Now, this is an exquisitely coonlike sentiment -- and not just because "theoptical" is a neʘlʘgism, a made-upword.
I'm not sure if "theoptical" is the best way to express it, though. If I understand him rightly, then our Ocabulary word "cardiomyopia" (not to be confused with cardiomyopathy) expresses the same idea -- that our Adamic standpoint can deseeve us, and that perceiving such a deep truth requires a sabbath restoration of our 20/∞ heart-vision.
At any rate, Davie asks whether we are "to suppose that God begins creating with a minimum," or "does not God express, all at once, the fullness that he is, the maximum -- the Word, the Logos who comprehends the whole world, and around whom the world is organized?"
Good question. I suggest we inquire into how man creates, since there is always something of the likeness in the image. I can't think of the Latin phrase at the moment, but there's one that has to do with the first in thought being the last in execution -- something like that.
The point is, if I build a house, I begin with the finished idea, but I can't start there. Rather, I need to pour the foundation, build the frame, do the electric and plumbing, hang the dry wall, etc.
Why should God's creativity -- especially as expressed in time -- be any different? I mean, he created time. Now he's gotta deal with it, just like the restavus in this manisfestivus.
My desk happens to face the former backyard, and at the moment I'm staring into a terrainwreck. Pool torn up, holes and ditches everywhere, exposed pipes and rebar, piles of dirt and gravel, lots of chatter in Spanish. All I can say is I hope my wife knows what she's doing, because I have no idea what it's going to look like when it's done. Maybe God or the all-seeing, all-spending domestic godess knows, but I know I don't.
Interesting too that at every point along the line there are a thousand little decisions to make -- or, to be perfectly accurate, decisions involving thousands of design choices -- down to the size and color of the rocks.
But you can't possibly make the choices unless you have in mind some image of the finished product. Conversely, you can't see the finished project without the individual choices. And when the project is finished -- no more choices! You're stuck with it. It's like a huge window that shrinks exponentially with each decision, until the window closes forever.
Yes, just like life, for "the night is coming when no man can work on self-improvement." Then all that's left is the Judgment. We'll return to that theme later. At least that's the plan.
Did you hear that? Sounds like muffled giggling.
Continuing with Davie's analysis, he suggests that the Godman "recapitulates to himself all stages in the evolution of man," which necessitates that "the creative maximum be expressed through him, in the Beginning, and also that time flows from him, rather than round him, so to speak."
I think I mentioned at the start of this series that Davie can leave you wanting a little more exposition when he throws out something like that. What does he mean?
Well, the Godman is again the Alpha and Omega, beginning and end. But what looks to us like a beginning -- due to our theoptical illusion/cardiomyopia -- is actually a stage on the way to the end.
It must be somewhat like a temporal hologram. In a hologram, the whole is in each part. Thus, in a temporal hologram, each portion of time would contain the Omega, so to speak. Does that make sense? I hope so, because I can't explain it any more clearly than that.
Well, maybe. Think of a symphony. I don't know if it's just apocryphal, but they say Mozart would see -- or hear -- the symphony in a kind of holistic flash, and then transcribe it in linear fashion -- like a kind of declension from four dimensions (musical space/time) to two (on paper).
Thus -- if you follow -- "Where chronology has pride of place, theologians are faced with a problem of their own making, the problem of inserting Jesus into their time series" -- in particular, his divinity (as opposed to humanity).
More orthoparadox: "[F]or if time flows from the center, and if that center is Jesus... then the centrality of Jesus is such that he does not need to be inserted into the time series, because his temporality will then be the outflow of his eternal creativity, its visible enactment..."
I'll just continue, and then maybe attempt to clarify: "Such temporal evolution would... be directed to an End, which is already divinely realized 'In the Beginning.'"
So, in the vertical "Alpha is Omega," which is also the now "where time and eternity intersect, in the moment when Father and Son are eternally one in surrender, yet furthest apart in time." I want to say "eternal sophering," but I won't. In any event, this latter "stretch of time is shortened to the span of the Cross."
You might say that descent and ascent, immanence and transcendence, represent vertically what requires time to play out horizontally.
And now I'm all out of verticality. Hey, Who just giggled?
27 comments:
I hope your swimming pool is going back in as part of the re-model. I love swimming pools; they have a good energy. The caveat is they are dangerous to children.
However, the benefits outweigh the risks. Children grow sturdy and water-adapted with frequent swims.
I had an insight regarding scriptures and other theoptical writings--they are useful preliminaries but at some point you get up in the morning and realize the whole thing is really astoundingly simple.
You can identify yourself with It (0) and state something simple like "show love" and then go to the kitchen for coffee.
Your striving is over. You are "in the pocket" where you belong.
Then you pick up a book, and listen intently for the guidance which comes. "Should I read this?" Much of the time the answer will be: no, it is not the best use of your time.
Ahhh summer slack, the tangent-rich environment, the happitat.
Trench, the good thing about books is that the answer "should I read this?" should become obvious within a few pages.
An English editor named Ford Madox Ford decided to publish submitted manuscripts on the basis of a few first few paragraphs. He felt that was enough. I think the MOOT says something about judgment becoming more intuitive over time.
What's on the summer playlists around here?
What ever is bound on earth is bound in heaven; whatever is loosed on earth is loosed in heaven.
Some say that there is an "already" implied in that.
Whatever built on earth is [already] built in heaven? It's easy to become a Platonist. But I think, too, that even in heaven some of the work is ongoing. I go to prepare a place for you.
