Posts Tagged ‘God’
Way, theophany and covenant
27
Jul
The historical narrative, the one made by
official historiography, narrates journalistic facts as they happen, sees the path only as a theory and method, the divine manifestation as a historical evolution, and the alliance with God as a religious illusion.
The evolution and fall of civilization prior to Semitic, the fact is that after the son of Noah (?) Without a civilization, it emerged and evolved in the ancient Mesopotamia of the Chaldeans, from there Abram left until he arrived and had the son Isaac promised by God Isaac and with him he made an alliance, and changed his name to Abraham, because he would have as many children as the stars in the sky (Genesis 17,1-4) and in fact three major religions invoke him as “father of faith”.
In history they will be close to the great Egyptian civilization, and they will leave there at the beginning of its decadence.
Thus, this cycle will be repeated with Moses, due to famine the Hebrews migrate to Egypt in the time of the 12 tribes of Israel (Jacob, son of Isaac, who took the place of Esau, had the fight with the angel), Joseph goes to Egypt and then the Hebrews begin to live in slavery, there Moses receives a new mission to leave for Canaan, and there will also be the divine manifestation on Sinai and the new covenant (Exodus 19:11): “and to be ready for the third day , for on that day the Lord will come down before all the people on Mount Sinai.”
Thus, a new Theophany and a new alliance take place with Moses receiving the tablets of the Law, almost arriving in Canaan and seeing it from afar, Moses dies and Joshua receives the mission to lead the people to the promised land, in the ark of the alliance (illustrative photo, the ark was lost) will be placed a vessel with manna mysterious food that the people ate in the desert, Aaron’s staff and the tablet of the 10 commandments).
From that moment until the birth of Jesus, the law and the prophets are valid, for Christians the new covenant is made with the proclamation of the Gospel (the good news) and the new covenant is God in the midst of his people and his own guide.
So today the ark is no longer needed, there was already a manifestation of the prophet Jeremiah (Jeremiah 3:16) even before the birth of the Messiah.
Truth between logic and onto-logic
30
Jun
The truth in the ontological construction of
the Greeks, there is something inexorable to Being and this led them to believe that somehow this was configured in a cosmological whole, the “highest good” of Plato or the “immovable motor” of Aristotle, was not just physical, but also meta-physical realities.
The physis for them was for the pre-Socratic philosophers something permanent, primary and fundamental and later it was elaborated as nature, which included the “cosmos”,
Plotinus, a neo-Platonist, will extend this reality to the Soul, which would be an intelligible form that thinks inside the intellect, in the current debate about consciousness in Artificial Intelligence, we would say that it is sensibility, of course it is necessary to resume in the context of Plotinus, he states in Ennead VI, 4:
“And we, what are we? Are we the one or are we the one that was associated and exists in time? Indeed, before birth took place, we were there [in the intelligible], being other men, and some also gods: pure souls and intellects united to the totality of essence, parts of the intelligible, without separation, without division, but being of the whole. (and even now we are not apart)”.
Thus the whole remains, if there is not in Plotinus the God as known by monotheistic religions, there is the idea of the whole that “put on us and added to himself that man”, in the continuity of the text above.
Saint Augustine starts from this idea to affirm that the soul is “the presence of God in man, and his connection with the Creator, responsible for the similarity of man with God”, as well as associating the soul with the One, a category also used by Plotinus , and in him the One is God.
It is true that modernity abandons the idea of God and, by dividing thought into objective and subjective, makes secondary what takes place in the mind, thought and soul, in short in the noosphere, and this also happens with the religious world, as we posted yesterday it is not enough to say “sir, sir” it takes an action that corresponds to a certain belief.
Even in his historical time, for those who believe this epiphany continues, Jesus already asked his disciples “who do men say that the son of man [I am]? ” (Mt 16,13), because he knew that much of what it is like to be divine and timeless would be confused with earthly and contextual aspects only, in times of cruelty and hostility it is necessary to rethink what we think of eternal, timeless and that we will no longer legacy for all mankind.
