MORAL CERTAINTY

How do we know the truth; where are the deep springs of certainty? In the depths of the heart of Man, the Apostle tells us, are things we just know, and ignore at our peril. Of course, sinful Man chooses to evade these things by obscuring their truth, arguing that we don't know these things, that they are not proven, that they are not logically necessary. The history of Modernity has been the history of the attempt to divorce Truth from its foundations planted by God deep in the heart of Man. When once Truth is located in things that Man can verify independently, then Man is the master of his own Truth, and hence of his own being. The senses having been selected early on as the location of ascertainable truth has led only to philosophical doubts of the instrument. The modern experiment should have ended there, but there came a crafty weaver into town by the name of I. Kant, who offered to clothe our noble Empiricist in a gown of superior quality, in which he has been strutting and parading the streets of Academia ever since, deaf to the cries of the children proclaiming his essential nakedness, though lately he seems to at least have developed the ability to blush.

There are currently two forms of transmission of truth from the past; Tradition and Scholarship. Originally, the two methods were one, scholarship being intensely tied to tradition, and used as a kind of filter to distinguish authentic tradition from its more spurious forms, but in modernity, the two have separated into hostile camps. The method of modern scholarship is apparently to adopt as a prejudice something immensely flattering to ourselves, and to always look at any actual evidence that may exist through the lens of our pet prejudice; Chesterton wrote of the scholarship of his time that it involved scrapping supernatural stories which have some foundation in favor of natural stories which have no foundation.

Scholarship and Tradition might be compared to two people, one who studies a rock known to have originated from a distant mountain, the other having a distant, hazy view of the mountain itself. If you study a rock intensely enough, you can probably tell a lot about the kind of soils, and therefore the kind of vegetation, which might prevail on the mountainside; of course, this involves a couple of key assumptions. One, that the data you possess is not something erratic, and therefore is truly indicative of conditions on the mountain, and Two, that it is in fact prevalent all over the mountain. The two methods should obviously be used in conjunction, but it is the one who has sight of the actual mountain who should have the controlling authority; modern scholarship is somewhat given to informing us authoritatively that there are no pine trees on the mountain, when they can be seen quite plainly standing out on the ridge.

Anyway, we live in the world of totalitarian scholarship, with its own epistemology, and a dedicated corps of amateur police tirelessly striving to enforce its decisions; but for one who heeds the voice within, these things are meaningless as the wind, which may shriek with all its voice, yet never compel one to surrender. It seems to be the role of the modern schools to create a race of individuals who simply cannot think outside the box of contemporary scholarship, baseless though its dictates may be.