tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post4168310706153946510..comments2024-03-28T00:17:55.823+00:00Comments on Bruce Charlton's Notions: Ask an abstract question, and you'll get an abstract answerBruce Charltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comBlogger8125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-87261682397256621862021-01-25T09:01:12.148+00:002021-01-25T09:01:12.148+00:00Hmmm. I'm really taken by your thought, by you...Hmmm. I'm really taken by your thought, by your blog, Dr. - should I call you Professor? It seems somehow more apt, even if you are not currently on a faculty - Charlton. What you have been saying here is deeply resonant to me.<br /><br />But. It seems to me that Christianity, which is to say Christ Himself in his Incarnate essence, is deeply paradoxical. "The Father and I are One." "I AM who AM." <br />"He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.. I am in the Father and the father is in me."<br /><br />What can all this possibly mean? Even more perplexing: "Father, why hast thou abandoned me?" <br /><br />All of this nothing but paradox.. Almost impossible to accept. But I do. <br /><br />I've tried to preach this to Muslims. I've lived in both Turkey and Egypt, and have on many occasions discussed Christianity with them.<br /><br />We don't understand how deeply the idea of the Incarnation permeates our culture. The babe in the manger. The man on the Cross. It's in the fabric of our minds, so that the very strangeness, the natural absurdity of it, rarely strikes us. Most of us never even acknowledge the weirdness of these ideas. Few Christians even. Most of us are in fact functionally Arian, deists. Protestants verge into Arianism by instinctively - naturally - assigning Mary's ontological reality to Christ..<br /><br />Because the paradox is, in absence of grace, too much to bear.<br /><br />You say that creation seems abstract. It's true: it's the problem of impermanence, of change. Heraclitus still has a hold on our minds. But consciousness - I speak for myself - seems solid, real. I am. I exist. I defy Descartes, though. My consciousness testifies to the reality beyond myself.. It testifies to your reality, for example. It's assertion of radical faith, but one that I have no problem at all making. Your existence. It seems self evident to me. <br /><br />So - thus, ergo - even if everything is in apparent incessant flux, I believe in the eternity of each moment as it slips ineluctably into the past. It is still real, still and nevertheless always there, if somehow inaccessible in its essence. <br /><br />God, Christ, is somehow even more real to me than you are. I think that this is a grace. I feel his presence palpably in the moment, right now. Meditating on the Incarnation led me to immediate faith in the Trinity.. I knew Christ present in the eucharist as a child, long before I associated his presence there (in the tabernacle, in the host particularly, in a more intense way than he is present everywhere in everything - another paradox that offends the mind, how is it so? it simply is so..) with the doctrinal or dogmatic truth of the Trinity. The graces are manifold and multivalent. They concatenate and augment one another exponentially.. <br /><br />I've tried to explain all of this, to muslims and atheists, but it is somehow like trying to explain color and light to someone congenitally blind. <br /><br />I think the fundamental problem in modernity and even more in post modernity is that nihilism is baked into the culture in a layer atop this primordial mystical core. The "values" of Christ echo aimlessly ("human rights" "compassion for the weak and persecuted" etc.) about us, while the pulsing source of these vibrations is dismissed and ignored, taken for granted, simultaneously scorned. fitzhamiltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01852672798351791749noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-51148390465905974802021-01-25T08:13:39.105+00:002021-01-25T08:13:39.105+00:00@Freddy - There is something in that, but all law ...@Freddy - There is something in that, but all law is abstract. Common law relies on the abstraction that 'this case' is not unique, but ultimately similar in essence to a previous case - this is an abstraction, albeit lesser than with Roman Law because it relies primarily on the 'human judgment' of the judge. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-67490909591036082082021-01-25T08:12:16.726+00:002021-01-25T08:12:16.726+00:00@Adil - "I agree with you that simplicity is ...@Adil - "I agree with you that simplicity is important, and one should always strive to reduce unnecessary complexity."<br /><br />One problem, however, is that people (I've done it myself) sometimes mistakenly believe they have simplified by using a large abstraction - all that has happened is that a lot of disparate stuff is brought under a single broad and poorly defined word. