-About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Book online (Third Millennium Library)
-Chapter on Thomas Aquinas
Intellect
12 hours ago
28.12.10
The Thirteenth; Greatest of Centuries -James J. Walsh
-About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Book online (Third Millennium Library)
-Chapter on Thomas Aquinas
27.12.10
Aquina; A Beginner's Guide -Edward Feser
26.12.10
Foundations of Thomistic Philosophy - A.G. Sertillanges, O.P.
-About the Author (wikipedia)
"Outside God and ourselves, an idea is a thing, while a thing, in us and in God, is an idea. At this stage, this will serve as a reasonably accurate resume of Thomism"
Guide to Thomas Aquinas - Josef Pieper
-About the Author (Ignatius Insight)
-About the Author (Wikipedia)
-Author's Obituary (First Things)
Aquinas Wikipedia page.
"The intellectual dynamics of the early thirteenth century was...determined chiefly by two forces, both revolutionary and both of tremendous vitality: on the one hand the radical evangelism of the voluntary poverty movement, which rediscovered the Bible and made it the guide to Christian doctrine and Christian life; and on the other hand the no less fierce urge to investigate, on the plane of pure natural philosophy, the reality that lay before men's eyes. This latter movement in the direction of a hitherto unknown and novel "worldliness" found ammunition in the complete works of Aristotle, which were at that time just beginning to be discovered.
Both movements contained within themselves sufficient explosive force to shatter the whole structure of medieval Christianity's intellectual order. Both appeared in extremist form - theologically speaking, in the form of heresies. The remarkable thing about St. Thomas, who was exposed to these two intellectual currents while he was still a student at Naples, is that he recognized and accepted the rightness of both approaches; that he identifies himself with both; that he affirmed both, although they seemed mutually opposed to one another; and that he attempted to incorporate both in his own spiritual and intellectual life. The paradigmatic, the exemplary quality of St.Thomas is, as we have said, contained precisely in his refusal to "choose" between the two extreme possibilities. Instead he "chose" both - and did so not by merely tacking one onto the other in a mechanical fashion, but by grasping and demonstrating their inherent compatibility; in fact, by showing the necessity for fusing these apparently contradictory and mutually exclusive approaches to the world."
( 30)
23.12.10
The Mind of Chesterton -Christopher Hollis
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
- Chesterton Wikipedia page.
"It is curious that Saint Thomas should be saddled with the responsibility for those purely mechanical and demonstrative proofs of the existence of God i which modern metaphysicians from Kant onwards have been so ready to point out the insufficiences. It is of course true that you cannot demonstrate the existence of God by the mere assertion that it is a condition of thought to believe that everything must have a cause. What then, ask the objectors, can be the cause of God? Such questions may be of force against many of the later, debased scholastics, concerned only to produce the mechanical demonstration and to leave the lecture before a hearer can confront them with a question. They are of no force against Saint Thomas who showed himself as fully aware of such difficulties as any modern skeptic. As Chesterton shows, far from saying that the existence of a creating God was absolutely demonstrable he confessed that, were it not for revelation, he knew of no reason to prefer the belief that the universe was created by God to the belief that it had always existed. But even supposing that it had always existed there must still, he argued, have been in it some inhabiting and creating spirit directing the developing forms which its objects took, and this, in any event true, is yet the more clearly true if, as we are now told, this universe is an expanding universe. Whence comes the expansion? Matter clearly cannot be the creator of mind. The ultimate direction must be with a Mens Creatrix.
Yet among the creatures of the universe Man is so obviously different in kind from any others, and has so much more obviously a moral nature that it is according to reason and not contrary to it to imagine that he has some share in the divine nature as other creatures do not possess. Christian teaching describes this share by saying that Man was made in the image of God and that God in the person of Christ became Man. The fact that these claims, if true, explains the universe as nothing else can explain it, does not in itself prove them to be true as matters of history. The Christian before he accepts his faith is under obligation to examine the evidence of Christ's life and to decide from it whether there is any other explanation that can account for the facts. In the same way, if there is nothing beyond this life or if the future is only the future of Buddha's Sorrowful Wheel, then this life in which we have such obstinate certainties of the value of virtue and of happiness as the end of man, and in which so often virtue does not lead to happiness, does not make sense.
