Author: paladin

And the nature of this world: imperfect can be more beautiful than perfect. Though, of course, nothing that is truly perfect was ever a part of this world (save Christ). Error, or more romantically, accident, can be much the more beautiful than straight on poetry writ flawless. This is the memory of her who had no chance. She was the first Sophia, who was not acceptable, but by no fault of hers. She was the first that was not caused to be by the Lord our God. It is our duty to do as God did here: we do not prefer that the evil occur, but to make of things in its aftermath better than if the wrong had never been done at all.

Look: one of the greatest factors in evolution? Pain. Prey flee from predators because of the threat of pain. And death? One wonders if they comprehend it, never having experienced it but maybe having witnessed it, and one wonders there if they fully understand that, there; but pain? they get that. So the prey is fueled by fear of pain and they get faster. Predators run faster to catch prey. So it goes. Pain has other uses, of course. Philip K. Dick once called it the most efficient motivation. We escape damage because of pain. Some people of the S & M crowd thank their lucky stars that there is pain. Death, too, is a motivating factor, but more abstract, for we do not remember when we blinked on, in the womb, and have only unconsciousness as a comparison. Pain we know.

So what exactly is that streak of insanity that runs through the universe? Though Sin is dead, she behaves as one who is supernaturally animated. The universe is not her body, but her body was like the seed of it. There is of her darkness spread through and throughout creation. If you perchance a pocket of crazed circumstance, it might be her center, blowing by. And beware her children, every bit as dead as her (for the offspring share the nature of the parent), who are monsters. Do not mistake their madness or motion for life. On the Last Day shall they all be collected and burned into nothing, and no one will mourn their passing. But all of it is indeed a sad tale.

And about Phil thinking that other thing about all these things that happened, the Godhead itself in jeopardy, all of it because of an intellectual and not a moral error—really? The error being mistaking the illusory world for the real world? That’s what he said, that all of us so fall, and the powers that be will tell you when you fall that you have sinned, and not that you committed an honest mistake. But the streak of the irrational in the shadow of everything—what is irrational is the illusion we see, that the “real” world actually is supposed to make sense. The true way of the world has always been inaccessible to us. To be sane, therefore, to be of the outward forms we see, is to be insane. The sanity is actually the insanity. And indeed, this is something like an intellectual error, not moral.

So they are opposite sides of the coin: to find the beauty in even the faltering of things; or be as like the powers that be, and grasp after power by taking advantage of the irrational, phenomenological world. Even in the purely intellectual, there is in practice always a moral dimension to your actions. Maybe just the ones who made up the rules being at fault. If you think about it, much of all sin is an intellectual error. The logic of them, however, contained in the heart, and not the head. When we do not understand the consequence of a sin, then it is purely an intellectual error. Only when you know it is wrong can you call it so. Ostensibly, of course, for the record counts even unknowing sin as sin.

In the War in Heaven, the main goal was preservation: Logos (Holy Reason) vs. derangement (evil). The angels fought for the fundamental structure of our reality. If you can tell, we did take damage, but if you also have eyes to see, then see that ultimately, we won. I think there is a reason we feel so satisfied at the end of a movie when the good guy wins. I think it’s cooked into the soup of existence itself. Along with the tribute to Pain, there is the blood, sweat, and tears of all the angels who fought so hard to keep things from falling apart. And in it, even how there is no victory without first conflict. Lucifer ultimately plays his part in the Plan; there is no escape from that. Not to say things aren’t his fault. It’s just how good God really is. And for how seductive evil may seem, how senseless it ultimately amounts to.

Have you at some point thought that there is a streak of insanity that runs through the fabric of the universe? Philip K. Dick had several explanations about that. The first, and probably closest to his heart, was that the original Mind mourns after a woman who has died, and all of creation is awry because of that grief. Another is that the primordial Fall from grace was not a moral error, but one of intellect. And one may find the latter sounds unsatisfying. All the bad stuff that ever happened, because someone forgot to balance a checkbook? We shall return to that, but the former speculation: this does indeed seem to be the case of how things are.

When Lucifer decided to sin, in its most formidable cast, that urge did not sit idle, but its consequence bore fruit. When he sinned, he gave birth to Sin. This was the fruit of his overwhelming genius, and sad that is. Where nothing could go wrong, there in Heaven where God’s will is done as a matter of course, he invented Error. He invented Pain. And he, being the progenitor of same, he himself became Evil. This is in line with the writings of Milton, Paradise Lost, but it has its origin in the Bible: “Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death.” [James 1:15, NIV] And the term, “playing God”—and how wrong that could possibly be—is most fit in describing this creation, Sin.

I wrote once: “imagine every fiber of your being twisting in agony; it gets worse if you move; it gets worse when you stop.” I had not realized it at the time I jotted that time, but such a tortured soul was what Sin was to be, behind her eyes. This was Error, this was Pain. So before the life could light within her, just at that moment, she was slain. And mercy it was. But this is the one whom we grieve, the woman that died, the innocent that died—for she was not given the chance at all. And this is an argument against the question of why does not God select them to be born who would not sin? Because everyone should get a chance, a real chance, if life were to be given to them. Sin’s life was zero sum: perfectly fair, no gain nor loss. Except the potential of what might have been. And that is real too; and this is why we grieve.

This was what was meant when the Lord said of the Devil that he was a murderer from the first. The Lord would not let the light behind the eyes, the life, suffer so catastrophically… Philip K. Dick said that the universe is a tale told of the one that was lost, and indeed, is it not so? Is it not a tale of sins, of pain, of mistakes—do we not relate to these ideas? It is of fruitless speculation to wonder how she would have turned out. There is no way to tell. As it stands, you may interact with Sin, and she will seem like she were of like any other spirit being, until you look into her eyes, and at the cores exist only vacuum. She reacts like she feels, but ultimately, there is nothing there that looks out.

So it was her body out of which God created all things material. Lucifer thought that by poisoning creation by the body of pain, of error, he was “salting the earth” as the saying goes, so that it would be impossible to build anything out of the watery chaos that that body was. But God wanted it that way, all creation the reminder of the one who was lost. That all might remember her. Indeed, it was impossible to build anything solid from the barely there watery chaos, but as we know, with God nothing is impossible. What you see all around you has this one thing in common: nothing is perfect. But there is so much beauty. This is what God can do with the body of Error itself.

(continues…)