THE LAND OF UNLIKENESS

two things after a long hiatus.

1. While preparing for a class on Christology, specifically Athanasius’ on the Incarnation, I re-discovered these beautiful passages.

Man, who was created in God’s image and in his possession of reason reflected the very Word Himself, was disappearing, and the work of God was being undone. The law of death… prevailed upon us, and from it there was no escape…. Was He to let corruption and death have their way with them? In that case, what was the use of having made them in the beginning?

…..

…the incorporeal and incorruptible and immaterial Word of God entered our world. In one sense, indeed, He was not far from it before, for o part of created had ever been without Him Who, while ever abiding in union with the Father, yet fills all things that are. But now He entere the world in a new way, stooping to our level in His love and Self-revealing to us. He saw the reasonable race, the race of men that, like Himself, expressed the Father’s Mind, wasting out of existence, and death reigning over all in corruption. He saw the corruption held us all the closer, because it was the penalty for the Transgression; He saw, too, how unthinkable it would be for the law to be repealed before it was fulfilled. he saw how unseemly it was that the very things of which He Himself was the Artificer should be disappearing…. All this He saw and, pitying our race, moved with compassion for our limitation, unable to endure that death should have the mastery, rather than that His creatures should erish the work of His Father for us men come to nought, He took to Himself a body, a human body even as our own… He surrendered His body to death instead of all, and offered it to the Father. This He did out of sheer love for us, so that in His death all might die, and the law of death thereby be abolished because, having fulfilled in His body that for which it was appointed, it was thereafter voided of its power for men.

++++++++++

2. Aron doesn’t talk about his music much at all, not nearly as often as he ought to.

Good Dust – and death shall have no dominion

2 people like this post.

Unlike

The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Washington DC has declared that they will pull their social services to city residents if the same sex bill, currently being considered by the Washington DC city council, is passed as is. “The city is saying in order to provide social services, you need to be secular. For us, that’s really a problem,” said Susan Gibbs, spokeswoman for the archdiocese.

So, essentially, those in the Archdiocese who are making this decision are saying that, contrary to what we might have believed, agape is not unconditional, but dependent on the Archdiocese’s imprimatur of City Council policy.

Tell me, where does Christ append an anti-secularity clause to his “do it to the least of these, you do it to me”? What kind of Church is this that demands compatibility with bureaucrats before it will do the work of Christ?

Read the whole story here.

PS. Vox Nova has picked up on the discussion here.

Like

Unlike

Aron recently wrote a great post looking at some features of nothingness in the Zen and Christian traditions. People clearly got a little riled up, so I thought I’d stoke the flame a little by throwing Pseudo-Dionysius into the mix.

As far as “nothingness” goes, most would probably expect a chunk from the Mystical Theology, but I prefer to pull from The Divine Names for the more systematic questions. In ch 1, Denys lays out the theurgical nature of his project: all of this, he says, ultimately comes down to the incarnational call of the Trinity to us, that we “rise up to it.” So, all the ontology, the hermeneutics, the trinitarian theory, etc… is for the greater end of theosis. Sometimes I wonder if Denys thinks that the best thing to do is become a monk. Anyway, the theurgic end of all theology is important to keep in mind when trying to understand what Denys does next with the Trinity.

The short term goal of the Divine Names is to lay out the way in which our names for God actually do or do not refer (or cohere – whichever anachronistic hermeneutic you want to sock him with) to God. The problem is, we’re not actually referring to “some-thing”. There is no X that marks God’s spot, at least, not in any way that could be grasped by finite beings. And here is the great similarity to the discussion about Aron’s post. I’ll end with these quotes.

We leave behind us all notions of the divine. We call a halt to the activities of our minds and, to the extent that is proper, we approach the ray which transcends being. Here, in a manner no words can describe, preexisted all the goals of all knowledge and it is of a kind that neither intelligence nor speech can lay hold of it nor can it at all be contemplated since it surpasses everything and is wholly beyond our capacity to know it… And if all knowledge is of that which is and is limited to the realm of the existent, then whatever transcendsbeing must also transcend knowledge.

