By Selwyn Duke ——Bio and Archives--November 4, 2012
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The unity of the source of all being and the analogical similarity of all things guarantee that a knowledge of each grade will shed some further light upon what is below and what is above it in the hierarchy of reality. For the better understanding of God and the creative process, we can turn to that order of being which provides the most intimate created similitude of the first intelligent and free Agent.But where we once studied angels to better understand God (and also that below them in the hierarchy of reality: man), now we do something different. As David Keck points out in Angels and Angelology in the Middle Ages:
Of all God’s creatures, human beings are nearest to the angels, and angelology thus promises to illuminate anthropology. In the modern world, the impulse to learn about human nature from closely related beings has shifted subjects from seraphim to simians. Whereas modern scientists study the origins of the apes to uncover clues about humanity, medieval theologians investigated angels.Of course, what else would materialistic modern man study? The Manicheans believed there should be a victory of the spiritual over the material, but today’s fashionable heresy proposes a victory of the material over the spiritual — by declaring the spiritual a no-show. As a consequence, whereas we once looked up to glean insight into our nature, we now look down. We do not believe in Heaven and aspire higher, but only in the material world and use as role models the only other kinds of creatures found within it: the lower. For example, today it is not uncommon to hear, as a famous primatologist (whose name is not important) has reported, “The Bonobo apes have sex frequently — even with members of the same sex — and this may be their secret to avoiding conflict.” Of course, the implication is that we humans just need to dispense with our Puritanism and unshackle our inner simian. Why, we do not need God or the law to act “morally,” as the aforementioned primatologist has also said; just take our cues from nature. Putting aside the fact that “morality,” properly understood, is incomprehensible within a universe of atheism (for who is to say what is right then? All is reduced to preference), those who animalize man present animal nature quite selectively. They will say that chimpanzees may comfort distressed neighbors, but chimps will also kill other chimps for sport. And I have yet to hear, as in the Planet of the Apes, a repetitive chant of “Ape killed ape!” as the hairy miscreants are held to account. It is also never proposed that since most apes — and, in fact, the majority of higher life forms — are male-dominated, that man should be patriarchal. We can also note that, as the last 50 years have attested, there is not much correlation between increasing libertinism and atheism and decreasing violence and strife. And this was entirely predictable. We used to say about the best of men, “He is an angel”; now we say about man, “He is a talking ape.” So is it any wonder he has started to act like one? One purpose man’s heroes always served was to give him examples of virtue to which to aspire. Those heroes evolved as time progressed from mythical characters such as Odysseus and Jason — who, though brave, had human frailties — to idealized real ones such as George Washington, who could not tell a lie. And thus does the Catholic Church declare saints, who exemplify ultimate virtue, winning battles not over terrible sinners, but over sin itself. And what do moderns give us? The Bonobo ape. Or, worse still, pop-culture icons. Whatever our beliefs about the spirit world, there is no question that man is better when he looks up to the ethereal than down to the terrestrial. For the more we kill our heroes and angels, dismissing them as fantasies of the past, the more we birth demons in the present.
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