/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.19942802]

is it true that most of these christian philosophers are actually mystics who believe god is some sort of mambo jambo essence inside of us and things, instead of the divine being described in the bible? or am I misunderstanding?

[Anonymous No.19942810]

I certainly hope so, otherwise they're all autistic children.

[Anonymous No.19942966]

Yeah basically. Depends on the philosophers but the general Christian transcendent god has nothing to do with the YHWH in the Old Testament.

[Anonymous No.19942993]

>>19942966
Obviously, as they're actually based

[Anonymous No.19943029]

There is a spectrum of thought on God's essence and man's capacity to experience it directly in Christianity, with the two ends of the spectrum being (1) what is usually derogatorily called pantheism or panentheism (a charge of borderline atheism in this context, i.e. Bible is mostly allegorical mystical text, God's "personality" is a "mystery" and like all mysteries only understandable allegorically, apophatically, anagogically) at one extreme and (2) Biblical literalism, God's "otherness" from creation is not to be disrespected by philosophers reducing Him to a philosophical abstraction or a featureless mystical unity, literal obedience to the revealed instructions of the Bible and literal adherence to the credos of the true Faith (whichever that is), etc. Most thinkers fall somewhere in between the two extremes. Both sides have their respective mysticisms.

The first side in its most extreme verges on reducing, or actually does reduce, the concrete and non-philosophical/allegorical elements of the Bible to an almost pagan pantheism or panentheism, or Neoplatonism at most. Eriugena was accused of this, as were the Amalricians, but even Hesychasm ("Palamism") in Orthodoxy has been accused of it. And being accused of it was always a risk, especially in the Middle Ages, so other thinkers like Aquinas who are sympathetic to it will often distance themselves by publically condemning the most extreme forms.

The second side in its most extreme verges on a form of Christianity that has a lot in common with certain austere forms of Judaism and Islam. Philosophy is seen as arrogant and perverse because it tries to doubt or do better than God's own revelation. This extreme may still tolerate mysticism but it will be the mysticism of pious prayer and theoria (proper contemplation) bringing one near God, and that's it. Very extreme ones will deny even mysticism and simply insist on living a just life according to God's revelations. "Fideist" is sometimes a term used for this position although it has other meanings that only overlap with it. Some representatives of this side of the spectrum are the Ockhamites, who demoted what they say as arrogant reason, via nominalism, to make room for faith, early Protestantism and especially Calvinism, and aspects of the medieval Catholic Church, which had recurrent crises about people using philosophy to interpret/reinterpret/deny sacraments like the eucharist, like Berengar did, and condemned Meister Eckhart. (But one should also keep in mind that Aquinas' own views were still being semi-condemned or nearly condemned at the same time that Eckhart's views were on trial.)

[Anonymous No.19943039]

>>19943029
As I said most people are in the middle. A moderate Catholic representative is Ignatius of Loyola, whose Spiritual Exercises are sort of mysticism but really more like semi-mystical focused prayer. This allows a vent for mysticism and mysteries but doesn't give them much room to fly off into Eckhart and Jakob Bohme style quasi-pantheism. But even the quasi-pantheists naturally claim that they do not flout the revealed faith. The question is then how sincere they are, since sometimes it's hard to reconcile highly allegorical and mystical readings of the Bible with literalist readings at all, which is why the fideist extreme of the spectrum sometimes gets mad at these types and wants to banish them altogether.

Islam has a word, "shath," meaning the kind of ecstatic antinomian utterance a mystic has after achieving supra-mundane, supra-conceptual insight into or union with God, which sometimes causes the mystic to say things that are (they claim) only apparently blasphemous, like "I am the Truth" or even "I am God." Not that surprising that ordinary faithful and anti-philosophical fideist theologians don't like this, if they already don't like people questioning how to justify the eucharist in Aristotelian logic.

