tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85802582024-03-19T01:48:48.084-07:00One Cʘsmos<b>The Religion the Almighty & Me Works out Betwixt us</b><br><i>multi-undisciplinary circumnavelgazing around the whole existentialada!</i><br><i>with</i> • Neotraditional Retrofuturism • Mental Gymgnostics • Verticalisthenics • Dilettantric Yoga • Leftwing Ridiculism • Freevangelical Pundamentalism • Advanced Leisure Studies • Comparative Nonsense • Flaming Homilies • Jehovial Witticisms<br><i><b>The Cosmos is our school, The Intellect our Faculty, Truth the first Principal</b></i>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14249005793605006679noreply@blogger.comBlogger4874125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-7468947866523354962024-03-18T10:30:00.000-07:002024-03-18T12:12:34.501-07:00Reality is Not What it Used to Be<p>Where do we go from there? -- in reference to the previous post, which took the telovator to the top floor and concluded that</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In everything that is true -- that exists -- there "has to be at least a vestige of the Son's correspondence to the Father."</span></span></blockquote><p>This explains why we are at once swimming in an ocean of truth and drowning in a sea of lies. </p><p>At any rate, supposing we have pierced the veil of the toppermost -- or it us, rather -- there's nowhere to go but back down into the world. </p><p>Indeed, we are always between immanence and transcendence, bearing in mind that Betweenness as such is a primordial category -- that something is always and forever going on Between the Father and Son, AKA conformity to the True. This <b>between</b> -- what Voegelin calls the <i>metaxy</i> -- represents</p><blockquote><p>human existence as "between" lower and upper poles; man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation of being" (Webb).</p></blockquote><p>This latter -- participation of being -- "Refers to sharing the qualities of the supreme exemplar," or "a condition between higher and lower degrees of reality." In the Judeo-Christian tradition it is reflected in the principle of our theomorphism, and can be symbolized as follows:</p><p></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">O</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">(⇅)</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Ø</span></p></blockquote><p></p><p>That's us in the middle. To dwell at the bottom equates to empiricism, to flee to the top idealism. But neither approach on its own is justifiable. It reminds us of a book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Cave-Light-Aristotle-Struggle-Civilization/dp/0553385666/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3RBCLKXC1X3MG&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.EGBAGipvKS9_P06c9KNjl7vbU9YJucLN2K6kKNwY_0StMd0AaeeWE4ZYVsyJG3vUYIKUIUwkQSQg57rpeyF45Ke-jCneF1R1HDD7XtjzzgN8MDUo0lAaF5dRPoHezKlFBBPF51hGNDKPpG7cZdoWL7U0sU1H66lD90mEsgzAy7GE35ciQO_fn6JdnWgWBhiyOcjbsO2YoUrBNyxA--thCJE13F6ojiuw8aS6bg8JYGQ.IUrrUJV3FnW6Li-IErqGwp2Hpuvj-22tAkynXE4Gkd0&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+Cave+and+the+Light&qid=1710777333&s=books&sprefix=the+cave+and+the+light%2Cstripbooks%2C163&sr=1-1" target="_blank">The Cave and the Light: Plato Versus Aristotle, and the Struggle for the Soul of Western Civilization</a>, which describes the seesaw argument that has been going on for over two millennia. </p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The two men disagreed on the fundamental purpose of the philosophy. For Plato, the image of the cave summed up man’s destined path, emerging from the darkness of material existence to the light of a higher and more spiritual truth [</span></span><span style="color: #0f1111; font-family: inherit;">↑</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111; font-family: inherit;">]. Aristotle thought otherwise. Instead of rising above mundane reality, he insisted, the philosopher’s job is to explain how the real world works, and how we can find our place in it [</span><span style="color: #0f1111; font-family: inherit;">↓</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111; font-family: inherit;">]. </span></blockquote><p>But an integral view of the cosmos requires both, since they are not dualistic but complementary. Perhaps I should reread it, but at the moment I'm reading a book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Triumph-Modern-Self-Individualism/dp/1433556332/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1HFXV050U36O2&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.J6_8cfp7Hitdvt7vjCzXA66xindtwjRtfwzX_mrwxaJxCrXHmKKvSBftiLRAmKlyEJgvUgJnbIWJqzxOfg4UCx3BfccKEIUHVIii8MF6WefKXqIz0YSuFVIppDOmB7LLKqiN0L0O_wzurgcRFKSPtkoGY9i3GsUaZKbQdOssPyI0Nbk5vnPAW21jw6h15b47Z7_8BShcfTumSmLjH7T0vJxlYlzc9kXKxuL7ia4U8cY.kAVgiEfBz8oLlm8Qc1gNt57R0CM8ZE9YBrb42RppfOI&dib_tag=se&keywords=The+Rise+and+Triumph+of+the+modern&qid=1710777833&s=books&sprefix=the+rise+and+triumph+of+teh%2Cstripbooks%2C7818&sr=1-1" target="_blank">The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution</a>.</p><p>And here we are. But how did we get here? That is the question the book attempts to answer. The short answer is through <i>really, really bad philosophy</i>, involving a great deal of amnesia, in particular, a systematic forgetting of what man knows about man. But I'm only up to p. 64.</p><p>At any rate, the book does bring us back down from the beautiful clouds of metaphysics to the cloudy muck of history.</p><p>So, how <i>did</i> we get here -- to a place that sees and raises Descartes, and says<i> I think I am a woman, therefore I am a woman. </i>What must the world be like in order for such a nonsensical statement to make sense? It actually requires centuries of work. Termites can't destroy a house in a day. </p><p>Long story short,</p><blockquote><p>Because men have forgotten God, they have also forgotten man; that's why all this has has happened.... Yet any proposed Christian solution to the crisis of modernity will fail if it does not address the core issues of the Great Forgetting (Trueman).</p></blockquote><p>Long story shorter,</p><p><i></i></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Each day modern man knows the world better and knows man less.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">"Human" is the adjective used to excuse any infamy.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The human has the insignificance of a swarm of insects when it is merely human.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Man speaks of the relativity of truth because he calls his innumerable errors truths.</span></i></p><p></p></blockquote><p>Nor is there a "Christian solution" per se, since ours is a chronic but treatable condition.</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">We only know how to solve problems that do not matter.</span></i></p><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Little problems like death, loss, evil, human nature, and the nature of reality. </p><p>Trueman actually begins with the problem of <i>I am a woman trapped in a man's body, </i>a sentence which "carries with it a world of metaphysical assumptions."</p><p>Now, every mentally ill person has a problem. As does every healthy person. What is life but problems?</p><p>The problem of the fellow somehow unhappiting the wrong body</p><blockquote><p>cannot be understood until it is set in the context of a much broader transformation in how society understands the nature of human selfhood.</p></blockquote><p>Get your anthropology wrong and everything else follows. Am I wrong?</p><p>No, but Nietzsche, Marx, and other fiending fathers of postmodernity are: they argue</p><blockquote><p>that the history of society is a history of power and oppression and that even notions such as human nature are constructs designed to reinforce and perpetuate this subjugation.</p></blockquote><p>In other words, forgetting human nature isn't a bug, it's a featured mind parasite. It's like saying<i> There's no such thing as a woman, and I am one.</i> But if everything is an oppressive social construct, so too is the construct of transgenderism. Indeed, often enough to only escape from this oppressive construct is suicide.</p><p>The product of power and oppression is the Sacred Victim, who are collectively "the real heroes of the narrative." You get more of what you reward, hence all the victim-heroes. At the same time the real heroes, from Washington to Churchill, are the oppressors.</p><p><span style="color: red;">Tell us something we don't know.</span></p><p>Okay, Trueman discusses the terms <i>mimesis</i> and <i>poiesis</i>, which "refer to two different ways of thinking about the world." The former is much like a realist philosophy in which truth is the conformity of intellect to being: it</p><blockquote><p>regards the world as having a given order and a given meaning and thus sees human beings as required to discover that meaning and conform themselves to it.</p></blockquote><p>Such a commonsense view of the world is precisely what makes you an oppressive and power-mad White European Heteronormative Christian Nationalist tyrant. Conversely, <i>poiesis</i> </p><blockquote><p>sees the world as so much raw material out of which meaning and purpose can be created by the individual.</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: red;">Genesis 3 All Over Again? </span></p><p>Sure sounds like it. Back in the real world,</p><blockquote><p>the authority of the created order was obvious and unavoidable. The world was what it was, and the individual needed to conform to it.</p></blockquote><p>Now, I'm all for questioning authority. But the authority of reality? And its author? That seems more than a bit soph-defeating. Nevertheless, "Today's world is not the objectively authoritative place" it used to be. Nowadays, </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>That's enough for today.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-46632639023874044192024-03-17T11:04:00.000-07:002024-03-17T11:28:27.612-07:00A Tweenage Correspondence Course in Reality <p>Or maybe three-ality.</p><p>Let's get back to basics: "truth is a relationship of correspondence <b>between</b> two quite different sorts of things," on the one hand, the intellect, on the other, intelligible reality. </p><p>But note that in reality there are always three, since <i>relationship</i> itself is equally primordial. That's our claim, anyway. </p><p>For example, try saying anything without a relationship between words and things or words and other words. Can't be done. </p><p>For me, a Christian metaphysic vaults this mysterious third to the toppermost of the poppermost. Looked at this way, we aren't just related to reality, but <i>relationship</i> as such is a part of the reality to which we are conformed.</p><p>I know, tricksy. But denying it is also a kind of trick, only the bad kind that results in a host of metaphysical mischief.</p><blockquote><p>Who is the third who walks always beside you? / When I count, there are only you and I together / But when I look ahead up the white road / There is always another one walking beside you (Eliot) </p></blockquote><p>Who is it? You know poets. They never come right out and say it. Although in the footnotes there is a counter-claim by the idealist philosopher F.H. Bradley which sketches out in precise terms what we do not believe: that</p><blockquote><p>my experience falls within my own circle, a circle closed on the outside; and... every sphere is opaque to the others which surround it.... the whole world for each is peculiar and private to that soul.</p></blockquote><p>If Professor Bad Example is correct, then there is no shared relationship, nor any "third" walking beside us. In fact, no real <b>us</b> at all, just two more or less contiguous but closed circles. </p><p>But for us the <b>Us</b> is as equally real as the<b> I </b>and the <b>Is</b> , i.e., Intellect-Being-Relation. Are you <b>with</b> me? Or just an adjacent circle enclosed in absurcularity -- a nul de slack? </p><p>Yada yada, truth is always a "three-way affair," is it not? Which is how we can at once know truth and share it with others. </p><p>Having said that, many people are indeed closed circles, i.e., the existential closure alluded to in yesterday's post. In reality, a person qua person is a truth-bearing being, but how? By virtue of what principle?</p><p>I'll just quote Marshall and add my own comments as necessary:</p><blockquote><p>if Jesus Christ is the truth, then truth is borne, not only chiefly by sentences or beliefs, but by a person.... in the end, truth <i>is</i> a person. </p></blockquote><p>That's the claim. Aphoristically speaking, that</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The truth is objective but not impersonal.</span></i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Truth is a person.</span></i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The life of the intelligence is a dialogue <b>between</b> the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.</span></i></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: red;">A person is a be-tween.</span> </p><p>A betweenager? And a trialogue? Sounds about right, Petey. But let us dig a little deeper into this whole. </p><p>Look! Down there: "a single concept of truth applicable to all true sentences and beliefs."</p><p>Wait -- it's alive! Don't act so surprised:</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>"In the correspondence of person to person by which the Trinity makes us Christ's icons one may hear an echo of the ancient idea that truth is a correspondence of mind to reality."</p><p>Listen! For <i><span style="color: #800180;">God is the guest of silence.</span></i></p><blockquote><p>we cannot be bearers of Christ's image without sharing in his correspondence to the Father, and so bearing, like him if imperfectly, the imprint of the Father himself....</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Granting to creatures a participated likeness in the incarnated Son's correspondence to the Father seems to be the final goal of the act by which the Trinity brings it about that we have true beliefs. </p></blockquote><p>In other words, conformity as such -- which is always a<i> relation</i> -- is grounded in the conformity of Son to Father?</p><blockquote><p>If correspondence to the Father is itself identity-constituting and non-contingent for the Son, then "truth" belongs... to God's own identity, in the form of the Word's perfect correspondence to the Father whose total reality he expresses. The Son would then correspond to the Father -- would be "the truth of the Father."</p></blockquote><p>The Truth of truth -- of even the possibility of truth? Sounds like it: this "identity-constituting relation to the Father would thus be basic to the truth of all possible true beliefs." Turns out that "Everything corresponds to the Father in some fashion, however remote." </p><p>In everything that is true -- that exists -- there "has to be at least a vestige of the Son's correspondence to the Father."</p><p>Short & sweet.</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">All truth goes from flesh to flesh.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>But</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Write concisely in order to finish before you become boring.</span></i></p></blockquote>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-50014134116012226432024-03-16T10:44:00.000-07:002024-03-16T10:55:00.589-07:00What Can We Not Doubt?<p>To review, we are discussing what it means to say that Christianity is true, which, of course, presupposes that we can know what truth is. </p><p>Conveniently, -- at least for those of us in the trailer Thomist park -- Christianity both implies and relies upon a realist metaphysic in which truth = the conformity, agreement, or correspondence of the intellect to reality: "truth is that which is."</p><p>This is how any and all truth is "justified," precisely. Supposing you think the rope is a snake, or Biden isn't one, then your belief is unjustified. Yes, man is prone to illusion, but illusion presupposes an underlying reality.</p><p>Indeed, even argument <i>per se</i> presupposes a reality we can know. This much is inarguable. In reality, everyone is a realist and can only pretend to be otherwise. </p><p>But nor is this an atomistic universe, so one truth will cohere with others, both horizontally and vertically. Reality is more like a holofractal organism of internally related parts than a machine with only exterior relations. </p><p>Indeed, this is why it is possible for (merely) biological organisms to exist. Otherwise it is impossible to account for the appearance of internal relations in a purely exterior universe. </p><p>So, Christianity is not restricted to purely "Christian" beliefs, but rather, rests upon epistemological and ontological assumptions capable of justifying "beliefs in general -- for any possible claim which wants to count as true."</p><p>To merely say that knowledge of truth is <i>possible</i> is to have said a great deal. Indeed, if the opposite is the case, what is there to say? Could there ever be a "community of the unreal" in which everyone exists in their own private Idaho, with no relationship to the real? In which every man is tenured? </p><p>Yes and no. But I don't want to get into progressive politics just yet. There will be plenty of time for insultainment.</p><p>We have a right to true beliefs because prior to this we have a belief in truth, ultimately because truth itself has rights. There can be no right to be wrong, because falsehood is unjustifiable, precisely. We have a relationship of dependency on the truth that is prior to our knowing it. </p><p>If truth is dependent upon <i>us</i>, that's just the metaphysical nonstarter known as rationalism, whereby we are enclosed in our own psychic preconceptions projected outward.</p><p>Of course, people tend to be more or less entangled in their own projections which are taken as real, but that's just mental illness or ideology (but I repeat myself). Part of the "maturational process" involves the ability to distinguish these from reality, AKA reality testing. </p><p>Come to think of it, ideology can be regarded as a sublimated form of mental illness. It exists on a spectrum from the relatively mature to the sadistically primitive, but a defense mechanism is nevertheless a defense mechanism, ultimately against reality. </p><p>Voegelin has much to say about such ideological deformations and epistemic pathologies rooted in what he calls <i>closed existence,</i></p><blockquote><p>in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental.</p></blockquote><p>He also refers to the <i>eclipse</i>, which is a</p><blockquote><p>perverse closure of consciousness against reality; a state that may become habitual and unconscious, but never entirely free from the pressure of reality and the anxiety produced by the attempt to evade it.</p></blockquote><p>This is why ideological activists are always so paranoid and persecuted. We don't need them but they need us, and <i>desperately</i>, as receptacles for their projections. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">If the leftist is not persecuting, he feels persecuted.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>In and by the content of his own mind. For example, where would they be without "white privilege" or "Christian nationalism" or "the patriarchy" to project into? They would have to be with <i>themselves</i>, which would by intolerable. Imagine a Joy Reid or Keith Olbermann having to tolerate their own heads!</p><p><span style="color: red;">The world is the projection of God.</span></p><p>You have a point, Petey, but there is a difference between pathological -- AKA "forced" -- projection, and what is called by the wise "diffusion of the Good." Really, it's the difference between love and hate, life and death, boundless creativity and leaden predictability.</p><p><span style="color: #494949;"><span style="background-color: white;">Yada yada,</span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Eventually the practice of justifying beliefs will have to appeal to beliefs which we... and our interlocutors hold true, but for which no reasons are given.</span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">In other words, <span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">Gödel, for there will always be at least one truth for which our system cannot account: "beliefs terminate arguments when no reasons need to be offered for them." </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">*Ironically*, it would be illogical to maintain that one's first principle can be reduced to logic. Rather, our First Principle simply <i>is</i>. Just don't pick one that cannot justify any entailments from it, for example, a-theism, or relativism, materialism, or subjectivism, each a form of cosmic irrationalism. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">It is not reasonable to pretend to enclose man in reason, for truth always transcends it. Which reminds me of a crack by Schuon to the effect that things aren't true because logical but logical because true -- or that no purely logical operation can furnish the premises on which it operates.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">Radical doubt is impossible, for there must be at least one thing that is not or cannot be doubted: "rational conversation and argument do not require, but rather preclude, holding all of our beliefs (including our criteria of truth) open to doubt at the same time." </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">What is the one Undoubtable Principle? We'll get into it in the next post, but the guy who said the following is my kind of guy:</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">Anyone who does not love the truth, has not yet known it (Gregory the Great Guy).</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-66353921696877311352024-03-15T11:07:00.000-07:002024-03-15T11:27:53.190-07:00The Metaphysics of Jesus<p>In our opinion, one should not be a Christian for any other reason than its truth. Or at least Christianity should be truer than any alternative -- meaning that it should simultaneously explain more than any other metaphysic on offer, without unexplaining anything important. </p><p>So, this book looked appealing: <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Trinity-Cambridge-Studies-Christian-Doctrine/dp/0521774918/ref=sr_1_1?crid=159FVF5PS9VD5&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9._1F6G9Sr6-V-FP1QsK_nBZ2hQMk7GSqCXixBdwp-Ve6hE3HxfUNvCrmcobcnSLzcGmeLHn2aKiKOBpTwM5RWeYeXW1DHi6JX6i0nDcS18BpRj9qOVzZCiV5dBcHbzhPOYPsyy-jCo0JYNxRN2kfS2VZEPLbU0QsxJS_Dd6fhgaw1AVmoYTnOVkC7P4w61WdU6qFAx6X7UI0mLgtFHtPTQ692hNGru4qXfvjGozTrZao.vTxpT8cr-I70w2dryKYXuvTZVK9NT_k80zls-Abey_o&dib_tag=se&keywords=truth+and+trinity&qid=1710521328&s=books&sprefix=truth+and+trinity%2Cstripbooks%2C160&sr=1-1" target="_blank">Trinity and Truth</a> by Bruce Marshall. Like most books, it fell into my hands via holy happenstance:</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">This book is about the problem of truth: what truth is, and how we can tell whether what we have said is true. Marshall approaches this problem from the standpoint of Christian theology, and especially that of the doctrine of the Trinity. The book offers a full-scale theological account of what truth is and whether Christians have adequate grounds for regarding their beliefs as true. </span></span></blockquote><p>It's a bit pedantic, and spends far too much time refuting self-refuting philosophical nonstarters, but makes some solid points along the way. </p><p>As we know, Jesus startles us with a number of startling truth claims, the most startling being that he <b>is </b>the truth. This is a startling claim. But because Christian doctrine is the water in which our civilization swims -- or at least the unpolluted spring from which it sprung -- perhaps we have lost our capacity to be startled by it. In other words, insufficient (!?!). </p><p>Our approach will be much like Leon Kass' <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-Wisdom-Reading-Genesis/dp/0226425673/ref=sr_1_1?crid=7E7NB0WLLXFP&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.maUl_pioRAzaKsR7cHpRFOG0_jKLTPhgJTAjDFiFCYoqMDR0dQeT-BZ9lRI2iSfDB8ggzXhmemI03nrW8vR-sJ23NS8TO706x6fnJZN4QODn-LPTHhN5Cd_bfnVxI5CWC6Epuo4twOkVK0jgbxg3zK6ENQy6lrWq3AavJ2p54lQDPXz_Ypnwo3zQXMrgPqSn8kwKRaX02p_SO4zzBDsQGcXVFs0RUhkwp6AR-4h_jWE.dn4Yxq_qMGTLguS0VTBp5JmVjAdooqFfr0FQ0WYoE6Y&dib_tag=se&keywords=leon+kass&qid=1710522076&s=books&sprefix=leon+kass%2Cstripbooks%2C170&sr=1-1" target="_blank">The Beginning of Wisdom</a>, which treats the claims of Genesis as any other philosophical text. Thus, we ought to be able to do the same with the New Testament, which, after all, is regarded by Christians as the fulfillment of the Old. </p><p>So when Jesus says he came here in order to straighten us out and "bear witness to the truth," we ought to take this epistemological claim literally and see where it leads. </p><p>After all, every uncorrupted -- or at least intellectually honest -- human wants to know the truth, and in my view, we are <i>entitled</i> to the truth. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of creating an epistemophilic being with no possibility of satisfying this unrestricted desire to know?</p><p>Assumes facts not in evidence: that we are created. </p><p>That's not true, because we have spent many posts discussing the Principle of Creation. It's your lucky day, because I won't rehash that material today. Suffice it to say</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Either God or chance: all other terms are disguises for one or the other.</span></i> </p></blockquote><p>Or, between O and Ø, and Ø just left the building. </p><p>Of course, this leaves open the question of "what O is like," and Jesus claims to tell us what O is like, precisely. He could be wrong, but when he says "I am the truth," it's a literal statement. It's up to us to assess the claim. If we are so inclined.