IC wrote: You won't find any "Great Chain of Being" or anything like it in the Bible. Sorry.
AJ responded: You certainly find a cosmogony in Genesis!
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sun May 08, 2022 5:08 amNot "The Great Chain of Being." That's a Medieval Catholic fiction. It has nothing to do with Scripture.
IC wrote: You seem to think I owe something to the mythologies of traditions that have nothing to do with Scripture. I don't.
So my suggestion is that we linger here for a moment. Here, some
soundtrack.
Let us remind ourselves what we are talking about. I will summarize. Christianity is a religious view that deeply involves a
worldpicture, a description of the world and of the kosmos. If Genesis is taken as the Central Story, the original story, the Origin Story, is is easy as pie to recognize in it a mythological, a mytho-religious, set of assertions about 'the world'. About existence, about being.
When one examines
The Story -- and I indicated this by referring to the Jewish religious site (the Jewish Encyclopedia) -- one easily sees that the Origin Story depicted in Genesis has itself an origin -- likely in Babylon and lost in *the mists of time*.
If there are four major centers or currents that inform our European traditions (Judea, Greece, Rome, Alexandria)
Judea brings to the table, as it were, an extremely ancient line or current of connection to Egypt and Babylon and back through these cultures, and these regions, into some of the most foundational cultures, civilizations, social organizations, mythologies and
worldpictures.
These
worldpictures are all parts-and-parcels of descriptions of pre-scientific world descriptions. They explain how the world came to be; who created it; and what is the place of humankind in the created world. They are cosmological and cosmogonical. All people, all so-called primitive people devise these stories. There is not a way around it when you examine the issue. And what is the issue? That we have to explain to ourselves what *all this* is; where it comes from; why we are here; and what we are supposed to do.
Cosmologies, therefore, have an
explanatory and
orienting function.
Now, with that said, let us turn the *lens of examination around* to examine our own explanatory system. This is where it gets weird but interesting. I will offer a quickly drawn picture of the Christian Story even though everyone knows it. God created Heaven and Earth and placed a man in a divinely created Garden. Then he took a part of man and created woman. There, they were to live (one presumes for all eternity) under the protection of God. But Satan entered in and corrupted the will and obedience of this Primeval Couple. As punishment they were evicted from the primeval garden and an Angel with some weird spinning sword was sent to block any attempt at *return*.
And thus, cast
out (I used a prepositional term 'down') from the Garden, Man & Woman as humankind were thrust into another sort of world, a world in which death reigned. A world (according to the story) of trials and tribulations. But also a world that had a Story Line. That Story line has to do with movement through the world -- Exodus in different forms -- but leading to an eventual reconciliation with the offended God who established the punishment in the first place (exile essentially and the couple's alienation from God through disobedience).
That reconciliation took place through God's own effort and decision, since it is asserted that Man cannot do it on his own, through an act of intervention in the kosmos, in the world, and in the worldpicture: God sent 'his son' down into the world to 'save' the world. However, this only led to another dimension to The Story (a cosmic set-back). The Savior, who would have righted everything had He the chance to do so, was adamantly resisted and opposed by Man. But behind this resistance and opposition, that is the one doing it, the one leading the effort, is Satan himself. Once, aligned with God and his favorite, somehow this servant-angel 'fell'.
And where did he fall
to? He fell from a celestial dimension or domain -- the angelical world of non-incarnate celestial being -- down
into our World. So, as the Story goes, we all live in Satan's Kingdom. Here, Satan has an unusually free reign.
Now it is true that the
worldpicture of
The Great Chain of Being is a conceptual picture, a diagram really, of the Cosmos. Heaven above, the Earth below, a celestial event similar to a palace intrigue and power-struggle, and a resulting 'fall' and 'banishment' of one of God's hyper-intelligent angelical creations
down into the density of earth and matter. But this picture is intimately, thoroughly and in fact completely presented in the Christian Story. That is to say that the Story, essentially, is precisely what is described in the (embellished and developed) worldpicture that was presented through TGCOB.
In order to understand Christianity -- this is what I say -- we have to understand the origin of the Christian concept in the 'former worldview', the former metaphysical picture!
But here we are now -- we are Moderns! The former worldpicture, if it were let's say a balloon -- had been punctured. Or to use Nietzsche's way of presenting it (through a picture) someone came along with an eraser and, literally, wiped away the picture!
How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained the earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left? Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is it not more and more night coming on all the time? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose.
So let us ask ourselves -- In what World do we now live? What is the World? What is Existence? What is Being? What are we? And what does it mean that we have awareness and consciousness?
So here is my summation: Obviously (except to IC who
performs the role of God's own idiot-child) all of us, because of our modern perspective, when we examine the Story we easily distinguish that it is a Story. This does not mean that there is no 'truth' in the Story if we recognize it as story! What it does mean is that something very very strange happened. A worldpicture was overturned. And yet, and yet! the story is still there, the narrative is still there, it still *operates*, and some hold to it adamantly and literally (IC is a bona fide Christian literalist and a true fundamentalist) while others veer away from the literalness.
But in this veered-away zone, and it is a question of degrees, that is where
we reside! So the metaphor of 'dusk' in which a former view, clear and bold as day, now recedes into shadow -- this provides us with a picture of where we are. That is, in the sense of *our locality*.
And when I say *locality* I do not mean the rock on which we stand. I mean our view, our perspective, our
worldpicture, our 'metaphysical dream of the world', and the
worldpicture we have and organize our sense of what the World is and what our place in it is.
