The spurious rupture twixt spirit and matter is anciently rooted in the divide between the pragmatics of rationalizing and manipulating the world, using the world, and the embracing of the world as at-one with man, man and world as sharing of one life, one soul: God. We find this psychic problematic embedded in tales that pre-date both Abraham and the glories of Greek civilization, specifically those of Dionysius.
As with all myths, there are variants, but the foundations of the Dionysian are rather consistent. Dionysius is the child of Zeus and a mortal, Semele. In contrast to Apollo with his powers of order, light, enlightenment, and inspiration, Dionysius is presented as androgynous, rather wild, the incarnate power of wine and its freeing, sometime libidinous, intoxications. Zeus loves Dionysius and decides to elevate him to supremacy amongst the Gods. The Titans, the primitive powers, rebel, kill Dionysius, and eat him. Semele (in later variants it is Athena) saves his heart, presents it to Zeus who then either ingests it or inserts it into his “thigh” (a deferential way of referencing the genitalia).[i] Thence Dionysius is resurrected or re-born, and becomes known as the “twice-born”.[ii] The Titans, however, have enraged Zeus. He incinerates them with a strike of his lightening bolt. From their ashes, which contain the remnants of their unholy meal, he forms the human race, thereby ending the preternatural world of a golden age and inaugurating “history”. Man is a reliquary, the composite of a divine son and of his captors, a being rooted in maddening and fearsome powers, a being conjured from a primitive antagonism. Man’s salvation, his fulfillment and peace, can be found only in the replication of Zeus’ revenge, the destruction of the captors that allows for the filial return to the safety of the father. The ascension of the divine essence is accomplished by a purging away, an incinerating, of the gargantuan body through the observance of strict morals and ascetic practices, a praxis whose attenuation is relieved on occasion by a wine or drug induced orgiastic ritual. Later Greek thought will provide two parallel tales, those of Demeter and Persephone, and of Orpheus and Eurydice.
Demeter is the mother earth Goddess. Her beloved daughter, Persephone, is abducted by Hades. Demeter descends into so deep a mourning that she neglects her duties to fecundate the earth, and all life is imperiled. Zeus intervenes and negotiates a compromise. Hades will allow Persephone to visit her mother for half the year if she returns to him in the underworld for the balance of the year. Thus, for six months Demeter, reunited with her daughter, proceeds to joyously exercise her divine powers, and the earth brings forth its crops. The world is saved. We have here the agricultural cycle divinized, raised to sacral abstraction. We have here also a vista onto the nature of human life, its capacity for continual renewal, for life-after-life. The Eleusinian Mysteries, the sacred rites of Demeter and Persephone, allowed one to be initiated into the secrets of this eternal vitality with its promises of reward for the life well tended.[iii]
Orpheus was a mortal whose abilities on the lyre, the instrument of Apollo, God of order and light, could charm even Hades. When his wife, Eurydice, dies, he descends to the underworld to rescue her. He wins permission to lead her back to earth on the conditions that she follow after him and he not look back until they are both again on earth. Overcome with enthusiasm, he turns around as soon as he touches earth, and she is immediately and forever resiled into Hades’ realm. Orpheus now descends into despair, abandons music, institutes the sacred rites of Dionysius, and after resisting the consolations and advances of the local women is by them torn to pieces.[iv]
These sacred myths tell of death and its defiance, the tension of de-fin-ition that resonates twixt the powers of the tangible and intangible, the form-ulry and the functional. From its inception to its dying days on the cusp of the new world order, the Western world informed of Christianity, Greco-Roman civilization will live from the heart of the Orphic rites that celebrate the Dionysian and Eleusinian “mysteries”, the sacral ideals and actions proclaiming the immortality and divinity of the soul, and its destiny of worldly incarnation/reincarnation, a debilitation amendable in ascetics and rituals that open to release and reward. Plato knows these mythologies. He and his world, his culture, are built up upon these cults. They in-form him.
