Sadly the very thing that strikes us as obvious always defeats our thinking about it in more penetrating ways: just as the Romans said that \'the good is the enemy of the better,\' so too \'the self-evident is the enemy of the very process of clarification or understanding,\' not to mention the enemy of the \'transcendent or ultimate.\'

I have always been spurred on by my not finding expressed anywhere the kinds of perspectives that I thought these issues most perspicuously needed and deserved; but that is just another way of saying that Americans have overwhelmingly expunged from their public understanding the strongest and most clarifying resources out of ancient and traditional European cultures. By far we prefer our familiar and user-friendly parochialisms, and there is no percentage in trying to pry these pachydermal plates apart.

The approach of intellect or noesis will forever be an effete and limited sort of thing by contrast with the vigor and color of gnosis; but in academia there is virtually nothing but noetic minds to be found, and the very idea of gnosis is alien and untranslatable, not to mention discreditable.

Thinking is the subtlest form of self-polemics, the art of a certain finesse in psychological self-vivisection and self-crucifixion (Hegel of course called the path of self-disillusion the via dolorosa or \'highway of despair,\' in Baillie's fine and florid rendering, like Jesus' route to Golgotha).