</p><p>For example, "Truth is not simply personal; for John truth <b>is</b> a person" (emphasis mine). But</p><blockquote><p>Even this is too weak: truth is not just any person, but this human being in particular: Jesus of Nazareth, and among human beings only he. Knowing what truth is and deciding about truth... finally depends on becoming adequately acquainted with this person.... this human being is divine truth itself.</p></blockquote><p>So, let's get acquainted with this strange person and his startling claims. I don't know about you, but my curiosity has been piqued.</p><p>Marshall writes that "Jesus makes the Father known" and that "He is 'the truth' only in virtue of his unique <b>relation</b> to the Father" (emphasis mine). Complicating matters,</p><blockquote><p>Jesus is "the truth," moreover, not only on account of his bond with the one who sent him, but also on account of his bond with another whom he will send: "the Spirit of truth..."</p></blockquote><p>This Spirit, whoever or whatever it is, is also "the truth" Jesus wants to reveal (and who in turn reveals further truth to us). Ultimately, "truth" is "an attribute of the triune God. Indeed, truth is in some deep sense identical with the persons of the Trinity." </p><p>Moreover, all truth, to the extent that it is true, has its origin in this Spirit. We Raccoons not only <i>reject no truth</i>, but happily celebrate and take on board <i>any and all truth</i>, the more the merrier. Come on in! </p><p>Now, not to say that the above formulation is a myth, but is there a way to "demythologize" this language and express it in a more purely metaphysical way? Or at least draw out the metaphysical implications and entailments? What is Jesus actually saying about ultimate reality that is more adequate than all our other ways of speaking of it?</p><p>For in the end it indeed comes down to the question of adequation -- that is, to a realist conception of metaphysics whereby truth is the conformity of intellect to being, all other conceivable epistemolgies being number two or lower. </p><p>And Jesus is telling us that this Being is ultimately a relation of three persons -- or, as we like to say, of substance-in-relation (which we borrowed from Norris Clarke but have long since adopted as our own).</p><p>Now, this metaphysical conception "must be regarded as epistemologically primary across the board," which is to say, as "the primary criteria of truth." As such, nothing can contradict it; "it must be regarded as the chief test of truth of the rest of what we want to believe."</p><blockquote><p>This means that the very notions of how we decide <b>what is true</b> and of<b> what truth is</b> must be reconfigured in a trinitarian way (emphasis mine).</p></blockquote><p>Is Jesus up to this challenge? Here again, he ought to be able to take on all comers -- not just strawman arguments but the steeliest of steelmen. </p><p>We're just getting started. Maybe a good place to pause.</p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-89475185564287874812024-03-14T10:43:00.000-07:002024-03-14T12:24:22.564-07:00A Miracle Cure for the Progressive Disease<blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">After conversing with some "thoroughly modern" people, we see that humanity escaped the "centuries of faith" only to get stuck in those of credulity.</span></i> <span style="font-family: inherit;">--<span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Dávila</span></span></p></blockquote><p>Why are we increasingly being ruled by fanatical secular theocrats? </p><blockquote><p>We should expect that as our society increasingly distances itself from its Christian roots, the Christian sensibility for limited government will wane, and the universal human tendency to unite all authority, spiritual and temporal, in one central office or structure will reassert itself (<u>The Religion of the Day</u>).</p></blockquote><p>We mustn't forget "that it has not been typical for humanity to make a distinction between" the sacred and secular, and that nearly all civilizations "have lodged spiritual, moral, and political authority in the same office" (ibid.). </p><p>We were once the great exception, but now we're back to the rule of giving to Caesar what doesn't belong to him:</p><blockquote><p>Once a Christian vision of the world has been abandoned, it is very difficult to limit the power of temporal governments (ibid.).</p></blockquote><p>Indeed, those of us who recognize such limits and object to caesarodopism are now called "Christian Nationalists," or -- with unsurpassable irony -- "fascists." In such an upside-down world, those of us who want the state to have less authority are called authoritarians.</p><p>Must these Gnostics always immanentize the eschaton? </p><blockquote><p>Given the fact that Progressive religion is this-worldly in its scope, the political arena has increasingly become the staging ground for religious propagation and... a kind of religious warfare (ibid.). </p></blockquote><p>An endless war of religion. It's the price of Progress.</p><p>You will have noticed that one of the characteristics of progressive religion is that it is devoid of wisdom. In the words of our fine Colombian, </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Political wisdom is the art of invigorating society and weakening the State.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Which is why the left specializes in pretending to solve "<span style="color: #800180;">transitory problems with permanent solutions</span>," and, come to think of it, permanent problems -- i.e., those arising out of human nature -- with political solutions. But there can be no political solution to a spiritual problem.</p><p>Thus, for example, corporations are greedy tax cheats. Unlike the Biden crime family.</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The only man who should speak of wealth and power is the one who did not extend his hand when they were within reach.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Brandon is not that man, and he has the shell corporations to prove it.</p><p>Yes, but he is a devout Catholic! </p><p><i>Correct</i>:</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>And surely Brandon is the most Perfect Idiot ever to be president. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Why is he so angry? Is it just the amphetamines, or is something else going on?<br /></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The progressive becomes angry at nothing as much as the stubbornness of the one who refuses to sacrifice the certain to the new.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>The stubborn white urbanite projecting his stubbornness and anger into us, so it is we who simmer with <i>White Rural Rage</i>™.</p><p>But Our Democracy™!</p><blockquote><p><span style="color: #800180;"><i>The leftist screams that freedom perishes when his victims refuse to finance their own murder. </i></span></p></blockquote><p>Lincoln Riley should be grateful for all the Diversity™.</p><p>Get on the Right -- which is to say, left -- Side of History™, peasant!</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The democrat defends his convictions by declaring whoever challenges him to be out of date.</span></i></p></blockquote><p> "Where genuinely Christian ideas predominate, neo-Gnostic religion loses influence" (ibid.). Conversely,</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Where Christianity disappears, greed, envy, and lust invent a thousand ideologies to justify themselves.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Wait. Aren't we MAGA types the Nazis? </p><p>That's not how I remember it: World War II was</p><blockquote><p>an internecine gnostic religious war between German Nazis and Russian communists. Each of these ideologies was attempting to replace a waning Christianity with a new, all-encompassing vision for the society that promised the perfection of the temporal world (ibid.). </p></blockquote><p>True, the Marxists prevailed, but why pick between them? The modern left combines statism, Jew hatred, identity politics, class envy, and the rule of lawlessness into one perennially attractive and monstrous package. </p><p>Pessimistic? Funny you ask:</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Even so, I am not without optimism, even if Progressive Man is a hopeless dumpster fire:</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope for a miracle.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>It's happened before, or we wouldn't be here.</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-43983796283212891172024-03-13T09:45:00.000-07:002024-03-13T10:02:49.100-07:00In This House We Believe Mind Parasites are Real<p>This is interesting: progressive religion isn't just a <i>personal</i> mind virus but a <i>collective</i> one that can only burrow into an existing culture that it could never have produced: it</p><blockquote><p>is inherently parasitic like a virus, or to put it more neutrally, it is derivative rather than original. The Gnostic turn of mind will inhabit an already existing religious faith or philosophical system and re-order the structure of its host body even while assuming the host's mythic power (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734882654?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" target="_blank">The Religion of the Day</a>). </p></blockquote><p><span style="color: red;">And here we are?</span> </p><p>You are correct, sir. But we could also say that Christianity is "viral," for example, in the way it wormed its way into the existing Roman Empire and spread throughout its body. And indeed, Richard Dawkins has called religion as such -- AKA the "God delusion" -- a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viruses_of_the_Mind" target="_blank">virus of the mind</a>, so what's the difference? </p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dawkins analyzes the propagation of religious ideas and behaviors as a memetic virus, analogous to how biological and computer viruses spread.</span></span></blockquote><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dawkins also describes religious beliefs as "mind-parasites," and as "gangs [that] will come to constitute a package, which may be sufficiently stable to deserve a collective name such as Roman Catholicism..."</span></span></blockquote><p>How to tell when one is infected? Well, the "faith sufferer" will, for example, hold convictions</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">but which, nevertheless, the believer feels as totally compelling and convincing.</span></span></blockquote><p>This is not my experience, rather, the opposite, for all the evidence -- evidence for truth as such -- points to a nonlocal source of Truth. Science, of course, assumes the intelligibility of the world to intelligence, without being able to account for what is otherwise a great mystery with no principle to account for it.</p><p>Mystery?</p><blockquote><p>There is a conviction that "mystery" <i>per se</i> is a good thing; the belief that it is not a virtue to solve mysteries but to enjoy them and revel in their insolubility.</p></blockquote><p>Again, not in my experience, for we do not equate mystery with the unknown, rather, with the infinitely knowable. Mystery is an easily verifiable existential and ontological fact. Unless, of course, you are omniscient, like Dawkins.</p><blockquote><p>If the believer is one of the rare exceptions who follows a different religion from his parents [like Bob], the explanation may be cultural transmission from a charismatic individual.</p></blockquote><p>Is that what it is? Granted, I have been influenced by certain individuals, but I would not say it is because of their charisma. Rather, because their explanations seem truer (i.e., conformed to reality) and account for more data than the alternatives. </p><p>A while back we began a series of posts on "philosophical nonstarters," of which atheism must be chief. I reject atheism on purely intellectual, logical, philosophical, metaphysical, experiential, and even scientific grounds.</p><p>What if we flip the script and say that atheism is a dangerous mind parasite? </p><blockquote><p>Historically, practical atheism has been the shrouded beginning and final result toward which all Progressive religious schemes tend.</p></blockquote><p>As such, it is both the first principle and last end -- the alpha and omega -- of the left. It is one of the primary divisions between conservative liberals and illiberal leftists. </p><p>Dawkins and I agree on the existence of mind parasites, since these are the stock in trade of the coonical pslackologist. I am intimately familiar with their destructive influence, but how does one distinguish these from live-enhancing memes that lead to human flourishing? </p><p>For example, the wiki article cited above references <span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">a meta-review of 100 studies showing that religion has "a positive effect on human well-being by 79%."</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Which for our purposes is neither here nor there, because a person living in untruth is setting himself up for unpleasant feelings down the line. </span></span></p><p>We certainly agree with Dawkins that there is such a thing as bad religion, since that is precisely the subject under discussion, i.e., progressive religion. However, unlike Dawkins, we maintain that man cannot <i>not</i> be religious, even -- indeed, especially -- if that man is a progressive atheist. </p><p>If your neighborhood is like mine, you've seen the signs of the times:</p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4llpbkb2p47yX6eRlWTSaN3PAwOeD3oARNQEKlETGdtBKixI-HWN__c_3YMQk0qc5RYkKBWtQYguTcU162TW4_ZX2NoyGtKd7D2PSNyHzSBnxZ7bynp2ktEGc2jVLDOD2AybZh7UMfPWk9ub1mZSiFDegPk2QBavNeLnzimzRKpaNZ1TK_DYGew/s474/th-2432096646.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="316" data-original-width="474" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4llpbkb2p47yX6eRlWTSaN3PAwOeD3oARNQEKlETGdtBKixI-HWN__c_3YMQk0qc5RYkKBWtQYguTcU162TW4_ZX2NoyGtKd7D2PSNyHzSBnxZ7bynp2ktEGc2jVLDOD2AybZh7UMfPWk9ub1mZSiFDegPk2QBavNeLnzimzRKpaNZ1TK_DYGew/s320/th-2432096646.jpg" width="320" /></a></div> In my house it's more like this:<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH7TEEs84sDL76CzPGFUvK_Zdq3V1cBB9-_H54SCHeUhUtxDcX1mnN3aPCT_dtNjhp8k9C4cOfuDJS58xZUCgKd-ICeylo-eT72IUdTc1dZGOD4zmvv6elXT5BoJaiENgbiXnjl9twT41Zx9XAyYihoqInSVVsor7x_Tj3b26EoYm9Q6eX3t2Yxg/s1177/IMG_3066.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="867" data-original-width="1177" height="236" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgH7TEEs84sDL76CzPGFUvK_Zdq3V1cBB9-_H54SCHeUhUtxDcX1mnN3aPCT_dtNjhp8k9C4cOfuDJS58xZUCgKd-ICeylo-eT72IUdTc1dZGOD4zmvv6elXT5BoJaiENgbiXnjl9twT41Zx9XAyYihoqInSVVsor7x_Tj3b26EoYm9Q6eX3t2Yxg/s320/IMG_3066.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>We also agree that science is real, but if <i>only</i> science is real, how to account for rights of any kind? </p><p>Being a Christian Nationalist, I believe they are anchored in the plain meaning of the Declaration of Independence -- that they are endowed to us by the Creator. It is the leftist who believes in them "without evidence," principle, or ground. For example, if "black lives matter," it can only be because <i>all </i>lives do, but why? Where did they get that crazy notion?</p><p>Obviously they got it from Christianity, but it is like a cut flower that can only wilt when detached from its roots. In this regard it is a bit like a virus, which is a fragment of genetic information looking for a host. The real host is the body from which it has been excised. Call it the Body of Christ, but that is getting ahead of the post.</p><p>Back to our book. It echoes what we just said, in that progressive religion "arises out of the soil of Christian belief." For who but a confused and poorly catechized Christian would say "kindness is everything"? Christianity has never been a suicide pact. Pacifism is just one of the shadows or viruses of Christianity. </p><p>In this context, atheism is just one more Christian heresy. It assumes a strictly rational universe that can be understood by the human mind, except they get off the truth train at a provincial bus stop instead of taking it all the way to the top. </p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: red; font-family: inherit;">Gödel?</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">You guessed it, Petey. Nothing could be more illogical than pretending to enclose being in one of the mind's rationalistic models. To the atheist we say: be reasonable! A little perspective, please. But of course, it is "a futile task to look for logical consistency in a Gnostic worldview."</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">In such an unstable alloy, there will be remaining bits from the host vision that do not square well with new Gnostic ideas.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">As to the parasitic nature of progressive religion,</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Much of the potency of a given Gnostic belief system comes from what it has borrowed from an existing and internally more coherent way of seeing things. It is doubtful that something called a</span> "pure Gnosticism" could exist for very long on its own.</blockquote><p>This being for the same reason that a virus cannot live long without finding a host. Technically a virus isn't even "alive" per se. Which is perhaps why, when I look at the left, I see dead people.</p><blockquote><p>There has never been a successful civilization founded on a Gnostic form of religion, and it is unlikely that there could be, given that many elements of Gnostic belief militate against any stable civilizational development. </p></blockquote><p>Again, the virus of progressivism can only hijack a living system. I well remember my own infection, which leads to questions of "treatment," "cure," and "inoculation," which I suppose we'll consider in the next post. Bottom line for today: even Marxism was and is</p><blockquote><p>dependent for much of its attractive power on the Judeo-Christian faith that preceded it, and has proved a destructive and incoherent failure wherever it has been put into practice.</p></blockquote><p>It evolved -- or devolved, rather --</p><blockquote><p>in the context of Christianity, and current Gnostic movements are dependent to a great degree on the Christian vision of reality.... [their] existence is unthinkable without the Jewish and Christian religion that preceded it.</p></blockquote><p>In this house we believe in parasitology and epidemiology.</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-34580793059678257982024-03-12T11:38:00.000-07:002024-03-12T11:42:50.186-07:00The Catechism of the One True Faith of the Left<p>We've suggested in the past that leftism in all its ghastly forms represents a crystallization -- the institutionalization -- of man's fall. It is the foolish attempt to make right everything that is wrong with man. Let us count the aphorisms, and elaborate them with material from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734882654?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" target="_blank">The Religion of the Day</a>:</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The radical error -- the deification of man -- does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of committing the error.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>"Neo-Gnostic belief is essentially, not accidentally, an expression of human pride." Thus, "Progressive believers have assumed that they are themselves unfallen and morally superior to their opponents." </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Socialism is the philosophy of the guilt of others.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>"It tends to produce an unfortunate but inevitable attitude of moral superiority": original sin for thee, original innocence for me. Or the "innocent envy" of the believers in White Privilege, Heteronormativity, Christian Nationalism, et al. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The left is made up of individuals who are dissatisfied with what they have and are satisfied with who they are.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>"Progressive religion harbors a profound hatred for the world as it currently exists." It "gains much of its attraction by appealing to the sense of alienation that we all experience." Which is why it holds no appeal to the contented. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Always and everywhere an attack on language, AKA the word. For example, it is offensive to call homicidal monsters "illegals." Indeed,</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The man guilty of the crime is not the envious murderer but the victim who has aroused his envy.</span></i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Man prefers to apologize by offering another person's guilt, rather then his own innocence, as an excuse.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>"'Not my fault!'" is the universal Progressive religious mantra." </p><p>"Unlike Christians, they hold that what needs to radically change is emphatically not <i>me</i>." <i><span style="color: #800180;"> </span></i></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">"Social justice" is the term we use for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>No social justice, no civil peace for the restavus. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">To believe in the redemption of man by man is more than an error; it is an idiocy.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>"The salvation offered by Progressive religion promises not only escape from evil, but the transformation of our current humanity." </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>"A modern neo-Gnostic belief system is a scheme of self-initiated salvation."</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; text-indent: 9px;"><span style="color: #800180;">Transforming the world: the occupation of a prisoner resigned to his sentence.</span></span></blockquote><p>"Progressive religion acknowledges the human tragedy of profound alienation from the world, and even from our own being." But</p><p></p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Neo-Gnosticism "promises to radically overcome the evil of the world and the alienation and lack of fulfillment experienced by humans." It "accomplishes its salvation through the application of some form of specialized technical knowledge (gnosis) gained by human effort."</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature in order to refrain from amending his own correctable nature.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>The neo-Gnostic "locates the source of the world's evil not in the individual human heart, but in fundamentally corrupted and therefore oppressive structures of human existence." </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">In order to enslave the people the politician needs to convince them that all their problems are "social."</span></i></p></blockquote><p>The neo-Gnostic accomplishes its salvation "through escape from or destruction of prevailing structures of oppression." </p><p>"The life and soul of Progressive religious practice involves stoking anger for the fight against those who are inhibiting" the birth of the New Age. "If such enemies are not obviously forthcoming, Progressive believers need to invent them, lest their mythic picture of the world should dissolve.:</p><p>When Hitler doesn't exist, the left invents him. Every time. </p><blockquote><p class="p1" style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-feature-settings: normal; font-kerning: auto; font-optical-sizing: auto; font-stretch: normal; font-variant-alternates: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-position: normal; font-variation-settings: normal; line-height: normal; margin: 0px;"><span style="-webkit-text-stroke: rgb(0, 0, 0); caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;"><i><span style="color: #800180;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In this century, compassion is an ideological weapon.</span></span></i></span></p></blockquote><p>"It is not so much love for those who suffer, but anger rooted in pride at the fact of suffering" that motivates them. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">In order to corrupt the individual it is enough to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses. </span></i></p></blockquote><p> "The names of the two antagonistic groups change, but the underlying structure is similar." </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Social salvation is near when each one admits that he can only save himself. Society is saved when its presumed saviors despair.</span></i></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Hierarchies are heavenly. In Hell all are equal.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Or have equity, rather. Equity is the flattening of vertical ascent.</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The cult of Humanity is celebrated with human sacrifices.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Most conspicuously the sacrament of abortion. "Something must die if the guilty human race is to be purified. This instinct is as old as humanity and can be found in every culture." </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Human nature always takes the progressive by surprise.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>This follows from the effort "to bring about a new type of human and to inaugurate an entirely new age of freedom that has overcome the past age of oppression." </p><p>Progressive religion is "founded on a radical departure from reality.... the more completely a given revolution succeeds, the more complete will be its resulting failure." "Due to the impossibility of making good on those promises, the hoped-for paradise never arrives."