21.12.10
20.12.10
15.12.10
30.11.10
30.9.10
Reason to Believe; Why Faith makes Sense -Richard Purtill
-Buy this book.
- About the Author
-Richard Purtill Page at Ignatius Insight.
"...a universe without God is a universe without reason, a universe without moral values, a universe without hope of lasting happiness. It is precisely that the modern atheist or agnostic inhabits, precisely this world that the modern theater of the absurd, novel of the absurd, art of the absurd, shout, whine, and snivel about. If reason left us no alternative to such a view, intellectual honesty might force us to accept it. But if this view is true, reason has no force. If morality impelled us to take such a view, integrity might make us choose it. But if the view is true, morality has no force. If the deepest needs of our nature were satisfied by this view, then our nature might compel us to accept it. But if this view is true, the deepest needs of our nature are illusory. In sum, there can be no reason for accepting the absurdist view of the universe, for that view destroys all reasons." p.119
22.9.10
The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy -Etienne Gilson
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
"In order to know what God is, Moses turns to God. He asks His name and straightway comes the answer: Ego sum qui Ait ; sic dices filiis Isreal ; qui est misit me ad vos (Exod. iii. 14). No hint of metaphysics, but God speaks, causa finita est, and Exodus lays down the principle from which henceforth the whole of Christian philosophy will be suspended. From this moment it is understood once and for all that the proper name of God is Being and that, according to the word of St. Ephrem, taken up later by St. Bonaventure, this name devotes His very essence. Now to say that the word being designates the very essence of God, and the essence of no other being but God, is to say that in God essence and existence are identical. That is why St. Thomas Aquinas, referring expressly to this text of Exodus, will declare that among all the divine names there is one that is eminently proper to God, namely Qui est, precisely because this Qui estnon significat forman aliquam sed ipsum esse. In this principle lies an inexhaustible metaphysical fecundity ; all the studies that here follow will be merely studies of its results. There is but one God and this God is Being, that is the corner-stone of all Christian philosophy, and it was not Plato, it was not even Aristotle, it was Moses who put it in position." p.51
20.9.10
10.9.10
The Rage Against God; how atheism led me to faith -Peter Hitchens
1.9.10
Newman and The Modern World - Christopher Hollis
-Newman (Wikipedia)
" The Grammar of Assent derives from Pope Paul's judgment an increased significance because in it Newman, rejecting the purely intellectualist approach to the problem of God, talks a language much more like that of Duns Scotus than that of St. Thomas. It is also much more like that of the modern analyst and existentialist and we can see that growth of tolerance reflected in the present language of the Church. Where the early nineteenth century Popes had been only concerned to denounce, the modern documents are concerned to explain and understand. Contrast for instance Pius IX's full blooded denunciation of all enemies of the Church with the careful and reasoned attempt to discover what had led atheists to become atheists of John XXIII in Mater et Magistra or in the Schema XIII of the Church in the World Today; contrast Gregory XVI's denunciation of freedom of opinion as 'insanity' with John XXIII's assertion of its rights in Pacem in Terris; compare the Syllabus Errorum's advocacy of a literal interpretation of the Scriptures with the assertion of a duty of hermeneutic exposition of them in Pius XII's Divino Afflante Spiritu; or the earlier Pope's denunciation of liberalism, progress and democracy with the Council's assertion of the autonomous rights of science and it's endorsement of democracy in it's judgment that 'admirable is the practice of those nations in which the greater number of citizens take part with true liberty in political life.'
16.8.10
The Go-Between - L.P. Hartely
- The Go-Between Wikipedia page.
- About The Author.
- Opening credit shots and theme from the 1971 film staring Alan Bates and Julie Christie.
"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there."
One of the greatest opening lines ever.