Temporal and eternal truths
27
Jun
The construction of the idea of truth by the Greeks comes from aletheia,
it refers to the self-manifestation of reality and beings to the human intellect, the word means a-lethea (not hidden, not veiled), this truth is either evident or can be constructed by reason.
This construction gave rise to “episteme” to oppose “doxa”, or mere opinion of the sophists, but they did not lose sight of the whole, which for Plato was the “highest good” and for Aristotle the “immovable engine” and both ideas approached God as is thought by Christians.
Thus knowledge was seen as a whole, and the contingent was seen as accidental, uncertain and doubtful, which occurs, but opposes the whole truth.
Aristotle had the classic ontological differentiation between the contingent and the necessary for the Being and this antagonistic relationship is expressed in a hierarchical relationship between the techné and the episteme, of course it has a historical and contingent meaning here, but it helps to understand the technique in its genesis.
The technique has no end in itself, it is linked to human purpose, and therefore it is not neutral, it is instrumental and serves human purposes.
We jump to the end of the low Middle Ages, in its period little studied and understood with the quarrel of the universals of Boethius (480-524 AD) and language studies of the monk Alcuin (735 –804 AD).
Boethius wrote “The consolation of philosophy” but it is a fragment of his writings that gave him fame, it is found in the quarrel of universals, the question of whether universals are things or merely words, this will give rise to the debate between realists and nominalists until the end of the middle idea, where the idea of truth will replace the Greek Eidos that means each Being has an essence.
In his ontological development Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) thus explains God as a necessary being: “a necessary being is the being that must exist, that cannot not exist”, thus the argument can be rewritten as: “The proposition ‘ God exists’ is necessary” or simply “God is” pure Being.
But modernity broke with ontology until Hidegger’s revival.
This break deepened in Cartesian reason, mediated by classical physics and the end of metaphysics, united with the idea of an abstract and idealistic universal knowledge.
Kant’s critique of pure reason (1724-1804), and German idealism with its apex in Hegel (1770-1831) give the final outline to an abstract and idealistic truth, the reach of Western Greco-Christian culture finds its end and truth becomes relative, the episteme just a method of neutral truth.
Dualism and unity
08
Jun
Dualism comes from Parmenides’ idealism and reaches Hegel, we have
already posted in its categories in-itself, of-itself and for-itself, being for-itself a certain return to in-itself.
There are two types of dualism: substance dualism and property dualism. While substance dualism (or Cartesian dualism) argues that the mind is an independently existing substance, property dualism describes a category of positions in philosophy of mind that advocate that, although the world is constituted by only one type of substance, of the physical kind, there are two distinct types of properties: physical properties and mental properties.
This quarrel within dualism continues on the separation of substance and mind, whether as substance or property.
Unity is possible if we think beyond the logical ontology of Parmenides where Being is and non-being is not, there is a Being that is not, that is present in the soul, and that in the trinitarian sense is a Being-for-itself, that is is a for in the sense of beyond, in this case beyond the substance, and if we think of Absolute God (using the Hegelian category) the for-itself is substance and materializes in the “son” of the Trinity who is Jesus, being-in – himself man and being-for-himself God.
Thus God enters history and substance as mind and property, what the French theologian and paleontologist Teilhard de Chardin calls the noosphere, which is the subtitle of this blog.
God mind and property enters history and eternalizes himself as a substance in body and blood, with the substances bread and wine, which are human artifacts, the wheat made bread by man and the grape made wine by man, thus human substance, deified and eternalized at the supper of Jesus, this is the feast of the Body of Christ held today by most Christians.
In Chardanian reasoning, God removed the universe from its sub-instance, which is also God, from the body of Christ, so the whole universe is Christocentric and penetrated by His divinity.
