/lit/ - Literature

>>22707271
When we understand the other, and come to see our selves in them, we can reach out in love, trying to repair their freedom and knowledge.

Knowledge is essential to being a good person because it is not easy to "know the good." Policy is extremely complex and requires an understanding of the world. Further, knowledge makes us more free, as it increases our causal powers through techne. We are not able to fly over oceans lest we invent airplanes, etc. Thus, continually going beyond our current desires and beliefs, in ongoing transcendence is the path towards greater freedom.

This leads us to consider what is most transcendent, that which is without limit. This is Hegel's true infinite, the God of the Patristics, the God of apophatic theology of which nothing can be said, since all words are finite and limiting, a divine nothing. This isn't the God of classical theism who sits beside the world and is thus in some ways limited and defined by it. This is a panENtheistic God that is, as Saint Augustine says, "within everything, but contained in nothing."

Or purpose, our telos, is bound up in what makes man unique. For the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions, as well as the Aristotlean, this is our rationality. To fullfil our telos of contemplation is to be our authentic selves, and we are only truly free in authenticity. Existentials butcher this old insight by denying telos. For Merton, "the contemplation of the ultimate, the divine" is our purpose. For Saint Augustine it is likewise (pic related), and you see this in Islam as well (e.g. Rumi).

Essentialism and reductionism results from a sort of dead end thinking. Unable to see how conciousness could emerge from reductive materialism, it is swept aside as illusory. This beggars belief (see Nagel's Mind and Cosmos), but it is core to the dominant philosophy of existentialism, where we become heroic overmen only through meeting a meaningless world face to face. It's a dogmatic position.

Peterson sort of butchers this whole tradition with a "cultural" Christianity that ignores the mystical experience and philosophical truths at the center of the faith. The "Good News," isn't just about man's salvation from punishment. Focusing on that makes the faith hollow and about self benefit.

The Good News is that, as Saint Athanasius says: "God became man so that man might become God." It is about the our ability to become one in the divine. Not to bring the divine down to us, but for us to be "in the fullness of God," as Saint Paul says.

This is no human effort. As Rumi says, "to praise the sun is to praise one's own eyes." Our coming to this God of Nothing, who is No Thing, Infinite, is a grace. Saint Bonaventure talks of the world as a ladder up to the Divine, but this is always a ladder extended by grace. Thus, we must never boast, but always seek to help others achieve the same.

>>22636015
Fears that man having any sovereignty will somehow violate God's sovereignty lead to a view where man must be a puppet. Man cannot do any good save for divine "acting through."

This comes from an idea of a God that is not truly infinite. Such a God is a powerful entity who nonetheless sits outside the world and is thus defined by it. God is necessarily defined by what God is not in such a case, God's action defined by human action.

But God's freedom is our freedom and we become more free as we go beyond ourselves. You see this recognition in philosophers of transcendence as well, Plato and Hegel.

Being poor in spirit means to be less defined by internal drives and desires and more ready to be defined by that which is from without, transcending the self.

Thus, the original Christian formulation is in some ways closer to panENtheism (not panthesism) than Enlightenment theism. But this is a mysterious, personal panentheism, not that of the logic chopping philosophers of religion today. God is, as Saint Augustine says, "in everything yet contained in nothing." As Saint Bonneventure says, "an effect is a sign of its cause," and so all the world is a sign of God (Romans 1).

Saint Aquinas has similar things to say.

The best place I have seen poverty of spirit and purgation explained is in Saint John of the Cross, who draws heavily on Job, Ecclesiastes, Jeremiah (his laments), and the Psalms to illustrate what is mean. That work (the late chapters deal with the "night of spirit," as opposed to sent) or those parts of the Bible are good illustrations. In the Psalms David talks about being made impoverished in eloquent ways.

We must come to God as beggars, for we have nothing to offer God. We are the work of God's hands, the clay that must be molded (Romans 9), we must be "broken with a rod of iron," and "dashed to pieces like pottery," (Psalm 2) before being remade. See also the metaphor uses in Jeremiah 18 of the potter's wheel.

>>22626263
Oh, right. Totally agree then.

I do wish whoever coined the term had considered that pantheism and panentheism look almost exactly the same.

There is this neat phenomena where, even if you mix up all the letters in individual words, you can generally still read them quite easily, because in general we don't "read letters," but read "sets of letters." But when you take a somewhat uncommon word and modify it by adding two letters that already existed in the original word?

I only recently heard of panendeism, which I like more for being more unique.

Process-relational theology.