15.8.10
Atheist Delusions; The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies -David Bentley Hart
-About The Author (Wikipedia)
-Review by Paul Griffiths (First Things)
-Review by Peter Lawler (First Principles)
-davidbhart.blogspot.com
"To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing. This is not to say it is to have no beliefs: the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or even perhaps in everything, so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in the nothing - or, better, in nothingness as such. Modernity's highest ideal - its special understanding of personal autonomy - requires us to place our trust in an original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves what we choose. We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense an infringement upon our freedom. This is our primal ideology. In the most unadorned terms possible, the ethos of modernity is - to be perfectly precise - nihilism." (20-21)
14.8.10
No One Sees God; The Dark Night of Atheists and Believers -Michael Novack
- About the Author (Wikipedia)
- Authors Website.
- NRO's The Corner blog post: "What is the Point of My New Book?"
- Interview with Author about book (First Things)
- Review (Washington Post)
- Archive of Author's articles in National Review
- Archive of Author's articles in First Things
10.8.10
16.7.10
At the End of an Age -John Lukacs
- About The Author
"The materialist philosophy and theories of the nineteenth century were hardly more than one chapter in the history of Science, even though its consequences are still all around us, blocking our vision. Physics has ended by explaining away matter itself, leaving us with an ever increasing skeleton, a more complex but essentially empty scaffolding of abstract mathematical formulae. Meanwhile evidences accumulate of the intrusion of mind into "matter." We need not hatch our way through the verbal jungle of "post-modern" philosophers of the twentieth century, even while we recognize their, long overdue, rejection of Objectivism. Unfortunately for so many of them this means but a supermodern kind of Subjectivism, which is a very insufficient approximation of the reality that the key to the universe is mind, not matter." (131)
6.6.10
Miracles; A Catholic View -Ralph McInerny
- About the Author.
- Author article; "The Eucharist and Culture" (Catholicity.com)
- Authors obituary: Ralph McInerny (1929-2010) by Thomas S. Hibbs
"What is a miracle? ....the one feature of the miracle that I have insisted upon is that it is a wonderful occurrence essentially linked to the truths of faith. The purpose of miracle is to direct the mind to the good news of Jesus: in that it differs from all kinds of other marvels and wonders, real and natural, as well as from the performance of magicians." (22)
"there is a certain kind of mind that cannot bear the thought that the supernatural exists and that it can get mixed up in the ordinary things of daily life. Such a mentality has to ignore quite a number of things." (81)
31.5.10
The Last Superstition; A Refutation of the New Atheism - Edward Feser
-About The Author
- Author's Blog
- Short review in St. Augustine's Press
- Short review from With Both Hands
- Radio interview with Author (James Allen Show)
-Article by Edward Feser in The American; "The New Philistinism"
"...as John Searle ( who, as we have seen, is no religious believer) has argued, every form of materialism implicitly denies the existence of the mind, whether or not it intends to (John Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind , 1992). Thus, every form of materialism really entails eliminative materialism, and is thus as absurd, incoherent, and false as eliminative materialism is. We have already seen in the previous chapter the deep reason why this is so. The conception of matter that modern materialism inherited from the Mechanical Philosophy, since it strips of matter anything that might smack of Aristotelian formal and final causes, necessarily strips from it also anything like qualia and intentionality, and thus anything that could possibly count as mental. Scientific materialism "explains everything" in non-Aristotelian terms only by sweeping what doesn't fit the mechanistic model under the rug of the mind. And thus the only way to deal with the lump that remains, short of Descarte's dualism, is to throw out the rug, lump and all. Hence, to say that matter, understood in mechanistic terms, is all that exists, is implicitly but necessarily to deny that the mind exists. Conversely, to acknowledge that both matter and mind exist is implicitly but necessarily to affirm either that something like Descarte's dualism is correct, or (if one wants to avoid the paradoxes inherent in Descarte's position) that something like Aristole's view really is right after all, and that the moderns were wrong to abandon it in favor of mechanism.
