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[Here, of course, I must place my own mea culpa.

What I am doing surely seems to be a fixation.  Look at this blog.  Who in their right mind would blog on a short theological treatise written by a now forgotten Dutch theologian?

I certainly operate within the parameters of my own dispositions.  I cannot claim a truly free conscience.  I always feel the call of a multitude of causes.  But these causes are magical.  They do not seek sovereign power.  They seek the laughter of the festival.  Lighten up.  Have some fun.  Do not be so intense.

These multitudinous causes should not be confused with religious causes, even though they may be accounted for by some religious institution.  They are play filled, like Disney’s Magic Kingdom.  They do not hold the possibility of grasping sovereign power. Perhaps, someday there will be a word for these phantasmagorical beings, a word that differs from the term “religion”.

The Sovereign does not need to maintain order in Disney’s Kingdom.  Unless, of course, a sovereign^infra religion motivates it to do so.

My play – my joy – is running around the landscape that Peirce discovered a century ago.  His joy – his madness – was to clear that field.  He called it “semiotics”.  I call it “postmodern scholasticism”.

At the same time, I wonder whether I will see the joy of freedom crushed, like a bird in a fist, as it has so many times before. Look at American Television in 2013.  It pretends to be our friend, while, at the same time, condescends and manipulates.  In fact, people on television claim to speak for me.  They tell me what I should think in order to me to be their friend.

The instruments of pro-objects occupy seats of sovereign power.  The television, that new way of talking, tells us “what we want to hear”.  I have a sickening feeling, culled from history, about where this will lead.  The Final Option (perhaps, the inevitable consequence of of a Single Payer Healthcare System) will be only one example of a Final Impenitence on a scale that dwarfs the individual as well as our imagination.

This topic, I suspect, Schoonenberg will tentatively approach.  Stay tuned.

And so I conclude my blogs on section 5, chapter 1, entitled: “Sin Unto Death – Mortal Sin – Venial Sin”.]

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[What about self-donation?]

In the same way that sins may lead to the final impenitence, basic moral acts may lead to the total self-donation and eternal reward.  But the virtuous person is not going it alone.  The Council of Trent talks about the special graces of perseverance.

[This is because, with every step upwards, there is a possibility of slipping back.  Every illumination offers the opportunity for reification, the fixation of an illumination into a think^group, lessons that tell people what they want to hear.

For grades of grace, the vertical nested form {think^divine(virtuous action(conscience^free))} trains the dispositions.  A significant feature of training is desensitizing oneself to partial objects.  Supernatural wisdom is needed in order to discern think^divine from the variety of partial objects through which God may be appreciated.  Conscience^free and the dispositions learn to work together.  Grace magically changes the possibilities of discernment and thus, the selection of human action.

Analogies between “grades of grace” and “grades of disgrace” break down because the dispositions respond to partial objects, not the whole object. No matter how hard one trains, each new good appears as a good in itself; that is, a temptation for idolatry.

Life is easier for grades of disgrace. Think^group substitutes a partial object for the whole.  Think^group trains our dispositions to fixate, rather than to step back.  How difficult is that?

Talk to any Professor in a Multiversity for a demonstration.  They have selected one another for employment on the basis of the intensity of their fixations.  Each department is ideologically pure.  The conversation will always turn to the Professor and ‘his’ fixation.]

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[Returning to Schoonenberg, what can I say?

The “final impenitence” and “thinking yourself to be a golden calf” have a lot in common.  After all, aren’t we entitled to hear only “what we want to hear”?  Who wants to hear the truth when it is so easy to deny it?]

[They realized that they were naked.

This precisely corresponds to the dawning awareness of golden calves as they persecute (what they imagine to be) the causes of their frustrations, the subjects who are deemed think^anti-object.

When sovereign^infra religions begin to feel vulnerable, they strive all the more to neutralize the sources of their frustrations.

Their exercise of power becomes less and less clothed by the robes of their righteousness.

Totalitarian regimes are left naked in the end.

Then the Lord God, the ultimate scapegoat, the only one capable of speaking for the now voiceless corpses, returns.]

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[Consider the depiction of the Temptation of Eve in An Archaeology of the Fall.

The serpent was the reified projection of Eve’s unconscious thoughts.  In Girard’s terminology, the serpent was the “rival whose desire Eve imitated”.

The serpent appears to be Eve’s double, because it appears to desire precisely what Eve desires.  The serpent was both rival and advisor to Eve.  The serpent was a golden calf.

When Eve ate the fruit, Eve and the serpent united against the Lord God.  The joining was spontaneous because the serpent was a projection of Eve’s mind.  Eve^pro-fruit was proven right.  Lord God^anti-fruit was proven real.  But the scapegoat was not a corpse.  Oops.

