The “plain” style of Puritanism, and its hatred of ornament is a reflection of the influence of Ramist logic. Petrus Ramus expelled Rhetoric from the discipline of Logic, identifying it with Sophistry. Rhetoric includes Dialectic, and Ramism is purely Analytical in its method.
This is the real subtext of cultural critics and discourse havers today who invoke the Puritans as a boogeyman of repression. These critics, who style themselves as “transgressive” artists against neo-Puritanism, are really acknowledging in the comparison that they’re Sophists.
Puritanism, in its allegiances to Ramism and later Cartesianism, and its contempt for sophistical dialectic and the empty discourse of contemporary academic and theological disputation, actually represented an intellectually progressive movement to generalized critical method
In Antiquity the Stoics divided Science into Physics, Ethics, and Logic. Logic’s primary division was into Rhetoric and Dialectic. Winning public disputations, not truth, was the main purpose of Logic. The Epicureans rejected this Sophistry, and replaced Logic with Canonics
The “Method” of Methodism is explicitly in reference to Ramist Method, as a generalized procedure of critical logical analysis. In John Wesley’s writing and sermons sophistical rhetoric is rejected, and man’s inherent divine capacity for logical understanding is emphasized
The Discourse haver fears the Ramist Puritan.
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This book is also the best Ive read about the international financial crisis, and can be read to circumvent Quinn Slobodian’s rather sloppy book “Globalists” which lacks the academic precision and larger analytical scope of Boyce’s superior history.
The concept of Worldview has degraded heavily from its origins to its present use in psychology, sociology, etc. It’s not an unconscious set of prejudices, assumptions, and values. It’s rather World-INTUITION, an image of cosmological unity we actively represent to ourselves
An intuition for Kant (who coined/invented the term worldview) is a class of representations. It’s a bundle of sensory data which the imagination binds together into a mental object, which we represent to ourselves in order to cognize/think about
A Worldview is an image of interconnected unity of things, but the imagination is incapable of raising this image to the level of an absolutely self-contained and coherent idea of world systemicity. The imagination stretches to extend its systemization, but snaps under the strain
The Voynich Manuscript is worthless actually, he was never able to sell it. His widow sold it decades later for $25,000, less than 1/4 his asking price. The buyer was unable to resell it and donated it to Yale. It’s value is only in the fictitious mystery constructed around it
The legend of the manuscript was only ever a marketing ploy, which a perpetually cash strapped Voynich cooked up with amateur Roger Bacon scholar Robert Steele, a friend from the Savage Club, and Steele’s friend A.G. Little to coincide with the 700th anniversary of Bacon’s birth
19th century positivists and amateur scholars had, in the final decades of the century, constructed a highly distorted image of Roger Bacon as a martyr for science, ignoring the complexities of his thought to bolster their ideology of scientific and Comtean social progress
I’m starting to wonder if Comenius didnt write the Rosicrucian manifestos. It seems increasingly clear to me that Rosicrucianism has a Hussite/Taborite core, that the concepts used trace back to Jan Hus and that Rosicrucian terminology is modified from phrases Hus used
The idea of the “invisible college” is right here: corpus mysticum universale eccles corcumex Christo et collegio predestinatorum veraciter constitutum
The universal mystical body, truly established by Christ and the college of the predestined.
The Temple of the Rose Cross is such a striking and original image, but what’s the source of that imagery? This militaristic, temple-tank on wheels? I can’t help but see some resemblance to the Hussite battle wagons. Am I crazy?
All online political discourse, all the takes and owns, all has as its exclusive and ultimate aim, not the improvement of material conditions in reality, but the control of the cybernetic psychological warfare machine that forges reality. There’s nothing noble about participating
Demonstrating or amplifying performances of morally laudable opinions in service of this competition and the increasing of the share of influence possessed by people whose leveraging of that influence you believe you will materially benefit from does not make you a good person
It’s through the ability to manipulate or influence the appearance of public opinion consensus thar power is wielded, as the fictive construct of that consensus is the illegitimate ground of action by the liberal state. But this mechanism is inherently always fraudulent
Never forget how the Papists persecuted the Church. The Catholic Church is the Anti-Christ. Popery is the denial of the reality of the Lord’s Universal Church.
Woodcuts from the Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days aka Foxe's Book of Martyrs, 1563
See: King, John N. 2001. “‘The Light of Printing’: William Tyndale, John Foxe, John Day, and Early Modern Print Culture.” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (1): 52–85
Thinking about the martyrdom of Petrus Ramus at the hands of the Papists and crying