apologia (ἀπολογία)

by Not Sure

3 December 2023

My apology: I sat down to write at 1:15 PM CST on this day, Sunday, December 3, 2023. What’s ticking around in my mind, I’m ill-prepared to write about. Having a transcript of Alan’s talks to refer to is helpful, and somewhere on a hard drive I’m sure that the transcript for today’s Redux exists, but it isn’t up on the website, handy. The talk is from July 7, 2019:

"Times and Portents to Conjure Terror,
Pay for Safety from War and Weather."

The Transcriber is doing what I haven’t had time to do in several years, proof-reading the transcripts, checking the formatting, and turning them into HTML documents ready for upload. I have a tidy stack from 2020, ready to upload, but the one(s) I want today are not available. Such a luxury to be able to search through Alan’s words in written form to refresh my memory.

As it turns out, this talk I chose because Alan Watt mentioned Henry Kissinger, was the middle segment of what ultimately became a trilogy of talks. My second apology: I only listened to the talk from July 7. At the beginning of this talk, Alan said it was a follow-up to his talk from the previous week (June 30, 2019) entitled, "Just a Minute.....There's Many an Idea We've so Sorely Bought, And Pain Foreseen with a Little Forethought." On July 14, 2019, Alan concluded this little series with part two of “Times and Portents…”

How sharp my mind would be for the task at hand if I had re-listened to the other two talks. There on the transcript page of the CTTM website are lots of transcripts through March of 2019, and resuming in August of 2019. My third apology: the time I spent watching a James Bond movie and eating a chocolate bar was just about enough time for me to have listened to both of those talks.

I’ve seen almost all the James Bond films several times with Alan because he had them on disc and they were silly, go-to movies when the brain wanted a break. When I was flipping through the offerings, I started on “Dr. No” for about five minutes, then considered “From Russia, With Love,” but I kept skipping along. Sometimes when the brain wants a break, it needs something novel, something new. There was something about trying to distract myself with a distraction I had done so many times with Alan that was altogether not distracting. And then I skipped over to “The World is Not Enough.” Bingo! How exciting and truly distracting! The one James Bond movie I’ve never seen, because Alan didn’t have it on disc. Believe it or not, he had that one on VHS, but it remained for me, unseen.

It was exactly what the doctor would have ordered, if the doctor had any interest in prescriptions that work. Two hours of mindless distraction. But the only thing about that movie worth sharing is the title. The world is not enough.

***

In this talk, Alan spoke about a piece of writing from 1949, that has been described as “dour prose poetry,” entitled The Terrors of the Year Two Thousand by the French philosopher and historian of philosophy Étienne Gilson. Though Alan only mentioned this little book a few times, it had a profound impact on him when as child his teacher read the book aloud to her class.

Over the years, Alan’s work gave us The Plan, worked out and implemented down through time, of those who would be gods. He didn’t spend time telling us about good thoughts some philosophers had, rather he would show us in their own words where these people were taking us, and the destination is hellish.

Alan talked about Nietzsche and a world in which God is dead and men make gods of themselves, and he talked about Christianity, the good that had come from it and why it had to be destroyed for this new world order to come fully in. Alan wasn’t one for pigeonholes and he understood that the moment one identifies with a group, he, as an individual, is lost. But this talk comes close to an apology for Christianity. It is lovely and thought-provoking and at the very end, Alan apologizes for “rambling on.”

***

Apologetics is from an Ancient Greek word, apologia (ἀπολογία.) It is a discipline of defending religious doctrine through argumentation and discourse. In this talk, Alan defended Christianity against its use by a system, urging the listener to examine it for what was eternally true, not corrupted and used. If Alan’s focus had been on sharing the good thoughts of some philosophers, he would have encouraged you to read Gilson’s 1937 book, The Unity of Philosophical Experience. I will share with you a link to an article by Peter Redpath from the Adler-Aquinas Institute, “Why Gilson? Why Now?” Alan talked about what happens in Nietzsche’s godless world, and Redpath writes about Gilson’s journey through philosophical writing to show what happened when the West abandoned “the Greek philosophical vision of the universe.”

Alan would not refer you to philosophy, but instead asked that you think for yourself. The philosophies of men are vain, he said to me on more than one occasion. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”

“There are no atheists in foxholes” is a saying that many atheists object to as “tired, old, and untrue.” I’ve noticed much more public praying in what we call the alternative news world. During Operation Covid, a favorite text often quoted before a prayer was Ephesians 6:11-12, “Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places.” This is true. When I look at those who plan and implement the horrors, who think nothing of killing thousands or hundreds of thousands of people, I cannot see them as human, as flesh and blood.

But years ago, when I first started to listen to the talks of Alan Watt, and slid under the microscope of self-scrutiny, I was struck by a different passage in Ephesians, Ch. 2, verses 1-6. Here are verses 1-3, and you who need to know the rest can seek it out.

And you hath he quickened,

Who were dead in trespasses and sins:

Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world,

according to the prince of the power of the air,

the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience:

Among whom also we all had our conversation

In times past in the lusts of our flesh,

Fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind:

And were by nature the children of wrath,

Even as others.

It was easy for me to understand that until we “wake up” or come out of Babylon, we are dead. And the dead do the things that dead people do. Those lacking spirit chase after the things of the world. They eat, drink, and are merry. It wasn’t hard (painful, but not hard) to see myself amongst the dead, but it took years and a few more readings until I saw that the verse is not only talking about “desires of the flesh” but also of the mind. When we insist on staying in the world of politics, is that a “dog…to its vomit?” When we pride ourselves on how much we know (of philosophy or religion,) how deeply we’ve read and studied, is that not a “pig returning to the mud?”

When the world is not enough, that’s when the journey begins.

Additional reading:

Why Gilson? Why now?

https://www.adler-aquinasinstitute.org/etienne-gilson-society/why-gilson-why-now/

Alan Watt’s talks from June 30, July 7, July 14, 2019:

https://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com/radio/Alan_Watt_CTTM_Blurbs_JanDec2019.html