</p><p>Give it four more years.</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-74743284186004301422024-03-11T11:13:00.000-07:002024-03-11T11:19:56.877-07:00Progressivism: The One True Faith<p>Today's random selection is a book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1734882654?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" target="_blank">The Religion of the Day</a>, but I wonder: is it just the same old Gnostic counter-religion in a new guise? For it is written:</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">For man to fall repeatedly into the same trap, just paint it a different color.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>And what colors has Marxism, each a garish one not found in nature: "though it is flying under new colors, the spiritual roots and the deep structure of the Gnostic religious attitude remain." And </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Whoever does not believe in myths believes in fables</span></i>.</p></blockquote><p>Yes, the mythology is settled, but</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>The awokened? Like Sleepy Joe?</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180; font-family: inherit;">Not even the kicks of history wake wake up the liberal.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Nor even after the amphetamines kick in. In reality, </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The waters of the West are stagnant, but the spring is unpolluted. </span></i></p></blockquote><p>Only here at the fountainhead</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Thirst runs out before the water does.</span></i></p></blockquote><p></p><p>True, we are living in a post-Christian age but hardly a post-religious one, for ours is</p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111; font-family: inherit;">a highly religious age. Secular gospels and dogmatic faiths promising salvation are all around us. So what is the belief system, the religious vision, that is displacing Christianity as the assumed narrative by which our post-Christian, modern societies live? And what is the religion that we ourselves need to be converted out of, if we are to be fully converted to the Christian faith?</span></blockquote><p>A reviewer says the book</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">concerns the Gnostic religion of our time -- a progressivism that seeks perfection via politics or environmental or social reform. The question is how to live as a Christian in a post-Christian world that mirrors the pagan world in which Christianity was born.</span></span></blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Another writes of </span><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #0f1111;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">the subtle principles and promises of the secular culture which make their way into our own minds without our recognizing it. </span></span></blockquote><p>So, right up our alley, so much so that I don't know that it says anything we haven't been saying for the last 18 years: that the post-Christian world is always and everywhere a crude anti-Christian caricature of the world from which it was hatched. The Religion of the Day is a reactionary anti-religion against the deity. It features</p><blockquote><p>a new set of first principles, a new constellation of dogmas, and a new story. We call this process the developing of a new "imaginative vision."</p></blockquote><p>Although we prefer to distinguish imagination from fantasy, for </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The imagination is not the place where reality is falsified, but where it is fulfilled.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Fantasy actually closes off the avenues opened by imagination -- like a delusion or hallucination, it escapes reality only to be confined to unreality. The deluded are not free, much less from their delusions.</p><p>It comes down to a matter of truth and its numberless alternatives:</p><blockquote><p>by approaching the many ideologies of the day from the perspective of first principles and fundamental convictions, we can identify consistent underlying threads -- dogmas -- that unite them.</p></blockquote><p>Conversely,</p><blockquote><p>To be a Christian in any age is to believe the Gospel <i>instead</i> <i>of</i> some alternative.</p></blockquote><p>In addition to the advantage of being true, this truth should help prevent us from catching the diseases of the day -- diseases that have leaked from the dark laboratories of academia and entered the collective bloodstream. The Church </p><blockquote><p>has always had to fight the battle against the intellectual diseases of the day... in order to develop the cure and make it available to the wider culture. </p></blockquote><p>Certainly I have had to unknowculate myself against the progressivism I caught back in the 1980s. I began redpilliing in the '90s, and only began breadpilling two years ago.</p><p>This book doesn't mention Voegelin, but he would agree that "Gnostic religion is the classic case of Christianity gone awry." It is</p><blockquote><p>"the primal heresy within the Christian worldview to which all subsequent heresies return." The arrival of some form of Gnostic religion seems to be the inevitable accompaniment to Christianity wherever it succeeds in gaining significant cultural influence..</p></blockquote><p><span style="color: red;">Ineveateapple?</span></p><p>Correct, my discarnate friend: call it the realmyth of Genesis and the falsefact of scientism:</p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><blockquote><i style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #800180; font-family: inherit;">There are two kinds of men: those who believe in original sin and idiots.</span></i></blockquote><p> Our idiotic friends pride themselves on being</p><blockquote><p>rational, scientific, and non-religious, even while expressing evident religious behavior, such as their commitment to doctrines and dogmas that are hardly self-evident, their holding to those dogmas with a tenacity incommensurate with their provability, their propensity to seek out fellow-believers who can cooperate in their sacred project and with whom they can share communion, and their quick vilification of heretics to the faith.</p></blockquote><p>Sounds like blue pill-popping wokester cancel culture to me, symptoms of which include the eradication of irony and elimination of self-awareness: as there are antibiotics, so too are there are soul-killing anti-pneumatics, rendering their consumers</p><blockquote><p>unable to exercise the kind of thoughtful investigation of dogma necessary for any intelligently held religious faith, and... unable to distinguish the kind of knowledge gained by religious assumptions from other kinds of knowledge. </p></blockquote><p>This religious self-reflection is impossible for the very reason that they </p><blockquote><p>demand that "religious" considerations be left out of all the questions of the day, not realizing that they are promoting and often coercing the practice of their own religion under the false guise of being religiously neutral.</p></blockquote><p>And here we are: there is no such thing as religion, and progressives have the One True Faith.</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-86714514193962547282024-03-10T11:26:00.000-07:002024-03-10T12:03:20.381-07:00Metaphysical Humor and Stand-Up Cosmology<p>In the book discussed yesterday -- <u>Deep Exegesis</u> -- there is a chapter called <i>The Text is a Joke</i>, which comes close to an explication of what we call the guffah-<i>HA! </i>experience. </p><p>In short, insight into any subject matter has a form analogous to getting the joke. Bearing in mind that there are stupid jokes and humorless people. Every paranoid patient I ever saw was conspicuously lacking in humor, except maybe the bitter and snarky kind.</p><p>Conspiracy theories are like elaborate but stupid jokes. Come to think of it, their devotees are also generally humorless, the latter because they lack self-awareness and take themselves so seriously. </p><p>Have you ever seen an MSNBC host? What makes them so punchable is the combination of smug superiority, conspiratorial insight, and mocking pseudo-humor toward those of us that the conspiracy supposedly "explains" -- for example, that you and I are racists who want to dismantle Our Democracy™ and long for an authoritarian strongman. Now<i> that's </i>funny.</p><p>Bold Statement:</p><blockquote><p>Every text is a joke, and a good interpreter is one with a good sense of humor, one with a broad knowledge and the wit to know what bits of knowledge are relevant. All interpretation is a matter of getting it. All texts mean the way jokes mean.</p></blockquote><p>Like how? Well, first of all, the reader has to bring something to the text analogous to what we have to bring to the joke in order to get it. Any form of sophisticated humor will go over the head of a child or MSNBC host because they are lacking vital information. The more you know, the deeper the joke.</p><p>If the reader "comes to the text with his mind a tabula rasa, the text will be as empty as his head." </p><blockquote><p>Everyone brings information to the text that is not in the text, and seeks to illuminate the text with light from outside.</p></blockquote><p>For example, even a literalist brings his literalism. His literalism is his hermeneutical technique. But in my experience, the more literal the person, the less the capacity for getting the joke. </p><p>If you -- the reader -- get my metaphysical humor, you may also have some insight into Bob's struggle with the world -- the world of people who get neither <i>it</i> nor <i>Bob</i>. Every post is packed with lightheaded japery, is it not? </p><p>But why? Must be because of all the cosmic connections everywhere, which some people see and most don't. Looking back on it, this tendency of mine really began to develop in grad school. Why is that? Because I began to internalize more information that I could bring to this or that text.</p><p>For example, I remember learning all the mutually exclusive theories and schools of psychology, from behaviorism to neurobiology to psychoanalysis, which I found funny. </p><p>Now, this absence of agreement is either a misfortune -- a cautionary tale -- or a joke. If someone, for instance, is shallow enough to become a behaviorist -- a psychologist who denies the existence of the psyche -- they certainly won't get the joke of so many "experts" who can't even agree on so much as a first principle of psychology. </p><p>Very much like philosophy, and why there are so many jokes about philosophers. A philosopher may be defined as someone who disagrees with other philosophers. Have you heard the one about the solipsist who thought it was such an attractive philosophy, he couldn't understand why more people don't believe it? </p><p>Which is much like the determinist frustrated by his inability to convince people to accept determinism, or the atheist whose intellectual powers are so godlike he can confidently pronounce on the nonexistence of God.</p><p>Certainly this is why Marxism is such a bad joke. But instead of laughing at themselves, they elaborated a theory of "false consciousness" to account for people who <i>do </i>get the joke. </p><p>In order to get the joke of Marxism you have to be outside Marxism. Wokeness and identity politics are the latest ways to pull them back in. Which is why the Woke are simultaneously so tediously humorless and precisely why they are so deserving of mockery.</p><p>Likewise, when science becomes scientism, it becomes a joke: "theorizing always involves not only an amassing of data but telling a story that gives the data coherence." Like a good joke, in a way.</p><blockquote><p>There is an imaginative leap from the data in Newton's gravitational theory, quantum physics, chaos theory, and Darwinian evolution. Theorizing is a joke.... It is a matter of gathering all the data, and suddenly, joyously, getting it.</p></blockquote><p>Or not. For</p><blockquote><p>If texts function like jokes, then texts require certain kinds of interpreters. What kind of interpreters? Funny ones? That would not be a bad start.</p></blockquote><p>But what "can one do with someone who has no sense of humor?"</p><blockquote><p>Analysis and teaching might improve things marginally, but that person's main problem is not a technical but a spiritual one: somebody without a sense of humor suffers from a contracted soul, and the only real solution is conversion.</p></blockquote><p>The chapter somewhat abruptly ends with the following:</p><blockquote><p>For both the interpreter and the reader of interpretations, the commentator and reader of commentaries, the experience of a good interpretation is very much like the experience of a good joke. An exegete pores over a text, and finally, and often suddenly, a dozen pieces fall into place; the experience is one of sudden release...</p></blockquote><p>Indeed, "The exegete might actually laugh." In which case he has had a guffah-<i>HA! </i>experience.</p><p>They say that Trump's supporters take him seriously but not literally, while his enemies take him literally but not seriously. Which is precisely why we laugh <i>with</i> Trump at those seriously literal-minded scolds and ideological puritans.</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-83766530223983054322024-03-09T11:03:00.000-08:002024-03-09T12:09:48.488-08:00Of Course You Can Change the Past<p>It is impossible to say how much of the Bible is improvised, only that it is, being that it is always (vertically speaking) a harmony of two voices, divine and human. Moreover, it is symphonic, in that it is a unity of many voices over a period of 2,000 years or so. That's a long time. </p><p>Nor can we say that it begins with the writing of Genesis, since Genesis adverts to <i>the</i> beginning, or to the beginning of time itself. It reminds me of a movie with a plot which in turn adverts to events prior to it, i.e, backshadowing. </p><p>Also, it is not as if it literally ends with the composition of Revelation in AD 95 (or whenever it was), nor with the closing of the canon in AD 363, because that's just another beginning -- of ceaseless riffing and improvising on the text. </p><p>Analogous to musical improvisation, it is as if scripture provides the chordal structure that supports the countless melodic improvisations we can draw from it, from trivial to profound. At any rate, it is inexhaustible.</p><p>And if we're going to be literal, we cannot even say that earlier events are fixed, since only future events can reveal their full meaning. We do not mean that the earlier events change figuratively, but literally. </p><p>For example, an eyewitness to the Crucifixion would not only have have no idea of its meaning, the meaning continuously unfolds through time, thus changing its very character.</p><p>Once again it's a relief to stumble upon a book that makes the same point, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1602580693?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" target="_blank">Deep Exegesis: The Mystery of Reading Scripture</a>. Chapter two in particular, <i>Texts Are Events</i>, not only explains how it is possible for past events to undergo "change," but how this is built into the very fabric of temporal being. </p><p>For example, supposing it were possible to witness the Big Bang, what could we really know of it? As we've said many times, the later emergence of such shocking properties as Life and Mind cause us to reconsider the very meaning of the Big Bang. </p><p>And not just the meaning, because the universe that suddenly comes to life is a <i>changed</i> universe: things require time in order to disclose what they <i>are</i>; in a single moment, nothing is anything. </p><p>Now, you will ask: are you saying that the future operates causally on the past? Because that's more than a bit woo woo. But Leithart makes it clear that</p><blockquote><p>Events themselves change over time, taking on new properties because of later events. </p></blockquote><p>And again, not just vis-a-vis scripture. He uses the mundane example of an assassination, but let's consider one in particular that occurred on the morning of June 28, 1914, since its effects continue to resonate and reveal "what happened." </p><p>Such an event is in one sense "fixed": "the assassin aims, shoots a gun, and hits his target with a bullet to the head" (or jugular in the case of the Archduke). </p><p>Assuming the victim doesn't die instantly, all an eyewitness could say is that an attempted assassination has taken place. Certainly he would have no knowledge of World War I, and how this in turn led to World War II, the Cold War, and even to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza. </p><blockquote><p>We cannot know the event fully because we do not yet know how the events of 10:00 a.m. will be modified by later events. </p></blockquote><p>This sounds like some fallacious trick of logic, e.g., Zeno's paradox or something. But no: "This is not simply a change of description but a change of the event," because "the event is brought into relation with subsequent events and acquires new properties that <i>change the very thing it is</i>" (emphasis mine). </p><p>I don't know, Bob. Too clever by half. </p><p>Clearly this has to do with the metaphysics of time. Back to our discussion of how music mirrors the nature of temporality, a note in one moment reveals next to nothing about the melody. Does the note undergo change? Yes and no, for the same unchanging note can support an infinite number of melodies which, once played, reveal the nature of that note.</p><p>What happened on January 6? Whatever it was, it's still happening, as per the amphetamine addled ravings of last Thursday's State of the Dementia. </p><p>Again, music is a quintessentially temporal event, not a static and atemporal thing. And last I checked, we to are allavus Plunged into Time, whatever that is.</p><blockquote><p>To hear the simplest melody, we need to listen for at least a few seconds. And more complex pieces of music can take an hour or more to experience. Notes follow notes, measures follow measures, movements follow movements.... If we are going to listen to music at all, we have to give it time to unfold.</p></blockquote><p>What if we're listening to history? Or to scripture?</p><blockquote><p>Texts are musical in that they take time, and the time texts take is musical time. The time of music and the time of texts always involve reaching for the next moment.... we are always reading beyond the individual word. </p></blockquote><p>In reading, we have to suspend judgment until the texts unfolds itself, but note that the Bible is again a special kind of text that spans from before-the-beginning to after-the-end, AKA Alpha to Omega and thensome. And</p><blockquote><p>Not unjustifiably may we say that musical motion is at the core of every motion; that every experience of motion is, finally, a musical experience. </p></blockquote><p>With respect to scripture, "the meanings of earlier texts shift with the introduction of later texts," and this is all over, for example, John, the prologue of which very much changes the meaning of Genesis 1. </p><p>Only in a timeless universe could the "past" be fixed: "Everything depends on the temporal dimension." And what it<b> is</b>, precisely. </p><blockquote><p>The meaning is disclosed only by taking the time that the text takes..., and the story changes not only what we thought happened but what did happen. </p></blockquote><p>Maybe. But "we need to consider what happens to texts after they seem to be finished." This post is finished, but we don't yet know what it means. We'll keep you and I in suspense for another 23 hours.</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-55705758618054491842024-03-08T10:45:00.000-08:002024-03-08T13:14:40.231-08:00God is a Swingin' Jazz Trio<p>"Improvisation provides a powerful enactment of the truth that our freedom is enabled to flourish only by engaging with and negotiating constraints" (Begbie).</p><p>True, but a bit pedestrian. Anything else? </p><blockquote><p>by enabling a freedom in relation to a vast array of constraints, [improvisation] can enable a freedom with respect to a fundamental continuous constraint which permeates them all, namely the world's temporality...</p></blockquote><p>It is true that the higher we ascend into vertical freedom, the more, not fewer, constraints. <i>I think</i>. For example, wild animals have no constraints but are thereby "enclosed" in a meaningless kind of freedom. The same could be said of a human being raised in the wild, who would scarcely be human. </p><p>I am completely free to pick up a saxophone and blow on it. Conversely, the great ones who play with real freedom tend to be obsessed with practice. It is as if they internalize <i>more </i>constraints, only to transcend them.</p><p>I wonder if this is what motivated Joyce -- as if to say, "I've mastered conventional language, but it's too confining. Time to move on to something more challenging." For example, instead of using just one language and culture, he</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">invented a unique polyglot-language or <i>idioglossia </i></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">solely for the purpose of this work. This language is composed of composite words from some <b>sixty to seventy world languages</b>,</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"> combined to form puns or portmanteau</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"> words and phrases intended to convey several layers of meaning at once (wiki).</span></span></blockquote><p> More constraints = more freedom:</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Joyce was attempting "to employ language as a new medium, breaking down all grammatical usages, all time space values, all ordinary conceptions of context.... the theme is the language and the language the theme, and a language where every association of sound and free association is exploited."</span></span></blockquote><p>As is the case with music, <span style="font-family: inherit;">"<span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">the writing is not so much <i>about</i> something as it is <i>that something itself</i>" (emphasis mine). <span style="font-family: inherit;">"T</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">he essential qualities and movement of the words, their <i>rhythmic and melodic sequences</i>..., are the main representatives of the author's thought and feeling" (emphasis mine).</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><i>Dreamspeak</i>:<span style="font-family: inherit;"> "</span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">a language that is basically English, but extremely malleable and all-inclusive, a fusion of portmanteau words, stylistic parodies, and complex puns."</span></span></p><p><span style="color: #202122;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i>There are rules!</i>, even in dreams. Freud attempted to nail them down, and these were later systematized into a kind of new logic -- called "symmetrical" -- by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignacio_Matte_Blanco" target="_blank">Ignacio Matte Blanco</a>, who argued </span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">that in the unconscious "a part can represent the whole" and that "past, present, and future are all the same." </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">He set out to examine the five characteristics of the unconscious that Freud </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">had outlined: timelessness, displacement</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">, condensation, replacement of external by internal reality, and absence of mutual contradiction.<span style="font-size: 13.3333px; text-wrap: nowrap;">... </span></span></span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">He deduced that if the unconscious has consistent characteristics it must follow rules, or there would be chaos. However the nature of these hypothetical characteristics indicates that their rules differ from conventional logic.</span></span></blockquote><p>Now, I'm guessing that this is not just a right-brain thing, but expresses the "metaphysics of the right brain," insofar as it is abstracted from its left-brain complement. </p><p>In health there is a dynamic and holistic interaction between the two, out of which emerges a "higher third," so to speak. But over-reliance on one to the exclusion of the other will result in varying types of pathology.</p><p>For example, earlier this year we spent a lot of time discussing how ideology is very much an LCH phenomenon. It is a kind of static grid that is superimposed over the world, when the world -- AKA reality -- is always much more complex, multifaceted, and hyperdimensional than the the models we invent. In other words, <i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Gödel.</span></span></i></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">And now I'm thinking about scripture, which lies on a variable continuum between dreamspeak and relatively straightforward propositions such as the Ten Commandments. The synoptic Gospels are relatively linear histories, but John partakes of more dreamspeak, which I suppose is why it is our favorite. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">And what is the book of Revelation but a rather florid dream, bearing in mind again that <i>there are rules</i> in dreaming. Prior to Finnegans Wake it was one of the tricksiest texts out there, defying any linear LCH approach. Indeed, my Orthodox Bible says that</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">in the second and third centuries Revelation was widely twisted and sensationally misinterpreted, and the erroneous teachings brought troublesome confusion to Christians -- a trend that continues to this day.