How then can we speak of the divine names? How can we do this is the Transcendent surpasses all discourse and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the read of mind and of being…? How can we enter upon this undertaking if the Godhead is superior to being and is unspeakable and unnameable?….

…Since the union of divinized minds with the Light beyond all deity occurs in the cessation of all intelligent activity, [then] the godlike unified minds who imitate these angels as far as possible praise it most appropriately through the denial of all beings.¹

Like

Unlike

1. from The Divine Names, Ch 1, PG 592D-593C, trans. Colm Luibheid (Paulist Press, 1987) ↩

It should be obvious that we must think of infinity here as other than an infinite succession or series. We must think of qualitative inexhaustibility rather than quantitative accumulation and summation. In a sense, such qualitative inexhaustibility is more than humans can think. And yet we can truthfully point to manifestations or images of such inexhaustibility in our human habitation of the middle. We divine it in the greatness of an unsurpassable artist, in the incalculable nobility of ethical heroism, in the measureless profundity of religious holiness. We praise its creative power when we celebrate being itself as agapeic.

-William Desmond, Being and the Between

1 person likes this post.

Unlike

“How does it stand with philosophy, if we are open to the ultimate claim that being religious may make on us? I am not countering philosophical reason with an opposing irrationalistic fideism. My purpose is to pose a question to philosophical thinking at certain limits. While I will make assertions and even suggestions about the direction the question points us, the main difficulty is to hear this question, for some of our characteristic ways of thinking deafen us to it. How deafen? We philosophers think we have already heard and answered the question. My argument will be that there is another question that has not been heard, or only rarrely or sporadically, and that this further question solicits a new origination of philosophy: a post-philosophical reverence that yet is philosophical through and through; a reverence that perhaps some philosophers once knew, maybe sometimes in a taken for granted way, when religious reverence was also taken for granted.”

William Desmond, “Religion and the Poverty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Religion in German Idealism (2004).

Like

Unlike

Those of you in DC might know that I’m having a very expectant advent right now.

You all know that I don’t forward emails or post silly stuff here (I don’t know why I make these caveats, but I feel compelled to nonetheless), but I thought that those of you that are intentional about resisting certain rather unhealthy aspects of the seasonal buzz might find this bit encouraging. And I’m all about encouragement here.

From the Sojourners daily email.

Have Yourself a Peace and Justice Christmas

Have yourself a peace and justice Christmas,
Set your heart a-right.
Flee the malls and focus on Christ’s guiding light.

Have yourself a peace and justice Christmas,
Give your time a way.
Share God’s love, And serve “the least of these” today.

Here we are, as we pray for peace,
We’ll live simply and give more.
We care for those far and near to us,
Which brings cheer to us, once more.

God brings down
The haughty from high places,
And lifts up the low.
God cares for the hungry and the humble, so –
Forget the stress and let the peace and justice flow!

Like

Unlike

The following is an *under construction* excerpt from a paper that is even more in the works than the excerpt. I’m sharing it as is because of a comment Matslacker made in the pervious post from AD, regarding orienting ourselves to the Spirit through activities like catechumenate that seek not necessarily for intelligibility but rather for points of connection “between dogma and life through the difficult practice of amending one’s life, of practicing humility, prayer, virtue in general, that is, of attaining purity of heart and thereby attracting the life-creating Spirit, whereby one’s “eyes” might truly “see”–even the eyes of the simple (cf. here the catechesis of Paul the Simple as an extreme case–or Aquinas’ last considerations upon his theologizing).” I thought his point was great, and happened to be a line of thought I’m trying to pursue in my own work. I heartily recommend that you read his comment, and offer the following only as an inchoate step toward a “systematic” account of the role of church practice.