And this brings us to a rich irony of historical proportions, yet one which goes almost entirely unnoticed. As I have said, most materialists would like to avoid eliminative materialism if they could. They have no problem, then, acknowledging the existence of reason, truth, beliefs, desires, or the mind and intentionality in general. At the same time, they are desperate to avoid anything that smacks of Descartes's dualism; and since, in the modern period, the mechanical conception of the natural world has unreflectively come to be taken for granted, so that Descartes's position has come to seem the only realistic alternative to materialism, these materialists tend to assume that if they can formulate and defend their position in a way that avoids dualism, they have thereby vindicated materialism. What they do not realize, however, is that many of their arguments can make sense only if interpreted in Aristotelian terms, and in particular in terms of final causes. Their arguments are ambiguous between a mechanistic reading and an Aristotelian one, and it is this ambiguity that gives them whatever plausibility they have. Yet they fail to see this ambiguity because of their general ignorance of the history of their subject, and in particular their ignorance of what thinkers in the Aristotelian tradition have actually believed. While they dutifully parrot the general line that Aristotle and his Scholastic followers were all wrong and no longer worth taking seriously, they often inadvertently appeal to concepts that can make sense only if interpreted in a broadly Aristotelian way." (236-37)
26.5.10
God's Battalions; The Case for the Crusades - Rodney Stark
- About The Author (Wikipedia)
- rodneystark.com
- Interview with Rodney Stark
- Interview; from Medievalists.net
- Between The Covers; podacst interview
- Browse Inside: God's Battalions
- Article: "Four Myths of the Crusades"
- Review by Brad Miner (The Catholic Thing)
-Critical review at Amarium Magnum
19.5.10
The Forge of Christendom; The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West - Tom Holland
-About The Author (Wikipedia; needs updating)
- Review (First Things)
On the meeting of Henry IV and Pope Gregory at Canossa (1077):
"Late that January, and accompanied by only a few companions, he began the ascent of yet another upland road. Ahead of him, jagged like the spume of great waves frozen to ice by the cold of that terrible winter, there stretched the frontier of the Apennines. A bare six miles from the plain he had left behind him, but many hours twisting and turning, Henry arrived at last before a valley, gouged out, it seemed, from the wild mountainscape, and spanned by a single ridge. Beyond it, surmounting a crag so sheer and desolate that it appeared utterly impregnable, the king could see the ramparts of the bolt hole where the Pope had taken refuge. The name of the fortress: Canossa.
On Henry pressed, into the castle's shadow. As he did so, the outer gates swung open to admit him, and then, halfway up the rock, the gates of a second wall. It would have been evident enough, even to the suspicious sentries, that their visitor intended no harm, nor presented any conceivable threat. "Barefoot, and clad in wool, he had cast aside all the splendour proper to a king." Although Henry was proud and combustible by nature, his head on this occasion was bowed. Tears streamed down his face. Humbly, joining a crowd of other penitents, he took up position before the gates of the castle's innermost wall. There the Caesar waited, the deputy of Christ, shivering in the snow. Nor, in all that time, did he neglect to continue with his lamentations - "until," as the watching Gregory put it, "he had provoked all who were there or who had been brought news of what was happening to such great mercy, and such pitying compassion, that they began to intercede for him with prayers and tears of their own." A truly awesome show. Ultimately, not even the stern and indomitable Pope himself was proof against it.
By the morning of Saturday 28 January, the third day of the royal penance, Gregory had seen enough. He ordered the inner set of gates unbarred at last. Negotiations were opened and soon concluded. Pope and king, for the first time, perhaps, since Henry had been a small child, met each other face to face. The pinch-faced penitent was absolved with a papal kiss. And so was set the seal on an episode as fateful as any in Europe's history.
11.4.10
8.4.10
The Savage Detectives -Roberto Bolano
-About the author (Wikipedia)
-Review from The New Yorker
-NYTimes Sunday Book Review
"I picked up The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño with high hopes. There are few pleasures rarer than when an American publisher begins releasing translations of a foreign writer all at once. When you feel you’ve exhausted the writers you love most and become overly familiar with the establishment
"I give up. I don’t know how to review The Savage Detectives.