</span></blockquote><p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_Behind" target="_blank">To put it mildly</a>.</p><p>I think it is more accurate to say that we are <i>always already </i>in the end times, although no one knows when <b>the</b> end will be. If your doors of perception are cleansed, you know that <i>the future's uncertain and the end is always near</i>.</p><p>Let me stop improvising and get back to improvisation as such, because I want to finish our discussion of this book. With it,</p><blockquote><p>new futures with hitherto unconsidered possibilities are opened up. In addition, <i>continuous constraints </i>are drawn into and promote this process....</p></blockquote><blockquote><p>The freedom realized in the best improvisation is not an amorphous "openness" struggling to conquer (or ignore) constraints, but a fruitful interaction between contingency and constraint. </p></blockquote><p>This dialectic leads to "a theology of human freedom," but I want to say <i>divine freedom</i> as well, for what kind of freedom has God? I strongly suspect that he's not only a jazzman but a jazz trio with a sensitive collective ear for co-creative harmony, melody, and rhythm.</p><p>For example, with improvisation there is a "growth of personal particularity through musical dialogue." In other words, one player discovers his musical identity via interaction with others who are equally adept at finding their identity in the same way. It reminds me of the most famous version of the Bill Evans Trio:</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">This trio is still widely regarded as his finest, largely because of the symbiotic interplay between its members.... </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;">Along with bassist Scott LaFaro and drummer Paul Motian, Evans perfected his democratic vision of trio cooperation, where all members performed with perfect empathy and telepathy (wiki).</span></span></blockquote><p>In such a setting,</p><blockquote><p>the constraint of others is experienced not as essentially oppressive but as conferring and confirming an inalienable particularity and uniqueness (Begbie).</p></blockquote><p>There are certain jazz players who are so strong that they have difficulty playing with others. Louis Armstrong, for example, often overwhelmed his compatriots and his musical surroundings, which served simply as a background for his own flights of improvisation. </p><p>The following is an exception, in that Johnny Dodds certainly holds up his end on clarinet. The rhythm section is somewhat rudimental but check out Armstrong's second solo in particular, which is both spontaneous but has a kind of propulsive inevitability:</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/AeBn_TZ4Iak" width="320" youtube-src-id="AeBn_TZ4Iak"></iframe></div><p>Contrast this with the Bill Evans Trio, where everyone is improvising with everyone else all the way through, and the beat is more elastic, dancing, and "breathing":</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/PQmZctWwsCE" width="320" youtube-src-id="PQmZctWwsCE"></iframe></div><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Armstrong is a musical god, but I think the latter is more like how the trinitarian God must sound.</span></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-57868379534141323812024-03-07T11:44:00.000-08:002024-03-07T12:08:14.320-08:00Improvisation in God and (Therefore) Man<blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">In any proposition about man its paradoxical fusion of determinism and freedom must emerge. </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">--</span></i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dávila </span></span></p></blockquote><p><i>Must</i>? Doesn't sound very free to me. </p><p><span style="color: red;">People who want to be spiritual and not religious are like a musician who wants to be unconstrained by any musical structure. Do you remember nothing? </span></p><blockquote><p>That freedom is dependent on constraint is patently evident in many spheres. In cybernetics there is a principle that states "Where a constraint exists, advantage can usually be taken of it" (Begbie). </p></blockquote><p>Like a good tax accountant, or similar to Polanyi's conception of how the boundary conditions of one level may be exploited by a higher level, e.g., words by sentences, sentences by paragraphs, paragraphs by post, etc. </p><p>Except I have no idea where this post is going; it is "open," but there must be something to which it is open -- one hopes, anyway -- a higher level of meaning.</p><p>Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not. Or perhaps the problem is on the lower level: sometimes <b><i>I</i></b> am not here, apparently. </p><p>Analogously, if God is omnipresent, any lack of presence isn't his fault, rather, ours. Properly understood, O is what is always here and cannot not be here.</p><p>But if Christianity is correct, then O itself has a kind of dynamic musical structure.</p><p>This reminds me of a comment by Keith Jarrett about the encounter with music, which may or may not occur in the case of improvisation, which is simultaneously a <i>search for </i>and a <i>manifestation</i> <i>of </i>the search for music: the jazz musician:</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">goes onto the stage hoping to have a rendezvous with music. He knows the music is <i>there</i> (it always is), but this meeting depends not only on knowledge but openness. </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">It must be let in, recognized, and revealed to the listener, the first of whom is the musician himself.</span></blockquote><p><i>Shamanic</i>, that's what it is: a negotiation with the unseen, unheard, and unwritten. Nevertheless, <i>there are rules!</i></p><p></p><blockquote><p>if there were unlimited degrees of self-communication we could not advance beyond chaos. Organizations of energy become possible because stable limits are set on their possibility: "Elaborate networks of constraint, running down eventually into laws of motion, set the conditions and boundaries...." </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>Human beings have developed the capacity to submit to the constraints deliberately in order to extend the possibilities of their interaction with the world.</p></blockquote><p>Is this what the world is "for"? To provide the boundary conditions for our improvisation? It certainly seems so. The only alternative is a determinism that would render improvisation impossible. </p><p>Does God himself improvise?, that's the question. In the classical view he does not and cannot, because he is timeless and immutable. But to repeat Zuckerkandl's quote from a couple of posts ago,</p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">A God enthroned beyond time in timeless eternity would have to renounce music... Are we to suppose that we mortals, in possessing such a wonder as music, are more privileged than God?</span></span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Well? I often wonder how much Jesus improvised. To the extent that he was human, we would say "a lot." </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">But are we to believe that his divine person underwent no change whatsoever? If so, what is the point? Does the revelation of the Trinity not reveal anything new about God? Is God not "constrained" by his triune structure -- a structure that is a kind of perpetual process? </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Time out for aphorisms:</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="color: #800180;">Two contradictory philosophical theses complete each other, but only God knows how.</span></i></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">For example, the theses of change and immutability, of freedom and necessity, of time and timelessness. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: red;">If the Father is "absolute freedom," it is nevertheless "constrained" by his eternal engendering of the Son. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">You think so, Petey? That's a bold claim. And yet, it seems that even -- especially -- the Father isn't "free" to not be the Father. Otherwise we land in ontological contradiction. At least from our end of the cosmos,</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="color: #800180;">Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.</span></i></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: red;">God himself doesn't know what to do with his infinite freedom but to generate the Son. Or rather, the Son is what the Father always knows via his freedom.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Aphorist suggests that</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #800180;"><i>The permanent possibility of initiating a causal series is what we call a person.</i></span></span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p>Does this apply equally to the divine persons? Or more so?</p><p>I'm going with the latter: that -- so to speak -- the person of the Father is the permanent possibility of generating the Son. </p><p>The Aphorist also says </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Authentic freedom consists in the power to adopt an authentic master. </span></i></p></blockquote><p>It would seem that this freedom of ours is grounded in the authentic freedom of the Son to do the will of the Father. Thus</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The free act is either rebellion or obedience. Man establishes his godlike pride or his creaturely humility. </span></i></p></blockquote><p>Genesis 3 All Over Again. For *ironically*</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison.</span></i> </p></blockquote><p>That checks out: the <i>tyranny of relativism</i> under which we currently live. Give me back my boundary conditions! Starting with the Constitution. </p><p><span style="color: red;">The ultimate boundary conditions are those between the Father, Son, and Spirit.</span> </p><p>And ultimately,</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The free act is only conceivable in a created universe. In the universe that results from a free act.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>The free act of engendering the Son or Word? Petey? Little help? Nicolas? Anyone?</p><p></p><blockquote><i><span style="color: #800180;">When we forget that to be free consists in the power to seek the master that we should serve, freedom merely becomes the very opportunity for the vilest master who commands us. </span></i></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="color: red;">You gotta serve somebody.</span></p><p>Is that true? What if I want to serve myself? Why can't it be a self-serve and self-serving cosmos?</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Whoever is liberated from everything that oppresses him soon discovers that he is also liberated from what protects him.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>No loopholes, no special exemptions? After all, I am a Good Man. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Man is the the most contemptible refuge of men.</span></i></p></blockquote><p> I know, I know. Don't remind me.</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">"Human" is the adjective used to excuse any infamy.</span></i> </p></blockquote><p>Okay, so remind me. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors. </span></i></p></blockquote><p>Which implies that the full mirror is the one full of God?</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Man inflates his emptiness in order to challenge God. </span></i> </p></blockquote><p>That's true. The biggest conceivable nothing is still nothing. Conversely,</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Authentic humanism is built upon the discernment of human insufficiency.</span></i></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: red;">The first baby step toward Genesis 3 <b>not </b>all over again.</span> </p><p>Let's come full circle to an aphorism about the aphorism at the top, and call it a post:</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">An individual is defined less by his contradictions than by the way he comes to terms with them.</span></i></p></blockquote>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-4421658184030661612024-03-06T09:54:00.000-08:002024-03-06T10:41:30.903-08:00Timelessness Waits for Everyone<blockquote><p>Jazz is more closely related to the realm in which music occurs -- time -- than is European music... if music -- as almost all philosophies of music hold -- is <i>the</i> art expressed in time, then jazz corresponds more fundamentally to the basic nature of the musical than European music. --Joachim Brendt </p></blockquote><p>Well, this book on <u>Theology, Music and Time</u> is a bit of a disappointment. Not much for Bob to work with, a few quotes notwithstanding such as the one above. </p><p>That passage does go to questions of freedom and structure in time, for time cannot be just one or the other. That is to say, pure freedom and spontaneity would be unintelligible, while pure structure would be as lifeless as metronome or drum machine. </p><p>Time marches on. Or does it? Sometimes it feels that way, but it can also slow, stretch, and dilate. Indeed, if not for the latter, then there would be no possibility of slack in the cosmos. Rather, life would be an unrelenting drill until the marching stops at death.</p><p>There is a chapter on the modern composer John Tavener, who calls his music "liquid metaphysics," and although Begbie doesn't mention it, it so happens that Tavener was a student of Schuon. I just <a href="https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/work/14361/Schuon-Lieder--John-Tavener/" target="_blank">googled</a> it, and he set a number of Schuon's poems to music. </p><p>There's a chapter on the relationship of music to time, which begins with a quote that poses the question of whether time "is a threat or gift." I suppose it depends on how we look at it. Is it just a velvet glove hiding an iron fist called Death? </p><p><span style="color: red;">No, it's an ironic redemption disclosing a love ensconced in velvet.</span></p><p><i>Ouch</i>, Petey. You can do better. </p><p><span style="color: red;">Not this morning I can't. </span></p><p>Begbie:</p><blockquote><p>If in Christ "all things" have found their fulfillment, then, presumably, the same can be said of time as an integral dimension of the created order. </p></blockquote><p>The Incarnation is either "central and decisive for all time and history," or we are somewhat screwed timewise. We would have little rational choice but to escape it by any means necessary, as in Neoplatonism or Buddhism. Time would have no purpose except insofar as it affords us a brief opportunity to flee it.</p><p>But in the Christian view "the reality of time" is "intrinsic to God's creation" and has an "essentially positive character." However, our post-Christian culture features a paradoxical combination of too much time and not enough of it:</p><blockquote><p>To state the obvious, being "pressured by time" is a pervasive feature of contemporary life in the West. "It is because our days are too full and because they move too fast that we seem never to catch up with ourselves."</p></blockquote><p>As a result, we are always hurtling toward a future that never arrives, no matter how much we accomplish in the moment. </p><blockquote><p>Human beings have always tried to control time by attempting to decelerate transience, to postpone the entropic processes of decay.</p></blockquote><p>Which goes to the very purpose of religion. And to its denial, especially as seen in the disordered political religions of the left. </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>Time, it seems, is our best frenemy, depending upon how we approach it. The conditions "that produce the time-scarce condition are the selfsame ones that produce its opposite."</p><p>Meaning what, exactly? Again, no humans in all of history have been so liberated from the necessities of time, and yet, so persecuted by its presence: "The dominant modern response to the relentless approach of death is massive denial." With the postmodern compression, dislocation, and scattering of time,</p><blockquote><p>there is much to suggest that elements of an intractable sterility and even destructiveness are also at work, extending rather than healing the malaise of modernity.</p></blockquote><p>And Here We Are: a "tyranny of clock-time" amidst "postmodernism's fragmentation and multiplicity of times." </p><p>Where is the slack?! This sounds like a joke, but the perpetual cry of the left is that the fascist dictator Trump is literally going to steal all our slack. But these are clearly slackless people to begin with, or they would be celebrating how much they have under Brandon. It's a simple question, really: <i>do you or do you not have more slack than you did five years ago?</i></p><p>Music "seems to offer a temporal adventure in which time is experienced not as an absolute receptacle or inert background," a time-affirming model of change which doesn't end in death or entropy. </p><p>For example, it "accustoms the mind to grasp immaterial reality." It "enables us to delight in" the unseen and untouched, being that it is independent of the senses (for it isn't actually perceived by the ears but by the immaterial mind). </p><p>Perhaps it serves as a model "to empower the mind" and "to apprehend the unified order of eternity." It "demonstrates that there can be ordered change, that change need not imply chaos," and that</p><blockquote><p>dynamic order is possible, that there can be ordered being and becoming, form and vitality, structure and dynamics, flux and articulation. For something to be subject to persistent change need not imply disorder.</p></blockquote><p>Well, good. Call it Developmental Cosmology:</p><blockquote><p>The created world takes time to be. Music presents us with a concrete demonstration of the inseparability of time and created reality, of the truth that it need not be seen as a vice of creation, that it can only reach its fulfillment, its perfection, through time. It shows us in an intense way that "taking time" can be good, profitable, and enriching.</p></blockquote><p>"Music asks for my patience, my trust that there is something worth waiting for." It "relies with a peculiar intensity on transience for its very functioning," thus liberating us "from the assumption that limited duration is of necessity problematic, that we can only discover authentic meaning in the unbounded and unlimited."</p><p>After all, God himself "once took time and thus treated it as something real," and "has allotted the time we need to fulfill our destiny."</p><p>"The universe is suspended between nothingness and the infinity of God," and "music can exemplify and embody just this suspension."</p><p>All I got.</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-69072038987203935562024-03-05T11:42:00.000-08:002024-03-05T11:48:32.552-08:00Water Everywhere, But Who Will Slake Our Thirst?<blockquote><p><i>A God enthroned beyond time in timeless eternity would have to renounce music... Are we to suppose that we mortals, in possessing such a wonder as music, are more privileged than God?</i> --Victor Zuckerkandl</p></blockquote><p>Turns out I didn't make up the word "theomusicology." </p><p>It's difficult to track down a precise definition, but it it has more do with the cultural and anthropological interface between music and the sacred, as opposed to our concerns, which are more metaphysical in nature, going to how music <i>as such</i> reveals the nature of God and of ultimate reality.</p><p>Again, we're looking for clues in a book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521785685?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" target="_blank">Theology, Music and Time</a>: it</p><p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><blockquote style="color: #0f1111;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">shows ways in which music can deepen our understanding of the Christian God and his involvement with the world. The author explores rhythm, meter, resolution, repetition and improvisation, and through them opens up some of the central themes of the Christian faith -- creation, salvation, eschatology, time and eternity, eucharist, election and ecclesiology. He shows that music can refresh theology, giving it new ways of coming to terms with God.</span></blockquote><p style="color: #0f1111;">Thus far I can't give it an unqualified raccoomendation, because it's simultaneously rambling and pedantic, a reminder that I could never be one of these academic types. <i>Only</i> a blogger? True, there are no minimal qualifications for being one, but nor is there an upper limit. Like music, come to think of it. Anyone can do it, but comparatively few do it well, <i>am I wrong? </i></p><p><span style="color: red;">WHO ARE MY COMPETITORS!</span></p><p style="color: #0f1111;"><i>Thaaat's right</i>, Petey. Name another blog that features tips, quips, and insults from a discarnate frenemy. </p><p style="color: #0f1111;">Let's flip.</p><blockquote><p style="color: #0f1111;">it is clear <i>that</i> music is one of the most powerful communicative media we have, but <i>how</i> it communicates and <i>what</i> it communicates are anything but clear.</p></blockquote><p>True, but the mere fact that music "clearly communicates" is what we want to focus on. In the past we have discussed Christopher Bollas' theory of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Bollas" target="_blank">idiom needs</a><span style="color: #0f1111;">, whereby objects in the external world in-form us about our interior world: everyone has</span></p><blockquote><p style="color: #202122; margin: 0.5em 0px 0px; padding-bottom: 0.5em;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">their own idiom for life -- a blend between the psychic organization which from birth forms the self's core.... </span><span style="font-family: inherit;">we spend our time looking for objects of interest -- human or material -- which can serve to enhance our particular idioms or styles of life...</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="color: #202122;">We are perpetually looking for those external objects that evoke a kind of re-collection of our own interior. For me, this is proof enough of the soul. </span></p><p><span style="color: #202122;">Bollas also calls these "</span><span style="color: #202122; font-family: inherit;">transformational objects" whereby one is "metamorphosed by one's interaction with the object world." <i>That</i> music speaks to us at all indicates that it is just such a transformational object. That it can also communicate the sacred presupposes this idiomatic/transformational structure, very much like a key that unlocks something <i>inside</i> us. </span></p><p><span style="color: #202122; font-family: inherit;">This is no different from art in general, which, according to Schuon, </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">has a function that is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders
present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a “sympathetic
magic”; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our
return to the “kingdom of God that is within you.” </span></blockquote><p>Thus, art is at once an exteriorization of what is interior to us and vice versa. Otherwise to hell with it. Its ultimate purpose is "<span style="font-family: inherit;">so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact
with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype." Again, a transformational object. It is "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">a movement from ourselves
to ourselves, or from the immanent Self to transcendent Being" (ibid.).</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Talent</i>. Plenty of people have it, but as the Aphorist reminds us,</span></p><p></p><blockquote><i><span style="color: #800180; font-family: inherit;">Mere talent is in literature what good intentions are in conduct.</span></i></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #333333;">Same with music. There are many more virtuosos than artists. Which is why so much music is inadequate, beauty being an adequation, precisely. "</span></span><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit;">The modern conception of art is false insofar as it puts
creative imagination -- or even simply the impulse to create" in the place of an adequation to the object of beauty:</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: transparent; font-family: inherit;">a subjective and conjectural valuation is substituted for an <b>objective
and spiritual one</b>; to do this is to replace by<b> talent alone</b> -- by talent real or illusory – that
skill and craftsmanship which must needs enter into the very definition of art, as if talent
could have meaning apart from the normative constants that are its criteria (Schuon, emphasis mine).</span></blockquote><p></p><span style="background-color: white;"><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">We are drowning in talent, in creativity, in imagination, that only make us more thirsty for the real thing -- a real thing that is again both interior and exterior. </span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i><span style="color: #800180;">Words do not communicate. They remind.</span></i></span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Same with music: we know it when we hear it. And we know <b>it </b>when we hear it, for it's a two-way communication or it's not communication at all. It is a Platonic re-collection, such that</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">The purpose of art is not <i>a priori</i> to induce aesthetic emotions, but to
