Christianity

[Lacewing]

I did rather expect to be misrepresented by you

Do you have some kind of fellowship with God?

[Immanuel Can]

I did rather expect to be misrepresented by you

Do you have some kind of fellowship with God?

Anyone can. There's no distinction in that. One simply has to come on God's terms, not one's own. So nothing special about any human being is implied by that.

[Lacewing]

I did rather expect to be misrepresented by you

Do you have some kind of fellowship with God?

Anyone can. There's no distinction in that. One simply has to come on God's terms, not one's own. So nothing special about any human being is implied by that.

I didn't misrepresent you. I responded to exactly what you said.

[Immanuel Can]

I didn't misrepresent you.

Yeah, you did; but I don't really care. I don't expect reason or balance out of you.

[Dubious]

Christianity...an intentionally constructed myth which survived for 2000 years and still hasn't managed to become totally defunct.

[Nick_A]

Hello Alexis, I haven't been able to find those on these forums who are interested in these ideas so for me you are a welcome exception.

I agree there are several layers to the concept of Plato’s Cave. I prefer to see how the Cave represents the human condition and why we are attached to the shadows on the wall while oblivious of the big picture within which opposing opinions are a part.

I agree that Christianity is a picture of reality. This has nothing to do with secular man made Christianity or what Kierkegaard called Christendom which is active in the world.

Yet people will always need forms and will always confuse the form with the content or the idea to which the form alludes.

It is even more so with people like me. My primary interest is in the union of the essence of religion with the intent of the scientific method. The essence of religion is true as is the intent of the scientific method. If both are true the divisions that now exit are an absurdity. Is there a way they can work together to reveal the truths essential for leaving the Cave and revealing human meaning and purpose so many are starved for and turn to drugs to deal with their feelings of emptiness?

I agree that the Great Chain of Being is essential for coming to understand the being of Man. We are dual natured and like Plato explained we have a higher and lower nature with the potential to evolve into a higher level of being. The energy of the Holy Spirit makes it possible to reconcile the human condition. We are a plurality with the conscious potential to become unified: I Am.

Simone Weil’s dedication to truth enabled her to change from an active admired Marxist into a Christian mystic and intellectual influence on Pope Paul V1. She wrote: “Humanism was not wrong in thinking that truth, beauty, liberty, and equality are of infinite value, but in thinking that man can get them for himself without grace.”

Left to his own devices the human condition forces Man to turn in circles often producing the exact opposite of the original intent. Can our species as a whole still open to the help of grace or has technology made the rejection of grace too strong?

Society is the Great Beast. The collective makes the Great Beast possible:

Plato critiques those who are "wise" through their study of society):

I might compare them to a man who should study the tempers and desires of a mighty strong beast who is fed by him--he would learn how to approach and handle him, also at what times and from what causes he is dangerous or the reverse, and what is the meaning of his several cries, and by what sounds, when another utters them, he is soothed or infuriated; and you may suppose further, that when, by continually attending upon him, he has become perfect in all this, he calls his knowledge wisdom, and makes of it a system or art, which he proceeds to teach, although he has no real notion of what he means by the principles or passions of which he is speaking, but calls this honourable and that dishonourable, or good or evil, or just or unjust, all in accordance with the tastes and tempers of the great brute. Good he pronounces to be that in which the beast delights and evil to be that which he dislikes...

The conscious potential for Man is sacrificed to the Great Beast or the concept of society; the collective which has become its God.

Is there a transcendent purpose of Christianity that originated with a conscious source as opposed to the many man made interpretations we see in the secular world? If true, can a person dedicated to truth trace it back to its source regardless of how they are scorned? Plato states in the cave allegory that such a person can be killed for such heresy against the collective.

What is a Christian? I’ve learned that a Christian is one who follows in the precepts of Christ. A person begins with the desire to become Christian. They soon realize that they are unable and are actually what Paul called himself the “wretched Man.” When they become able and become Christian they can be called Christian. Obviously there are very few Christians but many advocates of Christendom.

[Lacewing]

I didn't misrepresent you.

Yeah, you did; but I don't really care. I don't expect reason or balance out of you.

That's funny, considering that reason and balance are typically at odds with your theism.

[Age]

I did rather expect to be misrepresented by you

Do you have some kind of fellowship with God?

Anyone can. There's no distinction in that. One simply has to come on God's terms, not one's own. So nothing special about any human being is implied by that.

