I gotta have my orange juice.

And for yourself, may the gods grant you
Your heart’s desire, a husband and a home,
And the blessing of a harmonious life.
For nothing is greater or finer than this,
When a man and woman live together
With one heart and mind, bringing joy
To their friends and grief to their foes.”
—Homer, Odyssey, Book 6, trans. Stanley Lombardo

John Knightley made his appearance, and “How d’ye do, George?” and “John, how are you?” succeeded in the true English style, burying under a calmness that seemed all but indifference, the real attachment which would have led either of them, if requisite, to do every thing for the good of the other. (Jane Austen, Emma)

Here we come to a kind of reductio ad absurdum, or personalist cosmological argument. Every person is dependent upon prior persons to be a person. But where does this end or where does this begin? Is it conceivable that there is an infinite regress of finite persons to account for the reality of any given personality? What accounts for each prior personality that gives rise to the one following? Is prior personality sufficient to completely account for any personality at any given time? We have two choices, and, ultimately, only two. Either we owe our existence to ourselves (which carries within it some manifest impossibilities), or we owe our existence to God. Now my contention is quite simply that we, on a daily basis, are faced with the starkest contradiction imaginable. If we do not acknowledge the reality of the God of the Bible—if he does not exist—then neither do we. On the other hand, if we do exist, then he does too. Now the introduction of this stark contradiction may be ab it breathtaking and perhaps even shocking. But I would contend that our very existence brings us to this cliff, and to this very sharp either/or. In real life, however, it is ameliorated a bit by the recognition that if he does exist, and if we exist, but we refuse to acknowledge his existence, we don’t go up in a puff of smoke and cease to be. Rather, the result (because of God’s mercy and long-suffering with our foolishness) is both cognitive dissonance and existential confusion. Our existence will be at best “thin,” and it will be incomprehensible. We will have no ground at all for our very being and personhood.

John Calvin opened his Institutes of the Christian Religion with this very beautiful paragraph:

Our wisdom, in so far as it ought to be deemed true and solid Wisdom, consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But as these are connected together by many ties, it is not easy to determine which of the two precedes and gives birth to the other. For, in the first place, no man can survey himself without forthwith turning his thoughts towards the God in whom he lives and moves; because it is perfectly obvious, that the endowments which we possess cannot possibly be from ourselves; nay, that our very being is nothing else than subsistence in God alone. In the second place, whose blessings, which unceasingly distil to us from heaven, are like streams conducting us to the fountain.

Human consciousness necessarily involves consciousness of God. If the consciousness of God could be eradicated, then human self-consciousness would also disappear. Self-knowledge is possible only in God.

Of course, grant the premise of creation and a creator God, and everything I say follows. But why should I grant the premise? You should grant the premise because we either exist as a free creative act of this perfect God, and thus participate as created analogues in all of the real existent perfections of God, or we exist ultimately by chance, and partake in all of the analogues of that mistress. There is no third alternative. The analogues of God are (briefly) truth, goodness and beauty. The analogues of chance are chaos, confusion, and disorder. Pure chance is perfectly unknowable. If you or I, or everything and anything, is the product of pure chance, this would be completely unknowable, and the purely unknowable is no different from nothingness.

If you are driven mad by this conclusion this is exactly what the Bible itself would expect, and not a conclusion that the Bible would expect any man to take contentedly or serenely. the Bible (which is a long and difficult book) frankly diagnoses man, in his current state, as functioning everywhere with this epistemological glitch. To be an unbeliever is the natural state of man, and to be otherwise is attributed to nothing short of a miracle. A man’s unbelief is not simply neutral, or a state of being where one chooses to believe or not believe as one would choose a meal from a variegated menu. Unbelief occupies a religious position in a man’s life, and is as decisive for the unbeliever as belief is for the believer.

