Paradise Lost Again

           

I have just read Milton's Paradise Lost for the third time. But this time I did not spurn it as obsolete mythology. I honored it as actual history. Dynamic inner history, happening on subtler planes of energy and consciousness, in the causal realm behind the surface of the material world, where a very real struggle takes place between angelic and demonic powers. 

To me, in my feeble dotage, this reading of Milton explains what's really going on in our world a lot better than the smug materialism of Marxist economics, Freudian psychology, or sophomore sociology class. The astral conflict in the subtle world now overflows into the plane of sensory experience. In Shakespeare's words, "Hell is empty and all the devils are here." 

The moral ambiguity of postmodern intellectuals no longer explains why seemingly stable people suddenly perform acts of unspeakable violence, terrorism, infanticide; or why the voices of so-called "specialists" sound more and more like gibberish. We no longer inhabit the information age but the age of babel. The true sign of the demonic is not rationally organized evil, but drivel, gossip, and opinion posing as science and scholarship. 

As we listen to these nihilistic voices of amoral un-compassed relativism, where Good and Evil are mocked as childish fantasies, our minds grow more exhausted and confused, and the less we discern through the single eye of the heart. Under the spell of their gibberish, where all boundaries dissolve and choices don't matter, we lose the capacity to distinguish the structure of an intergalactic moral order. We no longer behold how consciousness resolves, over the eons, into the lineaments of Christ, the Omega point of embodied evolution. And we no longer see with Martin Luther King's coherent vision how "the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” 

What to do? No politician, no scientist, no professor will tell us. But we might all spend a little quiet time each day, tuning out the gibberish. It echoes back to us through our apps, our cell phones, our media, but make no mistake: this high-tech chatter is the groaning of own disordered mind. 

Instead, let us listen to the glowing silence of our heart, and hear, for a little while, the old clear temple bell of love, God's love, ringing us inward.

 

Engraving: illustration for Paradise Lost by Gustav Doré