mainstream Orthodox Church, which does not demand any mystical training/discipline from its adherents. Instead, Orthodox faithful are called on to live by a moral code provided to them by the Church. The code may or may not be considered “good” or “correct” by us, or rejected by German NEET-philosophers who argue that is a form of “slave morality” - but that is all beyond the point. Many practicing Christians are indeed empathetic and committed to the ideal of serving others. That being said, morality has only a tenuous connection to metaphysics and we are not discussing morality in this essay, but, again, metaphysics. And if metaphysics as a concept is hard to understand, feel free to substitute the word for magic as a useful placeholder term for the duration of this essay series.

Protestantism was also, in part, a reaction against the Pharasitic-like, rules-based approach to religion that Petrine Catholicism adopted. Martin Luther’s theses were, after all, partially inspired by the Church’s practice of selling indulgences i.e., express-lane passes to get a sinner’s soul through Purgatory and into heaven faster. This meant, in effect, that richer people would have an easier time getting into heaven. God works in mysterious ways, I suppose, but even Rome had to eventually drop this rather mercantile approach to spirituality during the Counter-Reformation that followed.

Many Protestant sects were named after the shamanic technique that its adherents used to achieve direct contact with metaphysical forces without the intermediary protocols and rules provided by the Catholic Church. So, for example, Shakers shook themselves into an ecstasy state. Quakers did something similar and incorporated dancing as well. There were those who would dig until exhaustion and achieve a hallucinatory state that way. Others still drowned themselves and then, upon resuscitation by a priest, felt themselves to be born again, raised from the dead and imbued with the Holy Spirit. Some took off their clothes in winter and used hypothermia to induce visions. And even today, we still see Pentecostal types practicing their “laying on of the hands” rituals with charismatic preachers who induce mystical babbling in their congregation - this is called “the gift of tongues” and you can find videos of this practice still up on YouTube:

Whether or not you believe that this is indeed a Christian practice or not, that is beyond the point. The technology of spiritualism is by and large the same regardless of what religious tradition it belongs to. Another example: Scandinavian mystery sects practiced a form of mock hanging by which they would suffocate an initiate and thereby produce a near death experience.

Again, mysticism boils down to using various techniques to achieve a mind-altering state that enables some sort of contact with metaph… magical forces. The how is not as important as the why although we’ll get into the how as the series progresses as well.

Over the last century, many Europeans have been drawn to various Eastern sects and cults because they wanted a more direct spiritual experience. These people were not content with the mainstream Christian approach which relies on proxy forms of spirituality provided by holy texts and holy priests doing holy rituals. Whether or not these people found what they sought for is (say it with me this time) beyond the point. The point is that there is an inherent conflict/dynamic in religion between the direct experience/finding out for yourself approach and the trusting the experts/having faith approach and that not everyone is content with the former or the latter approach.

Also, to cement the contrast in approaches, the Faith school generally condemns all those who seek to experience the metaphysical as heretics bound for Hell. There can be only one path to contact with the metaphysical: by proxy, either through the Church (Catholic, Orthodox) and its priests or through the holy writings (Protestants). The Knowing school, in contrast, is skeptical of dogma and insists that the individual or the community is responsible for their own spiritual journey. In other words, one must come into an intimate knowledge of these higher metaphysical realities by using mystical technologies to level oneself up.

Although these two approaches are at odds with one another as a result of the internal schism within the early Christian movement, this was not always the case.

In pre-Christian Europe, the Faith-based school and the Knowing-based school co-existed. Those who wanted to outsource their spirituality to the experts could do so and participate in a more public, ritual-based form of religiosity while those who wanted to go further could join a mystery sect and take their spirituality to the next level.

A metaphor just came to mind: one can’t go to a restaurant, order food off the menu and then claim to be a master chef. Faith-based approaches, fundamentally, are a form of spiritual outsourcing. The final product may vary in quality, and we may even listen to various food critics’ opinions on the matter (or our own stomachs’) but they remain a pre-packaged product that we had no hand in creating. There is a world of difference between the chef and the customer. It takes time and effort to become a chef. Now consider what would happen if some of the chefs take to preaching that regular people should give up cooking and totally rely on them for their culinary needs. What’s more, they started drastically cutting down on the variety of dishes they offer… There - metaphor beaten to death. Moving on.

The split between the Faith and Knowing schools is, in my opinion, more fundamental than the split between the materialists and the religionists. In fact, I’d argue that the Believers and the Deniers have more in common than they’d care to imagine, seeing as they are both quite skeptical of mysticism and seek to smother it out, albeit for different reasons. If at all possible, I believe that we would be well-served if we could return to the old detente between the two approaches to spirituality practiced in the ancient world. Unlike Rene Guenon, however, I don’t intend on writing a letter to any official church with my theses. If he and people like him failed then, I am sure to fail now, so I intend to learn from the mistakes of people far more intelligent than I am and simply let sleeping dogmas lie.

That being said, for those who are interested in a fresh approach to religion and metaphysics with the end-goal of finding a new spirituality for our people, we may as well keep discussing the topic here, among friends.