On the Reign of Anti-Christ I: Good and Evil

Part 1: The Metaphysics of Privationism

The first letter of St John, chapter 4, opens with the clearest and most thorough description of the Spirit of Anti-Christ we find in Holy Scripture, it declares:

“Dearly beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits if they be of God: because many false prophets are gone out into the world. By this is the spirit of God known. Every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God: And every spirit that dissolveth Jesus, is not of God: and this is Antichrist, of whom you have heard that he cometh, and he is now already in the world. You are of God, little children, and have overcome him. Because greater is he that is in you, than he that is in the world. They are of the world: therefore of the world they speak, and the world heareth them.”

In this essay, I am going to describe exactly what this spirit of Anti-Christ is and does and how to recognize it. At the start, I can say the easiest way to recognize it, and it has come to exist and dominate in western society in a very pure form, is to know its motto: “Don´t be Evil.“ To begin to describe what the two, the spirit of Anti-Christ and the slogan “don´t be Evil“ have to do with one another, att first glance, one might question? What´s so bad about “don´t be Evil“? How is that any different than saying “Be Good!“? What I am going to describe should make clear, that the mottos “don´t be Evil“ and “Be Good“ are literally an eternity apart.

There are many grand theories about what has gone wrong in modern/western society, basically the total decay of morals and the hollowing out of any sort of meaningful identification with one´s gender, ethnicity, nation, and religion. I recently had an interesting conversation with a lawyer who was well versed in both theology and philosophy. He said the whole problem is Martin Luther´s understanding of God. Basically that Luther´s God abrogated the free will and thus responsibility of humans. And then he could trace this thought through a number of philosophers and voila, he says he has his finger on the kernel of the problem. Over-intellectualizing the problem is also a problem, if the problem is merely in books and thoughts, it can be easily remedied by books and better thoughts. Academics like to play this fun sort of game like the one I just mentioned, arguing who has the best theory, and that the problem is theoretical goes without saying, for if its a practical problem the academics wouldn´t be so important. I think the problem is, much more than we would like to admit a practical problem. Its a problem of know-how, not knowing that.

This being said, every practical problem can be made sense of from a speculative or philosophical point of view. And what I am going to describe is, I think, the most succinct way of making sense of what is going on in modernity up until the present day and the basic pattern of thinking that has come to dominate western life. I don´t actually disagree with the man that Luther´s notion of God is at the root of the problem, and that its one way to explain whats going on. He´s not wrong. But what is the disease and what is the symptom? How can we know? To mistake the symptom for the disease means you treat the wrong thing. Is Luther´s notion of a omnipotent God that could not co-exist with human free will the root, or was it merely the consequence of a much deeper societal change.

I tend to think the latter, more along the Marxist materialist view, that our thinking is really a byproduct of our acting, and our acting is always shaped by our attempt to adapt to a material environment. And that if we have a fundamental alteration of our environment, say through technology, economics or political revolutions, this will change into alterations in our ways of acting or our form of life. And the changes in thinking are the byproduct of these changes, not the causes. Of course there is a level of interdependence. Changes in thinking open up the possibility for new patterns of action, like Marxism itself opened up a whole new way of thinking about economics and politics and let to worldwide revolution. But even here, the basic structure of this thinking is what I want to focus on, not any particular idea. This way of interpreting things is Catholic, we believe the most consequential change to the material environment of humans in the history of the world is the Incarnation of Jesus Christ, and the re-presentation of His Sacrifice and Flesh and Blood every day at Holy Mass. This matter, too, forces a most severe adaptation in action and thought. Or at least it should. The Spirit of Anti-Christ seeks to dissolve This Divine Flesh, this spirit rebels against it. I´m going to explain how.

I want to focus on the metaphysics of Good and Evil. I want to talk about Good and Evil in a very specific sense, according to the understanding of Aristotle. Aristotle taught that every action is an action towards an end, and the end is something that is either taken to be good, or not-evil. The Good is what we desire, it is what moves us. Evil is what we avoid, what we dislike or fear or find disgusting. Basically, Evil moves us as well, but evil repells us from itself. Thus, for any human movement, in fact Aristotle teaches the movement of any object whatsoever, presumes both an end or teleos, and a good. The end of a hammer is to drive nails. This is what is good for a hammer, and what a hammer is good for. The end of an apple tree is to produce fruit or reproduce. This is what is good for not only the tree and the farmer, but also for the survival of apple trees in general. But Good and Evil basically explain movement, they generate movement.