transmit, together with these, a more or less direct spiritual message, and thus suggestions
emanating from, and leading back to, the liberating truth (Schuon).</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Boom. Can't put it more clearly and concisely than that. Except to say that</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">It is not the sole obligation of art to come down towards the
common people; it should also remain faithful to its intrinsic truth in order to allow men
to rise towards that truth.</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></p></blockquote><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Sacred art is made as a vehicle for spiritual presences.... profane art on the other hand exists only for man and by that very fact betrays him. </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">We're still just tuning up. I guess we haven't gotten very far, but then again, we've already gotten all the way to the toppermost of the poppermost. Not only is God <i>not </i>bereft of music, but we say he is the nonlocal source and pattern of music as such. To be continued.</span></p><p></p><p></p></span><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-17349579585219889282024-03-04T11:05:00.000-08:002024-03-04T17:19:48.615-08:00Theomusicology and the Song SupremeAs I've said before, music had better be important, or I've wasted most of my life. If you tally the hours, it's probably tied with reading for how I've spent the bulk of my waking hours. So it's heartening to read that "Music is not only an art. It is a clue to the cosmos" -- and that it's "not just one phenomenon among many but the secret key to understanding the whole of reality" (Leithart).<div><br /></div><div>But what have I learned, exactly, from all those hours? For it's not as if music conveys propositional statements about the nature of reality. Rather, its very form is the message it conveys. Its mere existence leads us to wonder in what kind of cosmos it is possible for it to exist. To paraphrase Nietzsche, a Cosmos without music would be a mistake.</div><div><br /></div><div>Supposing we take that literally, it would have to be possible for God to err. But God cannot err. Therefore music is necessary? Well, it's one of the constants of human nature, and we are I & L of the C, so there's that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Augustine, for example, "recognized that music offers special insights into the nature of time," for it is the quintessentially temporal art, seemingly testifying to an irreducibly positive character of time -- again, in contrast to the pagan view of time as degenerative:</div><blockquote><div>To be ultimately real, something has to be static, ever itself, not turning into something else, not aging or decaying..., impervious to time's changes.</div></blockquote><p>Conversely, it is impossible "to take in music in a moment" but "only through the process of listening":</p><blockquote><p>Music forces time upon us, but shows us that the passage of time and the patience it demands are gifts to be received rather than evils to be endured. </p></blockquote><p>Otherwise the best song would be the shortest and fastest, or maybe just a single note, like an eternal siren blast. </p><p>In the previous post we spoke of the intersubjectivity of man, which is -- in my opinion -- gorounded in the intersubjectivity of the Trinity. Well, this is mirrored in music too: its</p><blockquote><p>overlapping and interpenetrating quality is one of the ways that music points to the mysteries of the world, for time has precisely this layered musical quality.... Music's form is a trace of the form of the whole cosmos.</p></blockquote><p>Change my mind. But wait until I dive into this next book on the pile, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521785685?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" target="_blank">Theology, Music and Time</a>. Right now I want to finish with <u>Traces of the Trinity</u> before circling back to theomusicology proper. </p><p>In the penultimate chapter, Leithart describes what amounts to (IMO) a purely left-brainish view of the world whereby</p><blockquote><p>Every thought is constructed with sharp cuts, and thoughts are combined at right angles. Everything depends on <i>this</i> not being <i>that</i>, on keeping <i>that</i> and<i> this </i>from touching or slopping into each other.</p></blockquote><p>In other words, an atomistic -- and tone deaf -- world of pure external relations. But music, it seems, is a quintessentially right-brain activity. I'll have to check back with McGilchrist as we plunge into the next book.</p><p>At any rate, it sounds very right-brainish to say that "the Spirit is the music of God, who lends melody and rhythm to the Father's Word," and that "The Father, Son, and Spirit live in a harmony and love that is a model for human life." Likewise,</p><blockquote><p>the Spirit who hovered over the formless and empty waters harmonizes, orchestrates, and sets the rhythm for all things.</p></blockquote><p>Bottom line, at least insofar as this book is concerned: RELATION is a "transcendental category," "the leading feature not only of the divine life but also of created life." </p><p>In his book <u>Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World</u>, Zuckerkandl asks</p><blockquote><p>What must the world be like, what must I be like, if between me and the world the phenomenon of music can occur?</p></blockquote><p>I guess we're about to find out.</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-54620233658060788062024-03-03T11:22:00.000-08:002024-03-03T11:50:01.963-08:00Our Metaphorical Cosmos<p>Human beings, like any other biological entity, are open systems. Now, it's one thing to be open to objective things such as food, water, and oxygen, but what makes a human human is our openness to other human subjects: our intersubjectivity, a mutual indwelling that begins even before birth, in the womb. </p><p>There is and never has been such a thing as a radically isolated human being who only later becomes "social." So, philosophers who imagine otherwise, such as Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, are not <i>even</i> wrong. They're anthropological nonstarters we can dismiss with extreme prejudice. </p><blockquote><p>How these [intersubjective] individuals come to be in the first place is a large lacuna in early modern political and economic thought (Leithart).</p></blockquote><p>I'll say. Man is a "political animal" because he is an <i>intersubjective</i> animal, not vice versa. And -- as explained in my book -- the first society is the mother-infant dyad, which coarises with the mother-father dyad: fathers are needed in order to protect mothers who can care for premature, helpless, and neurologically incomplete infants. </p><p>The principle of this mysterious and otherwise inexplicable mutual indwelling is the Trinity. If creation bears the marks of the Creator, vestiges of this intersubjectivity are exactly what we would expect to find, instead of the last thing we would expect to find.</p><p>Yesterday I read a book that expands upon this idea, called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/1587433672?psc=1&ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_product_details" target="_blank">Traces of the Trinity: Signs of God in Creation and Human Experience</a>. As always, it's a relief to discover someone who suspects what I suspect, and has targeted God as a person of interest. Indeed, there is sufficient evidence to hold him for interrogation.</p><p>Of course, it's not the book I would write, since I am too lazy to write one. So let's just flip around and expand upon what Leithart has written. It's a fairly short book, so we may be able to manage it in a single post. I will try to focus on the new rather than the same old same old you've heard before. </p><p>You don't have to be an advocate of woowoo physics to know that</p><blockquote><p>Nothing is other than what it is, but nothing is what it is except by the other things that dwell in it, the other things among which it dwells. </p></blockquote><p>We touched on this yesterday via Whitehead's fallacy of misplaced concreteness. Not only is everything in motion -- a field of energy -- but <span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><i>everything is everywhere at all times, </i>and<i> </i></span><span style="background-color: white; font-style: italic;">every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world. </span><span style="background-color: white;">I call this alone a pretty, pretty big vestige of the Trinity, wherein the whole is in the parts, and vice versa.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">Back to human development,</span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white;">everyone I know started life in a pretty intimate "engagement" with another human whom the child eventually learned to call mother...</span></blockquote><p>That's how I remember it: "We all begin life indwelling another human," and "if there's one thing we're <i>not</i> at the beginning, it's by ourselves." In The Beginning "we're already a society."</p><p>Prior to <i>I think, therefore I am </i>is <i>We are, and with your help, maybe I can start organizing these chaotic thoughts without a thinker. </i>We all start out as progressive crybabies, but some of us move on.</p><p>Society + individual are "equi-primordial," existing "as distinct realities only by virtue of their interaction with each other." </p><p>Now clearly, to say that we <i>develop</i> is to say that we are temporal beings who change with time, and yet, remain the same. If not for the latter, then every developmental change would result in a new being with no continuity with what came before. As we discussed a couple of posts ago, this problem of time was handled very differently by pagan folk for whom "the fundamental agenda was to escape time" (Leithart).</p><blockquote><p>Greek religion was a quest for a rock of ages, resistant to the flow of time, a place or part or aspect of reality immune to change.... All Greek religion was a metaphysical "quest for the timeless ground of temporal being" (ibid.). </p></blockquote><p>Again, we can find that illusory place, except we can't be there to enjoy it. The cosmic<i> d'oh!</i> </p><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white;">But what if time is a cosmic <i>woo hoo! </i>What if <i>"</i>we say that time is of the <i>essence</i> of things, and that change is good, very good." After all, we are interrogating God, and that's what he says. </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white;">Time isn't a problem to be solved. It's a wonder and a mystery of human existence.... Without change, we wouldn't exist at all (ibid.).</span></blockquote><p>I would qualify that and say that "mere" temporality becomes problematic to the extent that it is detached from its nonlocal source and ground. Our time is complementary to -- we won't say <i>timelessness</i>. Let's just leave it open for now.</p><p>The next chapter is on the subject of language, and here again, without the mutual indwelling alluded to above, "language would not exist at all." In an analogy we've used before, "Language is like a<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="background-color: white;">Möbius strip in which inside and outside form a continuum" (ibid.). I actually prefer the image of a dynamic Klein bottle, but the point is the same:</span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBEWS_Dti65I5OR40nbYfFWZ6MsM62rq63_9eAqm39DpF-_Ie7xKvupjSzucTYZmVwOQkZX1gb7ujPO_OSmIU_UO2wxvlqmHRWmCKN93bmJtGxstoiC2sOCdVKuzQMNhHknzdvmETtz36SmAroSPWIQ66__IMyvEPywkjLWTsyCC47pS60dkVmsQ/s474/th-3811299428.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="216" data-original-width="474" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjBEWS_Dti65I5OR40nbYfFWZ6MsM62rq63_9eAqm39DpF-_Ie7xKvupjSzucTYZmVwOQkZX1gb7ujPO_OSmIU_UO2wxvlqmHRWmCKN93bmJtGxstoiC2sOCdVKuzQMNhHknzdvmETtz36SmAroSPWIQ66__IMyvEPywkjLWTsyCC47pS60dkVmsQ/w400-h183/th-3811299428.jpg" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: inherit;">We began yesterday's post with the Aphorist's claim that</span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white; color: #800180;">Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others. </i></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Leithart writes that</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The property of metaphor depends on the mutual indwelling of word in word, and of world in word.... if words indwell words, and if things and words are mutually indwelling, then metaphor is not imposed from outside but a revelation of the character of language, the intimate interpenetration of one word by others. </span></p></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">This is ultimately because "mutual penetration is not something imposed on the world but the basic pattern of reality." </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">That's enough for today. I think we have sufficient evidence to bring an indictment, but we'll spell it out further tomorrow.</span></span></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-72236988199879540832024-03-02T09:39:00.000-08:002024-03-02T16:11:11.164-08:00Sympathy for the Deity, or The Source of Deep Comedy<blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="color: #800180;">Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others. </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">--</span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Dávila</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">And a good thing, because otherwise nothing could tell us about anything else. But in this cosmos, <i>anything</i> tells us a bit about <i>everything</i>. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Whitehead's fallacy of simple location rests on the outdated assumption that an entity</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">is where it is, in a definite region of space, and throughout a definite finite duration of time, apart from any reference of the relations of that bit of matter to other regions of space and to other durations of time.</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Nothing is righthere rightnow, for "each volume of space, each lapse of time, includes in its essence aspects of all volumes of space, or all lapses of time."</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">in a certain sense, <b>everything is everywhere at all times</b>. For every location involves an aspect of itself in every other location. Thus, <b>every spatio-temporal standpoint mirrors the world</b> (Whitehead, emphasis mine).</span></blockquote><p>Oh. That explains a lot. </p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Along these lines, Leithart writes that "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">the Trinity is the ground of metaphor," insofar as it reflects the "is/is not" structure, the metacosmic <i>notshall </i>discussed in yesterday's post: t</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">he Father can't be the Son, and yet, we have it on good authority that <i>If you have seen me, you have seen the Father</i>. </span></p><p><i style="font-family: inherit;">"</i><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">And this positive-negative"</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">is reflected in every feature of the creation. Creation contains objects that are really distinct and separate from one another.... At the same time, Scripture indicates that one thing can stand for, represent, or symbolize other things. Things in creation indwell other things (Leithart).</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Especially human things, who are intersubjective right down (and up) to the ground. Show me a human who isn't, and I'll show you a sociopath or an autistic person exiled from intersubjectivity, precisely.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">I just saw a movie last night with a brilliant depiction of sociopathy by Jake Gyllenhaal, called <i>Nightcrawler</i>. In it, he looks like someone who learned how to imitate human beings from a pamphlet. He knows the words but not the music. The facsimile is awkward and creepy, much like when a politician such as Brandon, Schiff, Warren, or Newsom take a stab at appearing quasi-human. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">At any rate, "</span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">This perichoretic 'is/is not'... structure is inherent in God and the very source of metaphor." And again, </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">it is the shape of time and history as well. Time is divided into past, present and future, and yet these are not wholly distinct.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Much like music, as discussed in the previous two posts: "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">the trinitarian life is a rhythm of self-giving and return within the life of God." <i>Play it again, I AM</i>.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, God is a musician. Is he also a divine comedian? "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">Is the life of the Trinity comic?," asks Leithart in the book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Comedy-Trinity-Tragedy-Literature/dp/1591280273/ref=sr_1_1?crid=J0VBPWNVW2V1&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Lzies3QDO0XXNU60Zv36A7hEIAabbiGjc1fby0oYb_k.TJA20maEvQsD0h7wImwH_PZkXV-WxX3JnG0l9DejbHg&dib_tag=se&keywords=leithart+deep+comedy&qid=1709321268&sprefix=leithart+deep+comedy%2Caps%2C158&sr=8-1" target="_blank">Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope In Western Literature</a>. Well,</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">for Greek philosophy tragedy was woven into the fabric of existence, and... these tragic obsessions are common elements of modern and postmodern thought as well.</span></blockquote><p>As we know, pagan time is cyclical and degenerative instead of linear and teleological. To the extent that there is a "happy ending," it is the result of a return to the Origin, the golden age prior to the "fall" into time. "For Platonic and Neoplatonic metaphysics," the later is worser, thus history is "essentially tragic": "the world" is</p><blockquote><p>bound to degenerate and decline until it sputter[s] to a halt... If it is cyclical, history merely repeats the story of decline again and again.... the ancient world, and the classical world in particular, knew nothing of eschatology... the view that history moves toward an end that is greater than the beginning. <b>The classical world knew nothing of "deep comedy"</b> (emphasis mine).</p></blockquote><p>All because the Resurrection is the eschatological <i>guffah-HA!</i> experience. Conversely, "The cyclic theory is most often found in the service of pessimism. The last state is always worse then the first," AKA the eschatological <i>d'oh! </i>The latter is Murphy's Law elevated to metaphysical principle.</p><p>The question is, how to we get the joke and see to it that the cosmos isn't laughing <i>at</i> us but <i>with</i> us? Well, a good start is the doctrine of creation, which provides a ground "for real newness and invention" instead of the same old same old. </p><p>This is why Christendom has been so creative compared to all other civilizations. It is certainly why we had the best comedians, and why comedy has become increasingly unfunny in our post-Christian world. Why is the Babylon Bee -- run by Christians -- so much funnier than our late nite anti-comedians? </p><blockquote><p>Death and resurrection, of course, is <i>the </i>comic theme, the comic theme of history, and there is thus a "comic" structure to the triune life...</p></blockquote><p>What did Eckhart say?</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #202122;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the core of the Trinity the Father laughs and gives birth to the Son. The Son laughs back at the Father and gives birth to the Spirit. The whole Trinity laughs and gives birth to us.</span></span></blockquote><p>Comedy is a serious business. We know that a true theory of reality will be beautiful. Will it also be funny?</p><blockquote><p>"Laughter has a deep philosophical meaning; it is one of the essential forms of the truth concerning the world as a whole.... Certain essential aspects of the world are accessible only to laughter" (in Leithart). </p></blockquote><p>We suggested in the previous post that we love music because it reveals the form of time. Perhaps we love comedy because it too reveals something essential about reality. We think of both of these -- music and comedy -- as subjective, but key aspects of the world are completely inaccessible to mere objectivity, which can't get the joke.</p><p>In order to be receptive to the full range of evidence, we must adopt an attitude of intersubjective receptivity, which we symbolize (o), which is a kind of sympathy for the deity:</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">we are all familiar with regions of intelligible fact which are only perceptible in the sunlight of a favourable attitude. Sympathy does not create the personal facts it desires, it reveals them; and there are many true facts sympathy appreciates, to which suspicion closes our eyes (Farrer).</span></blockquote><p>Paranoia is just one of the attitudes that closes off empathy. Other modes and mechanisms include projection, autism, cynicism, mistrust, envy, victimolatry, ideology, and schizoid defenses, all serving to enclose the person in what amounts to a "pseudo-subjectivity" that is only about itself, not about properly intersubjective reality. </p><p>Turns out that the same empathy we have for our fellow humans "is required for any recognition of God," and that "Religion is more like response to a friend, than it is like obedience to an expert." Conversely,</p><blockquote><p>The blind eye of suspicion may reduce our neighbour to a cunning beast; it can utterly shut out the being of God (ibid.).</p></blockquote><p>And that's not funny.</p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-1198974843107821412024-03-01T10:08:00.000-08:002024-03-01T10:41:47.587-08:00The Trinity in a Notshall<p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Another cold opening: </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">The Son and Spirit </span><i style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">must</i><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;"> be "something different" from the Father, and the Father/Principle would not be perfect "if it did not, of itself, produce the terms that as terms are different from it" (Leithart).</span></blockquote><p></p><p> I<span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">n a notshall,</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">"</span><b style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">not</b><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">" is essential to the life of God and our speaking of it, for the Father is</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;"> </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">not</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">the Son, the Son is</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;"> </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">not</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">the Spirit, and the Spirit is</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;"> </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">not </i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">the Father. "</span><b style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Not</b><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">" marks the "interval," the nonspatial but absolute distance between person and person" (emboldenment mine).</span></blockquote><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">The Absolute includes this "absolute distance"? YES, and this distance facilitates the absolute relationship between the Persons, or the eternally en-thusiastic YES they share with one another:</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">This absolute difference is simultaneously an absolute intimacy of mutual perichoretic indwelling, but the perichoretic communion depends on the absolute difference, since an undifferentiated God is merely a union and not a </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">com</i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">-union at all.</span></blockquote><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Not <i>even</i> a union, just a monistic </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">blob </i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">with no possibility of blabbing between persons</span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">. </i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Three's company but one's a cloud. Of eternally silent unknowability.</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: #800180; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; text-indent: 9px;">Monism is an attitude that violates half of the experience.</span></blockquote><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">Or, two thirds, to be precise. But even then, it seems to me that experience has to be "of" something -- or someone -- that is not itself.