1. A bout of insomnia this week left me only half-rational, hence why this is extra late.

2. Unity – ‘Oneness’ – is one of the transcendentals: qualities of Being that transcend the Ten Categories. It is the ability to speak of something as a single unit or concept. Coupled with this is Distinction: that a thing is not something else.

What this means is that any time you can speak of a thing: a person, object, group, etc. you must have an idea of it as defined by some unifying factor which excludes everything that does not include that factor.

The short version is that calls for Unity are always simultaneously calls for exclusion; they are two sides of the same coin. Moreover, you cannot have unity as such, you much have some unifying principle, possession of which includes you, lack of which excludes you.

3. In the United States, the source of unity is the Constitution. This is, in truth, its main purpose (perhaps not initially, but as it has developed). The Constitution is to the US what the King is to the UK: the symbolic source of sovereignty and legitimacy in government. That’s why soldiers swear an oath to uphold and defend it.

4. By the way, swearing an oath to uphold the Constitution means, in practice, swearing an oath to uphold the state. Since a written document can always be interpreted in multiple ways, it is not a soldier’s place to say whether the Constitution is being subverted or not; it is the place of the state itself. So, upholding the Constitution means upholding the decisions of the state, which is legitimised by the Constitution.

(In contrast, of course, a King can just tell you whether you are obeying him or not. This is why Monarchy is historically more effective as a source of unity than constitutions).

5. I’ve been thinking about Unity of Plot lately. A plot, essentially, is a character seeking the solution of a problem. We open with the problem being identified, and we end either with its solution (comedy) or a final failure to solve it (tragedy).

In Musashi, for instance, the unifying idea is Musashi’s quest for enlightenment via the way of the sword. The novel opens with his disillusionment and coming to terms with his need for enlightenment, and it ends with his achieving it and defeating his greatest rival, illustrating the superiority of the spiritual path over the worldly path. Everything else in the book is related to the idea of spiritual enlightenment and the way of the sword: either as an obstacle, a counter-example, or a guide.

In Lord of the Rings, of course, the problem is the corrupting power of the Ring and its potential to consume all that is good in the world. We open with Bilbo passing the Ring to Frodo after nearly succumbing to its power and we end, after the Ring’s destruction, with the last vestiges of the Ring’s influence departing as Frodo leaves Middle Earth to be healed of the damage it did to him. Everything else in the book is related, one way or another, to the fate of the Ring.

6. Thinking about this, I realised something about Back to the Future. The core problem of that film is not that Marty McFly is trapped in the past. Rather, it’s that he needs his father to act the part of a man. The story begins with the effects of George McFly’s weakness and it ends with us seeing how his overcoming that weakness (thanks to his time-travelling son) has led to his becoming a mature, integrated individual in contrast to the shell of a man he was in the beginning.

A lot of these classic films work so well because the surface-level plot is in fact a vehicle for something more universal.

7. Revisiting The Odyssey, I was struck by just how many foreshadowings of the Gospel there are in the story: the king entering his own land disguised as a beggar, finding those who long for his coming and those who fear it; the king who is thought dead, only to show himself alive against all hope; the returning king making himself known to his servants by showing his scars; the king cleansing the house of corruption (specifically, 108 usurpers: 108 being – in a bit of cross-reference – the number of worldly temptations in Buddhism, as well as the significant number of 9 x 12), and so on. There’s even a bit where Odysseus, during his visit with the Phaecians, seats himself in the lowest place by the hearth, only to be told to take the seat of honour.

My conclusion from all this (and more) is that Homer was a prophet without knowing it; one of the select pagans who was granted the “good dreams,” in Lewis’s words, foretelling the coming of Christ.