For human being in particular, when we are asked the question “why?” in regards to one of our actions, we inevitably, if we are sane, make reference to some good or evil thing that we were seeking or avoiding. “I went to the grocery to buy meat, I bought meet because I am hungry and want to eat, etc. I need to eat to be healthy. And so on.“ One could also say, “I went to the grocery to hide from the bear.“ Here, one is being moved by evil, danger. We cannot explain what causes human beings movements without reference to these things: Good the force propelling them, and Evil the force repelling them.

Obviously humans have some level of freedom in what they desire, in what they take to be good. And of course they don´t always get it right. We eat food for the purposes of nourishment, but sometimes food is spoiled or even poisoned and what we took for good was actually evil as it doesn´t actually fulfill the end we were seeking. But it doesnt change that what is apparently good to humans is what moves them. Also with evil. We can take things as apparently evil that are in fact good. Say, someone who refuses to take medicine they need to survive out of a mistrust of doctors. The medicine is objectively good for them, but they see it as evil as they have come to distrust modern medicine or the pharma industry.

But basically there was a radical shift in how people started thinking about good and evil in the 16th century. This change shows up in the renniasaance philosophy, also in the reformation, also in changes in political and economic life. What changed? Quite simply, good and evil were replaced with one another. This doesn´t mean that everything that was good previously was now taken to be evil. No, its just people shifted from a world view where the spiritual center or dominant motivating force was the Good, to a world view where this spiritual center was Evil. People moved from a world of primarily pursuing the Good, to avoiding Evil. I don´t think it´s happenstance that this happened as people became more and more detached from carving our survival out of and in relation to the world of created beings, i.e. agricultural life, and began existing more and more in terms of work, survival, now even sociality is mediated by made things and everything seems mediated by money.

At the outset the changes were slight and most things remained as they were before with only changes at the very top, it started with religious revolution, but slowly this spirit has come to devour more and more of what we used to call civilization. This manner of thinking slowly came to dominate political life, and then lastly in the 20th century family life as well. This shift of the dominating force in human society, from good to evil, set in motion basic patterns of thinking and change that continue to the present day.

The metaphysics of good and evil in the Ancient world and in Christianity is the following: Only the Good has substance and existence. What is evil is a privation of Good, or absence of it. Here are two quick examples concerning an organism and an idea. First consider bad fruit. We know bad fruit is lacking something good, it lacks the taste of good fruit and also sometimes the appearance of a good fruit. We can only know bad fruit from having known good fruit. If we´ve never tasted a delicious orange a bland one will not disappoint us, we will not notice the absence of the good. The bad fruit is defined by its lacking some good quality either in taste, nutrition, or appearance. And we can only know the bad quality from the good, as it is only the absence of this good. Now consider a trickier examlpe, war and peace. The Christian metaphysic wants to know the good thing first. It tends to define war as the absence of peace. St Augustine defines peace as the tranquility of order. War therefore, is an absence of this tranquility due to some disorder. But you cannot seek peace or oppose war without first knowing what is Good. Many husbands try to seek peace with their wives by avoiding conflict or topics of conversation they think could lead to conflict. Often times, this infuriates their wives and makes matters worse. Here, the husband acts only in relation to evil. In contrast, a husband wanting to seek true peace in his marriage may follow the advice of St Augustine and try to reorder the marriage to God. Maybe he triest to focus on praying with his wife or keeping the sabbath in a more intentional way. He would also be more motivated to address essentail issues that could create conflict with his wife. But he can only do this if he has a positive notion of peace. Not peace as the absence of war, but peace as the presence of something he can practically seek. Obviously, this is wiser, and this is the ancient or Christian way of thinking, whether about fruits and ideas. The best ideas are to be eaten, to be desired in themselves, they have a positive taste and substance to them.

In contrast, the modern way of thinking starts with Evil. It gives evil substance and existence. And it defines the Good as the absence of Evil. Lets return to the two examples. A modern capitalist wishes to make the world a better place by getting rid of bad fruit. Surely this is a laudable goal. Who could object? He imagines a world where no one ever tastes a bad fruit nor does any farmer have to tolerate a tree producing bad fruit. He starts with evil, bad fruit exists and must be stopped. The solution he offers, to erect a worldwide agricultural apparatus to implement a scheme whereby only genetically modified fruits may be grown, and genetically modified to never be bad. Easy solution, right! So he works to impliment the plan. Of course, he struggles to consider the unintended consequences, the rights of farmers, the dangers of genetic modification, the possible abuse of his control apparatus, and many other potential ills. The pattern of thinking goes from evil to the absence of this evil or what is assumed to be good. The only problem is, his plan to remove evil is not good. He reacts against evil badly. This is possible and is all too common in our world and lives. His plan basically creates a world much worse than the one where some trees had bad fruit. The response to Covid-19 had this same structure. It knew evil, and knew it had to elimitate it, and nothing else. Thus this response did much evil.