This spectrum has been a problem since antiquity. Philo is the first great author to try to solve it (although he may have been mirroring traditions that already existed in Alexandrian Judaism at the time). He was a great platonist and wanted to reconcile philosophical mysticism with revealed religion, which is the essential problem. Judaism also had rifts between millennialist movements with quasi-mystical aspects like the Essenes, vs. the much more literalist, fideist movements like the Pharisees (which eventually became rabbinical Judaism, while the Essene groups probably melded into "Jewish Christianity" and then into Christianity over the centuries).

Early Christianity had the same problems which is why people like Augustine even in the late 4th century when the trinitarian synthesis is well underway were still exposed to Manichaean, gnostic, and neoplatonist alternatives to Christianity before converting to Christianity. Origen and the great Cappadocian fathers were all platonists and followers of Philo's allegorical platonist interpretation of the Bible to some extent although they rebuked pagan philosophers who naturally said "Why not just go all the way and become pagan then?" Origen responds to things like that in Contra Celsum but you have to decide who you agree with. In the earlier church, the efforts to combat heretical gnostics were really efforts aimed at very similar thinkers, who liked Jesus' message but cared far less than the early church did about justifying or maintaining the Old Testament and its revelations.

[Anonymous No.19943049]

>>19943039
Also, Julian the Apostate's apostasy to paganism was really an apostasy to post-Christian neoplatonism, turned into a "faith" analogous to Christianity, rather than just a reversion to long-dying "cultural paganism." Interesting sidenote, Julian went to school with one of the three Cappadocian fathers, I forget which. One of the Gregories. They knew each other.

So there are slides and backslides in both directions: Augustine is considered an eclectic platonist but is hardcore fideist, but he was initially manichaean/neoplatonist; Pseudo-Dionysius and his devotee Eriugena are so neoplatonising that they borderline make Christ into just the primary hypostasis of a late neoplatonic (Proclean) hierarchy. When this is reintroduced into Christianity it causes controversy but also paradoxically reawakens passionate Christian devotionalism that simmers and periodically overflows for centuries. The Renaissance hermetics were sincerely Christian in their attempts to turn all of pagan philosophy and occult history into an internally consistent grand synthesis based on the Corpus Hermeticum, Plotinus, Proclus, the Chaldean Oracles and Orphic texts etc.

Debates on the literalness of scripture were also all over early Christianity. Thinkers like Origen from the 3rd century often got condemned in the late 4th and early 5th century for being too "free" with interpreting the trinity, but that's because quasi-philosophically speculating about the real nature of the trinity (is it just a mystery we'll never solve in this lifetime? do we need new concepts to explain the relation?) was normal at this time, since anti-heresy efforts were mostly aimed at gnostics who were clearly "beyond the pale" of the church. But by the mid 4th century and later, intra-church heresies about the trinity and Jesus' essence were now the main focus of anti-heresy worries, so they looked backward and saw Origen and others "blundering." Early church figures like Lactantius and Irenaeus and even the early Augustine who argued for freedom of faith are replaced by views like the late Augustine's, that compelling correct faith is actually doing the misbeliever a favour.

[Anonymous No.19943065]

>>19943049

The problem underlying it all is the spectrum I mentioned between a "pure" philosophical-allegorical reading of the Bible, which has always tended toward platonism at its best but also pantheism and atheism at its worst since the days of Philo, Justin Martyr, and Origen, and a "pure" non-allegorical reading, which at its best often shakes people out of atheism and "yeah yeah so 'we're all one' blah blah who cares" routinised pantheism and into genuine excitement about God's radical otherness, but at its worst tends toward some of the grumpiest and least spiritually satisfying anti-philosophers in extreme forms of Ockhamism, Calvinism (with similar problems in Islam). If you like, the central problem is the issue of being so philosophically pure (all is one; the end) that you become irreligious vs. becoming so unphilosophically arbitrary (God told you not to eat fish, so don't).

