Metaphysical Health

(this is, among other things, a first stab at blogging via my smartphone; hence a probable paucity of prettiness or fine formatting)

"... Certainly there is no true Christianity without the contemptus saeculi; but contempt for the world is not the same thing as hatred of being - quite the contrary, it is hatred of non-being. ..."
        -- Etienne Gilson

From inside Christianity this meaning is clear: that while the Christian must needs renounce the world and, in one way or another, turn his back on it, this renunciation has none of the character of a Manichean or an Over-Populationist; it is much more like a child turning away from a present to the mother who gave it to her.

The Christian does not turn his back on the world because he loathes it so much, but because he loves something else so much more. He looks excitedly from one thing of great importance and beauty, to another of incomparably greater worth.

Notice how this attitude is inevitably one of attention - almost of startlement. The really healthy religious attitude is of a rapt attention to Being Himself - so the really healthy philosophical attitude is one of rapt attention to things.

Attention to things, not to sensations. Our scientific successes have taught us all sorts of bad lessons; and one of the worst is the notion that qualia, after all, are only "subjective" and therefore unreal. "Redness", we assume, is only a name; the real thing is the frequency of reflected light.

And yet, this is profoundly untrue. And "metaphysical health" consists in habitually shaking off this vague atmosphere of Reductionism, in order to live, not in a ghost-town of accumulations atoms, but in a gloriously-variegated world of things.