Everyone told me I was supposed to love this book, but I didn’t. There, that’s a review. Not a good review, but there. I can’t remember a book ever taking me so long to finish or a book that I put down so often. When I truly love a book, I am moved. Often physically. Sometimes I have to stand up to read a book, I’m so moved. That’s a good book. (I never had to stand up during The Savage Detectives, although I often had to force myself to read thoroughly and not just skim). When I truly love a book, I’m a little sad and deflated when it’s over. I know a book is great if I’m compelled to go back and immediately reread sections. (Again, with Detectives, this didn’t happen). But it looks like I’m trashing the book. I shouldn’t. It has a lot going for it." -ed biblioklept
6.4.10
The Science of God; The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom - Gerald L. Schroeder
-About the author (Wikipedia)
-Author's Official Website
-Dr. Schroeder speaking on cosmology: a 30 min. clip from the documentary, "Has Science Discovered God?"
Watch This! It's long, and poor video quality, but worth it.
"The medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides wrote that conflicts between science and the Bible arise from either a lack of scientific knowledge or a defective understanding of the Bible. This is a continuing problem. Acknowledged experts in science may assume that although scientific research requires diligent intellectual effort, biblical wisdom can be obtained through a simple reading of the bible. Conversely, theologians who have devoted decades to plumbing the depths of biblical wisdom often satisfy their scientific curiosity through articles in the popular press and then assume they can evaluate the validity of scientific discoveries. The "opposition" is viewed with a level of knowledge frozen at a high school or pre-high school level. No wonder the other side seems superficial, even naive. To relate these two fields in a meaningful way requires an in-depth understanding of both. Nobel laureate and high energy physicist Steven Weinberg is unsympathetic to the idea that ancient commentators on the Bible foresaw modern cosmological concepts regarding the origin of our universe. Yet in his recent book Dreams of a Final Theory, he readily admits, It should be apparent that in discussing these things....I leave behind any claim to special expertise."
"Here we come to a basic tension between religion and science: biblical literalism. Haven't those who demand a literal reading of Genesis noticed that Genesis is literally filled with contradictions? Two millennia ago, long before paleontologists discovered fossils of dinosaurs and cavemen, long before the data from the Hubble and Keck telescopes hinted at a multibillion-year old universe, the Talmud stated explicitly that the opening chapter of Genesis, all thirty-one verses, is presented in a manner that conceals information (Babylonian Talmud Hagigah 11b, 112a, 500 C.E.). The kabalistic tradition has come to elucidate that which is held within those verses. Kabalah is logic, not mysticism, but logic so deep that it might seem mystical to the uninitiated. Literalism is simply not an effective way to extract meaning from the Bible." (10)
"The first step in a rapprochement between science and Bible is for each camp to understand the other. Distancing the Bible from a few misplaced theological shibboleths will do wonders in furthering this mutual understanding.
I have already treated several. Earth need not be at the center of the universe for biblical religion to survive. As Genesis 1:1 stated, first came the heavens and then came the Earth. Western religion has learned to forgo its misplaced dream of a universe revolving around Earth, to accept gravity as a part of nature and not the machinations of a perverted mind, and most important, to read the Bible, as Moses insisted three times on the day of his death, as a poem, as a text having within it a subtext harboring multiple meanings (Deut. 31:19, 30; 32:44)" (11)
"The conflict between science and the Bible is ironic. Throughout the Bible, knowledge of God is compared with the wonders of nature. As stated so well in Psalms (19:2): "The heavens tell of God's glory and the sky declares his handiwork."
Eight hundred years ago, the medieval philosopher Maimonides wrote that science in not only the surest path to knowing God, it is the only path, and for that reason the Bible commences with a description of Creation. In some communities that thought was sufficient cause to burn his books.
31.3.10
Genesis and the Big Bang; The Discovery of Harmony Between Modern Science and the Bible -Gerald L. Schroeder, PhD.
-About the author (Wikipedia)
-Author's Official Website
-Dr. Schroeder speaking on cosmology: a 30 min. clip from the documentary, "Has Science Discovered God?"
Watch This! It's long, and poor video quality, but worth it.
