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One Love
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Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/17/2009 2:19 AM (GMT -6) |   | Tom:
Each of us has to work out his own salvation in fear and trembling and do the best he can. Let each of us love God, cling to the Cross and then view the universe however he/she wants and do in it whatever he/she wants, right?
Let's do it this way.
There's only ONE Jesus. There's only ONE Holy Spirit of Jesus, which happens to indwell both of us. The only reason you and I believe that we are sons of God and brothers of one another in Christ. Let's believe that however we personally construct our "worlds", as long as we are totally yielded to that ONE Spiritual Presence of Jesus (that is our ground and personal foundation)...
we'll be ok. 
Oh, I did want to say this. Maybe it'd help. Ahem...
1) God likes and desires the existence of a reality "other" than God's own. Truly "other" than God. (Again, I'd say infinitely different/distinct that God)
2) God likes and desires the "other existence" to have self-relational and other-relational understanding and will, with the capacity for created personhood. (God created humanity to be personal bearers of Divine Presence. Think Theotokos.)
and most importantly...
3) I do NOT believe that interpersonal particularity and creaturely existence is "illusory" in some Advaita Hinduism monistic sense. Personal particularity is ultimate reality ala Trinity. Moreover, creaturely existence has it's OWN INDEPENDENT REALITY...that is constantly sustained, permeated, and given meaning by the Uncreated Spiritual Presence of Jesus.
I hope this really clears things up. I figured with the whole Maximos/logoi/tropoi thing we were solid on things...particularly that I agree that God creates sentient creature who are PERSONALLY "other" than God. I don't have any kind of covert monist scheme going or whatever. The language of the mystics is pretty much the same. It's HEAVY theocentric perspective such that God is "everything" and Creation is "nothing" (ala Eckhart, etc) And unfortunately, it sounds much too monistic for comfort. Even James Fowler was on that about the EO perspective on theosis. And you know how the whole "You're not God, Dwayne." convos when just trying to explain stuff. Oh, well. I don't know what to do about that. I'm with the mystics, I guess. Sue me. 
"Creation is allowed in intimate love to speak to the Creator as if to a lover. As the Creator loves the creation, so the creation loves the Creator. The whole world has been embraced by this kiss."
Hildegard of Bingen
Know me, Eternal Lover...and help me to know You... Post Edited (One Love) : 10/17/2009 2:30:59 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/17/2009 2:42 AM (GMT -6) | | Back to the other topic for a sec.
If strategic allocation of attention is pretty much the CORE of our human spirit's exercise and freedom...AND if it's also true that God is worthy of our undivided attention at any given time...then perhaps an expression of sin can be our valuation of God that says that God just simply isn't WORTH our undivided attention, let alone unconditional obedience and service. We naturally give our attention to those things we find extremely important or of interest. When we don't pay attention to something, it's usually because we don't care about it. It's seen to us a irrelevant...forgettable, and our brains treat it as such.
Isn't this Romans 1? Humans chose NOT to stragetically allocate there attention to God, but to themselves and their various "world compositions" (also called vain imaginations). What does God do? Give them over to their minds, where they strengthen the ability to attend to evil and cut off their ability to attend to God. But for those who keeps their minds with the Spirit (Romans 8), the very life, power, and glory of God Himself empowers those ones to strategically allocate attention to God's activity in Creation....seeing can be clearly seen from the Creation itself (Romans 1, again.)
"Creation is allowed in intimate love to speak to the Creator as if to a lover. As the Creator loves the creation, so the creation loves the Creator. The whole world has been embraced by this kiss."
Hildegard of Bingen
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Tom
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Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/17/2009 8:49 AM (GMT -6) | | D: 1) God likes and desires the existence of a reality "other" than God's own. Truly "other" than God.
2) God likes and desires the "other existence" to have self-relational and other-relational understanding and will, with the capacity for created personhood.
3) I do NOT believe that interpersonal particularity and creaturely existence is "illusory" in some Advaita Hinduism monistic sense. Personal particularity is ultimate reality ala Trinity. Moreover, creaturely existence has it's OWN INDEPENDENT REALITY.
I hope this really clears things up.
T: If you mean what I'd mean by this, then yeah, that helps a lot.
D: I figured with the whole Maximos/logoi/tropoi thing we were solid on things.
T: I did too.
D: I don't have any kind of covert monist scheme going or whatever. The language of the mystics is pretty much the same. It's HEAVY theocentric perspective such that God is "everything" and Creation is "nothing" (ala Eckhart, etc) And unfortunately, it sounds much too monistic for comfort.
T: It sounds like flat out monism, yep. I don't get why it is that when pressed you're happy with expressing yourself as you do in these three points above, D, which are all fine (if they mean what I think they mean), but then at other times you express your view and perspective as "remembering nothing but God, thinking nothing but God, and seeing nothing but God," which on the face of it contradicts your three points. Why is that? It so obviously miscommunicates, so why talk like that? I don't get it. You must feel there's some truth that captured by the "only God" talk that's lost in the three points you mentioned.