We cannot know or oppose evil without first knowing what is good. Now turn to the second example, a modern philosopher, like Thomas Hobbes, starts with war. His famous political theory begins with a meditation on the human condition without politics, he calls this state of nature a war of all against all. Total chaos and brutality and tyranny. He starts with evil. He knows what war is, he knows that must be evil. And the whole of his political philosophy is erected to avoid war. His definition of peace is precisely this: the absence of war. The first principle of the natural law for Hobbes is the injunction to pursue peace, but peace defined as the absence of evil. The fundamental point of motivation for Hobbian political theory is what is called the state of nature, which he defines as a war of all against all. His most famous work, Leviathan, begins with a meditation on this theme, and the crux of the theory is that political society and his theory of the social contract is necessary to achieve a privationist peace. Not a substantive peace like St Augustine. So it is the evil idea that has existence and substance, and pure evil is the main reference point, and what is good is the absence of evil. This theory of the social contract, a theory that came to dominate modern democracies, is based on this foundation. This is the modern pattern of thinking, which I call privationism, because it produces false goods that are truly privations of apparent evils. In contrast, Christianity does not attribute to evil the magical properties of producing good, or in any way leading to good. The Spirit of Anti-Christ does the opposite. Similarly, the starting point is different. The starting point of the Christian worldview and meditation on the state of nature is Eden, a paradise. The primary reference point is pure good. A Christian political society isn´t merely about avoiding evil, but about pursuing something positively good.

Here are a few more practical examples: darkness and light. Light is the presence of something, its lack does not admit of grades. A shadow or twilight or pitch black darkness is determined by the presence or absence of light, not of darkness. Darkness is merely the absence, darkness is always the same. Now consider sickness and health. If we replace the words Good with Health and Evil with Sickness, perhaps the idea here can become more intuitive. Only relative degrees of Heath exist, because it has substance and existence. One can be fit, out of shape, obese, morbidly obese, etc. But what increases in all of these cases, i.e. sickness, does not itself admit of a more or less, it is simply the absence of Health. Basically the only we we can recognize what a sickness is if we first know what Health is. Someone who has never worked in a garden can look at a plant and have very little idea if it is healthy or not, because they are not acquainted with healthy plants. A good gardner knows what a healthy plant looks like and on this basis can they recognize the absence of health, or sickness in a plant. A good gardner knows how to prune his plants, he doesn´t just let them grow according to nature, he prunes them so that they will grow perfectly. An unpruned tomato plant is to a gardner a form of evil, though it bear fruit, because the fruit will not be as excellent as a pruned tomato. A good gardner knows how to detect goodness first and foremost, his awareness of defects in his plants is derivative of this knowledge. Even in this case a lack of ripeness may be no defect in the plant itself, but it is evil in the sense that it guides his action as to when to harvest. A plant that is not yet ripe has a sort of defect related to its teleos or being sold or eaten. If he plucks the fruit now, he cannot sell it or wouldn´t want to eat it.

By a consideration of examples, we start to see the picture emerging. Human nature in most practical tasks, has to operate by the ancient form of thinking. In practical activites, one knows that its essential to test for the good, and that avoiding evil does not produce good. If you find a bad apple in the supermarket, you would be wrong to assume probablistically the next one will be better. It may not, they all could be bad. Much more effective is to have ways for testing if the apple is good. You inspect it, and squeeze it. Seems solid, looks ripe, it must be good. This is also how we learn any sort of skill in athletics or music. A golf coach would never teach a student by showing him 100 bad golf swings. Don´t do this, or this or this. It would be exhausting and futile. A golf coach shows his pupil what a good swing looks like, and the mechanics of it. There is no way from a consideration of bad swings to a good swing. You can mess up a golf swing in a million ways. What is essential is to know what a good swing is and how to produce it. If a music teacher instructed his student by teaching him only what melodies to avoid when he was composing music, he would never learn the art or principles of good music composition. In fact, by a mere feature of pattern recognition, that he had devoted so much time to listening to bad melodies, he would me more likely to reproduce these, rather than by luck arriving at a good melody.