There are two accounts of unbelief. The first account is that of the unbeliever himself. This is a necessary perspective, and it is not a simple, completely unified voice that speaks. Unbelief has as many voices as there are unbelievers. Not every voice is unique, though, and the absolute variety is not infinite. There are a certain number of objections to the Christian faith that cohere together, and not an uncountable number. Then, there is the diagnosis of the Bible itself concerning unbelief. the Bible has its own internal theology of unbelief and its own X-ray to offer. While the voice of the unbeliever itself ought to be heard, the most important voice is the voice of the Bible. The reason the voice of the unbeliever needs to be heard is in order to demonstrate that the voice of unbelief is really the voice of caviling or of disputing with the judgment that God has already handed down in the court that he has called. This is what “doubt” is: diakrinomoi. The unbeliever is a “debater of this age” (1 Cor 1:20), and his unbelief is closely associated with bringing accusation and bringing charges of an ethical nature against God. The doubter is, in fact, someone who himself calls God to account before his own bar of justice. The doubter is a judge who dares to question God, or dares to question that God, rather than he, ought to be the final judge. In other words, when we doubt God’s existence and his governing power over all things, what we are really doing is ruling him out of court, and inciting that we have the final word. This brings us to all of the above contradictions and epistemologically reduces us to the necessity of self-existence, which is the same as nothingness. Undeniably, man almost compulsively wants to get on in life without this surrender and this necessary belief—man is ethically offended by this. Let me invite you to the next chapter, which examines man’s penchant to always play the judge, even over God. (Rich Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?, 23-25)

In Rousseau, we especially find ourselves awash with so much that is modern. There is bathos, sentimentality, and the relish of pity that has its origin in self-pity. He nearly succeeds in making the self absolute as the feeling self, and then very quickly loses that same self as it drowns in its own self-felt concern. He is lost in self-pity and in self-importance in petty tragedy. Anything can be a tragedy—a toothache, the smallest unrequited love.

Rousseau didn’t invent anything absolutely new. He simply placed an emphasis on certain aspects of life that had never before been given such importance. Everybody has always known about feelings. Bathos and sentimentality have been around for a long time, but mostly as comedy. Rousseau made self-concern, in a deepened way, the end of life; for literary Europe, however, he managed to make it respectable. The importance of romance is not the glory of the beloved. The importance of romance is the glory of my own feeling of being in love. He was in love with being in love, and the beloved is a really quite secondary self-extension. He glorified the self’s importance by making the smallest self-pity seem as immense as the tragedy of King Lear.

What Rousseau accomplished was a lineage that is very old, and is deeply tied, ironically, to the love of death. The final glory, one begins to suspect, would be suicide over the tragedy of a toothache. Hopefully others will notice. My tragedy makes me overwhelmingly notable and important. . . .

Who was this lover and this beloved inside of Rousseau? Is this one who feels love for the self, sensing a prior self, or does he create this self? Did Rousseau exist before he felt himself in love, or did this love create this person?

There is a manifest contradiction here. Rousseau makes a good deal of “virtue.” The self is a “virtuous” self. But Rousseau is very interested in maintaining the utter independence of his existence. This good or virtuous self is only good because Rousseau loves this self. He creates himself by loving himself, and makes himself “virtuous” because he loves himself, and then “feels” this self-creation. He, in other words, creates himself out of nothing. Did he authentically exist before he loved himself? Where was he before he discovered this love? Apparently nowhere. He did not exist. Then he who did not exist began to exist and brought himself into existence by love. But how? By loving himself. Unfortunately, there was no one there to carry out the act of loving. Which is prior: self-love, or existence of the self? One cannot be without the other. This is creation out of nothing, creation ex nihilo. . . .

The United States—my own country—is, at this moment, in grave danger of falling into a final and irreversible sinkhole of Rousseauian sludge. Some years ago, the American education system adopted the “middle school” philosophy, which replaced the old-fashioned junior high school. The purpose of junior high was quite simply to prepare students for high school; the purpose of high school was to complete a basic and foundational educational curriculum that would enable one to enter the work and domestic force of the country, and also prepare some of those students for higher education at the nation’s colleges and universities. One, in other words, had to submit oneself to a particular body of learning. However, by the 1970s and 80s, America had been extensively psychologized. The purpose of education for adolescents ceased to be submission to a curriculum for life preparation, and was replaced with collective therapy to enable students to develop a “healthy self-esteem.” School, in other words, became “student-centered,” making the development of the students ego the central reality. The student, then, no longer submits him or herself to something larger than and outside of themselves, but the entire educational establishment submits itself to them. School became “ego-centric” in the most literal way. This was the essential purpose of middle school as opposed to junior high.