RE: Ford Madox Ford - have they ever made a movie of The Good Soldier or is that just too raw even for Hollyweird? And weird would be Ford's collaboration with Conrad in The Inheritors. I could read that more than once, but not TGS.
Interesting too that at every point along the line there are a thousand little decisions to make -- or, to be perfectly accurate, decisions involving thousands of design choices -- down to the size and color of the rocks.
Along those lines, we had quite a time getting to closing on our new house. We met the previous owners on closing day. The wife was very anxious about the whole thing, as the place had belonged to her parents, and she had done a lot of the design work. Thousands of different choices made, almost twenty years ago, but they had become symbolic of the life lived in the space ever since. I think she was afraid we'd gut the place and try to erase all its history, but of course that would be almost impossible, even if we wanted to do that.
Been chuckling pretty much at this new-to-me lady comedian's work:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2013/06/maria-bamford-asks-her-mom.html#entry-more
Ge, she's pretty funny. Thanks. I swear her mom lives in the neighborhood next door.
My landlord's boss is a Jewish carpenter. True story.
He talked me into building our first house. I was reluctant because I just couldn't see the whole thing. So he walked me through it.
Then he asked me, "you know how you build a house, Rick?" And before I could answer he said, "one stud at a time."
Also related, with vessel design, the design process is called a Design Spiral. In a sense, you begin with the constraints. In other words, you begin with the law. All parts of the ship must work together and are dependent on each other. The design is rough at first and the detail comes as you proceed to refine it through cycles or turns of the spiral.
But your back yard does not have free will, and new rocks are not born from hot gas, and the pool does not slide around on its foundation creating anew shape every few years. The point being, God can envision the finished work of art without painting every brush stroke or writing every note himself. We can't really imagine what "outside of time" actually means or how a non-time existence is experienced, but I would think God would find it very boring to be "all knowing" (can't spell omnicient!) in the way most people think of it. He put us into Time for a reason...Love is not real if it has been programmed in, nor is salvation. Does this make any sense?
I have this Eckhoptical theory that we cocreate the cosmos with the same bong with which God smokes us.
As in, the quantum world seems to weirditate as weird as the observer on who it's weirdy existence seems to depend.
"... It's The Religion the Almighty & Me Works out Betwixt us..."
Rick, does your company make boats?
Hmmm. I don't see the connection. To do the Lord's will seems to imply co-create. Re quantum world I seem to remember some thing about some tiny thing being here or there (or both) depending on the observer's observation of it.
re boats, we just design them. And parts of them. The law constrains the designs, as in, not any ol physics will do, but this or that design will or won't or might according to the law.
Geez I just noticed the heading of Bob's blog. Was that always there or recently added?
Been there a long time. TW Reverend Harry Powell.
My eyes work sometimes. It ain't easy.
TW?
TAIL WAGGLE
WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
(See official club greeting.)
Lol! Remove parentheses and I'ma lost.
Have you noticed how God says the day's creation is good only after He's made it? The timing of these statements means something, I think. In alignment with what James was driving at, maybe. Knowing that God cannot create a bad thing, one wonders if the statement of it being good is necessary. Perhaps the "life of the act" only came into being at the moment that God said it was good. And not alive until it was said. In other words, it's not created until it is good, as if the "good-statement" was the first created thing or the creative act itself.
I like the thought provoking nature of this Davie guy.
Just read the new heading. Very cool.
Mushroom said "Whatever built on earth is [already] built in heaven? It's easy to become a Platonist. But I think, too, that even in heaven some of the work is ongoing. "
Mushroom, think Class. It is well designed, the design pattern followed, its properties and behaviors thoroughly understood, in 'heaven', but the object implemented in runtime - unique.
For the non-geeks, think snowflakes. There's nothing that isn't known about them... except for the next one.
-makes me recall the lady writer who filled in extra column spaces in the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG, who noted that on the subject of male organs, she had the revelation that all are different, but all are the same...
What makes you recall?
Julie, I thought maybe you made the Rev Powell quote as a kind of warning about my theory that man co-creates the cosmos with God. As in say, this is an elevation of man to height equal to God or as Powell used it (or seems to mean) that he and God decide what's in Powell's religion, which is to say ultimately its completely up to Powell. A gnostic sort of view or cafeteria Catholic kind of view. A gnoptical allusion. If so, a good warning no doubt. But the two-way street of Grace (down arrow and up arrow) and the good fruit aspect of the theory must be true also on the other hand. (In which case, it's not my theory :-)
I've only watched Night of the Hunter one time. I think it's coming on TV in the next week or so. I can't remember, was Powell strictly a con man and knew it; knew all the religious lingo but used it for evil ends? Or did he think he was some kind of holy man? Or was there a split personality?
It's fair to say that theology is not math, and that it requires an element of "real-ization" and hence (lower case g) gnosis. Which only emphasizes the need for dogma/doctrine as a "given" handrail -- analogous to how physics reasons about a natural world that is given.
Harry strikes me as a psychopath with religious delusions. He has a psychotic form of rationalization, in which his evil impulses are given divine sanction.
There's a very funny scene in the beginning, symbolic of his conflicted personality, when he's watching a peep show and the jackknife in his pocket springs open. Someone has to die for "causing" his sexual impulses. Reminds me of the Islamists....
Also, it is an orthodox idea that (↑) is actually a disguised form of (↓) -- which is why they say that faith is already gift of the Spirit.
Thanks, Bob. All of that is very helpful. I like that "handrail" concept. There are similar ways in engineering; practical vs theoretical limits re strength of materials, say, and lots of safety factor layers added to calculations just in case we're human. They're a cautious bunch, engineers. Thank God.
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