So, it looks like we can’t talk about the Origin of anything without bringing in Creativity and Creation. Although I will endeavor this morning to create an original post, it won’t originate from nowhere or be made of nothing, rather, with pre-existing materials, e.g., words, ideas, and dreams, even if it leads nowhere. As usual.
As God said to the atheist who claimed he could create a universe without supernatural aid, Get your own dirt. Not to mention information, order, language, meaning, intelligence, math, etc. You and I can be creative, but we couldn't create creativity or speak language into existence. But on a positive note, we can't meaningfully deny meaning, truly claim that truth cannot be known, or maintain absolutely that everything is relative.
There’s a limit to what we can create, and all night long I dreamt about what this means — i.e., the existence of limits. I wish I could remember those dreams. Best I can do is try to redream them from scratch.
Lately we’ve been digging down to the foundations of the cosmos and inspecting its most primordial and irreducible principles and concepts such as Necessity, Possibility, Freedom, Absolute, Relative, Infinite, Origins, Creativity, etc. Each of these, it turns out, represents a kind of Limit to how far our Intelligence can penetrate.
Looking down that list, what is Necessity but a Limit on Possibility? And what is Possibility but a Limit on Necessity? Likewise, what is the Absolute but a limit on Infinitude, and vice versa? But what is "Limit-ness" as such? Does God have any limits?
Which brings to mind that other old gag about whether God can create a stone so heavy he can’t lift it. That he can’t is at once trivial but nevertheless a kind of limit, in that it means God cannot be absurd. So, that's a start.
Therefore, following our pretentious scheme of Capitalization, the Absurd cannot be one of our foundational concepts, even though absurdity will always be with us. Yes, today’s election may deal it a setback, but progressivism is relentlessly regressive.
Limits on God. Here is one of those areas where Luther departed -- to put it mildly, since he was never mild -- from orthodoxy, in that he unilaterally decided that God had no limits of any kind, even to the point of absurdity.
Which implies a link between limitlessness and absurdity, and I want to say that Genesis 3 even speaks to this, what with human beings usurping a right to their own unlimited intelligence, but let’s not rush to judgment.
First of all, let’s not be silly: of course God is limitless.
Yes, but within limits!
For example, could murder be good, or lies be true, or 2+2=5 just because God declares it so? Like Islam, this is what Luther maintains: that it is a grave insult to place any limits on God, including even (or perhaps especially) intelligibility. Rather, it is for us to merely obey, no matter how absurd the command.
I don't parent that way. Why would God?
With a limitless God comes a totally limited humanity, in that we have no free will and no real intelligence, or at least it can never be trusted due to our total depravity: “everything in you is completely blameworthy, damnable sins” (Luther). B-b-but — EVERYTHING!
Reason is the Devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom... Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism... She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.
Admittedly, this guy… this is not my kind of guy.
But since the devil’s bride, Reason, that pretty whore, comes in and thinks she’s wise, and what she says, what she thinks, is from the Holy Spirit, who can help us, then? Not judges, not doctors, no king or emperor, because [reason] is the Devil’s greatest whore.
So, no, I’m not a fan, and never have been, nor does it have anything whatsoever to do with Christianity, but because I reject nominalism as the Devil’s own metaphysic, so right back at you, Marty. It literally makes no sense to me, because if it is the case, then there is no sense to be made:
The debate over nominalism and its rival, realism [as represented by Thomas], was an argument about epistemology -- how we know things and how the words we use to express knowledge are related to what we know.
Are we or are we not knowers, and what does it mean to truly know? Well, "Nominalism was the deconstruction of its day. In its various forms, it cast doubt on the old certainties of language.” Which is fine as far as it goes, because nothing is easier than to be seduced by our own stupid or evil ideas [insert generic gag about the left].
But it’s a bridge too far to nowhere to thereby condemn all ideas as idolatry and to insist that God is wholly unintelligible to the very intelligence he -- for wholly opaque reasons -- gave us. For Luther, God
is free to do anything he wants. Human standards of morality or human ideas of what God should or should not do cannot then flow out of God’s essence…. God created human morality as we know it, and if he had wanted to do so, he might have created a different morality altogether.
Thus, no natural law, let alone natural rights, for there is only God’s unlimited will, but no intelligibility or universal ideas accessible to the intellect.
Of course, it can sound vulgar to bluntly say “God has limits,” and leave it at that. Rather, I would say he has limits, and that these limits are limitless -- for example, he is limited by love, but his love is unlimited. Likewise truth or beauty. God is limited by truth, in that there is no falsehood in him, but there are no limits to his truth.
Christ is like us in all things but sin. Does this mean he is limited? Definitely. Only in an unlimited way. Orthoparadox. It makes perfect nonsense to me, but it's not absurd and neither is God.
8 comments:
Though I think Luther's sparking of the Reformation accomplished much good, specifically as a catalyst to free access to the Scriptures to the lowliest of men, like, say, a fisherman, he also promulgated some absurdities, which Calvin absurdly embraced and embellished to the detriment of many who lean towards Protestantism. God set the rules, which indeed are limits, but He did so because of His limitlessness and infiniteness. If He had not, we'd be no better off than the apes.
I blame Gutenberg, because no one could have personal access to the Bible until there were lots of Bibles to go around. Most parishes were lucky to have one, which had to be chained down so folks wouldn't steal it. Nor could a great many Europeans read or write prior to that. Why bother, since there was nothing to read.
God cannot be absurd.
That gets to the meat of this morning's school discussion re. David's punishment for the whole Uriah thing. You could call it a limit that God either won't or can't turn back the clock and allow someone to undo his ruinous actions. Nor does He generally take away consequences herebelow. To do so would be absurd at best - what would be the point of free will? - and monstrous at worst.
In talking about God, we must somehow take into consideration both Formlessness and Form, another one of those metacosmic complementarities. Apophatic and Cataphatic, respectively; or Being and Beyond-Being. In fact, I read something the other day speculating that the Son may be seen as the form of the formless Father-Source. I don't know if that's true, but it is a way of thinking about what transcends thought.
I blame Gutenberg...
Well, I can understand that, but Gutenberg was just the printer, might be better to blame Tyndale. And while the paucity of the Bible's number of copies is of note, as is the lack of the ability to read amongst the common people, I do think it an injustice that til Tyndale and Gutenberg's time, most clergy did not consider the common people intelligent enough, even if they could read and/or write, to merit unfettered access to the Scriptures.
To be fair, who better than the clergy understood that the peasants are revolting?
Kidding, kidding.
As I see it, the spread of Christianity, including the spread of Bible reading, resembles the growth of a tremendous tree. Of course it starts with one trunk, but eventually the trunk has to put forth a couple of leaves, then branches, and finally start bearing fruit.
Yes: the trunk is "everything I have commanded you," the oral tradition out of which the written later emerges.
If one searches up “churches closing” one finds many trying to explain the rapid decline.
Personally, I think it’s been caused by scandalizing the unacceptable candidates, then forcing the initiates to bend over, give thanks, then please sir may I have another.
Fortunately there are less scandalous minds out there. One theory is that Christians would rather worship from the comfort of their own homes surrounded by their material blessings. But I retort that this leads to ever more individualistic denominations where spankings might be considered blessings.
And so we might need a prophet to help give us focus. I’ve narrowed it down to the decent but boring Raphael Warnock, the scandalous but comical Herschel Walker, and our own Gagdad Bob.
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