The middle school is an entirely Rousseauian institution, and has built into it all of the contradictions and conflicts that are outlined above. Not surprisingly, it has, over time, issued in all of the above contradictions. . . . If God cannot be one’s final and ultimate audience (as with Augustine in his Confessions, who gave himself to, but did not pander to, a public), then one can only “play to the crowd” as with Rousseau. The result is a world of constant offense, extensive hypocrisy, and a societal “anti-covenant” in which harmonious relationship is nearly impossible. In short, the Rousseauian “middle school” philosophy is a recipe for a completely neurotic society, one dominated by psychiatry and a legal profession with an inordinate number of people involved in lawsuits over absurd and petty offenses. What should have been a passing moment in the development of the adolescent’s personality in junior high school (with the constant sense of seeking to be “in” and “popular”) is now elevated to the final meaning of life and as grist for an everlasting therapy mill. It is a recipe for an adolescent society in which everything coalesces around nothing. (Rich Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?, 14-17)

You asked if there was anything in my congregation that could not be naturally accounted for by an unbelieving skeptic. My answer would be emphatically yes, but you will think me cheating when I tell you what they are. My congregation is filled with people who have been washed in the blood of the lamb, who have had their sins forgiven, who have been justified, and sanctified. No naturalist can account for any of these things. They have come to participate in the salvation of God. You will accuse me of begging the question, and of assuming what I need to prove, but my point is that the naturalist begs the question himself. He pretends he is searching for evidence that his epistemological grid has already ahead of time dogmatically declared cannot exist. So even if a man were to rise from the dead there would be a natural explanation for it and could not mean what, say, the Apostle Paul says it means. . . .

I can sympathize with your account of spending (I assume) heart-breaking time trying to find a miracle, or a clarity and experience of God in your earlier years, and not finding it. I went through something very similar, and spent a number of years close to despair at the “brass heavens.” God was nowhere. For all of my desperation, I could not “find” him. Then I met some people who were able to help me. What they helped me to see was that if we are to find God, and to find a real and living experience of Christ, it will be in the midst of a moral war that I must wage with myself. The only way that Christ can ever be found is when I’m thrown on, most specifically, an utter need for a Savior who can save me from sin. That meant I had to begin to take sin seriously in a way that I never had before. Before (and I was raised in the church), I was caught up in seeking “experiences,” and happiness, and (in a youthful way) success (of which I had little of any adolescent sort). (Rich Bledsoe, Can Saul Alinsky Be Saved?, 115-116)

“All things are hard which are fair and excellent.” (Dedication to Queen Elizabeth, The Geneva Bible, 1560 edition)

Some favorite quotes:

In everything but disposition they were admirably taught.

Lady Bertram . . . [was] one of those persons who think nothing can be dangerous or difficult or fatiguing to anybody but themselves.

Mrs Norris’s talking of it everywhere as a matter not to be talked of at present.

Of all transactions [marriage is] the one in which people expect most from others and are least honest themselves.

It will, I believe, be everywhere found, that as the clergy are, or are not what they ought to be, so are the rest of the nation.

It was a beautiful evening, mild and still, and the drive was as pleasant as the serenity of nature could make it; but when Mrs. Norris ceased speaking it was altogether a silent drive to those within. Their spirits were in general exhausted—and to determine whether the day had afforded most pleasure or pain, might occupy the meditations of almost all.

I speak what appears to me the general opinion; and where an opinion is general, it is usually correct.

Mrs. Norris . . . was now trying to be in a bustle without having any thing to bustle about, and laboring to be important where nothing was wanted but tranquility and silence.

There is nothing like employment, active indispensable employment, for relieving sorrow. Employment, even melancholy, may dispel melancholy.

Some more favorite quotes from Reflections on the French Revolution:

There are some follies which baffle argument, which go beyond ridicule, and which excite no feeling in us but disgust; and therefore I say no more upon it.

But what is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint. Those who know what virtuous liberty is cannot bear to see it disgraced by incapable heads, on account of their having high-sounding words in their mouths. . . . To make a government requires no great prudence. Settle the seat of power, teach obedience, and the work is done. To give freedom is still more easy. It is not necessary to guide; it only requires to let go the rein. But to form a free government, that is, to temper together these opposite elements of liberty and restraint in one consistent work, requires much thought, deep reflection, a sagacious, powerful, and combining mind. . . . When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators,—the instruments, not the guides of the people. . . . The popular leader is obliged to become active in propagating doctrines and establishing powers that will afterwards defeat any sober purpose at which he ultimately might have aimed.

[My countrymen] are not, I think, without some causes of apprehension and complaint; but these they do not owe to their Constitution, but to their own conduct. . . . I would not exclude alteration neither; but even when I changed, it should be to preserve. I should be led to my remedy by a great grievance. In what I did, I should follow the example of our ancestors. I would make the reparation as nearly as possible in the style of the building.