There is another aspect to the Greco-Roman world that informs: the pragmatic as represented in the investigations of its scientist-philosophers. The impetus to understand the stirrings of the human heart that play out in the myths and their cults is countered by the thrust to understand the structure of the cosmos. Pythagoras[v] uncovers the unitary functionality of the world, its ability to be deciphered mathematically. The atomists, Leucippus and Democritus, particularize his insights. Parmenides concretizes them, perceiving reality a constant, a permanence, an invariable mathematical formula, and all change but an illusion. In grasping reality we see through fleeting aspects of things into the universal aspect, the essential aspect of things. We may know this tree and that, this tree in bud, this in leaf, this in decline only because at the basis of this recognition we penetrate to the essence of being a tree, the truth of being a tree, the form, the form-ula of tree, the all-encompassing, universal, idea of that which is fundamental to being a tree. Heraclitus inverts this insight and claims the mathematical formulary is the imagined, a conceptualized abstraction, and change itself the constant reality. Plato, however, and with him and through him the vast number of thinkers and saints that follow, looks to the abstractions of Parmenides. Plato may, thanks to the rites of Orpheus, have the heart of a poet, but through Pythagoras and Parmenides he has the mind of a mathematician. Thus, he sees the meta-physic of the world and man as a formula that is invariable and all informative. God and the spark of this divine being, the soul, are unchanging and unchangeable, and whatsoever is seen as mutable about them is logically to be demoted and eliminated. The good, the proper, life is not so much a matter of seeking purity, as achieving purity of thought. Mind and truth, mind and reality, for Plato are bound together. To know truth is to be truth-ful. In Plato, morality and the theory of the constitutive of being (metaphysics) become epistemology, a theory of knowing, and this will confound the theologies of the early Church Fathers, Augustine, chief among them, the mystics of the mediaeval period and the reformers, both Protestant and Roman, because they will all fail to appreciate the epistemologically nuanced foundation of Plato’s orientation, his conflating of being and knowing and being virtuous.
Alfred North Whitehead opined that all Western thought is but a footnote to Plato. In his umbra, Christian spirituality becomes doubly torn.[vi] On one side stands the cultic images of God in Hebrew thought, his sociality and worldliness, his love of his creation. On the other side reside the twined antitheses of worldliness: the Greek mathematical inclinations that elevate God so far above cosmos as to plant the seeds of his irrelevance to the world (seeds that will ripen as both Deism and Atheism), and the poetics of Orphism that summon man away from the world and the worldly toward an abstract of perfection called God.
In Plato’s rationalist, cerebral, vision of man, the divine world, the world of the eternal and universal Forms or “Ideas”, stands above the world of sensation and desire. The perfection of man resides in rising above senses and passions, and finding solace in the purity of these ideas or formulae, ideas surmounted by those of truth, goodness and beauty. The soul, the divine spark within, the rational animating principle, in its pre-existence resided with the eternal “Ideas”. In the faintest memory of that pre-existence, the soul, like a fire simmering under ashes, yearns to flame bright again. The worldly experiences of beauty, the last Idea to be forgotten and the first to be remembered, awakens this fire, fills man with desire, and orients him toward the purity of Beauty Itself. Eros [έρως, desiring love] is the conjoining power that allows man to rise above the realm of particular things to the realm of singularity, to Truth. Eros can, admittedly, be endlessly distracted by the gratification afforded in immediate and particular things and thereby become reduced to a mere wanting for things and sensation, but it can, and rightly, turn from this world, take to its wings, and fly off to the perfection of truth, goodness and beauty.
Eros exists as evaluative and questing. It is exhausted, fulfilled, satisfied, dissipated in its victory, in the attainment of the object of desire. Therefore, the divine, the world of Ideas/Forms is self-contained, self-possessed, self-fulfilled, without either desire or love, with neither need for desire nor reason for love. The divine is frozen perfection, a crystalline light. Eros may be the fire that lifts man there, but it is a fire extinguished in ecstasy, in going beyond its being and becoming one with the Ideas/Forms.