As a philosophical historian of ethics, Alasdair seems almost obsessively concerned with recounting the development of practical rationality through the emergence of late modern liberalism. In Whose Justice? Which Rationality? MacIntyre argues that the loss of a teleological orientation in the account of social formation necessarily results in competing practical rationalities. Pursuant to which, modern social science lacks the ability to recognize much less help redress the fracture in practice and rationality caused by the loss of ends-based reasoning. Continue reading ‘An ill-formed Primer on “practice” in the work of Alasdair MacIntyre’

Like

Unlike

I’m sorry we’ve been so absent lately. I know you miss us, a lot. But we’ve been really busy, and we know you’re a patient folk. Besides, we gave you that lovely Bulgakov Blog conference, and we know you still haven’t read every post yet, and you certainly haven’t read every comment made by your fellow readers. Come now, can’t you make at least one comment yourself?

This would be an excellent opportunity for me to offer my sincere thanks to everyone who contributed to the conference. Whether you made a large or small contribution, we are in your debt for what turned out to be a fascinating and thought provoking event!

In any event, we were busy. I was in Chicago with many of you at AAR. However, Aron seems to have joined that contentious group of protesters who haven’t quite come to terms with the AAR/SBL estrangement. Fear not, they’re getting back together, maybe even by 2011. Aron made up for his absence by attending the Chesterton Conference in Niagra, Ontario. Look for his paper to appear here soon once I steal it from his laptop.

I’ve recently become interested in the Bible again after reading Irenaeus’ Against Heresies and teaching the Revelation unit in my advisor’s Seminarian course a couple times.I’m currently writing a paper on the regula fidei, and at Joshua’s suggestion began reading up on some literary theory, including Northrop Frye (although I wonder what you had in mind when you made that recommendation, JADR). Anyway, I stumbled across this bit in Frye that made me laugh, and for lack of anything substantial to post at the moment, I thought I’d toss this one out there:

It took me some time to hit on the right formula for a course in the Bible. I consulted the curricula of other universities, and found that they gave courses called “The Bible As Literature,” which involved chopping pieces out of the Bible like the book of Job and the parables of Jesus, saying, “Look, aren’t they literary?” that approach violated all my instincts as a critic, because those instincts told me that what a critic does when he is confronted with any verbal document whatever is to start on page one at the upper left-hand corner and god one reading until he reads the bottom right-hand corner of the last page. But many people who have attempted to do that with the Bible have flaked out very quickly, generally somewhere around the middle of Leviticus.

- Northop Frye from Northrop Frye and Jacy McPherson, Biblical and Classical Myths

Like

Unlike

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART FOUR

By Janet Leslie Blumberg (Deep Grace of Theory)

Wow, Joshua. You responded to every issue I raised, only more succinctly than I had managed to raise them. (In fact, I had to throw away two previous responses, because I discovered I hadn’t read your reply deeply enough yet.)

I find myself much won….

As you say, surely, what is most important is to think through the application of sophiology in contemporary culture. And that means most of all thinking how Bulgakov helps us to “maintain our openness to knowing that we are known by God.”

Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 14 – FINAL POST’

1 person likes this post.

Unlike

“A Discussion in Sophiology and Magic:  Renaissance Precursors to Bulgakov” — PART THREE

By Joshua Delpech-Ramey (The Land of Unlikeness)

The question Janet raises about whether Renaissance humanism, as found in Pico and Bruno, is really human enough, is very important to think through in terms of what we could call the application of sophiology in contemporary culture.

Pico’s emphasis on the polyvalent or indeterminate status of the human essence is not so much opposed to the Augustinian duality of divinity/humanity as the defining feature of human life as it is a setting of that duality in an epistemological situation that has complexified.  Augustine was adroitly skeptical about tying theology to the current dogmas of natural inquiry, whether it be inquiry about the difference between animals and humans or about the number of fixed stars or about any other subject of natural knowledge, including Biblical interpretation, where he advised much more caution about fixing the meaning of Biblical sense than future commentators would. Continue reading ‘Bulgakov Blog Conference, Day 13′

Like

Unlike