REVIEW: Logos Rising – E. Michael Jones (Fidelity Press, 2020)

With a subtitle like A History of Ultimate Reality, and a somewhat lengthy (although, by Jones’ standards, restrained) page count pushing the nine-hundreds, it’s hard to stifle one’s first impressions: “ambitious!” But the ambition is met by the author’s competence. Jones is no stranger to dense, seemingly convoluted, and historically complicated subject matter; his last major work, Barren Metal, was a dissection of usury both in theory and in practice, cutting a path through the history of medieval Europe all the way up to the last financial crisis. Prior to that, he published a history of revolution that got him effectively blacklisted from polite, respectable society; he learned the hard way that naming your book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, and then writing at length upon the theological identity of contemporary Judaism, is a good way to have figures you considered friends stop returning your calls.

While hardly as controversial as either of those subjects, Logos Rising’s content is even more important. It is a study of metahistory, or a history of how history has been conceived through the ages. More importantly, it’s the study of logos itself. As rational creatures, we have an implicit expectation that things are supposed to make sense; this expectation leads to the development of philosophy, which is itself, when properly oriented, a study of the logos. History is this study projected across generations; it is the unfolding of logos in time. Most sensibly this is construed as God’s plan, a divinely-authored story with billions of main characters, living their tragicomic lives to their completion until the consummation of the world.

The tome is divided into two parts, appropriately named The History of Logos and The Logos of History. “The Beginning of Everything”, as the first chapter is titled, is the concept of what is real; denying God denies that reality is even possible, an error in both metaphysics and epistemology that atheists tend to willfully obscure. It’s worth noting, however, that most atheists aren’t actually atheists; instead, they hide behind the term agnosticism in order to preserve whatever intellectual posturing or flimsy moral framework they propose. What this means is that atheists generally have beliefs about reality and ultimate being that, it turns out, are insufficient attempts to construct a system of thought capable of understanding logos. We all recognize that reality has some sort of measurable, knowable order to it, and all attempts to reject this disintegrate into incomprehensible (and obviously false) gibberish. On the other hand, acknowledging order and simultaneously denying the existence of an intelligence that ordered it all leads to conclusions almost as incomprehensible. So it’s not that atheists deny God’s existence, it’s that they either have a faulty understanding of God’s definition, or they are willfully obtuse as to what the term means.

The second issue Jones covers, once God is established, is the nature of man and man’s relationships with creation and with God. He gets to it in the second chapter, which deals primarily with the errors of Darwinism. Jones’ attack on Darwinism is well-argued and follows the lines of most scholars openly critical of the theory today. While hardly exhaustive—as exhaustive studies can be found to take up whole books by themselves, considering the mountain of documentation that the typical scholar has to argue against—the chapter hits the main points with accuracy enough to make his point.

Then, by chapter three, the book gets to what most of us thought the book was actually going to be about: history. It’s worth noting the method here, and why the first two chapters are important. This book is not merely some history textbook written by an eccentric Catholic. It’s much more than that. We’ll return to this point at the end of this review, but upon reading the whole thing, the first two seemingly-anachronistic chapters serve to fulfill the true purpose of Logos Rising.

The History of Logos

The term logos was coined by Heraclitus, Jones informs us, as the philosophers of Greece sought a single unifying principle by which to understand the motion and meaning of the world. For Thales, that principle could be summarized by water; for Anaximander, it was air. For Heraclitus, however, it was fire, but as Jones points out, this was not out of some misplaced concern that the other two obvious elements had already been taken:

Fire is, above all, “want and surfeit,” according to Heraclitus. Fire is, in other words, the coincidence of opposites held in tension, like a taut bow, and these opposites are constantly coming into and going out of existence. Fire then can symbolize the tension at the heart of the war of opposites. Fire is the arche because the universe displays the same characteristics. […] The universe is diverse, but not random or chaotic, and the unity which the mind perceives in spite of all of this random activity is not mere projection. The order of the universe is there waiting to be discovered. Heraclitus captured both ideas when he said nature loves to hide.¹

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s a conception of reality that most, if not all, sufficiently advanced civilizations eventually come to recognize. Mutually tolerable but conflicting opposites, the interaction of which constitute the motion of the universe: this is a motif found in nearly every advanced civilization and system of philosophy in history. Modernists in particular will find it echoed in the thought of Hegel, though in somewhat radically reworked and reinterpreted form.