Man is understood to have a true and inherent dignity by virtue of his prime animating principle, his rational soul. Tellingly, this dignity is dubbed καλοκαγαθία, calocagathia [a portmanteau of καλος (beautiful) and αγαθος (good)]. In the classical Greek mind, and for Plato, in particular, Truth-Beauty-Good constitute a type of bracketed equation: {truth=beauty=good}. It is a formula of being of which all other formulae are but part. It is an ancient “theory of everything”. In man, it translates as: {intellect=will=proper action}. It is a beautiful formula. It looks at man from various fundamental points: the capacities to think, to will, to act. It unites these, claims they are a singularity of being understood from differing perspectives. As regard man, the equation functions backward: to do good, one must will it, and to will it one must clearly understand. The clarity of understanding is the critical first step, and it is ambiguous. Who among men has the right, the clear view? Plato has no doubt that it is the philosopher, and that the philosopher in his serene contemplation stands above the hoi polloi of labourers of all types. As with all “rationalists” systems, it is aristocratic, something best confined to ivory towers or, as I am not disinclined to the idea of a philosopher-king, to benign enlightened dictators. Such confinement, however, is never a best option; it is a utopian fantasy which hamstrings creativity, stifles openness to novelty and adaptability. Life, be it individual or corporate, evolves. All items of reality are subject to change, and how that impetus is received and responded to decides whether or not an item of reality, be it a tree or a society, lives, endures, flourishes. Every moment presents the dilemma: die or transform.[vii]
The ever pragmatic and practical Romans translated the Greek idea of the dignity of true-beauty-good as magnanimitas, literally “great spirit”. Neither Latin nor English, despite “magnanimous”, contain a single word to enwrap the Greek term’s potent intimacy of understanding-aesthetics-morality, the aptitude for the truly fulfilling appreciation of the beauteous and good as the actualization of reason understood as the highest definiens of man.
Whether it be the Greek or the Roman notion of this dignity of man, there are two directions in which this vision can be flexed. It can be understood exoterically as a noblesse oblige, as something oriented toward others, the good of others and world. Alternately, this noble and great spirit at the heart of man can be viewed esoterically, as something oriented toward a passivity, an insularity, a closing off from the world, a cloistering of the self in contemplation of the Ideal Beauty and Good. There is here a play between the world-views of Heraclitus and Parmenides: a world ever changing in contrast to the solidity of Being, a world in which nobility of spirit resides in solidarity with cosmos in contrast to a nobility called to transcend the endless variances of a world caught-up in its becoming. Plato takes self-possession and transcendence as resident in contemplation. Bliss of the mind cannot compete with the variability of the world, the transience of its every aspect. The great spirit is great in its likeness to the cold abstractions of which the world is but a copy. Transcendence is not of this world, not a social empowerment. It is intellectual, solitary.
Aristotle injects a certain amount of movement into the cosmos. Everything hangs upon an unmoved and first mover, an uncaused and first cause, and within this system, man moves from potential to actuality, from imperfection to perfection, from matter to form, from his existence to his essence, by desire for perfection, by the thirst for the absolute of order intellectually, aesthetically, and morally, for truth, beauty, goodness. In Aristotle’s analysis, man is always, foremost, and inseparably rational and social. There is a place for contemplation, but not to the exclusion or demeaning of all else. The nobility of man is worldly. The good life is the exemplification of the golden mean. The great spirit knows dignity in equilibrium, is aware of capacities and limitations, comprehends both modesty and humility, is neither smug nor arrogant. Aristotle’s vision of man might be encapsulated as, to borrow from Vico, “reasonable and civil”.[viii]
The Stoics shift the boundaries, and view transcendence within a dual context: the inner freedom of man, and a fate-governed cosmos. Man’s freedom is challenged, be it by divine ordinance or the internal harmonics of the cosmos. Man must, to maintain his true-most dignity, his nobility of spirit, sacrifice, suffer, endure. We move here from a sense of control to something negative–the need to suffer, the inescapability of suffering, under fate.