What does this metaphysic tell us? It basically says that you can never, ever learn about what is Good from what is evil, you can never learn about Health from Sickness. That if you think you know what evil is, you can never ever on the basis of the knowledge of evil claim to know what is good. How is this relevant? Well, our society and even our political system and unfortunately even the Catholic church has become dominated by a spirit that thinks it can arrive at knowledge of what is good, or what is to be desired, from what is evil, or what is to be avoided.

One proof that the metaphysic has been inverted is that now only evil admits of grades, and good is the simple absence of evil. I think the covid-19 pandemic exemplified this dynamic well. In the beginning, was the Pandemic, and the Pandemic was with evil, and the Pandemic was Evil… And things or people that obstructed the given plan to eradicate the disease possessed various grades of perfection, it terms of the evil. Slacking on mask wearing was evil, but not so evil as being skeptical of the vax. Being skeptical of the vax was evil, but not as thinking the vax was a nefarious for-profit conspiracy, but really worst of all were the people that were focused on other goods, which threatened the whole ideology, people who were concerned about rights and freedoms necessary to a free society and resisted on principled grounds. But unlike a plant, whose goodness admits grades in relation to its perfection. Here only evil admited grades in relation to the perfection of full compliance with the totalitarian society created to oppose the disease. Perfection was Zero Covid, the total and complete eradication of the disease. The Hero, a triple-vaxed, OCD, mask-wearing teenager who ostracized non-compliant people. The folly of the thought form is how much good was sacrificed on this altar, children ceased to be educated, the vax wasn´t sufficiently tested and is causing widespread health problems likely more consequent than Covid itself.

This was so easy to achieve because this pattern has come to dominate how we think about the self and morality in the west. Basically if you ask your average citizen in the west: what should all humans agree upon morally speaking? 99% of the time, if they are willing to answer the question, or think that is even worthwhile to consider, they will list off a number of bad things, “don´t be racist, don´t be a nazi“ so basically the slogan of google, “don´t be evil!“ And even if they do have positive slogans they live by, like “accept everyone, or love is love,“ the practical meaning of these slogans are that it would be evil to not accept someone, or it would be evil to forbid someone to “love“ someone else. From a practical point of view the meaning is negative, these slogans tell the person much more about who they should not accept (e.g. the intolerant or unaccepting bigots) than who they should, or what is not love (e.g. love does not tell people not to have sex with whom they wish, with some very minimal parameters like consent and violence) than what it means to “love” in this picture. To accept all genders is to know less about what gender is than a human should, thus inclusivity is a mandated ignorance about what is good for humans. Marriage equality was a claim to know less about what marriage is for, or its end. Previously it was an institution for the upbringing of children, and being members of opposite sexes was a biological prerequisite for procration. To make marriage strictly about love is to know much less concretely what mariage is for, and also what love is. But equality mandates ignorance of the good in the name of increasing freedom. But in both cases, what is taken to be evil, i.e. restriction, is the focal point that fobids knowing what was previously known to be good. This mandated ignorance or blindness is the working of the Spirit of Antichrist. This spirit works to hollow out the practical meaning of all things that were once most essential to living a good life, God, Nation, Family, Gender, Virtue, Truth. This is because the basis of the worldview is the knowledge of apparent evil. And the knowledge of evil in the absence of the knowledge of good.

The upshot is that we act in relation to what we know, and what we know in the privationist religion is what is apparently evil. In truth, we can only make proper sense of evil in relation to the good of which it is a privation. Worse this knowledge chains us to apparent evil in a sense. If my modus opperandi in life is to avoid hell, from a practical point of view, I will only know the right direction to go in if I stand at the gates of hell. The further and further away from hell I get, the less it can direct me, the more lost I am. The moral project is that evil increase, that it be brought nearer, so that I might give meaning to life in my avoidance and opposition to evil. Thus the psychology of privationism is highly counter-intuitive. The best way to avoid hell is to desire heaven. A pure desire to avoid hell is, perhaps a round about way, but a sure way to hell. But for it to be counter-intuitive doesn´t make it any less powerful. Someone who has tarried at the gates of hell their whole life, at some point, grows afraid of leaving, of thinking about how much they´ve sacrificed for nothing. Thus the power of this religion increases in proportion to not only human ignorance of the ontological good, but also in proportion to how much of this good is sacrificed by the religion. The entire western world has become like a post-op trans person. We´ve removed our subjective identity from our objective ontological good. We have metaphysically self-castrated this good from ourselves and our societies, and can no longer be fecund as a people nor desire much of anything with vigour, and to distract ourselves from this depressing reality, we commence an unceasing litany of superficial battles against a buffet of apparent evils.