Even WITHIN some of these authors, like Philo and Origen and Nicholas of Cusa, it's hard to tell whether they are "really" or "primarily" platonic mystics or Christians. Also at the highest levels of mysticism many report experiencing the mystery of the personhood and otherness of God or the Trinity, so it's not like they stop being Christians at the moment of mystical union.

The best way to approach it is to realise that the mystical domain is itself structured in the form of mysteries that have "alogical" content, i.e. they have "contingent" structure relative to pure (and thus empty) logical absolute. So what is really needed is a kind of mystical empiricism, taking the best of both Christian and neoplatonic praxis.

>>19942966
That's called Marcionism and is a common gnostic heresy. On another note, there are also people who reject Paul as a perverter of Jesus' message and say the New Testament is 90% Paul doing bootleg Greek philosophy.

Everybody says everybody else is a heretic of course.

[Anonymous No.19943085]

>>19942802
The belief that "god is some sort of mambo jambo essence inside of us" does not contradict the Bible. Not things, though. That's heresy.

[Anonymous No.19943107]

>>19943029
I always feel disappointed when I see an effortpost, knowing most will just scroll past it to look for another post they can easily respond to with a low effort meme. They know they aren't learned enough to sincerely discuss anything, and yet they continue believing they must be correct about everything.

[Anonymous No.19943125]

>>19943049
Julian was effectively the first neo-pagan, having been raised Christian.

[Anonymous No.19943175]

>>19942966
False.

[Anonymous No.19943191]

>>19943107
Couldn’t disagree more. Effortposts are great and they tend to always be freer and more straightforward than the stilted academic formal writing people produce when they’re worried about their reputations. The one you replied to is exceptionally good, too. Not much to add to it.

[Anonymous No.19943201]

>>19943029
>>19943039
>>19943049
>>19943065
Thanks for these posts. Ignore the other anon.

[Anonymous No.19943256]

>>19943029
One question anon, why are you on /lit/?

[Anonymous No.19943285]

>>19943191
I'm not seeing where you're disagreeing with me, anon.

[Anonymous No.19943312]

>>19942802
Of course anon.
>, instead of the divine being described in the bibl
only jews and americans believe this.

[Anonymous No.19943345]

>>19943285
That’s funny. I’m tired and it seems like your post is ambiguous. I’m so used to cruel “low energy” “Sad!” posts that I thought yours was in the same vein and making fun of effortposters for pathetically insisting on being right even as they shout anonymously into the void. Sorry for the misreading.

[Anonymous No.19943358]

>>19943029
>>19943039
>>19943049
have you read R. C. Zaehner? he describes the monistic and dualistic mysticisms, but strongly denounces monism. He explains this as a false identification since man is made in the likeness of God, and the experience of eternity can be found in one's own soul, but this does not mean it is equal to God.

[Anonymous No.19943368]

i recommend reading zaehner's article "can mysticism be christian?"

[Anonymous No.19943378]

>>19943358
What "Buddhist" mistakes himself for "God"?

[Anonymous No.19943385]

Without God's grace the furthest point a mystic reach is that in which he sees his immortality. This, according to Zaehner, is what leads to monistic experiences.

[Anonymous No.19943393]

>>19943368
I'm surprised Christians don't succumb to this form of mysticism more often, with the body being the temple of the Lord and the soul the throne of Christ, and the whole God-becoming-human-deifying-humanity

[Anonymous No.19943418]

>>19943378
I don't know much about buddhism, but it is monistic as far as I know, theravada being an exception. Mahayana and concepts like tatagatha posit a transcendental substance underlying all things.