Plotinus[ix] moves the boundaries into man himself. Plato and Aristotle both take the soul and destiny of man as something that can be encompassed in the notions of desire, beauty and goodness. The perfection of human nature resides in the desire for the highest beauty, the highest good, and the thrust for such a quest is the rational soul itself. The dichotomy twixt the world of Ideas/Forms and this world, between the transcendent and the immanent, is taken as fact. Its how is accepted, not analyzed. Plotinus gives us the how. Man’s world descends, emanates, “leaks” from the divine. For Plato and Aristotle, the ascent of man is the focus. In Plotinus, the descent becomes the defining consideration. The soul retains traces of beauty and goodness, but it has been infiltrated, polluted, enmeshed in “evil”, in a privation of its truth, its true vitality. The soul is no longer merely separated from the divine, it is defiled. Neither memory of the eternal nor the stirring for perfection can stimulate the ascent of man. There must come some agent or intermediary to awaken man. The trek upward and home is a battle to subdue the material, the sensual, the concupiscible in which man is corrupted and imprisoned. The divine and the mundane are not at opposite ends of a cosmos conjoined by man; man is the nadir of the divine engrossed in the lowest of elements.
Greek thought generally holds that reason, mind, the greatness and dignity of spirit, leads man in “righteousness”, attunes man to the divine, guides him to “walk in holy ways”. Man is deemed self-sufficient and autonomous. This is not a bumptious braying; it is a humble acknowledgement of talent and obligation, of being and duty as the basis of the metaphysics and ethics which are mythologized and iconized in religion. In Plotinus, this balance is ruptured; the nature of being, of cosmos, of man is ruptured. The divine and the mundane are not apposed, not even opposed, they are disjointed. There may be an emanation from the One through the eternal Mind through the World Soul ending in the material cosmos, but this is not an unwavering shaft of light, it is something continuously distorted and deflected in its every moment and movement. The ancient dualism of matter and spirit has become a double negativity—the factuality of the polluting of the divine in its descent, and the necessity of a world-negating human ascent.
Plotinus’ reflections open the door to varied forms of the dualistic system known as Gnosticism. Gnosticism is concerned with the issue of salvation, man’s coming into his full stature, dignity, propriety of being, his wholeness, holiness. It is founded upon the belief that the world is an un-natural admixture of physical and spiritual elements. By some means, there has occurred a falling of the spiritual One-ness of being into lesser realms, realms of non-being, void, “evil” understood as the absence of Being (that surmounting summation of the ideals of actuality, good, beauty, and truth). Salvation is in two parts: a secret knowledge (gnosis) that awakens the soul to its origins and true identity, and a studied dissolution of all worldly connections and defilements through the disciplines of interiorization and ascetic practices. With all worldliness purged away, the soul returns to unity in and with the One. In Plato, it is beauty in the world that first awakens in man the memory of Beauty and its fellow transcending Ideas. In Plotinus and Gnosticism, the world is a vortex in a void and there is, thus, nothing in the world that can act as stimulus. A divine embassador, a saviour, is needed. He must descend from above and become the teacher and revealer of the truth that man is spirit, has fallen into this world, and must now fight his way out of the prison that is both body and world. The power of these ideas will for centuries deflect occidental thought from embracing the world and the self as integral partners of vitality, and agitate man deeper and deeper into loathing of the world and of self, an un-natural state stimulating all manner of psychoses, and all this in the name of transcendence, salvation, the fulfillment of being truly man. Plotinus appears on the world stage as the surety of world governance is wobbling. Such uncertainty rouses an intellectual catabolism. Man is at a loss for confidence in a way forward; the socializing centrifugal forces of psyche collapse into the centripetal forces of introspection and cataplexy. As the bubonic plague brought Europe to its knees before the icon of the fearsome Judge of the terrifying and last judgement, so too here, world events engendered themselves in spiritual, evaluative fear, and a scrambling for an escape.