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">And as we said yesterday about the principle of time being found in the Trinity,</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">God </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">begins</b><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">as Father,</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;"> </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">moves</b><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;"> </span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">as Son,</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;"> </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">completes</b><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;"> as Spirit; God exists as "past," as "present," as "future" (Leithart, emphasis mine).</span></blockquote><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">This is the eternal pattern, the AlphOmega of temporal creation; and why, as the Aphorist says,</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: #800180; font-family: inherit; font-style: italic; text-indent: 9px;">Creation is the nexus between eternity and history.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">Leithart continues:</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">For just this reason and this reason only, the Creator is capable of creating while remaining entirely and utterly himself....</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: inherit; text-indent: 9px;">Just as the Father eternally gives himself wholly to the Son, so the Trinity eternally gives up having an exclusive hold on the divine property of existence, calling creatures to exist.</span></blockquote><p> <span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">And Here We Are. "Creation's history is"</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">"nothing other than the created image, extended in space and time, of that nothing/all of the love which in God the Trinity is the Word/Son of the Father..." (Piero Coda, in Leithart). </span></blockquote><p> <span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Nothing/All? We've gone this far. Why not?</span></p><p></p><blockquote><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">nothing </i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">because he [the Son] receives his being from the love of the Father;</span><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;"> </span><i style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">all </i><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">because the infinite fullness of the Father is fully reflected and expressed in him (ibid.).</span></blockquote><p> <span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Expressed in another orthoparadoxical notshall,</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">The nothingness of love is the trinitarian grammar with which the book of creation is written (ibid.).</span></blockquote><p> <span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">That smells fumiliar:</span></p><p></p><blockquote><i style="background-color: white; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: #800180; font-family: inherit;">The universe is a useless dictionary for someone who does not provide its proper syntax.</i></blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Let's sink into the abstract Now. What is it without a concrete relation to past and future?</span><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">The life of the triune God is not a "sheer point of presence" but "a life among persons" that is "constituted in a structure of relations" (ibid.).</span></blockquote><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Not a lifeless blob but endless blab. And to threepeat,</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">in God is a "'past and 'future,' which is identical with the distinction between the Father and the Spirit" (ibid.).</span></blockquote><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">The teleological structure of time is built into the cake of being, and I am tempted to ask this guy if I can buy some pot from him.</span></p><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">We, of course, are "stretched between memory and desire" -- d'oh! -- or "between past and future on the knife-edge 'nothing' of the present moment.... </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Time is a dimension of our experiencing anything at all." It is</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">an objective, "architectural" feature of the world because it is the distension of the eternal Trinity in time.</span></blockquote><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">With all due respect, Plato is wrong: "</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Time is not a moving image of motionless eternity," rather</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">Created time is a moving image of the dynamic, structured, infinitely mobile life of the Father who begets the Son, from whom the Spirit proceeds. </span><b style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">It moves because it <i>shares</i> the infinitely mobile life of God</b><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;"> (emphasis mine).</span></blockquote><p><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">It is irreversible because it hurtles higgledy piggledy toward its own eternal fulfillment in God, or "is enclosed within the irreversible eternal ordered life of the Trinity." As Petey once whimsically put it in plain unglish,</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: red; text-indent: 9px;">light plunges an undying fire into its own shadow and </span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: red; font-size: xx-large; text-indent: 9px;">f</span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: red; text-indent: 9px;"><span style="font-size: large;">a</span></span><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: initial; caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: red; text-indent: 9px;"><span style="font-size: medium;">l</span>l<span style="font-size: x-small;">s </span>in love with the productions of time. And thank-you, we said, thanking the man for this undertaking of mortality, for our daily lessons in evanescence, for this manifestivus for the restavus! </span></blockquote><p></p><p style="text-indent: 9px;">Or in plain English, </p><p></p><blockquote><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 9px;">We live, move, and have being in time because we live, move, and have our being in the God who is Beginning, Middle, and End.... All that moves in time dances in the steps of the temporally ordered communion of Father, Son, and Spirit..., as the whence and wither of created time mirror and share the eternal life of God.</span> </blockquote><p><span style="text-indent: 9px;">And we're back to music. Leithart writes of the "music of spacetime," and of how in Genesis "time is radically anti-presentist: "the Creator is to the creation as singer to a song. And there is no ongoing song except as the singer continues to sing.... the rhythm of created time is the rhythm of triune life."</span></p><p><span style="text-indent: 9px;">Rhythm and Deus? </span><span style="text-indent: 9px;">In another book by Leithart called </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Comedy-Trinity-Tragedy-Literature/dp/1591280273/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2VTP9ZB8OOK6U&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.Lzies3QDO0XXNU60Zv36A7hEIAabbiGjc1fby0oYb_k.TJA20maEvQsD0h7wImwH_PZkXV-WxX3JnG0l9DejbHg&dib_tag=se&keywords=leithart+deep+comedy&qid=1709315327&s=books&sprefix=leithart+deep+comedy%2Cstripbooks%2C171&sr=1-1" style="text-indent: 9px;" target="_blank">Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, & Hope In Western Literature</a>, he writes of how</p><blockquote><p>the present moment, like a musical note, is what it is because of what has gone before and is in turn shaped by what comes after, so that every present contains within itself traces of the past and seeds of the future.</p></blockquote><p>A voice in my head is singing: <span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>There once was a note pure and easy / </i></span></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Playing so free like a breath rippling by.</i></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"> Play us out, Petey:</span></span></p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/J9-IyAqsn9k" width="320" youtube-src-id="J9-IyAqsn9k"></iframe></div><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-26516632894896066792024-02-29T10:39:00.000-08:002024-02-29T10:49:21.740-08:00Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy<p>Cold opening:</p><blockquote><p>the Bible, <i>never</i>, for even a single clause, teaches a strict, monadic monotheism. The Bible <i>never</i> teaches that God is simply one, without simultaneously hinting at, however teasingly, plurality within the divine life (Leithart).</p></blockquote><p>Oh? </p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #001320; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one.</i></span></span></blockquote><p>Recall that there is<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">natural theology (</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↗O</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">) and supernatural revelation (O</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↘</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">), and the complementary relationship between them (</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">↔</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">). </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">But perhaps there is also an </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">↔</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">) between revelation and its subsequent development? Certainly we need to revisit Genesis 1 with our later revelation of the Trinity, but Leihart maintains that it was there implicitly from the start.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">He's not wrong. But is he right? </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">The sequence of revelation is not from monotheism to trinitarian monotheism because Genesis 1 is already nascently trinitarianism. </span></blockquote><p>There are some obvious clues, for example, <i>Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness</i>. Some people say that's just the royal we, even though that convention didn't exist for another millennium or so. Others say God is talking to the angels, even though we are not made in the image of angels.</p><p>Later, with the events of Genesis 3, "the Lord warns that Adam has 'become like one of Us.'" Or pretends to have, anyway. Big. Mistake. There's also Babel, when God says "Come, let Us go down" and check this thing out. </p><p>Genesis does not depict a "frozen... block of absolute essence," because such a being "would be 'impotent to create,' incapable of communicating himself because he is enclosed within himself." </p><p>Say what you want, but this Creator "is supremely self-diffusive." He can scarcely contain himself. Full of en-thusiasm you might say, which means literally <i>entheos</i>, veritably brimming with the spirit of God. </p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white;">The Spirit is the passion, the source and center of the emotional life of the Creator.</span></blockquote><p>E<i>motion</i>? Isn't that a human -- even neurobiological -- thing? Yes, but what is its principle? "The Creator's yearning is not like our yearning. He does not long for what he lacks." Well, that's a relief. What is it, then?</p><p>One doesn't want to put words in his mouth or emotions in his heart, but -- perhaps? --</p><blockquote><p>His longing is the longing of infinite fullness, undiluted joy, sheer bliss, not the longing to have what is absent but longing to share what is superabundantly present.</p></blockquote><p>Unlike our yearning for what we lack, the Father yearns for what he always already has in the Son? And vice versa?</p><p>The One and the Many. Problem solved:</p><blockquote><p>Trinitarian Christianity disturbs the simple contrast of one and many by redefining unity as a harmony of difference and difference as the dynamic of unity. Unity is only manifest and realized in multiplicity.</p></blockquote><p>I'll buy that. We've said before that music mimics the form of reality, and is maybe even why man loves music:</p><blockquote><p>The "harmony of the Trinity is... not the harmony of a finished totality but a 'musical' harmony of infinity."</p></blockquote><p>Infinite harmony. I'll buy that too. Time out for some heavenly harmonies: </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/8Dc2z_0mAYM" width="320" youtube-src-id="8Dc2z_0mAYM"></iframe></div><p></p><blockquote><p>Elsewhere in Scripture, the Spirit is the source of sound, including the sound of music.</p></blockquote><p>Example?</p><p></p><blockquote><i>'Elohim </i>the Creator, creating by and through his Spirit, is God most musical... he joyfully sings a creation that can, and will, join to harmonize on his eternal song. </blockquote><p>Too fruity, or not fruity enough? It reminds me of something I wrote in the book about "the polyphonic score that surrounds and abides within us," and how we may "harmonize existence in our own beautiful way, and thereby hear the vespered strains of the song supreme." Nah, too fruity.</p><blockquote><p>The time of Genesis is the layered, multiply rhythmic, multi-melody time of polyphony.</p></blockquote><p>Recall what we were saying -- if you could tolerate the pedantry -- about the complementary categories of abstract and concrete. In all Primordial Complementarities, one must be prior, and in this case -- somewhat surprisingly -- it is the Concrete. </p><p>Which led us to the coonclusion that the abstract has no independent existence outside the concrete:<span style="font-family: inherit;"> "<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa." In Hartshorne's words, </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">"Any concrete case contains the entire unlimited form," therefore "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">God as merely absolute is nonactual, whereas God-as-relative is concrete person."</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Which is why we agree wholeheadedly with the Aphorist that</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="color: #800180; font-family: inherit;"><i>Truth is a person.</i></span></blockquote><p>And this person is a musician? Well, let's say that music is the concrete expression of time. This being the case, it is more real than any purely abstract notion of time.</p><blockquote><p>Creation has no immutable dance floor. It is nothing but [concrete] dancing, all the way down and all the way up (Leithart).</p></blockquote><p>Again, "We are tempted to think technical measures of time are more basic, fundamental, and true than everyday natural or cultural rhythms," but nah, "Time is, most fundamentally, personal time," which is "composed by the Word of a tryhypostatic person." </p><p>If this is the case, then we have to rethink our metaphysic, because Eternity would an utterly unthinkable abstraction from concrete time. This is for both Petey and Pascal, </p><p><i><span style="color: red;">Not the God of the philosophers, not the God of the scholars! (p. 261).</span></i></p><p>Cards on the table: I've suggested before that time is a distant reflection of the "time" it takes for the Father to generate the Son. This, of course, is a quintessentially timeless *process* that takes place in eternity, because there was never a time when the Son did not exist.</p><p>To which we say: oh?</p><p>Leithart alludes to what he calls the "metaphysical temptation," which for me connotes a flight into the pure abstraction alluded to above. But if the real is the Concrete, then we have to resist this temptation, for "of a non-Creator's relation to time we know nothing because there is literally nothing to know." </p><p>For again: the (concrete) Creator creates (concretely). Ultimately,</p><blockquote><p>Time's order is determined by persons, above all by the ordered life of the triune persons. Hence, the movement of time through past, present, and future mirrors the eternal, and eternally realized, becoming and unfolding of the triune Source, Radiance, and Diffusion.</p></blockquote><p>Hey, that's what I think! But it sure is nice to find someone else who thinks it.</p><p>I try not to burden readers with more than 1,000 words a day, so, to be continued. Sun Ra, play us out, whatever that means.</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/i5Lkp7Go-po" width="320" youtube-src-id="i5Lkp7Go-po"></iframe></div><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-59787411369231178832024-02-28T09:59:00.000-08:002024-02-28T13:35:08.966-08:00The Absolute Relative and the Merely Absolute<p>If God is the Absolute Relative, does this make man the<i> relative absolute? </i>Maybe -- especially post-Incarnation -- but even the world isn't the <i>relative relative, </i>because that would reduce to the absolute nihilism of the left, AKA the tyranny of relativism. Creation is only possible because </p><blockquote><p>The Creator is<i> internally</i> related, a speaking communion capable of internal address, a God who says "us" (Leithart).</p></blockquote><p>Emphasis mine: "<b>This internal relationship is the condition of possibility for creation</b>."</p><p>I've been saying this for twenty years, so it is a relief to find someone else saying it so clearly. </p><p>Insofar as the principle of creation is concerned, it is grounded in the God who "is always already related to what is <i>other</i> than himself."</p><p>Granted, I believe we can take this doctrine too far and make the Creator dependent upon the creation. This is what Whitehead, Hartshorne, and other process philosophers do: too much (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: Georgia, serif; font-size: 13px;">→</span>) contaminating th<span style="font-family: inherit;">e <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">(O</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↘</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">), ultimately reducing to pantheism. Ask a process philosopher if God exists and the answer is <i>Yes, but not yet. </i></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Oops. Next sentence: "Creator and creation are joined in mutual relation, a relation we must finally describe as mutually <i>dependent</i>." Given that the first principle is (in Norris Clarke's formulation and now mine) <i>substance-in-relation</i>, it is not a wholly unreasonable assertion. So how do we tweak it, and what do we put in its place? </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">More problematically, are we defying our own statement from yesterday about the principle of noncontradiction? </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">Bob wondered to himself. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">We will put that in the cosmic hopper and hope for an answer by the end of the post. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">Leithart qualifies the mutual dependence, calling it "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">radically asymmetrical," being that "Creation need not have existed." However, once creation exists, God -- it would seem -- places himself in a position of "<span style="font-size: x-small;">dependence</span>." He is <i>related</i> to his cosmos. He cares about it. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">Analogously, I didn't have to create a dependent. But once I did... Am I dependent on my dependent? Yes, very much so, but again, not only is there asymmetry, but as any parent can tell you, I'll bet I care about him more than he cares about me. </span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">Not to say that he doesn't care, but back when he was a little guy, we would tell him that he won't know how much we love him until he has a little guy of his own.</span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">Does this analogy tell us anything about God? <i>Create your own cosmos, then you'll know how much I love this one!</i></span></p><p><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="background-color: white;">As alluded to above, I can't agree with everything Hartshorne says, but I do agree with him that God is <i>omnipathos</i>: <a href="https://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2014/11/omniscience-omnipotence-omnipathos.html" target="_blank">here</a> is something from an old post, and let's see how it holds up:</span></span></p><p><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">One thing that Hartshorne highlights is the "omnipathos" of God. This is a very useful word, because it means that, in addition to being all-knowing and all-powerful, he is all-feeling.</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Right there we see an interesting Trinity consisting of truth, love, and power, each conditioned by the other. More to the point, if we deny God's omnipathos, there is no way for him to meaningfully relate to us -- to put himself in our shoes. But isn't this what the Incarnation is all about?</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Hartshorne makes the intriguing point that God is not only the cause of all effects (the First Cause), but also </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">the effect of all causes</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">: the First Effect. This would be the metaphysical basis of his all-feeling omnipathos, as it means that he is supremely receptive to his own creation (or better, perpetual creativity).</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">This leads to one of Hartshorne's most controversial ideas, that God "changes." Quite simply, he changes because he is truly receptive to his creation -- hence also the "suffering with." Hartshorne believes that the overemphasis on the notion of Unchanging Absolute -- as we've discussed in the past -- is a Greek import, not truly biblical (not to mention incoherent and ultimately absurd).</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">In the Greek conception, time is completely devalued in favor of eternity. Time is change, and change is bad because it cannot disclose unchanging truth.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">But there is change and there is change. For example, there is decadence, deterioration, corruption, degradation, dissolution, decline -- you know, Obama style change.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">But there is also growth, development, maturation, perfection, etc. These are very different things. For Hartshorne, God possesses <i>super-eminent relativity</i>, meaning that his omnipathos is to our empathy as his omniscience is to our knowing. But it is certainly not to be thought of as a <i>deficit</i>. Rather, it is a kind of <i>perfect</i> attunement.</span></blockquote><p>Like the perfect parent. </p><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">On a purely logical basis, how could God even have knowledge unless that knowledge is related to a known? No, we don't want to simply anthropomorphize him, but nor should we say that God has knowledge if we mean something <i>totally different</i> by the word. As Hartshorne writes, if</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">the divine knowledge is purely absolute, hence involves no relation to things known, what analogy can it have to what is commonly meant by knowledge, which seems to be nothing without such a relation?</span></blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Yes, he is the cause of this world, but here again, what is a cause without an effect? To say that in God cause and effect are absolutely one is to simply deny cause and effect, and to enclose him in a static monad.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The same applies to free will. If being omnipotent -- all-powerful -- means that we humans have <i>no</i> power, then that ends the discussion. But if omnipotence is bound up with omniscience (bearing in mind that to know is to relate) <i>and</i> omnipathos, then this changes the equation.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">As Hartshorne writes, "Power to cause someone to perform by his own choice an act precisely defined by the cause is meaningless." Again, if God's omnipotence excludes our limited potency, then he is as pointlessly enclosed in his own circuitous locution as any deconstructionist.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">If we consider the creation, we see that it is woven of chance and necessity, of freedom and constraint, of boundary conditions and emergent phenomena, of order and surprise. Perhaps this tells us something about its creator. Too much order equates to absolute omnipotence in the traditional sense, but a world of pure chance is inconceivable.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Even leaving all the specifics to the side, life makes no sense without this oddly "perfect" cosmic complementarity of design and freedom (which I would say is the very essence of creativity). Furthermore, "the reality of chance is the very thing that makes providence significant," because otherwise any intervention by God is just necessity in deusguise.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Running out of time here, but perhaps "maximizing relativity as well as absoluteness in God enables us to conceive him as supreme person." Unless by "personhood" we mean something totally alien to us.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">For if God is "in all aspects absolute, then literally it is 'all the same' to him, a matter of utter indifference, whether we do this or do that, whether we live or die, whether we joy or suffer." In short, if this is "personal," then we aren't.