From what I am observing and hearing here "immanuel can" has FAR LESS fellowship with God than "lacewing" has.

"lacewings" views are FAR MORE aligned to those of Gods than "immanuel cans" are, which is Truly humorous to watch especially considering both of their views on 'God', Itself.

[Alexis Jacobi]

I agree there are several layers to the concept of Plato’s Cave. I prefer to see how the Cave represents the human condition and why we are attached to the shadows on the wall while oblivious of the big picture within which opposing opinions are a part.

Heidegger's essay "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" might interest you. He begins by stating that any given proposition by any given thinker has, effectively, two sides or aspects: One, what is stated and what is clear, and Two what is implied, or unstated, or unrevealed. So *what is left unsaid*, then, has a great deal of importance. In fact it is (I personally think) the area that we most need to examine and interrogate (as the saying goes today). And his interest is in *exposing* the hidden side, or the ideological side, of Plato's myth.

Now, we obviously are living in times of extreme assertion of *ideological positions*. The rise of both a radical Left and, on the other side, the rise of a radical Right. Those definitions, those understandings and agreements upon which we based our confidence, these seem to come undone at the seams. In any case this is what I have most noticed as I have studied The Culture Wars. Within The Culture Wars there is, most certainly, a raging conflict over Christianity (to use the broadest but non-specific term). For this reason its relevancy, and also the need to undermine it and disempower it, have to be looked at carefully.

So it is within this framework of consideration that I locate myself and my own interest. And the myth of Plato's Cave seems highly relevant. Because Plato's Cave questions, at the most fundamental level, how our entire structure of perception is oriented. Obviously it proposes the possibility of absolute error of perception and understanding. Simultaneously it alludes to the possibility of seeing clearly, or seeing truly. But the entire issue of *seeing* (as IC and I have talked about in previous posts in this thread) is so bound up in metaphysics that it is not possible to extract the seer from the act of seeing -- which is always an *imposition* in the literal sense: placing something in an intermediary position or as a 'lens' (which is my preferred term). (I thought to mention that I just remembered a dream I had where I had an instrument, like a sexton, and I held it to my eye in order to *get a reading* and to *orient myself*. I see now that this sexton was, in Jungian terms, a symbol of the Self, but also that the dream (an important dream with many other elements) foretold many years of searching and intellectual weighing.

And given that this is a philosophy forum, and not a a forum dedicated to defining specific belief-systems (I mean only that any declaration of belief will be submitted to philosophical scrutiny), we have as our responsibility to deeply interrogate Christian belief. A great deal depends on whether this is done carefully and delicately, or crudely and violently.

But certainly within the context where a person -- you and me and anyone else -- attempts to orient themselves truthfully, authentically, honestly, but also I would say effectively within life, we really are talking about the most essential things. So, our *guidance systems*, the instruments (of thought, of perception, of understanding, of determination) all become crucial concerns.

What I have written here is a sort of free-flow response to what you wrote and my attempt to express agreement with what you say.

I have a feeling that this conversation, now at page 117, could open up even more.

I agree that Christianity is a picture of reality. This has nothing to do with secular man made Christianity or what Kierkegaard called Christendom which is active in the world.

In my own case it became imperative for me to investigate the most traditional forms of Christianity. As I said many pages back I felt inclined to go very deeply into the traditionalist, ultra-conservative, far-right and so-called *extreme-right* positions and orientations -- I include fascist doctrine here (and I mean the various manifestations that came to the forefront in the Interwar Period (1920s more or less). The way I explained it was to use the metaphor of *going down the rabbit hole* that being the popular way of defining any turn to any *extreme* position. I believe that the reason I could do this is because I have a substantial platform within my own self to deal with and withstand any particular extremism, which always have psychological origins.

So the question Why do people feel inclined to seek out and invest themselves in radical positions? becomes a necessary position. And if I refer to a *radical position* I could just as well describe the process of a secular, modern person who, for one reason or another, feels a deep need to go back into those strict, defined, encompassing perceptual positions such as, for example, the conversion to the Christian belief can indeed be. What I did, and what in certain degrees I am still doing, is to *turn back to* traditional Catholicism. My reason? Because it is traditional Catholicism that is, in fact, what Christianity is -- that is when it was formed in the 1st and second centuries.

But it is not a completely *authentic* position for me because I was not raised in it. It is something like an *overlay*. To the degree however that I identify with my European Self it does represent an authentic identification. Yet it has whole arrays of *problematic* aspects and elements.