The divine will at work in the world was something already known explicitly to the ancient Hebrews, though their understanding of it was of a very different character than that of the Greeks. The Hebrews understood that God was intelligent, personal, and, to a certain extent, knowable. What they did not realize was exactly how personal He really was, nor exactly how at work in history He continued to be. This was made clear when, at the foot of the Cross, the Hebrew people were forced to make a choice to either reject His Holy Sacrifice, and become what would eventually be the Rabbinical Jews, or to embrace it, and become Christians.

Jones addresses this exact phenomenon in detail, and the course it plotted through history, in The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit. In his chapter on St. Paul, however, he addresses the specifics of how the saint brought his Hebrew background to Athens in the first attempt there to evangelize:

Paul preached Christ crucified and Christ raised from the dead, which got him in trouble in Athens, which was still the home of he Platonic academy, because “it was not primarily a metaphysical doctrine which Paul preached but a historical claim.” But to do this, he had to use philosophical concepts, because now history had a metaphysical significance. If history itself, and not some hypothetical construct confected by a brilliant thinker, served as proof of the claims Paul was making about Christianity, this meant that history now had a significance hitherto unappreciated by his Greek audience. History now had a beginning, a middle, and an end, like one of the dramas Aristotle dissected in his Poetics. History wasn’t just a series of random anecdotes assembled by someone gullible like Herodotus or involved in the conflict, like Xenophon. History was revelation. It was a book, written by God, and it could now serve as testimony to God’s intentions.²

While correct, St. Paul’s efforts in Athens were largely unconvincing to the native Athenians. The Platonic Academy of the time were little more than “poseurs who draped Plato’s mantle around their own shoulders”, whose intellects had been darkened by an autistic senselessness and, ironically, their own version of sophistry.³ Attempting to connect logos with the Unknown God of Athens, St. Paul’s efforts were, of course, more than merely a metahistorical study; his was the business of making the Faith known, bringing the fire of life to the darkened corners of the Mediterranean. St. Paul was not a philosopher per se, though whether it was through his own brilliant intuition or the inspiration of the Holy Ghost, he proved himself capable of articulating philosophic principles to audiences who couldn’t connect to the Hebraic tradition of his background. This proved true in Ephesus as well:

Magic, not philosophy, posed the first and greatest challenge to Paul’s mission in Ephesus. Even though philosophy had decayed into magic, Paul was forced to use philosophical terms in preaching to the pagans because philosophy provided the only vocabulary which allowed discussion of God’s existence to an audience ignorant of the Hebrew scriptures. Confronted with a pagan world full of gods and goddesses, Paul presented “his own system of religious philosophy” in his epistle to the Romans. Paul’s condemnation of philosophy in Romans reflected the decadent state into which it had fallen. Three hundred years after Aristotle had discovered the “unmoved mover,” philosophy had degenerated into a popular religion that was little more than an excuse for debauchery.⁴

This is worth noting because Jones’ comment on how “philosophy had decayed into magic” is not one that should be considered as an isolated historical event. Magic originates from sophistry, which has long been a well-understood method of social control and rhetorical conditioning. The use of words or language to alter reality, by virtue of the belief in some power the words themselves possess, is a superstition common to most if not all pagan traditions. What will seem an irony, but is in fact quite fitting, is that the end of philosophy, if it is not to service theology in its study of logos, is this degeneration into what is effectively “magic”. We saw the same phenomenon at work in the twentieth century, as the work of Modernism and the embrace of materialism and ideology brought forth the works of thinkers such as Derrida and Foucault. For the post-structuralists, language was a means of literally changing reality, as reality was little more than a consensus understanding of semiotics. Manipulating language, for them, manipulates meaning, which manipulates what is real—reality. Jones makes some note on this toward the end of the book. And while somewhat distant in relation, the media-entertainment complex today believes the same thing and operates using the same approach. Our modern-day magicians are the people who run public opinion, and they deserve every bit as much scorn as St. Paul showed to the idolatrous.

Where St. Paul failed in Athens, Jones asserts, St. John more or less succeeded in Ephesus, though it was quite some time later. St. John’s gospel would not be written until toward the end of the first century, nearly seventy years after St. Paul’s sojourn in Athens. En arche en ho Logos, it begins: “In the beginning was the Word.” Although translated into Latin as In principio et Verbum and into English as its famous permutation, Jones notes that the original Greek word logos means much more than what is commonly associated with the term “word”. Logos means, in effect, that which makes reality comprehensible, sensible, knowable; it refers to a certain sensibility to the world that implies a supernatural intellect and at least partly-understandable plan. It’s the notion that ultimately everything is supposed to make sense. And while it can be argued that these are things implied by the term “word”, Jones is right in asserting that “word” hardly brings these concepts immediately to mind, while “logos” does.