In the sixth century BC, when Greek thought begins to emerge from mythology and coalesce into science, philosophy and theology, from India to Egypt, we find civilizations experiencing a focal shift. The question of the structure, constitution, and functioning of the universe fades, and the nature and purpose of man become increasingly the concern of deliberation and reflection. Concomitantly, the tribal enclosure of the individual loosens. The meaning of obligation, responsibility, and culpability collate around the individual not primarily as member of a social grouping, but as in a social grouping. The individual comes to his voice. He, not the family, not the tribe, is answerable. The concern is for “one-self”. Man is answerable for his-self, and the ultimate forum before which he answers is God’s. There is in this made a conjunction of a man and God as opposed to the primordial conjoining of God and community or God and cosmos. The solitude of responsibility creates an unbearable condition, and therein a yearning for an ultimate cessation of answerability, for an escape from the world, from being, for a state of out-of-my-being (ecstasy). Notably, the state of the deceased, who to this point were usually considered to return in a type of sleep to the matrix of mother-earth, or roam the darkled depths of an under-world, is now revisited. As the mind attunes itself to the issue of personal answerability, realms of everlasting reward and punishment begin to emerge. Catenutely, from Plato to Plotinus we feel the yearning for serenity and integrity slowly regress into psychic stress and world-weary ennui.
The soul, the conjunctive of our worldliness and sociality, “the image of God”, rises to its truth, its true self, from the innocent-one, the not knowing one, to the wise-one, the one transcending through the experience of life to the sacred (holy, holistic) under-standing and com-prehension of life. This it does in decipherable moments and movements. These processes of psyche unfolding cannot be overlaid on the rational mind as the basis for a theory of how we know, how we come to know things. Plato and Plotinus rout the problem by declaring all ideas are innate, a part of the crasis of the eternal soul (psyche/mind); they need only be clarified or uncovered in disciplined consideration. Epistemology and psychology are coarctated, and Augustine, the cornerstone of so much in Christian thought, will exult this epistemology-psychology into a spirituality of grace with his notion of Illumination, attesting that God must descend to the corrupted human mind (psyche/soul) and illuminate it by grace that man might see, know, will and rightly act. Because of the corruption inherited from the primordial fall in Paradise, without this grace man cannot properly function—intellectually, volitionally, morally. This, however, compresses the God of the Hebrews, the God and Father of Jesus-Christ, into the parameters of Greco-Roman proto-science, and will prove, for many, to be as untenable spiritually as the literal reading of the Genesis’ creation is scientifically. That which is here lost is the sacral tongue, the language that knows when one speaks of God and soul as light, as love, as creative, etc. the words are merely emblematic of powers to disclose, reveal, open, give, grow, understand, see, embrace–all colours of a spectrum whose transcending, integrating nature is pure and purifying psychic light, be it Plato’s philosophical singularity of truth-beauty-good, or scripture’s sacred One, the “Thou that dwellest in light inaccessible”.[x]
[i] Hebrew scripture contains two narratives (Genesis 24, 47) wherein the son is made to swear an oath on the father’s thigh (genitals). Beyond the patent symbolism of swearing on the familial power of continuance contained in the sexual organs of the pater familias, the Hebrew covenant with God sacralizes these organs in the rite of circumcision. Circumcision is, from the human side, the requisite sealing of the communal covenant, a covenant twixt the chosen people and God. It presents as a modified human sacrifice: blood is shed, a portion is cut away to God’s honour, and after, the assembled celebrate with a communal meal of thanksgiving. Thus, the father’s sexual organs are consecrated, conjoined to the sacred, and taking an oath upon them (or a deferential proximity to them) becomes not simply a testimony on the patriarchal family honour but the ancient equivalent of swearing by God or on God’s covenanted word.