Traditional Catholicism is a *diagram*, a picture, a representation, of an orientation in respect to the ineffable. What is perceived, what is *felt* (to be true and Real) but which cannot, in my view, actually be pictured. Traditional Catholicism is a system of symbols, yet very potent symbols laden with *layers of meaning*. But the more that one looks at it (and certain sources really reveal this, such as A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, which is a list or encyclopedia of those symbols and their content) that it takes on greater and greater importance, when one (in this case me) sees more clearly what in fact is alluded.

But it is all, in its way, a series of 'shadows'. Reflected light. Symbols allude but they are not themselves what is alluded! So no matter what, and perhaps Mr IC will correct me, but there is no *real world* that one can refer to, yet there are real allusions to real things. Have I contradicted myself? Richard Weaver noticed that we deviated from realism into nominalism. I agree. But what is *real* is real because it is metaphysical. And what is metaphysical, what is seen and understood as real and true, depends on a human instrument of perception.

Thus it is that human being, that instrument, that is the necessary focus. And this loops back around to belief-systems and the unstated ideologies that they contain.

It is even more so with people like me. My primary interest is in the union of the essence of religion with the intent of the scientific method. The essence of religion is true as is the intent of the scientific method. If both are true the divisions that now exit are an absurdity. Is there a way they can work together to reveal the truths essential for leaving the Cave and revealing human meaning and purpose so many are starved for and turn to drugs to deal with their feelings of emptiness?

Sometimes people who recommend books should be hauled out and shot at dawn, but given what you say here I have a feeling you would appreciate the first few pages of The Seventeenth Century Background (Basil Willey).

It explains and opens up the confict that developed between very different explanatory systems.

[Alexis Jacobi]

Just above I wrote:

Traditional Catholicism is a *diagram*, a picture, a representation, of an orientation in respect to the ineffable. What is perceived, what is *felt* (to be true and Real) but which cannot, in my view, actually be pictured. Traditional Catholicism is a system of symbols, yet very potent symbols laden with *layers of meaning*. But the more that one looks at it (and certain sources really reveal this, such as A Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, which is a list or encyclopedia of those symbols and their content) that it takes on greater and greater importance, when one (in this case me) sees more clearly what in fact is alluded.

IC I am interested in your view of the short essay on Apostasy in the above-referenced dictionary. Because I am interested, as you seem to be, in the entire issue of *falling away* -- why it happens, what it means, and what results from it.

[Nick_A]

Alexis

Heidegger's essay "Plato's Doctrine of Truth" might interest you. He begins by stating that any given proposition by any given thinker has, effectively, two sides or aspects: One, what is stated and what is clear, and Two what is implied, or unstated, or unrevealed. So *what is left unsaid*, then, has a great deal of importance. In fact it is (I personally think) the area that we most need to examine and interrogate (as the saying goes today). And his interest is in *exposing* the hidden side, or the ideological side, of Plato's myth.

Now, we obviously are living in times of extreme assertion of *ideological positions*. The rise of both a radical Left and, on the other side, the rise of a radical Right. Those definitions, those understandings and agreements upon which we based our confidence, these seem to come undone at the seams. In any case this is what I have most noticed as I have studied The Culture Wars. Within The Culture Wars there is, most certainly, a raging conflict over Christianity (to use the broadest but non-specific term). For this reason its relevancy, and also the need to undermine it and disempower it, have to be looked at carefully.

I just see the same concept Heidegger spoke of slightly differently. For me a word has both a literal meaning and a meaning by form; an emotional meaning. A sunset for example has the same literal meaning for two people but the person experiences its beauty has a different meaning than the one being mugged on the beach at sunset. A person’s hidden side is created by emotional experiences. That is why people do not understand each other.

From Jacob Needleman’s book “Lost Christianity” during his discussion with Metropolitan Anthony

Metropolitan Anthony," I began, "five years ago when I visited you I attended services which you yourself conducted and I remarked to you how struck I was by the absence of emotion in your voice. Today, in the same way where it was not you but the choir, I was struck by the same thing, the almost complete lack of emotion in the voices of the singers."

Yes he said, "this is quite true, it has taken years for that, but they are finally beginning to understand...."

