An Attempt at the Ordered Life

It can be difficult to figure out what is important in life and what isn’t.  There is always a disconnect between what is important in reality, and what is important to us.  When the two match up, however, we are able to place our spiritual and physical power in the right area, and the result can be magnificently beautiful.

The reason why it is often so difficult to get our priorities in order is because we have inordinate desires that drive us in mistaken directions.  An easy example of this is the greedy person who betrays his friend to make money.  His greed leads him to prioritize money over friendship, and so he makes a costly mistake, not realizing that in the end friends are actually more valuable than money.

But wealth has a certain sheen that friendship does not necessarily have.  The value of friendship is discovered incrementally, often in imperceptible ways that one can’t control or hold in his hands.  Money, however, is easy to see and use.  It has a sort of immediate value that is more glamorous than the value of a friend.

Disordered desires are in the will and emotions, so they need an outside source to regulate them.  The intellect is this source.  With the intellect, we are able to reach past our own disordered desires and discover what exactly is the proper order of things.

Where does the intellect find the knowledge to prioritize the goods in our lives?  There are a few sources.  First, we can think about morality, and draw our own conclusions.  This process is invigorating, and can be fruitful, but can also lead us in false directions, because our intellects are limited.  Another way is to speak with people whom we identify as being wise.  The third way is by reading moral philosophers, who have thought a great deal about these issues.  This too, though, can often be based on the musings of men with limited intellects and their own disorders to mix up their thinking. 

The final way to learn to prioritize our lives is by turning to God with an intellectual assent to what he has revealed to us.  This can manifest itself in many ways, depending on the person’s current state in life.  It can mean turning to the Word of God, in which God sets out moral principles to guide us.  God knows that we have limited intellects, and He has given us His Word to help us see things as they are.  We can also turn to the Church, which bears God’s message through time and continually applies eternal principles to the here and now.

The Creative Synthesis

Say we are presented with several images, that are seemingly unrelated.  There are three methods of engaging them intellectually.  First, we can, without thought, say they are unrelated.  Second, we can pretend that we see relations in them that aren’t actually there.  Third, we can discover a deeper unity that wasn’t initially seen.  This last act is what modernist poets like T.S. Eliot ask us to do in poems like “The Wasteland," where the sections of the poem are seemingly unconnected, but are actually connected in a more obscure way.
 

The common principle serves as the light that shines on the images that it gathers together.  Darkness remains in the unthoughtful, unconnected mind.  The intellect is the principle of the person, which finds principles in things and thereby draws them together.  The intellect is the principle of principles.  It is the metaprinciple.  In mathematics there are functions, and these functions produce numbers.  The spirit is on the face of the deep when we encounter the numbers, and come up with the function.  This is a process of induction.  It is, along with deduction, the process by which we come to understand reality.


There are also received ideas, when one takes another's word for it that one thing is the principle of the other.  There is no spirit in this case, but merely acceptance of the movement of another spirit.  We must all move our spirits, and in doing so become human.  We are all meant to be creative, and to discover meaning ourselves.  We can accept principles from others, but must always try to see the truth of them for ourselves.