The root of privationism is in its subversion of the Christian religion. This spirit is more intimately tied to protestantism, which grew and took its character primarily in opposition to an apparent evil: i.e. catholicism. Basically one of the the only things the reformers and all of the early protestant confessions have in common is a common identification of the papacy itself as being the Anti-Christ. They weren´t sure at all about the Blessed Sacrament, with various highly divergent teachings, but they were sure of this apparent evil. The key dogmas sola scriptura and sola fide similiarly tell us more about what they are against, i.e. ecclesial authority\tradition and taking pride in good works, than what they are for. The text that most succinctly summarizes the spirit of Luther´s rebellion, Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen, speaks of this freedom in a negative or privationist sense. He writes in this text,

Let it suffice to say this concerning the inner man and its liberty, and concerning that righteousness of faith which needs neither laws nor good works; nay, they are even hurtful to it, if any one pretends to be justified by them.

Luther´s ideal is an interior liberty that need not be determined by law or good in order to justify, which is to Luther an apparent evil. The traditional catholic teaching is, in contrast, that our obedience to law and performance of good deed do increase rightousness and justification (Trent. Sess. 6. Can. 24). In their traditional formulations, protestantism is at the crucial points privationist, and the traditional Catholic dogma affirms the metaphysic of antiquity. Unfortunately, the contemporary catholic church has increasingly less to do with the traditional faith, and has consistently put privationist goods like “dialogue,” “encounter,” and with Pope Francis a privationist false “mercy,” at the pennacle of our religoius observance instead of Jesus Christ. All of these privational goods entail negations or opposition to the practices of the true Church, i.e. to proclaim the truth, condemn error and sin, and save souls. “Dialogue” asks that we learn about Jesus from heretics and infidels. The question in either case is whether Christ serves our interior liberty or whether our interior liberty serves Christ, whether dialogue serves preaching or if preaching is constrained to make room for dialogue. If the highest good is thereby subverted, this dark spirit has taken over. The Spirit of Anti-Christ subverts any religion once it can set up one of these false goods as supreme.

What guides our actions becomes our master or god in a sense. This is the reason why the privationist ideologies place such imporance on people who symbolize evil and in some sense worship these people to the extent they provide the reason for the ideologies existence. Trump is a prime example. It wasn´t primarily his supporters who worshiped him, but his opponents. Making him more evil than he was filled gave them a reason for living. Also Antifa needs fascists to exist for it to exist. But Trump´s deranged mass of despisers was all to willing to become the image of the dictator they despised in him in order to oppose him. He was all they knew. Antifa uses gestapo tactics all to fight “fascisim.” In countries like germany where there are basically no fascists anymore they try desperately to make them, so they can justify thier opposition of evil or resistance. The basic reality is that “Acceptance,” “Empathy,” “Love” in this moral universe translates practically into a sort of slavery to people who are smeared as non-accepting, non-empathetic, and opposed to “love.“

Without these enemies or evil people, those adhering to this ideology are left with vapid slogans that don´t have any positive content to help them live their lives. Its horribly impractical. Imagine if there was a golf coach who spent hours with his students teaching them about bad golf swings but never showing them a good one. What would become of his students? What would they be good at? They would be good at criticizing certain golf swings they recognized as bad. They would he horrible at playing golf. So they would enjoy criticizing others much more than trying to play the game. [Enter: social justice warrior.] To hide this fact they would look for people to criticize to show their knowledge of evil. This is also how the ideology works. It doesn´t help people live well, it helps them identify and criticize people they understand to be evil so they might understand themselves to be good in their attempt to oppose evil. The Christian metaphysic says merely to oppose evil is not guarantee that you are doing good. You have to live well and oppose evil well, in reference to what is independently good, say honesty, respect, justice, etc.