"The Creator had and has a stake in the universe. We can assume that from the fact that the universe exists.What the stake is, however, we don't know. We get some hints, though, from interactions that have occurred between the Creator and the universe. Traditional theology maintains that had the creator wished to form the universe in a single act, then the Creator could have done so. From the biblical narrative, it is clear that the plan was not to bring the ready made universe into existence in a single stroke. For some reason a gradual unfolding was chosen as the method" (48)
"The parallel between the opinion of present day cosmological theory and the biblical tradition that predates it by over a thousand years is striking, almost unnerving. In view of the radical departure from our conception of reality, it is not surprising that even a Nobel laureate, such as Steven Weinberg, would think that unaided human perception is incapable of having any inkling of these occurrences that marked the evolution of our early universe.
The question we face is, from what source came the aid in perception? I think that we can relay on our understanding of history. Ancient biblical scholars did not have the aid of radio-astronomy or spectroscopy. So how did they have the insight, a thousand years ago, to form an account of the Big Bang so strikingly similar to our modern theories? How could these early teachers have known of our origins within a speck of space, of the expansion of space that has led to our universe, of the transition from an ethereal non substance to tangible matter, and, even more precisely, that this transition from formlessness to matter with form accompanied the expansion of the universe?
When the writers of the Cosmos series claimed that without the modern equipment available to those involved in cosmic research we would not suspect that the universe is expanding, that we would have no inkling that the universe probably expanded from a primordial state of high density, that is, we would not have discovered the phenomena of the big Bang - they were, of course, correct. Discovering the phenomena related to the original Big Bang required sophisticated radio and optical telescopes and all the technology related to high-energy particle accelerators. These became available only in the last 50 years or so. Data had to be gathered and correlated and inferences had to be drawn. Nahmanides and Maimonides were not in the business of discovering. For them, all could be derived from the revelation associated with the Bible. As Nahmanides stated, "What other source would be used?"
Consider the position of a teacher of natural sciences a thousand years ago suggesting that in the beginning all that is now our universe was contained within a single location no larger than a grain of mustard. A skeptic places before the teacher a glass of water and asks the teacher to compress it to half its size. Impossible, in human experience. How much less probable is the compression of all the contents of the Earth and then of the universe into a space the size of a grain of mustard? The response to the skeptic is not one of proof. It must be one of faith; faith in the accuracy of revelation even when it precedes the advances of science that eventually come to confirm it.
Revelation, at least as we have it today, did not provide details. At normal temperatures and pressure, matter is arranged in molecules. As pressures increase, the molecular structure is destroyed and individual atoms remain. Increasing the pressure even more destroys atomic structure until only atomic nuclei and free electrons exist. Finally, even the nuclei are pressed so tightly together that they break. When the compression finally results in temperatures that exceed the rest energy of these particles, that is, when the E is greater than the corresponding mc2, the particles freely transform from their mass form into energy.
Mankind, formed from the primeval energy of the Big Bang, can discover the details of physics just as he could receive them from biblical revelation." (67-8)
26.3.10
The Hidden Face of God; How Science Reveals the Ultimate Truth -Gerald L. Schroeder
-About the author (wikipedia)
-Author's Official Wesite
-Dr. Schroeder speaking on cosmology: a 30 min. clip from the documentary, "Has Science Discovered God?"
Watch This! It's long, and poor video quality, but worth it.
" When we piece together these aspects of what the metaphysical might be, we find that the common ground held both by skeptic and believer is actually quite broad. All hold that an eternal non-thing preceded our universe; that our universe had a beginning; that intelligent design, even Divine intelligent design, is not necessarily perfect design. All agree that our universe operates according to laws of great power. One and only one facet of the metaphysical separates the skeptic from the believer. That is whether or not that which preceded creation is immanent and active in the creation. Believer says yes. Skeptic says no. But even on this point, the putative presence of the biblical God can be quite tenuous, and often not evident to the untrained eye.
We humans like to label things, to wrap our minds around a concept, to define and package it; in essence to limit it so that the concept finds harmony within our human definition of logic. But how does someone label or even think about that which is not part of our human world? Confining the metaphysical to a physical description totally misses the "meta" aspect.
