The Pillarist: Logos Rising Review– E. Michael Jones

by Merri

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….

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