Belinda wrote: ↑Wed Feb 02, 2022 1:59 am
The "other agent that intervenes" is the physical which may be contrasted with intellectual reason. The physical body is the receptor of the sacred which is most available to us in wild nature or in sexual communion .This is the Romantic view of the Eternal and Absolute.
I have no idea what you mean by "the life of prayer" except insofar as you say atheists would not understand. I don't even know what you mean by "atheists". What I mean by 'atheists' is they are people whose prayers are more creative and free than the prayers of many religious believers.
No, the 'other agent that intervenes' is spirit or the divine or the angelic. I realize that these are words and terms with an ancient history, and so they reflect conceptions and models of reality that are part of the *olden metaphysic*. I have a feeling that such ideas,
as real things, do not and cannot make sense to you. They are colorful artifacts in the graveyard of dead concepts. These ideas are
excluded as possibilities, am I right? And that is because you are, in your honest core, an atheist.
The notion of
intellectus, you may or not be familiar with it, was explained in this way (Catholic Encyclopedia):
The faculty of thought. As understood in Catholic philosophical literature it signifies the higher, spiritual, cognitive power of the soul. It is in this view awakened to action by sense, but transcends the latter in range. Amongst its functions are attention, conception, judgment, reasoning, reflection, and self-consciousness. All these modes of activity exhibit a distinctly suprasensuous element, and reveal a cognitive faculty of a higher order than is required for mere sense-cognitions. In harmony, therefore, with Catholic usage, we reserve the terms intellect, intelligence, and intellectual to this higher power and its operations, although many modern psychologists are wont, with much resulting confusion, to extend the application of these terms so as to include sensuous forms of the cognitive process. By thus restricting the use of these terms, the inaccuracy of such phrases as "animal intelligence" is avoided. Before such language may be legitimately employed, it should be shown that the lower animals are endowed with genuinely rational faculties, fundamentally one in kind with those of man. Catholic philosophers, however they differ on minor points, as a general body have held that intellect is a spiritual faculty depending extrinsically, but not intrinsically, on the bodily organism. The importance of a right theory of intellect is twofold: on account of its bearing on epistemology, or the doctrine of knowledge; and because of its connexion with the question of the spirituality of the soul.
So if one accepts that 'the soul' exists, one then conceives that the soul has a special connection with divinity, with spirit, and with the angelic. If one has that as a conceptual base then the question arises -- How can contact or communication be augmented and strengthened between the soul and the Divine? This is of course predicated on the assumption that one does recognize these things as *facts* and *truths* and desires to augment and strengthen the relationship and the communication. A long time ago there was the notion of *conversation with the guardian angel*. That is, an established and augmented relationship with non-physical but intelligent entity. Something supervising, let's say, our life and destiny.
What I recommend is examining these pictures, these stories, these conceptualizations, perhaps I can say as metaphors
for something that is done. The language, the picture, is not the thing that is done. What is done takes shape on an internal level -- at the level of the personality and also the soul. What is done is the establishment of a relationship to something ineffable. I think it can be fairly said -- consider for a moment Uwot's and Dubious' oppositional discourse -- that people react against the story-line, or the elements of the story-line as it is presented. They shoot down the story without understanding what the story
pictures. So by using the term 'angel' for example, in the minds of Uwot and Dubious, the idea that is presented is seen as unreal, impossible, non-scientific, and false. But the reaction is really cognitive, perhaps linguistic. Since one cannot conceive of 'angelic being' all that language, the 'picture', and similar references and allusions, are seen as hallucinatory. And the entire topic is thus dismissed.
My recommendation is to revisit the guiding, fundamental concept, and see that it can be expressed in many different ways, through many different language-routes. But let me say that the essence of the relationship (to the divine) cannot really be explained. But in this sense existence and being -- our awareness of ourselves here -- cannot ever really be explained. If we resort to merely mechanical, biological and material descriptions of reality (these are the more common in our worlds these days) we
are availing ourselves of an organization of perception, a story, but it is one that effectively locks us out of the possibility of the perception, and the possibility of relationship, I allude to.
I see what you are doing though. You are using language in the only way that you can so that it accords with your predicated principles. Any other way of describing things would be, for you, dishonest or perhaps *self-deceptively romantic*.
What I mean by 'atheists' is they are people whose prayers are more creative and free than the prayers of many religious believers.
When you say *prayer* I assume you actually mean
affirmation or
declaration. You do not actually mean that the 'relationship' to ineffable intelligence or 'higher being' is real and possible.
So again all your language is, in my view,
constrained by inhibitory predicates.