E. L. Allen on Berdyaev:
What are we to say of the mystic's goal? What is this indescribable thing which he has found and of which he seeks to tell us with stammering lips and strange signs? It is the experience of unity with God. He describes this in terms which we may find shocking, but that is because we are so foolish as to take them literally; the mystic is akin to the artist, and we must ask what he means rather than what he says. Let us take some typical mystical utterances as quoted by Berdyaev: "I am as great as God, He as small as I." "If I did not exist, neither would God." "I am man by name, and God by grace." "Unworthy though I be I am the hand and foot of Christ. I move my hand, and my hand is wholly Christ's, for God's divinity is united inseparably to me. As I move my foot it glows with the light of God himself." To the uninstructed ear, these immediately suggest pantheistic arrogance; the boundary between the Creator and the creature has been obliterated. Berdyaev would say that this is what mysticism is, it is "the overcoming of creatureliness." But he goes on to add that if we take such language literally, as implying that the distinction between God and man has been done away with, we merely commit the old error of supposing that expressions derived from our experience in space and time are adequate to the full truth. There is no question here of the human being included in and absorbed by the divine; what is involved is a unity in personal love.
Some things. (1) The hermeneutic being advised (We must ask "what the mystic means rather than what he says" ) is lost on me. I can't even begin to figure out what "I am God" MEANS apart from the words being used, and if what's meant is found somewhere other than in the words, then again, the meaning is inaccessible to me. I'm happy for the mystic, but I can't talk to him. (2) If the mystic's goal is "the overcoming of creaturliness" AND (at the same time) the distinction between creator and creature remains (i.e., is not overcome or dissolved) then both what it means to "overcome creaturliness" and what it means to "be distinct from God" are utterly out of my reach. What's affirmed is denied and what's denied is affirmed. Words don't mean anything anymore. Maybe Berdyaev should have stopped writing (using words) and taken up painting. (3) I think our destiny, and the substance of our oneness with God, will mean finally being creatures in the truest sense of the word; not overcoming creaturliness, but overcoming the illusion that the substance of our telos is that we become something other than 'creature'. Overcome the temporary this-worldly limitations of creaturliness (which are not essential to creaturliness per se)? Yes. Overcome the damage of sin to our creatureliness? Yes. Overcome the epistemic distance that confines our creaturliness presently and makes us so open to misrelation? Yes. Overcomes our mortality? Yes. But all these things which are overcome are NOT definitive of creaturliness PER SE. Nothing essential to being a creature is overcome. Nothing essential to being a creature COULD be overcome. It may be just my own personality quirks or hangups, but I just can't appreciate mystical language that so predominantly miscommunicates (as does D's "remember only God, think only God, see only God" etc.) especially when mystics are perfectly capable of expressing themselves in ways that DO communicate well (as D's three points do).
By the way, I'm pretty sure Berdyaev posits the choice to create as constitutive of the Trinity (the same way McCormack does). There is no Trinity apart from God's commitment to create; that is, the determination to incarnate IS the begetting of the Son. I hope this isn't the case, but the passages I ran across seemed to imply that pretty strongly. That's bad news. For example:
Whereas man is as it were part of the very life of God; he is God's "other self" and without him [viz., without human beings] God could not come to self-expression. The doctrine of the Trinity has to be taken in conjunction with the Incarnation, so that we see in Christ the "Eternal Man."
Not good.
Tom
"Man is a person not by nature but by spirit. By nature he is only an individual." Nicolas BerdyaevPost Edited (Tom) : 10/17/2009 10:10:57 AM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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| Posted 10/17/2009 4:28 PM (GMT -6) | | |
Just a thought...
When Berdyaev says what he does, I believe he refers to the fact that mysticism helps human beings to overcome the "nothingness" inherent their very nature as creatures...such that they become ACTUAL hypostases, REAL be-ings because of the Spiritual Presence of God continually indwelling the human beings.
Like your quote, Tom...
"Man is a person not by nature but by spirit. By nature he is only an individual."
Reposting...
Tom:
I mean, I'm fine with saying human beings naturally are the potential for becoming true persons. What parts of the process you choose to call by which labels doesn't matter.
One Love:
The corrolary to this idea, IMO, is that being "merely human" is NOT the same as being a truly existent person who is "fully human" like Jesus was. One is not instantly an actual "person" or "hypostasis" just because one is a human being living, breathing, and walking around. It doesn't work that way. There is the work of faith. Without the Spirit, we are pretty much higher functioning animals (humans ARE a part of the animal kingdom!) that have capacity for rationality, emotionality, will, and "individual" self-reflection...possessing the capacity to be truly human, but never exerting that capacity. We could just as easily talk about the difference between spiritually dead humans who live in "beasthood"...and spiritually regenerated humans who are on the way to becoming "created gods" through Grace. We never lose the image living as humans who self-reflect and self-relate...but we are NOT truly personal until we are lifted into hypostasis (ecclesial hypostasis, if you wish) by our indwelling of the Holy One.