The discrepancy between the fact that Eve and the serpent and Adam had scapegoated the Lord God^anti-fruit and the fact that the Lord God was not Lord God^anti-fruit must have been alarming.  Eve and Adam realized that they were naked.]

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[I do not know whether Rene Girard ever imagined the possibility that the mimetic rival could be pure projection.

Notably, this could account for an odd yet pivotal detail in his scenario-rich hypothesis. At the zenith of the mimetic crisis, the rivals-in-conflict join one another and turn their accumulated anger against a scapegoat.  The united rivals-in-conflict unite in attacking the scapegoat.  The scapegoat gets the blame for the crisis in the first place. Plus, the scapegoat’s sacrifice appears to resolve the crisis and bring (temporary) relief.

Girard views these features of the mimetic crisis as natural properties of the crisis itself, even though it is hard to imagine two contenders suddenly joining forces.

However, if one rival is the projection of the other, in the same manner that think^anti-object is a projection of think^pro-object, then the conflict dramatizes a sovereign^infra religion in battle with the demons that arise with the unintended consequences of its own social constructions.  The battle is resolved at the moment that blame is laid upon the scapegoat.  The projection is reified.  The scapegoat is sacrificed.

Think^pro-object is proven right.  Think^anti-object is proven real.  The scapegoat is a corpse.]

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[To me, this dynamic provides an adequate description of the idea of “golden calf” that complements Rene Girard’s concept of “scapegoat”.

Mimetic Rivalry lies at the heart of the drama of the scapegoat. Acquisitive mimesis describes the pursuit of sovereign power by infrasovereign religions.  Each has organizational goals that they want promulgated as law.  None can achieve power alone.  Coalitions form.

Once sovereign power falls within the grasp of any coalition of infrasovereign religions, conflictual mimesis begins, where the “Parties of Pro-Objects” contest all others by branding them “anti-objects”.  Every other institution, transcendent or mundane, becomes a potential enemy.  The fundamental transformation of Society begins.

When unintended consequences of the transformations appear, they are declared to be “exceptions” by the “golden calves” (whose behaviors are made “golden” by their object relation) and blamed on the “scapegoats” (who are easy enough to find, no matter what they believe, and who are, by definition, think^anti-object).]

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[Co-emergent with the success of a sovereign think^group is the conjuring of the relation of impossibility between the denial of law^essential and acceptance of law^essential.

Denials come in many forms. “The deformative results of pro-object deeds may be exceptions to the mundane world of unintended consequences.  Unintended results are due to those who harbor anti-object ideologies.  The causes reside in those with false consciousness.  The only option must be to even more dogmatically establish the idol of pro-object and more relentlessly punish the ones who are responsible for failure.”]

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[“The final self-donation” opens our metaphorical windows to knowing both think^divine and law^essential.  That does not mean that we achieve the fullness of wisdom.  It simply means openness to wisdom.

“The final impenitence” shuts our windows tight and creates a virtual outside in order to keep them closed.  There is no openness here.  Within the reach of the sovereign, there is no escape from think^pro-object.

When think^group assumes the throne and eclipses think^divine, it becomes think^pro-object.  “The Party of Think^pro-object” holds as sacred the “object that brings all of subjects into organization”.

Who does not hold the object in esteem? Who will break one of a tangle of rules? Who dare piss off a perverted instrument of their pro-object order? Who stands at the wrong place at the wrong time?  These are branded think^anti-object.

Sovereign^infra rule establishes a new religion, a new Public Cult.

Hail Pro-Object!  Hail the Dear Leader who bears “the Object that brings us into Organization”.

Think^divine resides beyond the thin line marking the horizon.

Think^divine exterpellates.]

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[You have the power.  You have the power to be responsible.  You also have the power to be an instrument of “the object that brings all subjects into organization”.  You have the choice.

In this, “the exercise of power” mirrors “the final total self-donation” and “the final impenitence”.

Total self-donation – the confirmation of love – puts sovereign power into context by saying, “You have the power to be responsible.”  Hope and faith yield “organizational goals without the need for sovereign power”.

Impenitence, the hollowing out of hope and faith in favor of some partial object, grasps for sovereign power by saying what many want to hear: “You have the power to bring society into order according some organizational objective”.

But then, what if, by some historical fluke, I become sovereign.  Can I become “the object that brings everyone into organization”?  I am the change is more than a title of a good book.  The phrase brings to the fore the creepy confounding of human flesh and totalitarian impulse.  In the exercise of power, final impenitence becomes idolatry.  The “object that brings all subjects into organization” is mortal.

The golden calf walks on two hind legs.]