God Likes Process

Petey, what are you giving up for Lent?

Self-denial.

Good -- just remember, it's a process, not a state of being. No one becomes an epicurean overnight. 

Life is a series of modest and transitory pleasures, no?

Mingled with enduring irritations and inconveniences, like time and death. I suppose the purpose of a spiritual practice is to turn the latter into fleeting impositions in the metacosmic scheme of things. Thus the only cure for time is timelessness, and if there's a cure for death, it seems to involve dying to it, AKA vertical rebirth.   

Pleasures abound as long as we do not confuse their ranks.

Christianity does not solve "problems"; it merely obliges us to live them at a higher level. 

Perhaps Wilde was right: Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.

Anyway, we've been discussing our reservations with the conception of a static God, and our preference for a dynamic and open one. This makes God a process, but not only a process, rather... how to put it?  

I suppose God could have created a static universe, in which case it would be like a still photograph instead of an unfolding movie, amirirte? God is rational, but there's more to life than syllogisms or deductive reason. An organism, for example, is rational, but not in a linear way. And I say organisms are only possible because God is the very principle of organismic relations, AKA the Trinity.

For this reason we don't say organisms are alive, rather, life is organismic. If God is alive, it is because he is Life Itself. And Life Itself is the process living -- a verb and not a noun, as discussed in yesterday's post. Hence God must be Godding, now and forever, i.e., endless life? 

Abruptly shifting seers, I'm reading Mark Perry's Uprooting the Vineyard: The Fate of the Catholic Church After Vatican II, and he takes a rather dim view of progress, to put it mildly. He's a second generation Schuonian, and a rather dyspeptic one at that. Like Tony Soprano, he wants us to believe The best is over, such that the more we progress the more we decline. 

I get it, but do we really want to deny history and return to the caves? He says as much by highlighting a remark by Cooomarasamy:

From the Stone Age until now, Quelle dégringolade!

I don't speak French either, but it means What a tumble! Really? Our astoneaged furbears lived in paradise, since which time it's been an unending fall? This strikes me as a rather neandertall tale that cannot be squared with the Judeo-Christian conception of time as going somewhere, i.e., not just entropic but teleological. Time out for some Joycean weirdplay:

What a quhare soort of mahan... It is slaking nuncheon out of some thing's brain pan. Me seemeth a dragon man... Whoat is the mutter with you? You that side your voise are almost inedible to me. Become a bitskin more wiseable, as if I were you.

It reminds me of Chesteron't Everlasting Man, which traces man's journey from caves to Christ. The merest man is an infinite distance from the beasts, but the latent potential of the caveman is also infinite, and requires time to unfold and be a bitskin more wiseable. 

Do we really want to say that science, symphonies, and space travel are on the same plane as slaking nuncheon out of some thing's brain pan? Perry says as much:

[T]he profanation of man's space-landing on the virgin moon comes to mind here...

There is no such thing as an underdeveloped nation, only over-developed nations.  

Even "Pasteur's serums (vaccines)" mean that "people physically unfit to live according to the wisdom inherent in natural laws can now survive," which has "contributed to the destructive overpopulation of the earth..." 

So much for "be fruitful and multiply"! 

I have a personal stake in this, because the guy who discovered insulin is responsible for mitigating my own unfitness to live according to the merciless wisdom inherent in natural laws.

Granted, the romance and enchantment of space travel escape me. But the virgin moon? Why not the virgin earth, in which case man is an unwanted despoiler here too? Extremes meet, in this case the premodern Perry with the postmodern environmental zealots.

Pack to process, the church fathers recognized early on that humanity has a kind of intellectual and moral progress built into it. Things do get better, even if they're simultaneously getting worse.

After all, we never stop learning and developing, both individually and collectively. Tumble or not, we're no longer living in caves, or conducting human sacrifice, or murdering anyone who isn't a member of our tribe. We are no longer passively subject to the whims of a demon-haunted world, but can work to enhance life, better ourselves, and evolve civilizations because of our logoistic rationality.

Indeed, the fathers realized that history had to evolve to the point at which Christ could appear. He did so at the time he did because men had to first become habituated to the divine logos, which is to say, the principle of rationality. The Aztecs, for example, would have had no idea what to make of Jesus, except perhaps dinner. 

Regarding history, Perry's advice is to avoid it -- to revert to the timeless Origin and Center before it got underway. (I'm probably being unfair to Perry. We'll do a deeper dive after I finish the book.). But the Judeo-Christian perspective sees it as providential, while not forgetting that it can cut both ways, up and down. For Fretheim, the future is both open-ended and teleological, drawn by God in a non-deterministic manner toward its ultimate fulfillment.

Or, I suppose Christianity reconciles the ultimate failure of history with a divine intervention to save itself from itself? The Book of Revelation is obscure, but it seems to involve God snatching victory from the jaws of the Antichrist.

Gemini?

This text is a fascinating, dense, and somewhat rambling philosophical and theological exploration.

Only somewhat rambling? You're so kind. Perhaps you can tie it together and make my inedible voise a bitskin more wiseable?

Style and Tone:

• The text is highly intellectual and philosophical, drawing on a wide range of sources (Wilde, Chesterton, Perry, Fretheim, etc.).
• It is conversational and sometimes digressive, reflecting the author's thought process.
• It uses a mix of formal and informal language, adding to its conversational tone.
• There is a clear sense of the author's own personality coming through.

Overall:

This text is a complex and thought-provoking exploration of fundamental questions about God, history, and the human condition. It reflects a desire to reconcile faith with reason and to find meaning in a world of constant change.