"What do you mean?" I asked. I knew what he meant but I wanted to hear him speak about this - this most unexpected aspect of the Christianity I never knew, and perhaps very few modern people ever knew. I put the question further: "The average person hearing this service - and of course the average Westerner having to stand up for several hours it took - might not be able to distinguish it from the mechanical routine that has become so predominant in the performance of the Christian liturgy in the West. He might come wanting to be lifted, inspired,moved to joy or sadness - and this the churches in the West are trying to produce because many leaders of the Church are turning away from the mechanical, the routine.."

He gently waved aside what I was saying and I stopped in mid sentence. "There was a pause, then he said: "No. Emotion must be destroyed."

He stopped, reflected, and started again, speaking in his husky Russian accent: "We have to get rid of emotions....in order to reach.....feeling."

Again he paused, looking at me, weighing the effect his words were having. I said nothing. but inside I was alive with expectancy. I waited.

Very tentatively, I nodded my head.

He continued: "You ask about the liturgy in the West and in the East. it is precisely the same issue. the sermons, the Holy Days - you don't why one comes after the other. or why this one now and the other one later. Even if you read everything about it you still wouldn't know, believe me.

"And yet . . . there is a profound logic in them, in the sequence of the Holy Days. And this sequence leads people somewhere - without their knowing it intellectually. Actually, it is impossible for anyone to understand the sequence of rituals and Holy Days intellectually. it is not meant for that. It is meant for something else, something higher.

For this you have to be in a state of prayer, otherwise it passes you by-"

"What is prayer?" I asked.

He did not seem to mind my interrupting with this question. Quite the contrary. "In a state of prayer one is vulnerable." He emphasized the last word and then waited until he was sure I had not taken it in an ordinary way.

"In prayer one is vulnerable, not enthusiastic. and then these rituals have such force. they hit you like a locomotive. You must be not enthusiastic, nor rejecting - but only open. This is the whole idea of asceticism: to become open."

How many in the West can respect the difference between the corrupton of animal EMOTION arising from the earth and FEELINGS descending from above? Can anyone understand Christianity without having felt this distinction between emotion and feelings? Yet the conflict between the left and right is the result of emotional corruption. The only winner is “force” or a universal necessity. Simone Weil describes “force” in the beginning of her essay on the Iliad

The true hero, the true subject, the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man’s flesh shrinks away. In this work, at all times, the human spirit is shown as modified by its relations with force, as swept away, blinded, by the very force it imagined it could handle, as deformed by the weight of the force it submits to. For those dreamers who considered that force, thanks to progress, would soon be a thing of the past, the Iliad could appear as an historical document; for others, whose powers of recognition are more acute and who perceive force, today as yesterday, at the very center of human history, the Iliad is the purest and the loveliest of mirrors.
To define force — it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. Somebody was here, and the next minute there is nobody here at all; this is a spectacle the Iliad never wearies of showing us:

... the horses
Rattled the empty chariots through the files of battle,
Longing for their noble drivers. But they on the ground Lay,
dearer to the vultures than to their wives.
The hero becomes a thing dragged behind a chariot in the dust:

Imagine the left on one side and the right on the other locked in perpetual combat. For a while the left wins and then the right. On and on it goes. Only “force” wins or the universal necessity and its purpose for birth, sustaining life, and death.

“The supernatural greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering but a supernatural use for it.” Simone Weil.

Can Man lessen the horrors of war by collectively learning how to consciously suffer for a universal supernatural purpose?

[Nick_A]

I was thinking tonight as to the real meaning of Christmas. I came across this observation from the church father Irenaeus who wrote, “if one does not accept [the Son of God’s] birth from a Virgin, how can he accept His resurrection from the dead?”

Can you imagine trying to explain this to an atheist who is yet to feel the reality of the Great Chain of Being? The men in the white coats will be called to take you away.

It is awe inspiring. I believe I have an elementary understanding of the depth of esoteric Christianity but when I think of what I don't understand and even knowing what it means to understand esoteric Christianity as opposed to secularized Christendom, the difference is incredible

[Alexis Jacobi]

How many in the West can respect the difference between the corrupton of animal EMOTION arising from the earth and FEELINGS descending from above? Can anyone understand Christianity without having felt this distinction between emotion and feelings? Yet the conflict between the left and right is the result of emotional corruption.

You bring up an interesting issue and one that I have tried to think about. Put into the terms I am familiar with you allude to a conflict between feeling and intellect, or the sensuous experience and a directing intelligence. Traditional Catholicism refers to 'intellectus' and I gather that at that point, as Nietzsche expressed it, Christianity (Catholicism) is infused with Platonic categories.

