Charles Victor on Religion

Augustine lived in an age of anxiety.The established state and the civilized world were being eroded by foreign elements once considered the necessary components of political stabilization and economic surety, and by political divisiveness and uncertainty as to how to deflate or to correct this oversight of judgement now virtually incorporate in the system of state. Policies of immigration, accommodation, and colonialism—one time solutions to social, economic and security problems–had transformed into situations that were not only unravelling the status quo, but toppling an entire civilization, and replacing it with something very other, something the history texts are wont to call the barbarian invasions. The 330AD move of the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium renamed Constantinople was a tacit abdication of imperial power in the West. Continue reading →

Plotinus is the last flower of the world as Greek. After him it is the Roman influence that ascends in cult and culture, and its power comes in two flavours: practicality, and legality. Both these, along with Plotinus, and the Judeo-Christian scriptures fuse in the anabatic mind of Augustine, fifth century bishop of Hippo, the last great philosopher and theologian before the crepuscule of the Dark Ages, the father of the theories of original sin, predestination, illuministic spirituality, and, not least, blain on my pre-adolescent mind. Continue reading →

In the ancient world there was a detectable ennui with the ability of any cult or philosophy to wield a binding vision. There was more serious discontent with the lack of an embraceable order to govern the acts of men. Greek thought could allow for the intellectual elite to find spiritual peace in the contemplation of the Pure Act or the Idea of the Good, or to exalt forbearance (Stoicism), or to flaunt the ephemeral nature of time (Epicureanism), but the masses of humanity were in want and in search of an understanding, a way, a light, a truth to live by in hope and with hope. Christianity was on the cusp of being able to fulfil that need. Unfortunately, history always seems to take the long and circuitous road, and along the way many things change, many things fail to happen, many things get tied up in indecipherable knots. Continue reading →

In the theories of Plato and Aristotle we have the two poles of occidental philosophical thought. All that follows orbits in some degree about one of these two understandings of how reality is constructed, and how we come to know it. Yet, as a culture we have another corpus of consideration regarding the ideas of god and soul, the Jewish and Christian scriptures. They are not philosophies, but spiritual speculations (or according to some, revelations) conveyed in socio-religious imagery and ethical codes. They, like philosophy, attest to the search for meaning, at first tribally, then individually, and finally universally. Continue reading →

Plato inherited a world intellectually divided between Parmenides’ vision of the constancy and immutability of being and Heraclitus’ vision of the constancy of change. Plato’s vision of reality is a strait vertical line between these two points, the immutable Ideas, the mutating world. It is mathematical, intellectual, oriental, serene. The world is a flickering shadow of a singular light. Here one contemplates, sees through the illusionary surface to the inner, the transcending truth. Aristotle’s vision is geometrical, Hesperian, ceaselessly moving. Reality is not characterized as a line between two points, it is a triangle in a square within a circle with tangents flying off in all directions, intersecting, forming more triangles, forming a polygon, enclosed in a greater circle, and all of this not on a singular plane, but multidirectional, solid, substantial, spherical. The Aristotelian universe races with life. It is the concrete, the reasonable world, and Aristotle’s mind tracks its every reason. Continue reading →

In the sixth century before Christ there takes place across a wide swath of the civilized world a coup de theatre, a dramatic turn in the human psyche; in the East enter Confucius and the Buddha, in the West the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers. The human mind turns within and without with a nuance not encountered before. It is as if there is a slight shift in the intellectual tectonic plates of the species, and it produces the spiritual acclivity of much of the next millennium. Continue reading →