More important even than the versatility of the Greek language to communicate philosophical ideas is how St. John used it. The Word, logos itself, this divine nature, he wrote, took on human form and lived as one of us. From this fact, the nature of the Trinity starts to become clearer:

John’s Gospel deepened our understanding of the relationship between fire and logos by associating them with the divine persons of the Trinity. In Christian iconography, fire is traditionally the symbol of the Holy Spirit, the Third Person of the Trinity. The relation between Logos and fire, then, is the same as the relationship between the second and third persons of the Trinity. This, of course, is not to say that the Father and the Son are not loving or that the spirit is not knowing, because all three persons have one nature. So we can say that God is Logos in three different ways.⁵

Logos is being, is knowing, is loving; it is, it knows, it loves, but it is also those things in and of themselves. I’ll refrain from getting into too much Trinitarian theology here (as I’m wholly unqualified) but at the very least, it should be clear from this explanation how the Divine Logos can only be understood as Trinitarian. The Trinity is what makes the study of logos—the study of reality, ultimately—sensible. And as Jones points out in the later chapters on Islam and the development of science, the abandonment or ignorance of the Trinity marked serious setbacks in the conception of God, firstly, and of reality, secondly.

Jones briefly plots the philosophical development of Islamic scholarship across several centuries of their existence, pointing out the crucial bond that Islamic thought had to its politics and social order. The expulsion, suppression, and eventual destruction of the Mu’tazilite school of theology is, according to Jones, what drove Islamic thought into the dark realm of conceptualizing God purely as will—at the expense of His love and at the expense of human agency. It’s an error that he returns to when discussing the errors of Luther and Hegel in the second half of the book, but it’s one that he claims Shi’a Islam mildly recovered from.

On the other hand, some centuries later, the conception of God would suffer a different distillation during the scientific revolutions at around the time of the Renaissance—the summation of God as knowing, i.e. rationalism. Jones comments on the eventual dominion which nominalists came to hold over Church theology toward the end of the medieval period:

The breakdown of Thomistic synthesis under the blows of the nominalists would have far-reaching consequences. By liberating “faculties, habits, and acts” from the formal object, nominalists “prepared the downfall of solid Scholastic theology, and prepared for the errors of Luther, whose teachers in the schools of Wittenberg were nominalists.” Because Ockham was proposing nothing less than “the end of all knowledge of God,” he and his followers “were formally expelled from the University of Paris.” Ockham eventually ended up in Munich where he died of the plague. Just as God permits evil to bring about a greater good, He permits error to bring about a greater understanding of the truth. This describes nominalism’s role in the development of empirical science: “For if the way in which things are is a purely contingent fact, the only way of discovering how they are is to investigate the matter empirically.”

Nominalism led to fideism and skepticism, but it also led to the rise of modern science among the philosophers who remained at the University of Paris.⁶

By the dawn of the early modern age, logos was understood—erroneously, but only by so many degrees—as pure willpower on one hand, or utter being as represented by the early Protestants and Islam, and pure reason, or utter knowing on the other as represented by empiricism and modern science. Love, the personable aspect of logos, was lost in the fog. Attempts were made to distill Godliness down to a single attribute, at the expense of its Trinitiarian organization, and the fallout of those attempts were catastrophic for conceptualizing how the world works; we still live under the dominion of these errors today, only now they’re so numerous that the umbrella term for them is simply called Modernism. It is with this dark note that Jones closes the first half of Logos Rising; The History of Logos ends as man loses sight of what actually makes sense, blindfolds himself, and feels compelled to search about in the darkness for something that resembles reality.

The Logos of History

But in God is anything possible, and by His infinite wisdom does He use the bad to bring about even greater goods. The Logos of History is exactly such a story; beginning with the defeat of properly ordered study, the subsequent history of ideological mistakes and their half-corrections, of revolutions and counterrevolutions, would lead us to the present day.