The human attempt to create an intelligent and beyond-human “being” is an ex-machina incapable of being for-itself.
This is how Trinitarian and human unity is achieved, it is necessary to pass through the non-Being that is Being, it is necessary to overcome contradictions and go beyond oneself, to enter a divine and eternal for-itself.
Idealism and perichoresis
02
Jun
Idealism, by developing the categories in-itself, of-itself and for-itself, isolates the
trinitarian possibility of relationship and annuls the idea of ontological relationship, what is in-itself if it is not Being and what is for-itself if it is not is non-Being, the Other is not the negation of Being, but its complement.
Self is relationship, and this completes the Christian Trinitarian idea of three persons in relationship, which is called perichoresis.
In a possible metaphor with Idealism: God-Father is God-in-itself, God-son is God-for-itself and God-Holy Spirit is God-in-itself, it is observed that God-for-itself is both man ( God transcendent his divinity) as he is Divine (Jesus is God and transcends humanity)
This means the one in three persons, the first Christian council of Nicaea (325) discussed the divinity of Jesus, because it was even easier, due to the dualism of Being and non-Being, to believe in two than in three.
To support the dualistic idea, some pseudo-theologians have used the idea that God the Father is the source and origin of all divinity, so the other two people were generated by the Father, creating a new way of denying the Trinitarian perichoresis, or if you prefer “ the dance” in the inner divine relationship.
It was the Cappadocian priests, Gregório Magno, Gregório de Nyssa and Basilio de Nyssa, who saw this contradiction, which comes dressed in a new guise, with the exchange of the word prosopon (persona) for hypostasis, which in turn is confused with ousía.
Basilio used the formula of Mt 28,19 which states that the communication of the Three in baptism manifests the Holy Spirit in the union of the Father with the son, in the same dignity, and manifests it to man in baptism, for this reason valid baptism is in the name of the Three People.
The relationship is like a dance between the three people with the metaphor of the Cappadocians.
This relationship is mystical, but it is concretely described in John 3:17: “In fact, God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him”.
Understand, see and believe
05
May
Not being able to have a category for itself that contemplates the Whole,
beyond the universe and its mysteries, the Being that precedes everything and everyone, Hegel’s category for itself returns to be the one that Sartre sees with the return to being- purely human in itself and finds nothingness instead of everything.
Yes, it is a mystery, how the universe itself reveals itself, even penetrating the depths of our Being we will only find both the being-in-itself revealed as designo (in the sense of divine designer) if we truly find the for-itself, and in this case as there is an infinite mystery, it is necessary to believe.
But it is not a blind belief, or pure fanaticism, not even an act of elevated altruism, it must be an encounter with our own Being, there we sit in a comfortable armchair and understand that we were born to build, grow and love, without these premises , the opposite will be dangerous and when taken to the whole society, hatred, intolerance and in the end: war prevails.
It is not the threat of a divine Being who created us for perfection, it is the threat of those who deny more than the need for a supreme Being and Knowledge (Plato called it the Supreme Good), which cannot be realized except in the fullness of a pure Being that is Being-in, Being-for-Itself and being-from-above that humanity becomes.
Hegel came close to a trinitarian concept, but idealism prevented him, since there is an intrinsic dualism in him, which divides objectivity (of being-in-itself) from subjectivity (of being-for-itself).
This difficulty was striking in Thomas who wanted to see and touch the marks on the body of the Risen Jesus, also in another passage (a little forgotten) Philip asks Jesus to “show the father”*, to which Jesus replies: whoever sees me, sees the Father .
The historical Jesus cannot be denied, he is not a myth, nor a symbolic fact, there was a man in himself, a God-for-himself and a man/God-of-himself in relation to humanity.
* The specific passage of the Bible is in John 14, 8-9: Philip said: “Lord, show us the Father, that is enough for us!” Jesus answered: “Have I been with you so long, and you don’t know me, Philip? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”