[ii] There are in the myths of Dionysius several turns of note. First there is the issue of being “born again” from God. Second, Dionysius is raised from the world of the dead by his father, the high God of heaven and earth. Third, Dionysius in turn raises his mother, Semele, from the dead. (She had pleaded with her lover, Zeus, to see him in his divine glory. Zeus did act to shield her, but even cloaked, his natural brilliance incinerated her.) The ideas of second birth, being born from God, resurrection, and the rescue of mother or other beloved from death are not uncommon, and Christian scripture is not uninformed of the themes. Hebrew sacred writ tells us on several occasions that man cannot look upon God and live. There is also, in Exodus, the account of Moses praying the special favour to look upon God. As with Zeus and Semele, it is a prayer acceded to with a provision attached: God allows Moses to see him only from behind as he walks away. Even the sight of the divine back-side, however, causes Moses’s face to burn with a light so intense he must wear a veil when he descends the sacred mountain to the people. This particle of slightly ribald humour defines the status of man, even the “graced” man, for God, even in his descent to man, remains ever also the ungraspable transcendent that causes man “to burn”, be it with desire, love, or sting of conscience.
[iii] The Egyptian Isis and Osiris present a dynamic akin to that of Demeter and Persephone. The rites of both were fodder for critique by early church theologians and apologists as, at best, burlesques. However, varied rites of initiation and bonds of fellowship within a civilization will be expected to exhibit similar traits denoting cleansing, birth, and sharing. Christian rites of baptism and eucharist became topics of defence simply because they patently (and connaturally) mirrored “pagan” entities.
[iv] In Hebrew sacred writ, there is of Orpheus and Eurydice the parallel tale of Lot and his family. They escape a type of hell, the destruction of their world. Lot’s wife turns before the allotted time and is transformed forever. She becomes the personally inaccessible (a pillar of stone/salt). Lot is not physically torn apart by local women, but he is drugged and raped by his daughters who fear they will become impregnated by “foreigners” and the family seed be lost. While a commentary here on the evolution of morals, man, sacred writings, and God is unnecessary, note may be made of the differing ways these two tales detail the response to death, to the irretrievable loss of an item of great value.
Orpheus plays the hero. He goes to hell and back to win the love of his heart. Heroes are not flawless, and often some speck of unrestraint or hubris deals them a fatal blow. Orpheus shouts victory before he takes the last step, and everything is lost. The flaw in his gravity exposed, he spins out of all control. He descends into a mourning that makes Victoria’s threnetic forty years of widowhood seem a pittance. He abandons his talents. He “finds religion”, but like so many who turn toward the spiritual in time of crisis, he does not allow it to find him, rescue him, transform him. He sits in it. He mourns in it. He uses it to pseudo-consecrate his grief, his embrace of, his living in, death before he is dead. It is not surprising that the women who want him finally give him what he wants—death.
The story of Abraham’s nephew, Lot, gives another perspective on mortal loss. Lot and his family lived in Sodom. Their city is destroyed. Both home and their way of life have been lost. Cult and culture are without root. How shall they live? In contrast to the sweep of history that is promised to Abraham who is ever open to history in faith, the tale of Lot virtually drips in relating the debilitating flaw in tribal insularity of mind and its xenophobia. Abraham toddles off everywhere as he finds it necessary, and shies not from negotiating everything. Lot’s little family cannot even entertain the idea of entering into another society. Their focus is not perseverance but preserving. The daughters of Lot drug and rape to maintain the purity of patriarchal seed. From their conjoining with their father come the peoples of Moab and Ammon, the trans-Jordan neighbours of Israel, nations with whom Israel will have, for the most part, troubled or troubling relations as both the prophets and Pharisees will detail. Beyond the etiology of defining the biological connections to neighbouring peoples, and as a contrast to the divine election of Abraham and his descendants through Isaac, the tale tells of the frustration woven into history in trying to hold onto something that has ceased to be there, the shameless and cloaked actions taken to maintain the fiction of something destroyed and dead. Some, like Abraham, discern the voice of God that tells them to move on. Some, like the daughters of Lot, just descend into narcotized stupor and visionless, despicable rapaciousness.