Hegel’s presence dominates the second half of the book, as for Jones, the study of Logos becomes something that cannot be easily discussed without mentioning his work on the subject. Before Hegel, however, was Vico, a man whose work served to offset the infamous Descartes. Jones traces how Descartes’ thought was shaped predominantly by Montaigne, despite his Jesuit upbringing, and how that established the skepticism of modernity that is so easily traced back to Descartes’ Meditations:

Nominalism’s attack on universals and its agnosticism about what the mind could know about God culminated in Luther’s hatred of reason and his aggressively anti-intellectual theology. The Reformation was first and foremost a looting operation carried out by princes who lusted after Church property, but Luther’s nominalism contributed to the religious wars which followed the looting by making intellectual agreement impossible, which in turn led to the “complete triumph of a universal skepticism” in the writings of Montaigne.⁷

This led to the “circular cosmology” of Isaac Newton, via Descartes, which “eliminated Divine Providence from the universe” by reducing all motion to a singular type, “violent motion”; as Jones elaborates, under this definition, “the acorn becoming an oak was no longer an example of motion.”⁸ At this point in intellectual history, the world still made sense, but it made significantly less sense than it did before; in place of a reality which is the fulfillment of meaning, in which objects exist for reasons, there is a reality that is imperfectly knowable and is comprised of sensed objects with indiscernible explanations for their existence. But reality at least still existed.

Which is approximately where Hegel enters the scene. Jones’ chapter on Hegel is one of the most impressive in the volume, for a variety of reasons—not the least of which being that his correlation to Hegel’s personal life to his intellectual output is, to say the least, not exactly mainstream among the professional academics. Fortunately, he’s not writing for them per se; his analysis pits this narrative of logos against Hegel’s biography and his writing, in addition to the Lutheran theology that acted as the landscape for Hegel’s thought. It’s one of the longest chapters in the book, and for good reason: Jones has to explain the differences in Lutheranism from Catholicism when it comes to understanding God, reality, and agency, in addition to tracking Hegel’s work in relation to all of this as well.

Hegel knew that to rehabilitate Logos, he had to render the meaning of the Trinity in the vocabulary of Enlightenment Wissenschaft. That project got derailed not by the Enlightenment but by the Lutheran understanding of the Trinity which Hegel derived from Luther and Jakob Boehme, the man Hegel refers to as the “Philosophicus Teutonicus,” “the first German philosopher.” Boehme’s philosophizing is “genuinely German,” because he has adopted “the Protestant principle” that has reduced “the holy trinity” to “an object containing all the powers of nature, including heaven, earth, stars, elements, the Devil, the angels, human beings, animals and everything that exists and has come into being.” Boehme confected this quaternity by meditating on Luther’s “Protestant principle.” Hegel did the same thing.⁹

Jones frames Hegel as a sort of secularizing agent of Luther’s theology—his work isn’t something like a philosophical component to Protestantism, but rather a distillation of Protestantism into pure philosophy. Or at least, that was the idea; if Hegel’s notoriously convoluted writings are any indication, whether or not it worked is a matter of some debate. At the time, however, it was convincing enough:

It wasn’t Hegel’s eloquence which drew crowds. Hegel was in Hoelderlin’s opinion, “a man of calm, prosaic understanding” who never “gave the impression of exuberant genius.” What he did convey beneath his ponderous style was a sense that the universe was a coherent whole and that he held the key to understanding it. After wandering neglected and alone in the wilderness of “science,” ultimate reality had once again found a home in philosophy. Hegel’s philosophy was “truly comprehensive and the man who propounded it so vigorously appeared to have penetrated the very secrets of God and the creation. He had openly claimed to have disclosed the inner secret of being itself.”¹⁰

To this day, Hegelian-derived philosophy tries to express this, despite having collapsed, as Jones points out, into two competing forms of thought: the leftist-materialist and the more conservative-moral or theological. Fitting, some might argue, given that the dialectic he spent his life studying would characterize, in a certain sense, his legacy. Failure.

None of his successors had the power to hold the contradictory premises of his dialect together, and so the Hegelian synthesis fell apart into its component parts. Under Schelling and Drey, ontology led back to theology. Under Feuerbach, the dialectic led to atheism; under Marx it led to materialism. God was not necessary to the functioning of the dialectic.¹¹

This collapse persists in some form even in liberal arts departments of colleges today, although having permutated into various different aspects of continental philosophy. Without God, the study of Logos—which is God—becomes an exercise akin to holding too much fruit; the philosopher has to juggle contradictions and inconsistencies and maintain them all at the same time. Hegel’s system of thought is exactly this, which is why it comes across as a pantheistic religion not-unlike Gnosticism or Taoism, except stripped of theological language and built with German engineering. Ironically, the mystical adornments are still more or less present.