Tom:
Right.
"Creation is allowed in intimate love to speak to the Creator as if to a lover. As the Creator loves the creation, so the creation loves the Creator. The whole world has been embraced by this kiss."
Hildegard of Bingen
Know me, Eternal Lover...and help me to know You... Post Edited (One Love) : 10/17/2009 4:37:22 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/17/2009 4:36 PM (GMT -6) | | Thinking of Berdyaev's somewhat mystical statements...
"I am as great as God, He as small as I."
"If I did not exist, neither would God."
"I am man by name, and God by grace."
Particularly this one...
"Unworthy though I be I am the hand and foot of Christ. I move my hand, and my hand is wholly Christ's, for God's divinity is united inseparably to me. As I move my foot it glows with the light of God himself."
See...to me...from a panENtheistic perspective (considering epikletic and eucharistic existence in Christ and all that) these make perfectly good (NON IDOLATROUS) sense...even WHILE I still hold to the 3 things I gave before.
Hmmm...
I'm not understanding how someone could assume this to be "pantheistic arrogance." 
"Creation is allowed in intimate love to speak to the Creator as if to a lover. As the Creator loves the creation, so the creation loves the Creator. The whole world has been embraced by this kiss."
Hildegard of Bingen
Know me, Eternal Lover...and help me to know You... Post Edited (One Love) : 10/17/2009 4:40:00 PM (GMT-5) | | Back to Top | | |
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Tom
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Date Joined Jul 2001
Total Posts : 10353
| Posted 10/18/2009 12:52 AM (GMT -6) | | I'm not disputing the ecstatic nature of human personhood, so yes, Zizzy argues this, and others. That isn't my problem.
My problem, as was clear, was what one could possibly MEAN by saying our oneness with God lead to a form of existence in which we "remember ONLY God, see ONLY God, etc."
I don't at all see how panentheism makes perfectly good sense of the word "only" in such a phrase while it's also true that God is NOT the ONLY thing that exists and is NOT the ONLY thing we remember and NOT the ONLY thing we see, etc.
D: I'm not understanding how someone could assume this to be "pantheistic arrogance."
T: Nobody's assuming anything. We (well, I) TRY to understand what "words" mean. But maybe part why people assume, if they do, that mystical language comes across as arrogant is that "the language of the mystics...sounds much too monistic for comfort." Hmmm, wonder who said that?  Well, if you admit it sounds monistic, why are you having trouble understanding how someone could think its monistic?
;o)
"Man is a person not by nature but by spirit. By nature he is only an individual." Nicolas Berdyaev | | Back to Top | | |
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One Love
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Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/18/2009 7:11 AM (GMT -6) | | Tom:
My problem, as was clear, was what one could possibly MEAN by saying our oneness with God lead to a form of existence in which we "remember ONLY God, see ONLY God, etc."
I don't at all see how panentheism makes perfectly good sense of the word "only" in such a phrase while it's also true that God is NOT the ONLY thing that exists and is NOT the ONLY thing we remember and NOT the ONLY thing we see, etc.
To me it would be like this:
If someone told me: See only the Good. Remember only the Good, etc. I would not understand this to mean to attribute as "goodness" each particular thing and event I see. I would understand this to mean that out of everything that occurs, I should presuppose that Goodness is at work...and has always been. It's not saying ONLY the Good exists. It's saying that ultimately, Goodness grounds all and can be found in all, if one chooses to "look."
"Creation is allowed in intimate love to speak to the Creator as if to a lover. As the Creator loves the creation, so the creation loves the Creator. The whole world has been embraced by this kiss."
Hildegard of Bingen
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One Love
Registered Member
Date Joined Jan 2003
Total Posts : 13888
| Posted 10/18/2009 7:14 AM (GMT -6) | | D: I'm not understanding how someone could assume this to be "pantheistic arrogance."
T: Nobody's assuming anything. We (well, I) TRY to understand what "words" mean. But maybe part why people assume, if they do, that mystical language comes across as arrogant is that "the language of the mystics...sounds much too monistic for comfort." Hmmm, wonder who said that? Well, if you admit it sounds monistic, why are you having trouble understanding how someone could think its monistic?
It's one thing for a person to be a pantheist, believing they have essential oneness and/or identity with God on pretty much every level. It's a whole other thing for that to be judged as "arrogance" by someone who holds said (false) belief.
Not that YOU'VE said any such thing.
"Creation is allowed in intimate love to speak to the Creator as if to a lover. As the Creator loves the creation, so the creation loves the Creator. The whole world has been embraced by this kiss."
Hildegard of Bingen
Know me, Eternal Lover...and help me to know You... | | Back to Top | | |
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