[v] In Pythagorean thought, the classical Greek sensitivity for the unity of form and beauty, for the singularity of truth-beauty-good is well ensconced. There is not only the propensity toward the mathematical deciphering of the cosmos, but the extended understanding of the beauty and goodness, the form-ality, the balanced equation-ality, the geometrics, inherent in this. Pythagoras believed the mathematical graph-ability of cosmos bespeaks itself acoustically. Mathematical points denote frequencies that can be scored musically. The arithmetical cosmos is at once also a resonating and harmonious sound. Man, as part of this eternal cosmic diapason, is summoned from within to the observance of the constitutional euphonic, and accordingly, to the ordered life, a vocation accomplished in reflective director-ship, in contemplation and control. Pythagoras unites the scientific and the mystical, comprehending all truth resonates with beauty, quivers toward goodness.
[vi] The ideas regarding the ultimate or foundational construct of man and cosmos put forward by Plato and Plotinus, and to lesser degree by Aristotle, are, resultant of Christianity’s early enculturation into the Greco-Roman world, so deeply embedded in dogma and the interpretation of Judeo-Christian scriptures, that it is impossible to read the sacred texts without constantly deterging the mind of the incrustations of Greek “Forms”. The early fathers, the mediaeval theologians, and even the early reformers see through the lenses of, and think within the mind framed by Greek philosophy. Thus, Christianity, a child of Judaism, worshipper of the God of the Hebrews, has been implanted into the Western mind—both the conscious and subconscious mind—in Greek dress, in Greek notions about what it means to be God, cosmos, man, moral, immortal. Because the permeation of these ideas reaches below the surface consciousness, the situation is not easily amended or dispelled. They that attempt to publish the requisite exorcisms of this Hellenism are invariably pilloried as heretics seeking to dissemble orthodoxy. There is, thus, valued ground in the theological questioning and attempted re-envisioning as put forward by Locke, Reimarus, Ritschl, Strauss, Schweitzer, Loisy, Bultmann, McFague, Ruether, Daly, Barth, Brunner, Bonhoeffer, Tillich, Rahner, the Moltmanns, Whitehead, Hartshorn, Cobb Jr., Panikker, Choan Seng Song, among others. There is such and much value also in the attempts made to move the church from entrenchment in institution and dogma toward being Christo-centrically personal and personalizing as found in the pastoral approach of Rome’s supreme pontiff, Francis.
(Francis seems merely to follow Jesus in chastening the attitudes of formalism and legalism that distort the relationships twixt God and man, and men and men, and yet there are conservative factions in his church anguished by his every word, and, reportedly, on the verge of revolt. The interesting item here is that according to their own conserve-ative confession of the constitution of the church, Francis holds his office by the grace and election of the Spirit for the welfare of all the church, and as their primary spiritual director commands their hearing, their respect, and their obedience. In the matter of spirituality, direction is neither a democracy nor a pick-and-choose buffet, and when one is challenged by one’s director, one needs rise to attention and serious self-reflection as to why the challenge is raised or a direction is so received. Cf: “Focus” in Spirituality, Finding the Full Voice of Our Nature, June 2016.)
[vii] The vitalizing practicality of adaptation is not ignored in scripture. Deuteronomy tells of God setting out the need of a continuing choice: life or death, curse or blessing, and Paul (1 Corinthians) counsels his charges to choose the moral dynamic of love.
[viii] Cf: Giambattista Vico in Occidental Ideas, Part 18: The Enlightenment, October 2014.
Aquinas’s meta-physic of man is indebted to Aristotle, although his spirituality remains well within the orbit of Plato. Through Aquinas’ theology, Roman Catholicism will limp along with a dichotomous vision of man as capable of finding God in the world, and the need to ever look away from the world to a Plato inspired abstract of perfection wherein all desire is extinguished in satisfaction.
[ix] Cf: Occidental Ideas, Part 5: Plotinus (Plato revisited), December 2013.
[x] Augustine knows this, admits this. So also do most theologians and philosophers of heft. However, the too very human impetus to conceptualize constantly runs rough shod over this delicacy of soul, and makes us speak and, more importantly, act, as though we are dealing with things, not powers.