This left the door wide open for the Dionysian spirit, as Jones refers to it, to take over in 1848. Here, Jones reexamines a topic he first discussed at relative length in 1994, when he wrote Dionysos Rising. The Nietzschian ‘will to power’ and Wagner’s impassioned traipse into tonal dissonance are, on one hand, two sides of the same coin, and on the other, a direct response to the confusion left in the wake of Hegel’s system of thought. Jones traces how the personalities of these two men are inextricably related to their beliefs, as their beliefs were formed as a result of their inability—or complete disinterest—in curbing their passions. This revolt against reason, against Logos, is to Jones an obvious result of the Lutheran spirit as it was transmogrified by Hegel:

Because of his repudiation of reason, there is a sense in which Nietzsche is a Lutheran “saint.” Because of his inability to pursue that rejection of reason to its logical conclusion, there is a sense in which Wagner is a Lutheran apostate. In both instances, reason and will are viewed in a sexual context. Wagner said that music was a woman, by which he meant some formless matrix upon which the poet could impose his meanings. Nietzsche called truth a woman, by which he meant much the same thing. For both, the will imposed its own desires on an ever-compliant and, therefore, female reality.¹²

In Wagner and Nietzsche, Jones points out that the abandonment of pursuing logos which began with the Early Moderns reaches its critical mass. In De Civitate Dei, St. Augustine pointed out that man will either conform his passions to the truth and bring them to heel, or he will try to conform the truth to his passions and abandon all reason. With the figures of Wagner and Nietzsche, you see the wholehearted embrace of the latter—Nietzsche abandoning reason itself, truth, while Wagner abandoned aesthetics, beauty. Wagner’s musical revolution led eventually to the thoroughly unlistenable experiments of Schoenberg, Cage, and the contemporary dustbin of composition. Nietzsche’s ideological revolution led to Derrida, Foucault, and the normalization of pornography.

This is, in fact, what Jones traces following his chapter on Nietzsche: the ravaging of Germany by the sexual revolution and the disintegration of materialism by Heisenberg during the twentieth century, the growth of Civilta Cattolica’s influence to combat modernism in the Church, and Jacques Maritain’s work to bring Thomism—surviving as the only and best means of studying the Logos—to America.

Thomism’s establishment at Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana sets the stage for the last chapter of the book: a lengthy chapter on the consequences of the year 1979—the Year of Miracles, he calls it, referring both to the world at-large and the world of his own life. It’s the year Notre Dame lost the mantle of Thomism inherited from Jacques Maritain, and with it, losing any right to the study of logos. It’s the year Islamic revolutionaries overthrew the CIA-backed Shah in Iran, installing the scholar Ayatollahs as rulers. And, for Jones, it’s the year he was fired from a Catholic girl’s college in South Bend, the same year he got there, for opposing abortion—a key event in his life that led him to starting Culture Wars magazine and sending him down the path he’s on today. Had he not been fired, it’s very likely that the study of this decline, of the breakdown of American Catholic culture, that his written output since Degenerate Moderns analyzes, would never have happened.

It’s a personal note to end the book on, and an odd one if taken purely at face value. But it serves to highlight the point of the book: Logos, the Divine Will, as it unfolds in history, is not an abstract concept that remains sequestered away in history books or genealogies. It’s tangible in the sense that it is found in the actions, behaviors, and deeds of the people around us, in our lives. We participate in it as we interact with it; our lives are formed by it just as much as our agencies shape the currents of history.

Conclusion

Logos Rising is probably the most important book Jones has written to date. It is certainly his most openly accessible, and one of the least-incendiary of his major works. But the important part of Logos Rising is that it isn’t strictly-speaking a work of meta-history. It’s a work of evangelism cruising under the guise of meta-history, a work built around an idea beneath an idea. Its main thesis concerns the divine logos and its study as it unfolded throughout history, but its method was a matter of specifically attacking the modernist, ‘anti-logos’ frame of mind that most non-Catholics (and many Catholics, even) have mistakenly operated under now for several generations.