</span></blockquote><p>End of excerpt. I see that I dealt with objections in the <a href="https://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2014/11/merely-absolute.html" target="_blank">next post</a>, and let me extract any useful nuggets. It gets a little technical, but here goes:</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">For Hartshorne, God is both absolute and relative: absolute in the abstract but relative in the concrete. In short, absolute/relative is an <i>irreducible</i> complementarity, something which I believe is a fundamental lesson of the Trinity.</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The Trinity cannot be further reduced to something less (or more) than itself (i.e., an impersonal monad) without thereby losing its identifying features of love, relationship, knowledge, creation, etc. Behind or before the Father is not an ontological bachelor; we might even say that the Trinity is just as much an <i>effect</i> as a cause of eternal love-in-relation. Certainly it is a way to conceptualize, frame, and think about this eternal love.</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">For me, one of Hartshorne's most helpful ideas -- and it can be used in many contexts -- is that when faced with a complementarity, the more concrete of the two complements is the more fundamental.</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thus, for example, the unchanging God is the abstract <i>form</i> of "the supreme personality as such." It is like saying Joe is Joe. Without ever actually meeting him in the flesh, we can affirm that Joe is Joe, has always been Joe, and will always be Joe. In that sense, Joe is unchanging, for Joe = Joe.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">But there is also the concrete state of "God as person caring for the creatures he has created." This is the real Joe, not just the idea of Joe. For Hartshorne, "The abstract does not act, only the concrete acts or is a person." Furthermore -- and this is the (for me) revolutionary part -- "it is the divine Person that contains the Absolute, not vice versa" -- just as "the man contains his character, not the character the man."</span> </blockquote><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Any concrete case," writes Hartshorne, "contains the entire unlimited form." For example, consistent with Aristotle, there is no abstract realm of disembodied ideas.</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Rather, the idea is in its concrete expression: <b>any</b> man is an instance of man-as-such. Thus, the abstract form<i> appears </i>"unlimited, not because it has all possible cases in actualized form, but because it has no actual case within it, being the common form of all actuality, and no actuality whatever."</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">In short, abstract possibility "is unlimited because it is not actualized at all. It is everything in the form of possibility, nothing whatever in the form of actuality."</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Therefore </i><span style="font-family: inherit;">-- and I realize this is a Big Leap for many people, "God as merely absolute is nonactual," whereas God-as-relative is concrete person.</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">I love that <i><b>merely</b></i> absolute. For example, if someone were to try to sell me on Islam, the first thing I might say is: "Allah? He is <i>merely</i> absolute. He can't be the real thing. He can't even be actual. He's just an abstraction, not a concrete person."</span></blockquote><p></p><p style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">Perhaps this is why the <i>only</i> way to relate to the abstract Father is through the concrete Son, always and forever. God is our eternal relative, and we his.</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="color: #333333;">[A]s absolute, God is 'simple,' has no constituents. But this only shows once more that it is God as relative that is the inclusive conception.... A wholly absolute God is power divorced from responsiveness or sensitivity...</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: inherit;">--Hartshorne</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">And here we are. Back to Leithart:</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Once we have baked in this asymmetrical reciprocity, we can say without hesitation or qualm that God is responsive to creation." We just need a bigger -- and more omnipathos -- God, AKA the Absolute Relative. </span></span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The only God who <i>is</i> is the related God, the God who has created a world that is other than himself and who, in that very act, has related himself to a world other than himself. The quest for an <i>un</i>related non-Creator is quixotic, for an unrelated God has nothing to do with us.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">"God is </span><i style="font-family: inherit;">actualized</i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> as Creator"; and "We have to do only with the Absolute-relative, never with the Absolute" (Leithart).</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">I guess that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.</span></span></p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-8904407874780033392024-02-27T11:13:00.000-08:002024-02-27T14:39:35.545-08:00The Motion in the Ocean of Being<p>A bold claim about the Angelic Doctor: "His doctrine of God is partially but not fully baptized." I don't even like to go there, and I don't know if I would put it that way, but if the principle of noncontradiction holds -- which it must -- then God is either immutable or he isn't, and that's all there is to it. No fudging.</p><p>By the way, the principle of noncontradiction isn't spelled out in scripture. Rather, it's an example of something we work out from our side -- one of those self-evident truths without which there could be no truth. Must it apply to O? Can't God violate it if he wants and do whatever he feels like doing? Isn't he the God of pure Napoleonism, doing</p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdSPzmRZ_3MmPIfl5TfX4j7c7FiORdcI-UvHfQIRrneeYK4V_xMzn4OY_JlXPESx0Zj-siS1nAizqodPUatsvwh5mxmj9U2gGK9MbMIcX8LYbAiy0vggG4CbTWw0jrH9pGZvTjv_TYEwVgQliCP2Wyl-H5H_jlnCpnLFBg-xUIdmoAyOqAmEbgWA/s474/th-1515432153.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="225" data-original-width="474" height="152" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgdSPzmRZ_3MmPIfl5TfX4j7c7FiORdcI-UvHfQIRrneeYK4V_xMzn4OY_JlXPESx0Zj-siS1nAizqodPUatsvwh5mxmj9U2gGK9MbMIcX8LYbAiy0vggG4CbTWw0jrH9pGZvTjv_TYEwVgQliCP2Wyl-H5H_jlnCpnLFBg-xUIdmoAyOqAmEbgWA/w320-h152/th-1515432153.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><p>No, because that would be the voluntaristic God of Calvin or Mohammed, one of pure will if not willfulness, impervious to reason, and eating all our steak. </p><p>I doubt if readers are as enthusiastic about my symbols as I am, but let's review: there is natural theology (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↗O</span>) and there is supernatural revelation (O<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↘</span>), but also a complementary relationship between them (<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">↔</span>). </p><p>Someone like Luther would say that (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↗O</span>) is worthless if not diabolical, and that all we can know of God is what he reveals to us: to say <i>sola scriptura</i> and <i>sola fide</i> is to say <i>sola<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></i><span style="font-family: inherit;">(O<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↘</span>), even if it makes no sense to us and cannot be reconciled with reason.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">For us this is a nonstarter. For we have to have <i>some </i>conception of O or we could never speak or know of it at all, even if it were hand delivered to us from God himself. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">But man qua man is always seeking God, or in other words, man has the dynamic form of </span>(<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↗O</span>), which is why when the shepherd calls, the sheep know his voice; it must sound like God or we couldn't distinguish it from spam.</p><p>To put it another way, man is not only the image and likeness of O, but is conformed to it. Nevertheless conformity takes time. I want to say that the time it takes is the timelessness it takes for the Father to generate the Son, but that's getting ahead of ourpost. </p><p>Here at One Cosmos we are all about... <i>one cosmos</i>. What I mean is that we insist that there is a harmonious and fruitful relationship (<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">↔</span>) between (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↗O</span>) and (O<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↘</span>). Once we receive the latter then we can apply it to the former and adjust it accordingly.</p><p>A classic example of this comes from Thomas himself. Natural theology cannot prove whether or not the universe had a beginning or is eternal. But Thomas accepts from revelation that it did have a beginning. Therefore he adjusts his metaphysic accordingly.</p><p>Now, the first thing revelation reveals about God is that he is a Creator, and this too is full of implications. In fact, the next chapter of the <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Creator-Theological-Interpretation-Genesis-1/dp/1514002167/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2CQTSR1IO7XG5&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hHHhCxH9HaqVqaypxzq0Qs0ghLlM1hHRWYINvtjumHmRMjRNTkqH2H7heoAJlFdwH7Jb2Rq-sausEYMo9xGLOC4oWNgI1U8X4m_Goqf2Hyhf2edyPb_5_UbFb0l2VGMxiMfofme2vfsQigbmVlCRye0FOHxIpKK95kb9MGd0Wz1HrN0W1veatGbdUSgG-66dKZqpLP2Y68DFSbDS8q7DM9ZiglRPnlpq39LD55y0i3tfzl5f-SJLMcOg5B39Ej41rzTofWE09-qhlABVIXcxxvhtTlsIRJFQ9_ZWswNpJGQ.bCV81CZLV5sPnke7JTb-W8BLc8d4Kg7AaAJuSQ42pSE&dib_tag=se&keywords=peter+leithart+books&qid=1708795723&sprefix=peter+leithart%2Caps%2C176&sr=8-2" target="_blank">book</a> we're looking at is called <i>Creator</i>, and let the flipping commence. Speaking of eternity,</p><blockquote><p>If God-as-Creator is identical to God-as-God, perhaps creation is eternal. On the other hand, if creation is not eternal, it seems God "becomes" Creator... </p></blockquote><p>Leithart asks, "is the doctrine of creation compatible with the belief that God is absolutely simple and unchangeable?" (as maintained by Thomas). More to the point, "<i>Could a simple God create in the way Genesis 1 says God created</i>?"</p><p>Here again, this is an example of how we must harmonize our metaphysic via (<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">↔</span>). </p><blockquote><p>Either a creator is always creating, in which case he will be an actual creator, or he is merely a <i>potential</i> creator until he begins to create. </p></blockquote><p>Now, scripture tells us nothing about any <i>potential</i> creator. Rather, only about <i>the</i> Creator who creates. It is not as if we can seek some extra-scriptural entity who is the real God behind and above the one revealed to us in scripture.</p><p>I suppose we could do that, but that would be an unauthorized use of (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↗O</span>) -- as if we can override God with our own conception of him.</p><p>In short, <i>idolatry</i>, which is to say, Genesis 3 All Over Again. Back to the critique of Thomas, </p><blockquote><p>If the Creator is fully actualized in every respect, without any form of potency, and if the Creator is incapable of change, then it seems the world must be eternal and the Creator must create.</p></blockquote><p>But how can this be reconciled with the doctrine that God freely creates -- in other words, that the world is a contingent gift that need not have been given? "In my view, Thomas's efforts to reconcile absolute simplicity and free creation fail." This is what we might call illegitimate<span style="font-family: inherit;"> <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="color: #494949;">→</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">), which is to say, forcing God into our own conception of how he must roll.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Let's reverse imagineer this cosmos: God wills to create it. But "Can a simple God create?" For a "simple God is always already fully actualized, whether or not creation exists." Thus,</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">Thomas's doctrine of God cannot get past the first verse of the Bible before slamming into incoherence. Something has gone wrong.</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">But what?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: red;">THE ABSOLUTE RELATIVE</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><i>Thaaaat's right</i>, Petey, that is the orthoparadoxical answer to all our existential questions and ontological conundrums. In fact, it is the subtitle of the next section. Let us dive in.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">"God" is a relational term, describing the relation of the Absolute to the world.... it is not enough for God to be Absolute, "self-enclosed and all-exclusive."</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Again, how would it be "possible for an absolute, simple, self-contained, immutable God to create?" </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">For Leithart, the <span style="font-family: inherit;">Absolute "is no more than a conventional placeholder," much like our symbol O. But "the Absolute-relative is the only God with whom we have to do," and "Who God is inevitably follows from the fact that he created." And Genesis "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">begins with God establishing that relation in the act of creating a world that is other than himself." </span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">In Scripture, there is no God without interplay with creatures, without a created playground.</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Scripture knows nothing at all about a God who might-or-might-<i>not</i> create. Scripture reveals only the God who <i>has in fact</i> created.</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Penultimate line: </span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">A non-Creator is, in the strictest possible sense, a <i>nonentity</i>. God-without creation is an<i> idol</i>. No such God exists, because the only God who<i> is </i>is the God who created... </span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Thus,</span></p><blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">"Creator" is an inherently<i> relative</i> term. If "Creator" is the first name of God, then our theology must be, from top to bottom, a theology of the related God.</span></p></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Bottom line, at least for this morning: the</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> Creator himself -- or <i>selves</i>, rather -- "is <i>internally</i> related," and "</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">This internal relationality is the condition of the possibility for creation.... this God is always already related to what is <i>other</i> than himself."</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">So, not only does God move, he never stops moving. Loose ends will be tied up in the next post.</span></span></p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-29175556186688239722024-02-26T10:26:00.000-08:002024-02-26T11:30:56.224-08:00Big Verb: The Event of God<p><span style="font-family: inherit;">How else to put it if we are to maintain a trinitarian metaphysic, or one that is true to scripture? For scripture</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">is full of ordinary "composite" statements about God that cannot, in any obvious way, be reduced to "to be God is to <b>be</b>'" (emphasis mine). </span></blockquote><p>Who says Being must be <b>Big Noun</b> instead of <b>Big Verb</b>? Why not both -- or both/and? Maybe we're a bit naive, but in the Bible, </p><blockquote><p>To be God is to be God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; to be God is to be God of Exodus; to be God is to be Creator of heaven and earth...</p></blockquote><p>Etc. That's a whole lotta doing, and one need hardly be a biblical literalist to see that any such actions cannot easily be reconciled with a simple, static, timeless, immutable, and unrelated God. Why assume all of these characteristics, especially after the revelation of the triune Godhead? </p><p>Again, once we have received the revelation <span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">(O</span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="color: #494949;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">↘</span>), we need to engage in a little </span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">←</span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">) in order to tweak our metaphysic </span><span style="color: #333333;">(<span style="color: #494949;"><b>↗</b></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">O). And yet, it seems that Thomas allows certain prejudices against Big Verb to reduce it to Big Noun:</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">The question is whether Thomas's initial account of simplicity is compatible with the modifications he later makes under pressure of the Christian creed. Does he build trinitarian modifications into his understanding of simplicity [</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">←</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">], or does he initially assume a <i>non-</i> (or <i>anti-</i>) trinitarian account of simplicity [</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">→</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">]? </span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p><span style="color: #333333;">In other words -- or symbols rather -- too much (</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">→</span></span><span style="color: #333333;">) and not enough </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">←</span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">)? Granted, there must be a mutual influence -- </span><span style="color: #333333;">(<span style="font-family: inherit;">↔</span>) -- but some things are nonnegotiable, because Trinity means Trinity. Which, at a minimum, means what?</span></p><p><span style="color: #333333;">Well, we know from our<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(<span style="color: #494949;"><b>↗</b></span></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">O)</span> that God is the Unmoved Mover, which is to say that he is not moved by an <i>other</i>. But who says he can't be moved by, or in, himselves? This lifts us out of so many metaphysical nul-de-slacks that one scarcely knows where to begin. According to </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">(O</span><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="color: #494949;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">↘</span>), i.e., revelation, </span></span></p><p><span style="color: #333333;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="color: #494949;">the Son <i>is</i> "from another," and therefore his necessary existence as eternal Son is derived from and dependent on the Father's act of begetting. We speak rightly of the Son only with passive locutions: He is begotten of the Father; as Word, he is spoken. "Patiency" <i>is</i> a feature of triune being and existence. </span></blockquote><p>Note that such a view reconciles what is otherwise an insoluble mystery -- the mysteries of Big Noun and Big Verb. </p><blockquote><p>The trinitarian argument assumes a kind of "movement" in God that the argument from motion denies.</p></blockquote><p>Not only does this this denial render <i>God </i>inexplicable, it also renders <i>our </i>existence inexplicable -- especially if we are the image and likeness. But with a little<span style="color: #333333;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">←</span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">), we see that the</span></p><p></p><blockquote><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">motions of created things point to the infinitely mobile triune God. Indeed, precisely the partial and intermittent acts and motions of creatures constitute their likeness to the Father who generates the Son and breathes forth the Spirit.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">Looked at this way, God must be something like <i>perfect change</i>, while we are<i> imperfect change</i>. Which is why we are strongly advised to pray that <i>Thy will be done</i>. For his part, Thomas denies that </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">the procession is a motion. Grant the point. Yet, if a trinitarian ontology is assumed, we may say: There is that in God of which the simultaneity of cause and effect is a resemblance.</span></blockquote><p></p><p><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">Or as Galileo murmured in a different context, <i><span style="font-size: x-small;">And yet it moves</span></i>.</span></p><p><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">Besides, if God is absolute immobility, full stop, "</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">how can he create a world in motion? If God lacks potency, where does the potency and patiency of creation <i>come</i> from?" At the very least, </span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">the fact of a mobile universe leads just as plausibly to an ineffably <i>mobile</i> first cause as to an ineffably <i>im</i>mobile one. </span></blockquote><p>I say, why not take <span style="color: #333333;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">←</span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">) all the way to our </span>(<span style="color: #494949;"><b><span style="font-family: inherit;">↗</span></b></span><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">O</span>) and alter it accordingly? Why hold on to immobility? Why give priority to the non-trinitarian paradigm? What's the prayoff? </span></p><blockquote><p>Natural reason [<span style="color: #494949;"><b>↗</b></span><span style="background-color: white;">O] leads to an immobile, simple God, without internal "motions," reception, or relations.</span> </p></blockquote><p></p><p><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">But "</span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">by disclosing the Trinity [</span>O<span style="color: #494949;">↘], revelation trumps reason." Or rather, reason transcends its own limits, a la</span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, "sans-serif"" style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-size: 14.4px;"> </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444;">Gödel,</span></span><span style="color: #494949;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span>and discovers its source and goround. </span></p><p><span style="color: #494949;">Now, "</span><span style="color: #494949;">What would it look like to begin from an ontology fully baptized in the triune name?" -- which is to say, to fully </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">←</span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">) our (</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #494949;"><b>↗</b></span><span style="background-color: white;">O)?</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">It would mean that God is the "ever-actual event";</span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">And the eventfulness of God, his liveliness, is the foundation of "the possibility of all creaturely becoming." God does not become; but there is that in God of which becoming is an image. There is a source in God's own life for the created distinction between potency and actuality, between action and contemplation, between male and female....</span></blockquote><p>At risk of belaboring the point,</p><blockquote><p>The argument from motion points to a first mover, but a mover eternally in "motion," moved with inconceivable motion that infinitely exceeds the movements of creation, yet moved and moving.</p></blockquote><p>This is not "what <i>everybody</i> understands by God" <span style="color: #333333;">(<span style="color: #494949;"><b>↗</b></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;">O),</span> rather, "what <i>we Christians</i> understand by God" (O<span style="color: #494949;">↘).</span> Suffice it to say, the eternal event of God implies that he is indeed Big Verb, but much more to follow. </p><p>(All quotes taken from <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Creator-Theological-Interpretation-Genesis-1/dp/1514002167/ref=sr_1_2?crid=592IB1FVDB60&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hHHhCxH9HaqVqaypxzq0Qs0ghLlM1hHRWYINvtjumHmRMjRNTkqH2H7heoAJlFdw32wB9-s8slrmt-vdKC8oUtReixAfy6Apf91C61G1ruhbGINKoVTWTYbA1ri_kTugAL8Ua1e2PmdkJ6XjXQTyf1D7kNr5ZXBD31KpgaU2XGBDtoojflEksRjQvwV38CAPbXEvsEWBKAhOPp6niY7xzxz6iHN2y4N97m2oC9Gi2Igx6HZS0E0UmjYYYB0O0IvtLfC2x2K80xyEL6j0GlZhA1FTvlzygkbtbY1q70yxpDU.hqObN9cth3NysPUA-sE1YdoMuQ1Ukgt_YV8LAptQrY0&dib_tag=se&keywords=peter+leithart+books&qid=1708971315&sprefix=Peter+Leithaert%2Caps%2C161&sr=8-2" target="_blank">Creator: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1</a>, by Peter Leithart.)</p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-58779176853570703932024-02-25T10:36:00.000-08:002024-02-25T11:01:05.304-08:00Time for a Change in God<p>To review: the philosophical ascent to God is<span style="font-family: inherit;"> (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>↗</b></span></span></span>O), while God's descent to us is (O<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;"><span style="font-size: x-small; font-weight: bold;">↘</span><span style="font-family: inherit;">)</span>.