Thus, the Christian metaphysic tells us in contrast. The most important thing is to know the Good and desire it. What is good? Your human nature, health, your vocation, your gender, your family, your ethnicity, your homeland, your nation, virtue, your religion, your God. Without knowing what these good things are and how to live them out, you cannot know and avoid evil. No religion affirms this metaphysic more than Christianity, even if there are other pre- and post-christian religions and philosophies that affirmed this basic truth. Why? Because Christ is a revelation of the Good. He says he is Light, Truth, Life. If we know Him, then we know everything. In contrast, the Buddha said the whole inspiriation for his philosphy was to help people avoid suffering. So the starting point is evil. And avoiding evil would be… good. He should have said “I wanted to help people avoid suffering but I realized I couldn´t know if suffering is bad or not without knowing the Good. And I don´t know what is Good.”

Unfortunately, our culture basically trains people to have an allergic reaction to the thought of a singular Good which all humans must accept as their end, as their reason for being, as their goal in life. And in so doing it enforces a general blindness and mental slavery on souls. This culture continues to hold up as apparent evils things that forbid knowledge of the Good. To know your nature is given the epithet “essentializing,” to know your gender, “sexist,” to know and love your nation is “fascist,” to know and love your God is… also fascist! The ideology enforces a greater and greater agnosticism about the good, e.g. “I think everyone should be free to be who they are and do what they want,“ of course in the name of opposing evil. In this religion, the good has no positive character, it gives no normative guidance. Only evil does.

And this general blindness and mental slavery is derivative of the worship of evil, this is the Spirit of Anti-Christ. Like the golfer without a clue about a good swing, what they offer to this idol is life itself, they offer up playing the game. Because for humans, the only possiblity for unifying our thinking and action and even our passions is by unifying them in a picture of the Good. A plane that only knows where it doesnt want to go never takes off. Or if it does one is almost assured of a crash landing. So too with our lives, we need models of the Good, we need to strive for personality traits and characteristics we know to be Good. By starting with the knowledge of evil, by having this as a basis point, one practically gives existence to that which does not have existence at all. Evil is an absence of the Good, not the presence or existence of something in its own right.

This spirit or ideology endows evil with the qualities of God or the Good. It says: eradicating evil should be our focus, and thus the fight against evil aught to guide all our actions. It tells us we need not consider or know what is self-sufficiently Good. This is the Spririt of Anti-Christ. Its never been stronger than today. Our religion establishes what we focus on, what we attend to, what moves our action and reasoning toward its end, also what we are willing to sacrifice for. The Spirit of Anti-Christ asks for everything and takes everything, and gives quite literally nothing in return, because it is nothing. It is evil, darkness, which is the absence of something Good.

The highest feature of the environment of Christian, the most sublime Matter to which he must adapt his actions and thoughts is the Incaration of Jesus Christ, the Word made Flesh, in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar. This has been, and is, and will be, according the prophecy in Daniel Chapter 12, the front line of the battle. Returning to the opening scripture from St John the Evangelist: “Every spirit which confesseth that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh, is of God: And every spirit that dissolveth Jesus, is not of God: and this is Antichrist.” The metaphysical contours of this spirit which dissolveth have been explained and can now fill out the meaning of this scripture. The Reformers turned this Holy Sacrifice, and Body, and Blood, against the Sacrifice on Calvary, and ripped the sacrum imperium asunder. They saught to dessolveth Jesus in his Flesh,

At the start of this essay, I claimed this was the best way to think about the matter, because I said it is a matter of practice. How can I claim this? How is what I am saying different from what my lawyer friend saying, about Luther´s notion of God being the heart of the problem. Well, I presume if he is trying to convince people of this, he needs to convert them to the Catholic God, for he is a Catholic. He also needs to discuss the relation of human freedom to Divine Providence. He has put himself on difficult terrain to help anyone in our society, as most people aren´t living in a spiritual world where they could even care about which concept of God is correct, less the mysteries of Divine Providence and human freedom. My way of thinking about this philosophically is the best because it is the most ready-to-hand, it is the most practicable. For those that aren´t interested in hearing about the Incarnate Good, Jesus Christ, what I say to such people is this: “think about the Good. Read biographies to find heroes, look at plants, spend time in nature, live out the Works of Mercy, make sure your life is more guided by plans and principles and virtues that have positive content.” When people do this, whether they know it or not, they are starting to turn to the God of Abraham, they are entering into a different spiritual universe. They will then, perhaps, come to know a human freedom that works in cooperation with Divine Providence, but not before they have taken this first step. In contrast, to those who say “I know more about who I am not than who I am”, or those who say “I know more about what I don´t want that what I want,” I must say to such people, and they are legion, “please know you are a slave to the devil, that you are living according to the Spirit of Anti-Christ.”

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