Arriving at God Via a Process of Illumination

Eh, just a short post because I'd rather write about something else.

The Divine Project. That's the name of this recently published book by Ratzinger, consisting of six lectures given in 1985 on the subject of "God the Creator and of man as this Creator's masterpiece." 

Masterpiece. Which leads directly to the question: Who goofed?  

Everybody everywhere every time? 

Which reminds me of the book I was reading yesterday called Socrates' Children by Peter Kreeft -- specifically, volume 4, covering "contemporary philosophers." In philosophy "contemporary" means the last couple hundred years, so it starts with Kierkrgaard. 

On the other hand, contemporary could mean anything after Plato. Or rather, Plato himself.  

Why, you may ask, am I reading such a basic survey? I can think of several reasons, but I won't burden you with them. One good reason is that these people are so obnoxious, or so shallow (albeit deeply shallow), or so tedious, or such poor writers, that I'd rather outsource the work to someone else.  

The most obnoxious is, of course, Nietzsche, who is pretty much the Don Rickles of philosophy. He even boasts of philosophizing "with a hammer," but in the end he turned out to be the anvil. 

Like the deconstructionists he inspired, if you take Nietzsche seriously, you can't possibly take him seriously. Unless you are fundamentally unserious, you hockey puck.

I remember reading him back when I literally knew nothing. I've mentioned before that when I began reading philosophy I started with recent ones like Nietzsche, Sartre, Foucault, Bergson, Russell, etc., on the assumption that philosophy progressed like science, so the most recent must be inherently superior. 

Yes, that is how stupid I was.

Aside from morbid curiosity, there is simply no reason to read Nietzsche as a philosopher after he blows off the will to truth -- AKA our innate epistemophilia, adequation to the real, and consciousness of the Absolute -- and asks Hey, why not rather untruth? 

I guess this appeals to an adolescent who knows nothing, because it instantly puts him on the same plane as the people who do know something. This is precisely how contemporary tenuroids are so superior to dullards like Shakespeare and Aquinas. 

Anyway, I thought I might go through these thinkers one by one and show their Big Mistake, i.e., exactly where they go off the rails. Through this process of elimination I would then show the truth of Christianity. Who is the Last Man Standing -- the One who laughs last? The answer may surprise you! 

I was even going to call it A Process of Illumination, but I'm already sick of the idea. Let the dead bury the tenured. 

Back to Ratzinger. The first lecture is called Image and Truth, and in reading it the thought occurred to me that we're back to right and left brain, respectively. 

Obviously, the OT in particular is quite provocative with images, for example, in Genesis, which no serious thinker ever took literally until modern unserious fundamentalism. "Since the beginning of Christianity,"

it was already, from a scientific point of view, more or less outdated. It embodied a different way of viewing the world from one that was common and accepted.

Definitely not an invalid way, just not a left-brained way. Rather, it is a kind of knowledge that renders "deeper, true realities accessible to man":

one has to distinguish between the form of presentation and the content being presented.... only this reality, that shines forth through the images, is truly enduring.   

Schuon often talks about how big-box religious retailers must speak to the common man and the average mentality, not to the metaphysician. But with a handful of principles, the metaphysician is easily able to unpack the timeless symbolism present in these narratives. 

"The danger confronting those of us who live in technological civilizations is that we have cut ourselves off from this primordial knowledge" due to the cerebral eclispe mentioned in yesterday's post. People are on the one hand "literate," but literally illiterate in the sense that they no longer know how to comprehend a symbolically resonant text. 

Today there is a dead body in the tomb. Tomorrow the tomb will be empty. Who died? Where is this tomb? 

Asked the deathbound, left-brained ego.