This is what I meant earlier: in order to understand why Jones spends so much time at the beginning of the book attacking New Atheism and Darwinism under chapter headings concerned with the beginning of the world and the beginning of man, it must first be established what the purpose was behind writing Logos Rising in the first place. And for that, the key is right in its first pages, before the book really begins. Jones implies it with his introduction that tracked the life and works of Bertrand Russell, a man whose self-indulgent skepticism—and his honest unwillingness to actually pursue the truth—frames the contemporary world:

Russell responds by saying: [..] The physicist looks for causes. That does not necessarily imply that there are causes everywhere. A man may look for gold without assuming that there is gold everywhere. I think that the notion that the world has an explanation is a mistake.

Copleston: Your general point, Lord Russel, is that it is illegitimate even to ask the question for the cause of the world.

Russell: Yes, that is my position.

Copleston: Well, if the question for you has no meaning, it’s very difficult to discuss, isn’t it?

Russell: Yes, it is very difficult as you say. Shall we pass on to some other issue?¹³

By discussing Russell’s thought and his life in the book’s introduction, Jones is setting the stage. This paraphrased excerpt of the interview Russell did with Copleston is the exact summation of Russell’s interior conflict projected outward into his public life: the world is fundamentally mysterious, unknowable, vague. He did this toward the end of his life. He’s openly saying, life is difficult to define in any way, and probably meaningless, but with this acknowledged, can we please talk about something else? In Russell’s case, as with so many of us, the topic of attractive young women is preferable to the disquieting contemplation of the void.

But the point is that the void isn’t all there is, and that using attractive young women as a distraction for the contemplation of what does exist—the divine logos, the sensibility of the world and its higher purpose, God—is actually quite a bad thing, rather than comforting reprieve from meaninglessness. If the world does actually make sense, is actually knowable, and isn’t totally vague, then any attempt to pitch it as such is a failure to understand the world on the individual’s side of things, not a problem with the world itself. Russell, a man of intelligence and letters, can be taken as a both the poster child and the stand-in for hundreds of years of Western thought inundated with this sort of absurd skepticism and simultaneous indulgence. If life has no meaning, then pursuing vice is the only reason to live. You could call it Sadean, or simply hedonistic, but it’s something actually must worse: it’s a carnal sense of, ironically, apathy. It’s acedia, intellectual sloth, thought-death, the result of which allows the passions of the flesh to govern every aspect of reason. We see what this ideology has resulted in today: a civilization of pornographied zombies, worked and taxed into debt bondage, and drugged.

It’s an ideology that tempts its victims into rejecting faith, losing hope, and trivializing charity. We could dwell on the scale of this depressing state of affairs, or we could formulate a battle plan. Logos Rising, for Jones, is part of that battle plan. This book isn’t an outright pouring of evangelistic furor, and it’s stronger for it. It’s an attempt to bring the suggestion that the world really does make sense to those of us on the edge of questioning the modernist narrative. Because if it can be asserted, beyond reasonable doubt, that things are ultimately supposed to make sense, then it can be asserted with equal reliability that things also have meaning, that things have purpose.

Jones begins his book with Bertrand Russell, with Atheism, and with Darwinism because that’s where most of us began. Our worldviews were framed by countless hours in public school, or watching television, or reading science fiction comic books and fantasy stories, where the foundations of modernity were fed to us before our intellects had even reached the age of reason. Darwinism is considered unimpeachable by vast sectors of the population, despite its glaring holes and obvious contradictions. Atheism is the default mode of religious life in America, even among those who consider themselves vaguely or tangentially Christian. Russell’s attitude is the contemporary Western attitude, an early postmodern one: “things don’t really make sense, and I know that, but it’s fine so long as I have a distraction.”

Logos Rising is an attempt to break through this fortress of literal nonsense. It’s a book contra modernum, not simply ideologically, but practically. He isn’t looking merely to educate his audience, he’s looking to offer an alternative to the prison of modernity. If that alternative is offered often enough, then maybe enough people will reject it, and it’ll collapse from want of ideologues.

We can certainly hope.

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1Jones, E. Michael, Logos Rising: A History of Ultimate Reality (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2020), 157.

2Ibid, 191.

3Ibid, 203.

4Ibid, 200-201.

5Ibid, 226.

6Ibid, 357.

7Ibid, 369.

8Ibid 380.

9Ibid, 448.

10Ibid, 471.

11Ibid, 500.

12Ibid, 537.

13Ibid, 21.