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-13589332293905095882021-01-25T08:03:34.168+00:002021-01-25T08:03:34.168+00:00@edwin - Maybe I was too brief in what I said, but...@edwin - Maybe I was too brief in what I said, but I was referring to Plato. Bruce Charltonhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09615189090601688535noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-31250664131473351362021-01-24T20:07:37.184+00:002021-01-24T20:07:37.184+00:00"I dislike the idea that atheism somehow is t..."I dislike the idea that atheism somehow is the more 'natural' position"<br />Do advocates of atheism actually use this position? It doesn't surprise me, but they would have a hard time arguing that (from a historical/anthropological perspective) seeing as how mass atheism is clearly a modern phenomena.<br /><br />Reminds me a bit of those feminist "anthropologists" arguing that humankind is naturally matriarchal and sometime long ago (before the historical record, of course) patriarchy (somehow) was imposed upon every civilization (for some reason).TonguelessYoungManhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12433490543280815258noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-12711643596653491422021-01-24T17:47:15.061+00:002021-01-24T17:47:15.061+00:00Although I think the apophatic approach has its me...Although I think the apophatic approach has its merits for certain purposes, I agree with you that simplicity is important, and one should always strive to reduce unnecessary complexity. The simpler you are able to convey something, the more accomplished it usually is. Our personal relationship to God should be a natural and spontaneous thing. <br /><br />I dislike the idea that atheism somehow is the more 'natural' position, whereas God is something that has to be 'imposed' as an 'extra' belief from the outside, making it 'unnatural' and abstract. I think that atheism is the unnatural position, and one should 'fall back' to the natural state of faith. Most people still have some amount of natural faith and yearning for spirituality, even if they don't consciously acknowledge any belief in God.<br /><br />Of course, the birdemic situation seems to attempt to squeeze out any good faith people had left in life.Adilhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12458942641355740167noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-34198043791038874622021-01-24T16:48:11.500+00:002021-01-24T16:48:11.500+00:00Thanks for your good work on this subject over the...Thanks for your good work on this subject over the years. In reading tons of theology over the decades, it seems to me that I understand what they are TRYING to say, but, ultimately, what they say is irrelevant at best, and harmful at worst, especially when trying to shoehorn arcane rules or regulations (In our language, Ahrimanic arcane bureaucracy) to these irrelevant abstractions. Good work much appreciated on your part. Just a thought: it seems to me that it has a lot of parallels to Anglo-Saxon Common Law, using common sense, and precedence, versus, the more continental-style Napoleonic Code law systems, based more upon abstractions, and not as much precedence and Common Sense.Freddy Martinihttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07503658203357240239noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4683970826895755480.post-38411444158851830052021-01-24T16:30:24.080+00:002021-01-24T16:30:24.080+00:00Just to offer a clarification: it was Aristotle wh...Just to offer a clarification: it was Aristotle who thought our knowledge comes from abstraction, that is, forming concepts based on sense perceptions, which concepts organized those perceptions into discrete objects. Knowledge for Plato was not derived by abstracting from the senses, but from intellectual vision, which rested on prior knowledge: we would never be able to recognize truth if we did not know it, were not formed by it, were not essentially beings of truth. The Platonic forms were not abstractions but productive, creative principles: the one, the good, the true pouring itself out, so to speak, until it manifests for the senses in material objects. I think your notion of intuition has more in common with Platonic thought than you may realize. And the Fourth Gospel begins by identifying Christ with the Logos - the creative principle from which all the logoi - the manifest forms of life - proceed and are sustained. "kai xoris autou egeneto oude hen ho gegenon - without him was made not one thing that was made." The logos as the fount of creation goes back to Heraclitus and was obviously well-known to the writer of the Fourth Gospel, which Gospel goes somewhat beyond the bounds of "common sense." edwin faustnoreply@blogger.com