</span> But these two arrows -- of natural and revealed theology, respectively -- have a mutual influence, such that the whole durn cosmic mountain must look like<span style="font-family: inherit;"> (</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>↗</b></span></span>O<b style="background-color: white; color: #494949;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">↘</span></b><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">)</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">, </span><span style="background-color: white;">but with</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;"> an (</span><span style="background-color: white;">↔) of mutual influence at the bottom. Like one giant loop. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #494949;"><span style="background-color: white;">Now, the last word in (</span></span></span><b style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-size: small;">↘</b><span style="color: #494949; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">)</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> is obviously the Incarnation whereby God literally has skin in the game. However, there are many other hints short of this, for again, the Universe speaks, such that the existence of O is clearly seen by its effects, which include the total intelligibility of being. If there were no </span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #494949;"><span style="background-color: white;">(</span></span></span><b style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-size: small;">↘</b><span style="color: #494949; font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white;">)</span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> of any kind, we would be plunged into an unintelligible world of non-being.</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Total chaos and formless darkness, much like that which the Spirit of God hovers over In the Beginning. That right there -- "Spirit of God" -- tells us that there is more to God than an absolute monistic oneness, much less the fact that there's a lot of speaking going on in Genesis 1, and speaking is always<i> from</i> and<i> to</i>. Later we are told that</span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"></span></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span class="text John-1-1" style="background-color: white;">In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was <b>with </b>God, and the Word <b>was</b> God.... </span><span class="text John-1-3" id="en-NIV-26048" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. </span><span class="text John-1-4" id="en-NIV-26049" style="background-color: white; font-family: inherit;">In him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind.</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">In short, the With goes all the way up and down: this is an irreducibly <i>relational</i> God. This being the case, we should find traces of relationality everywhere and in every thing, and this is indeed exactly what we do find. </span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">The revelation of relationality is an example of what I mean by the mutual influence of (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↔)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">. In this case, we have to rethink the (</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>↗</b></span></span><span style="font-family: inherit;">O)</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"> from our side via (</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">←</span></span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-size: 14.4px;">).</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"> What we call natural theology is now supplemented by what we have received from God, (</span><b style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">↘</b><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">). </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">This is why a Christian natural theology is so different from the Greek or any other natural theology. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">Now, some might say that this is no longer natural theology at all, since it has become contaminated by the supernatural. To which we would reply that nature is <i>already</i> supernatural, unless you're just not paying attention: natural and supernatural always and everywhere constitute a benign complementarity, not a vicious dualism.</span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">Again, hints are everywhere, and revelation provides the reason why the hints are here to begin with. Through purely natural theology (</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>↗</b></span></span>O<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">) we are indeed able to reason our way up to the Absolute, but revelation, among other things, tells us why the ascent is even possible. </span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">As we discussed a few post ago, the purest form of </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">(</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>↗</b></span></span>O<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">) is described by Plotinus (or Buddha or Shankara in the East), who ascends to the point of total absorption into, and union with, the One:</span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">Since we are multiple, composite beings, striving toward union with the One means undoing our specific forms of existence.... To save our life we must lose it (Leithart).</span></span></blockquote><p></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">Plotinus can ascend to O, but in so doing must leave Plotinus behind and below:</span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;">To approach the origin, we must abandon discursive thought, which means that philosophy comes to an end just at the moment it attains its end (ibid.).</span></span></blockquote><p><span style="font-family: inherit;">Just when it was getting interesting! Bestwecando? <b>Yes</b>, absent the (<span style="font-family: inherit;">O</span><b style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit; font-size: small;">↘</b><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">) from Godside.</span></span></span></p><p><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i>Skin in the game</i>. As it so happens, Plotinus detested his own skin, and quite literally. His crony<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></span><span style="background-color: white;">Porphyry said that he appeared "ashamed to have a body."</span><span style="background-color: white;"> </span> </span></span></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">So deeply rooted was this feeling that he could never be induced to tell of his ancestry, his parentage, or his birthplace.</span></blockquote><p></p><p></p><p></p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;">He showed, too, an unconquerable reluctance to sit for a painter or a sculptor, and when Amelius persisted in urging him to allow of a portrait being made he asked him, "Is it not enough to carry about this image in which nature has enclosed us?"</span></blockquote><p>Probably the most unlikely concept Plotinus could imagine would be the idea that God would willingly subject himself to one of these shameful meatbags.</p><p>Above we spoke of the contamination of pure metaphysics by Christianity, but what if, somewhere along the line, pure Christianity has been contaminated by the metaphysics of Greece? Again, that arrow at the bottom of O (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;">↔) </span>is a two-way street. </p><p>Plotinus' One is radically simple, meaning it can have no parts or distinctions whatsoever: it is timeless, immutable, immobile, utterly self-sufficient, and certainly doesn't care about anything outside itself. But if this is the case, then how can this One</p><blockquote><p>exist in three distinct persons? How can there be processions in God if "in God, nothing can be moved or be outside"[?] There is no place for processions in an immobile, simple God.</p></blockquote><p>Here we have a problem of the excluded middle, for God cannot be both simple and three; nor do I believe we can just defer to "mystery" when our metaphysic becomes tricksy, because there can be no right to absurdity, much less for God. </p><p>Cards on the table: <i>of course</i> God changes, except we have to stop thinking of change as a privation, rather, as an eminent perfection. For me this is the whole point of the revelation of Trinity, and once revealed to us, we must take it back to our metaphysic <span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">(</span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-family: inherit;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">←</span></span><span face="DDG_ProximaNova, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_0, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_1, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_2, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_3, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_4, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_5, DDG_ProximaNova_UI_6, "Proxima Nova", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, "Segoe UI", "Nimbus Sans L", "Liberation Sans", "Open Sans", FreeSans, Arial, sans-serif" style="background-color: white; color: #494949; font-size: 14.4px;">)</span> and rethink the whole (<span style="background-color: white; color: #494949;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><b>↗</b></span></span>O) from the goround up.</p><p>In the sidebar you will see a quote by Bishop Robert Barron:</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="font-family: inherit;"><i style="background-color: white;">No, the perfect, unchanging God of whom Thomas speaks must be a gyroscope of energy and activity </i><span style="background-color: white;">and</span><i style="background-color: white;"> at the same time a stable rock.</i></span></blockquote><p>Which comes close but may not be quite radical enough for what we are proposing. Leithart writes that</p><blockquote><p>To say there are processions is to say that there is something analogous to "movement" within the Godhead, a "whither" and a "whence." </p></blockquote><p>And I say movement is movement, and cannot be reduced to simplicity. In short, you can maintain simplicity, but then you are no longer talking about the God revealed to us. Leithart is somewhat disorganized and repetitive, but the following passage will do: </p><blockquote><p>the Trinity is not a sheer mystery of revelation, but an eminent original of which created being is a resemblance.... </p></blockquote><blockquote><p>The act of creation reveals the inner life of the Trinity; the generation of the Son is the eternal and necessary root of the Father's free act of creating, and the Son's reception of being is the uncreated model of the receptive existence of creatures.</p></blockquote><p>This post is getting long, but I've said before that the principles of creation, change, movement, relation, life, love, beauty, and even time may be situated in this "difference," this "space" between Father and Son, but we'll flesh it out in the next post.<span style="font-family: inherit;"> </span></p><p></p><p></p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-35234809520069521982024-02-24T10:58:00.000-08:002024-02-24T11:32:03.551-08:00A Science of the Inexact, So to Speak<p>I think we're done thinking about God from our side of the divide. Let's flip the universe and check out what God has to say about himself. Then we can harmonize the two and come up with a single mega-metaphysic that covers everything from the universe on up, to God on down, and everybuddhi in between. </p><p>I visualize it like a mountain, with O at the top: <span style="font-size: medium;">⇗</span>O<span style="font-size: medium;">⇘</span> . The upward pointing arrow to the left is natural theology, the downward pointing one to the right revelation. </p><p>However, once received, the right arrow can circle back to the left and fill out lacunae and aporia that necessarily exist on that side: again, (<span style="font-size: large;">⇗</span>) can say <i>that </i>God is, but there are limits on what it can say about <i>who</i> he is. </p><p>The right-to-left movement can correct any false conclusions of the left, but there is a mutual influence, because the left can correct certain incorrect <i>interpretations </i>of the right, at least where there is ambiguity. As always, Truth is the controlling principle.</p><p>I've said on a number of occasions that the very first thing revealed to us of God is that he is the <i>Creator</i>, which is a rather large hint, and turns out to be full of implications. </p><p>I thought I was the only one who felt this way until stumbling upon a book called <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Creator-Theological-Interpretation-Genesis-1/dp/1514002167/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2CQTSR1IO7XG5&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.hHHhCxH9HaqVqaypxzq0Qs0ghLlM1hHRWYINvtjumHmRMjRNTkqH2H7heoAJlFdwH7Jb2Rq-sausEYMo9xGLOC4oWNgI1U8X4m_Goqf2Hyhf2edyPb_5_UbFb0l2VGMxiMfofme2vfsQigbmVlCRye0FOHxIpKK95kb9MGd0Wz1HrN0W1veatGbdUSgG-66dKZqpLP2Y68DFSbDS8q7DM9ZiglRPnlpq39LD55y0i3tfzl5f-SJLMcOg5B39Ej41rzTofWE09-qhlABVIXcxxvhtTlsIRJFQ9_ZWswNpJGQ.bCV81CZLV5sPnke7JTb-W8BLc8d4Kg7AaAJuSQ42pSE&dib_tag=se&keywords=peter+leithart+books&qid=1708795723&sprefix=peter+leithart%2Caps%2C176&sr=8-2" target="_blank">Creator: A Theological Interpretation of Genesis 1</a>, which we will be playgiarising with this morning and until further gnosis. </p><p>Leithart comes to a number of unorthodox conclusions, but for me they are perfectly orthoparadoxical. I don't know enough about Presbyterianism to know why he is one, but Calvin? I find him intellectually and morally offensive in the extreme, but I'm not here to judge, let alone condemn. That's Dupree's department.</p><p>His writing is at times pedantic and rambling, without the concision and organization of a Thomas. Nevertheless, I find his criticism of certain Thomistic conclusions to be entirely coongenial. </p><p>For as I've said on a number of occasions, it seems to me -- for what it's worth, since I am not a Trained Theologian -- Thomas smuggles in certain Greek assumptions of deity that are insufficiently baptized, let alone bobtized. This is precisely what I mean above about the right arrow of revelation (<span style="font-size: large;">⇘</span><span>)</span><span style="font-size: large;"> </span>having to fill out and correct the left arrow of metaphysics and natural theology (<span style="font-size: large;">⇗</span>).</p><p>If that's not clear, it will be as we proceed. I'm not a <i>sola scriptura</i> guy, but nor am I not one. Rather, "sola O" with two avenues of approach that we aim to reconcile. </p><p>This approach is also distinct from Schuon, who, as it were, posits the same mountain but with with different authentic religions constituting distinct but equally valid paths meeting at the top: "the transcendent unity of religions." We are not religious indifferentists, but nor do we dismiss the others. </p><p>Again, this should become clear as we proceed. But for me, the revelation of the Triune God most adequately accounts for even the possibility of (<span style="font-size: large;">⇗</span>), not to mention science and other nice things we take for granted in the West.</p><p>I'm just going to start flipping from the beginning, and light on any passages that shed further light on the argument.</p><blockquote><p>Our capacity to name and shape the world through words at all is a continuous miracle, a daily aftershock of the Creator's first magical <i>fiat lux</i>. Mystery does not suddenly confront us when we begin to speak about God.</p></blockquote><p>Exactly. This goes to what was said above about even the possibility of (<span style="font-size: large;">⇗</span>); you might say that we need a metaphysic that can account for the very possibility of metaphysics -- or a (<span style="font-size: large;">⇘</span><span>) </span>that explains how (<span style="font-size: large;">⇗</span>) is possible. To paraphrase the Aphorist, not an <i>exact science</i> but a <i>science of the inexact. </i>Our two arrows </p><blockquote><p>are mutually determinative. <i>Because </i>God [AKA O] is transcendent, unbounded by temporal and spatial limits, he is immanent, present, and active in every space and time.... his hiddenness -- his transcendence -- is always already manifestation.</p></blockquote><p>God transcends the language he never stops speaking. So to speak. "He transcends language because there is always <i>more</i> to say of him, <i>always forever</i> more to say..." Even -- especially -- "scientific knowledge is not impersonal and objectivized but arises from deep communion with reality" (cf. Polanyi for <span style="font-size: medium;">⇗</span> details).</p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">The truth is objective but not impersonal.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>It is at once (<span style="font-size: medium;">⇗</span>) but nor is it not (<span style="font-size: medium;">⇘</span>).</p><blockquote><p>Anthropomorphism is not a projection from finite to infinite. In the order of knowing, it seems so. In the order of being, it is the opposite: It is authorized from the top down.</p></blockquote><p>Ultimately, </p><blockquote><p><i><span style="color: #800180;">Truth is a person.</span></i></p></blockquote><p>If not, then there is no ground, principle, or basis for (<span style="font-size: medium;">⇗</span>) of any kind, whether scientific, philosophical, or theological. Stalin said, <i>No man, no problem</i>, and he wasn't wrong. </p><blockquote><p>Having created a world that comprehensively speaks of God, why would God prohibit us to use the language he made? How could it possibly be inadequate or inappropriate?</p></blockquote><p>He's making an argument against radical apophaticism, but at risk of belaboring the point, (<span style="font-size: medium;">⇗</span>) is perfectly valid so long as we don't detach it from (<span style="font-size: medium;">⇘</span>) and pretend it is self-sufficient or self-explanatory, or can adequately map O. "Even abstract language rests on metaphor that has concrete, physical roots," and -- this is getting ahead of ourselves, but let us recall that</p><blockquote style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 1.3em; margin: 1em 20px;"><i><span style="color: #800180;"><span style="font-family: inherit;">Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others.</span></span></i></blockquote><p>"<span style="color: #333333;">God creates by the Word; creation is his speech to us. By virtue of creation, we are surrounded by the inescapable speech of God" (Leithart).</span></p><p>As we know from our recent series of posts, it's a talking universe, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it except listen and follow the words back up to their nonlocal source. Let those with ears see O<span style="font-size: medium;">⇘ </span><span>and hear it speak</span>.</p><p>Much more to come...</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8580258.post-27767350400299170882024-02-23T11:03:00.000-08:002024-02-23T11:33:31.818-08:00Roll Over Shankara and Tell Einstein the News<p>They say that reality is the thing that doesn't go away when we stop thinking about it. But reality includes not only empirical facts and scientific laws, but metaphysical principles such as the one mentioned yesterday, effect-implying-cause: we never see a cause without an effect, and vice versa. </p><p>Moreover, on the temporal plane cause-and-effect are simultaneous, whereas causation must be ontologically prior to its effects, or nothing makes sense. To understand something is to understand its cause.</p><p>ONCE AGAIN THIS IS ALL VERY EDIFYING, BUT I AM WHAT DOESN'T GO AWAY WHEN YOU STOP THINKING ABOUT ME, PRECISELY.</p><p>Oh? Kant didn't think so. He thought you were just a form of our own ideas about you.</p><p>KANT WAS AN ASS.</p><p>We agree, but why do we agree? Must be because of the analogy of being, which is one of our first principles: that there is an analogy between creature and Creator, even if the dissimilarities are always greater then the similarities.</p><p>I'm with you: I say we can learn a great deal from the sheer existence of the Universe, among which is the fact that you cannot be self-sufficient. Or, either you are or you aren't, and if you are, then you are unintelligible.</p><p>Even revelation must implicitly accept the doctrine of analogy, for any statements about God -- who is infinite -- </p><blockquote><p>must be expressed and plainly are expressed in language from the finite world.... the revelation has to be thought about to be received, and can be thought about only by the aid of words or finite images (Mascall).</p></blockquote><p>Now, revelation comes in many forms: there is revelation proper, but so too is existence itself a revelation, not to mention the phenomenon of life and the miracle of subjectivity. </p><p>And what can we say about the surprising relationship between intelligence and intelligibility? Einstein claimed that <i>The most incomprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible</i>.</p><p>That's you in the spotlight, regaining your religion. Because I've got news for Albert: the doctrine of creation implies that the most comprehensible thing about the Universe is that it is comprehensible. It is precisely what we would expect of an intelligent and rational Creator. Absent this doctrine, then the universe is not only incomprehensible but we could never know it. </p><p>You know the gag: If God doesn't exist only he knows it. And if he does, only man could not know it.</p><p>YOU AND YOUR WORDPLAY. I DON'T PLAY.</p><p>OM he don't play. But God does. We're not nondual Vedantins, we're personalists.</p><p>In fact, your very existence implies the existence of a particular kind of God. Not just any God could have pulled this off. Ultimately he must be something like a triune God, but that's for a later post. At the moment we're still trying to reason up from our side of the finite-infinite relation. </p><p>Now, the doctrine of analogy is what makes it possible for us to speak meaningfully of God, not in the past but in the Now, any Now. And if two men -- or a man and a Universe --</p><blockquote><p>affirm and deny that God exists, they are in fact disagreeing about the nature of reality [i.e., That which doesn't go away just because we're not thinking about it], and not merely expressing different emotional or aesthetic attitudes (Mascall). </p></blockquote><p>So you and I have very different conceptions of reality -- of what <i>does not </i>and <i>cannot</i> go away.</p><p>YOU ARE MAKING AN ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT, BUT THINKING DOESN'T MAKE IT SO.</p><p>No, we are making an <i>existential </i>argument with the assumption that thinking -- about finite things -- tells us about reality. Otherwise to hell with it.</p><p>Yes, we are assuming a realist philosophy, "which holds that words are not merely noises and thought is not merely about ideas, but that speech with its words and thought with its ideas are ultimately about things."</p><p>Granted, you are a Big Thing, but you're still a thing. And if you are not an intelligible thing, then you are no-thing at all, and Kant is right. But we've already stipulated that he is an ass.</p><p>Look, you and I are not so different. Indeed, the fact that we are different means that there is a sameness underneath the differences.</p><p>YOU'VE LOST ME.</p><p>We're talking about Being, "which must embrace everything, including its differences; if differences were not instances of being, they would be non-existent, and no two things could be distinct from each other."</p><p>SO? THE ONE AND THE MANY. WHY CAN'T I BE BOTH?</p><p>You can be, but by virtue of what principle? Because "every being must <i>be</i>, and must be in some determinate way," and "the way in which it has being depends in the last resort upon its relation to the self-existent Being which is the prime analogate of all."</p><p>You exist -- you <i>are </i>-- but you are not Being itself, rather a function of Being, or in relation to it: "being designates <i>that which</i> has relation to existence." Any finite existent is composed of existence + essence, but there is one being whose essence is to exist--</p><p>"AND EVERYONE CALLS THIS GOD." I CALL IT <b>ME</b>.</p><p>Can't be: "The world requires as its cause a being totally transcending it in every respect."</p><p>WE'RE JUST GOING IN CIRCLES.</p><p>And I say there is a way -- only one way -- up and out of absurcularity: "The crucial moment" occurs when </p><blockquote><p>we apprehend finite being as what it really is, as existent and yet not self-existent, as effect-implying cause. Its essence is really distinct from its existence, in the sense that there is nothing about the kind of thing that it is that necessitates that it exists.</p></blockquote><p>So, the analogy of being is what doesn't go away when we pretend not to use it. "You cannot get necessity from contingency by multiplying contingency." And</p><blockquote><p>the more fully we understand the world, the more clearly we can see that the world does not explain itself and therefore its explanation must lie outside itself. Considered as a closed system the world is unintelligible.</p></blockquote><p>But the world<i> is</i> intelligible; and open, and in relation. Much like the Trinity which is its ultimate principle to which (or whom) we are analogous.</p><p>But That! touches on the next post.</p>Gagdad Bobhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00911613613759942690noreply@blogger.com2