Just My Lux

So, Caldecott, like your humble correspundant, is just a (¶)lay theologian, a soph-taught auto-deidact, not a credentialed pneumacrat.

Which is a good thing, in my opinion, for the most tedious books on theology are generally written by those who have the academic right to do so, but no divine obligation or mandate. I mean, no one asks Michael Jordan to show us his Ph.D. in basketballogy.

"There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures" (Dávila). Just so, there can be a hunger in the body that no amount of food can appease -- an insultaining formulation which explains the existence of both fatheads and fatasses.

Besides, in the words of Dávilagain, A dentistry degree is respectable, but a philosophy degree is grotesque. So a theology degree is just plain nauseating. For if you know what you're doing, you can't really be theologizing, because it's just coming from you, right? Thus, "the most lucid writer spends a lot of time doing what he does not know how he knows how to do" (ibid). I know I don't.

And what truly counts "is not what comes from the depths [↑] of the soul, but what invades [↓] it." (↑) can only take one so far. Even Aquinas -- one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived -- said that all his (↑) was "so much straw" in comparison to the overpowering infusion of (↓) he was vouchsafed toward the end of his life.

Not to mention the fact that "Prose is corrupted when it proposes to be convincing rather than simply intelligible" (ibid). In other words, I think the effective theologian must show, not argue, let alone "prove." It takes a lot of intelligence to not pretend to know what one is talking about, especially when one has a lot of education.

The first and last temptation of the tenured is the "solution." If this country fails, it will be due to the deadly solutions of the left, which mostly involve the manipulation language so as to try to alter reality.

Obama daftly illustrated this in his speech the other day at the National Defense University -- for example, "We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us."

This is a quintessentially postmodern sentiment, analogous to saying, "reality must comport with our truth, or else truth will be a reflection of reality." Can't have that!

As mentioned in the previous post, Caldecott's book is divided into three parts, the first one revolving around the "nature of nature."

Now, we all know that nature herself is supernatural, otherwise it would make no sense at all. I would say that, just as the intellect is "supernaturally natural," nature is "naturally supernatural." And to "know nature" is a form of mystical union -- to say nothing of loving nature, i.e., perceiving the beauty all around us.

So although the third section of the book is on "divine Wisdom," one is reminded of the fractal-trinitarian structure of the world, through which everything dynamically interpenetrates everything else. In order to depict this visually, one would need a trinitarian yin-yang symbol rendered fractally, only in a spherical form -- like the lower two combined into the shape of a ball:

The first chapter is on the nature of light. As we know, in a properly oriented, bright-side up cosmos, the light we perceive with our eyes is an analogue of spiritual and intellectual light, not the converse. And here is something I did not know: Caldecott (quoting Thomas Torrance) notes that

"Clerk Maxwell's belief in the God who became incarnate in Jesus Christ made him question whether the universe created by the Wisdom of God did really behave in the way described by Newtonian mechanics.... It was through allowing Christian thought (such as the understanding of interpersonal relations derived from the doctrine of the Holy Trinity) to bear upon his scientific thinking that he came up with the conception of the continuous dynamic field, to which Einstein was to point as introducing the most far-reaching change in the rational structure of science and our understanding of nature."

So light comes from Light (just as life from Life, intelligence from Intelligence), for the converse could never be true -- nor could there even be truth in such a backassword cosmos, for that matter.

Later in the essay -- and I'm just flipping around -- Caldecott suggests that "the whole world" might be "a product of zero and infinity, in a sense poised between these two extremes."

I don't think there's any doubt about that, regardless of what the physics shows. Man is without question suspended between O and Ø -- we are spirit and dust, or matter that may transcend itself and touch truth, beauty, love, virtue, etc. The ambiguity of this in-between space is the source of all this tension and drama, because compared to God we are nothing.

And yet, compared to nothing, we are everything.

That's it for today. To be continued...