>>19943393
the resurrection of Christ and the promise of our bodily resurrection is strong enough to dismiss any extreme form of self-identification with God

[Anonymous No.19943422]

>>19943385
similar thing in massignon i think

[Anonymous No.19943430]

>>19943422

[Anonymous No.19943436]

>>19943430

[Anonymous No.19943464]

>>19943422
>>19943430
>>19943436
thanks. I plan to read him one day

[Anonymous No.19943470]

>>19942802
God is a man in the sky who is on my side

[Anonymous No.19943487]

>>19943470
>God is a man in the sky
audianism is heresy

[Anonymous No.19943491]

>>19943418
Tathagatagarbha is the notion that all beings have the potential to reach enlightenment, not an underlying or transcendental substance per se. That might be more accurate to the notion of sunyata or emptiness, though that is supposed to be void of description but is effectively an absolute or sole substance.

[Anonymous No.19943495]

>>19943065
Top tier posts

[Anonymous No.19943569]

>>19943491
i read about it in this article (not authoritative i know):
https://www.jstor.org/stable/3270201

it says:
>the tathagata-garba tradition and hongaku shiso ideas have always been open to the charge that they posit an un-Buddhist subsitantialist or atman-like existence.
and that tathagata is a form of dathu-vada

[Anonymous No.19943574]

>>19943569
>The idea of tathagata-garbha, on the contrary, posits a substance (namely, tathagata-garbha) as the basis of the phenomenal world.

[Anonymous No.19943578]

>>19943487
I'm sorry forgive me
I like the "radical otherness" thing the anon was talking about above. Whenever people say god is just like some metaphysical construct I feel like "well then what's the point".

[Anonymous No.19943607]

>>19943578
don't worry friend, we hold a personalistic view of God so no need to anthropomorphize Him.

[Anonymous No.19943630]

>>19943607
>personalistic view of God
That he is a "self" of some kind?

[Anonymous No.19943658]

>>19943569
>>19943574
Not sure what the article is saying as I can only see that it is meant to be a criticism of Zen from the 1990s, but yes there is an argument to made that tgg is no different from an atman, however most Buddhists who hold the doctrine of tgg would probably equate it with emptiness, which atmavada non-Buddhist schools of Indian philosophy do not do, i.e. no Vedantin will say the atman is void of characteristics or interdependent etc.

[Anonymous No.19944392]

>>19942802
Ellul is the most un-mystical of Christian philosophers, if you want to ignore a lot of vague mumbo-jumbo.

[Anonymous No.19944398]

>>19944392
>buy my book!

[Anonymous No.19944572]

>>19944398
Ellul has been dead for a long time, anon

[Anonymous No.19944818]

>>19944572
You're right, publishers don't profit from the selling of books at all. This faggot posting his books in every other thread with his lies and clickbait posts is totally not a bunch of free advertising.

[Anonymous No.19944852]

>>19943491
>not an underlying or transcendental substance per se.
In the Lankavatara Sutra, the Tatgatagarbha is treated as equivalent with the storehouse consciousness.

[Anonymous No.19944877]

>>19942802
Probably.

[Anonymous No.19944879]

Not reading all these posts

[Anonymous No.19944894]

>>19942966
"I Am That I Am"
Its simple nigga. Stop talking nonsense.

[Anonymous No.19944899]

>>19943107
More often than not an effort post will just be some anon rambling on about his opinion and then drifting off onto another topic. Its a waste to read to be honest.

[Anonymous No.19944964]

>>19942802
what is God described like in the bible

[Anonymous No.19944989]

>>19942802
It goes back to Jewish philosophy

[Anonymous No.19945062]

>>19944964
>Revelation 19:11-16
>11 And I saw heaven opened, and behold a white horse; and he that sat upon him was called Faithful and True, and in righteousness he doth judge and make war.
>12 His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were many crowns; and he had a name written, that no man knew, but he himself.
>13 And he was clothed with a vesture dipped in blood: and his name is called The Word of God.
>14 And the armies which were in heaven followed him upon white horses, clothed in fine linen, white and clean.
>15 And out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations: and he shall rule them with a rod of iron: and he treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God.
>16 And he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, KING OF KINGS, AND LORD OF LORDS.