So the way that I have thought about all of this, and in relation to our *modern culture*, is to consider the notion of seduction as, let's say, a primary enemy. And we certainly live in a culture that has developed, through PR and the psychology of advertising, into a seduction-machine. This is, of course, pretty basic Conservative theory.

Despite its many flaws the intellectualism of the Schoolmen (Scholasticism) has been described as profound intellectualism and as I read through (parts) of the Dictionary I referenced, I quickly saw how seriously the tenets of Christian belief were taken. To 'take the Christian cure' (to submit oneself to the process of becoming a Christian) was a serious affair and the conversion-process took months if not years. And in relation to what you are saying the conversion was not measured nor expressed by emotional declaration but in relation to the depth of one's commitment to the core tenets.

I wonder how the conflict between the Right and the Left can fairly and accurately be described? On one level it seems fairly obvious that the contrast between feelings and intellectual decisiveness could be one major area. I admit I do not have this one worked out very well . . .

[Alexis Jacobi]

Can you imagine trying to explain this to an atheist who is yet to feel the reality of the Great Chain of Being? The men in the white coats will be called to take you away.

This is another topic, or problem, that interests me a great deal. When one examines The Great Chain of Being -- I mean as a system of organizing perception and understanding -- one of the first things one realizes is the degree to which all of our language is infused and intertwined with ideas that derive from it. Just the contrast between the celestial world and the lower, terrestrial world -- guiding star, imprisoning earth -- reveals a profound metaphysical picture.

Simply put, in former times, *reality* was understood to be a gradation between the absolutely spiritual and the lowest orders of manifestation, and it is in the Earth where the lowest and the densest congregate. There is of course even another level and that is the (also invisible) hell-realm. And Man was the territory, as it were, in a conflict between the demands of the Lower World and those of the Higher World, existing in Middle Earth. The conflict being, essentially, one between heavenly and celestial being and earth-bound terrestrial being.

The old Catholic Mass is infused with this idea: "Then will I go unto the altar of God, unto God my exceeding joy: yea, upon the harp will I praise thee, O God my God". It is all about ascent and going up, step by step.

It does seem to be true, and it is true, that more and more it appears that certain metaphysical ideas are being seen as signs of pathology which require a counter-cure and a form of social and cultural intervention. The reduction of the Idea of God to that of a Flying Spaghetti Monster expresses the unavoidable contrast between the former metaphysics and the New Anti-metaphysics.

It has always occurred to me that if this project is successful -- to remove all metaphysical concept from the way we see -- it will in fact undermine all sense of the possibility of meaning. Because when meaning is examined it is pretty easy to see that the perception of meaning, the assigning of meaning, is completely metaphysical. It requires a metaphysical mind to perceive and conceive meaning.

Though I can say that I understand why the New Anti-metaphysicians are committed to their *categories*, time and again I have seen that trying to reason with them (I mean those strongly committed) results in impasse. Why? Ultimately I guess metaphysical view defines and divides people. It is like two tribes of people who will never be able to *see* the same world.

In contrast to Ascent is the idea of Assent and giving assent to certain ideas, which are, of course, metaphysical. Cardinal Newman deals on this in the Grammar of Assent. How can we give assent to what cannot be seen in the same way as an object? It is an entire processes of cultivation of intellectus. But who can think in these terms when the Machine of Seduction is so prevalent, so powerful.

Uwot, what do you think?

[Alexis Jacobi]

Despite its many flaws the intellectualism of the Schoolmen (Scholasticism) has been described as profound intellectualism and as I read through (parts) of the Dictionary I referenced, I quickly saw how seriously the tenets of Christian belief were taken. To 'take the Christian cure' (to submit oneself to the process of becoming a Christian) was a serious affair and the conversion-process took months if not years. And in relation to what you are saying the conversion was not measured nor expressed by emotional declaration but in relation to the depth of one's commitment to the core tenets.

So one of the things, those assertions of IC, I have certain doubts about is just this: the conversion-process. IC has stated that the Christian conversion is something utterly simple and immediate -- such that a child or a very simple person could declare her or himself a convert and, mystically, come under the salvific protection of the Supreme Divinity. Conversion, I gathered, takes place in a mere moment. And that salvation does not depend on any action or external activity. Perhaps no further internal activity if, as they say, salvation is instant.

But this has never seemed right to me. I understand the concept however.