And Jacob asked him, and said "Tell me your name." And he said "Wherefore is it that you ask after my name?" (Genesis 32:30)Le-olam - a Hebrew word with three root meanings: forever, and also hidden, and also in the world. This is my name forever hidden in the world. So how to recognize the presence of the metaphysical?
And (the people) will say to me "What is His name?" What shall I say to them? And God said to Moses, "I will be that which I will be." And He said thus shall you say to the children of Israel "I will be" sent me to you.....This is My name leolam. (Exod. 3:13-15)
On that day (the Eternal) shall be One and Its name One. (Zech. 14:9)That is to say, the Eternal is One.
The Eternal is One. (Deut. 6:4)
But don't think that this is the kind of one after which might come the quantities two, three, and four. Nothing as superficial as number is being revealed in these statements. Rather, the infinite metaphysical as perceived by the physical is an all encompassing, universal unity. A total oneness is as close as the several trillion neural connections in our brains can come in our quest to discern the infinite.
You shall know this day and place it in your heart that the Eternal is God in heaven above and on earth below; ain od. (Deut. 4:39)ain od - a Hebrew expression in this verse meaning there is nothing else (compare Deut. 4:39 with Deut. 4:35)
That is to say, there is nothing else. Nothing other than this singular totality.
Everything, everything with no exception, is a manifestation of an eternal unity, a transcending ubiquitous consciousness, which many label as God. When you touch that unity, you perceive and also experience the wonder within which you and all the rest of creation are embedded. As the rush of emotion sweeps through your body, your level of consciousness moves from the personal aspect of being self-aware and closes the gulf between the local physical and the universal metaphysical." (12-14)
17.3.10
10.3.10
Not With A Bang But With A Whimper; The Politics and Culture of Decline - Theodore Dalrymple
-About the author (wikipedia)
-The Skeptical Doctor, a blog dedicated to the work of Theodore Dalrymple
" My father, whose immigrant parents never learned to speak English well, attended a slum school during and just after World War I, with classmates so poor that they went hungry and barefoot. Despite his background, my father found himself inducted into British culture by teachers who did not believe that the ability to understand and appreciate Milton or Shakespeare, or to make a contribution to national life, depended on social class or required roots in the soil going back before the Norman conquests. His teachers had the same faith in the liberating power of high culture, in its universal value and appeal, that many British workers then shared. As the historian Jonathan Rose has beautifully demonstrated in The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class, many ordinary English workmen, who led lives of sometimes numbing toil and financial hardship, nevertheless devoted much of their little spare time and tiny wages to improving their lives by strenuous reading of good literature, of whose transcendent value they had no doubt - a faith borne out by the success many of them attained in later years.
My father's teachers were the only people I ever heard him mention with unqualified admiration and gratitude. And he was right to do so: their philosophy was infinitely more generous than that of the multiculturalists who succeeded him. They had no desire to enclose my father in the world that his parents had fled. And they understood that for society to avoid bitter internal conflicts, everyone had to share important elements of culture and historical knowledge that would result in a shared identity. Not by chance did Trevor Phillips regret eighty years later that teachers were instructing children less and less in the great works of English literature, especially Shakespeare - a deprivation wrought not because teachers were complying with any spontaneous demand from below but because they were implementing the theories of elite educationists, especially the multiculturalists.
...English literature is the perfect vehicle for promoting a shared identity. Not to teach Shakespeare or other giants of British culture is to provide no worthwhile tradition with which the increasingly divers population can identify. Without such a tradition, nothing deeper than the ephemeral products of popular culture will be on hand to unite that population, even as profound cultural differences divide it. A shared culture consisting of pop ephemera will likely arouse the justified contempt of immigrants and their children, driving them into ethnic, cultural, or ideological enclaves in search of something more mentally and spiritually nourishing - thereby increasing social tensions, sometimes disastrously." (212-13)
3.3.10
Our Culture, What's Left Of It; The Mandarins and the Masses -Theodre Dalrymple
-But this book.-About the author (wikipedia)
-The Skeptical Doctor, a blog dedicated to the work of Theodore Dalrymple
"The first requirement of civilization is that men should be willing to repress their basest instincts and appetites: failure to do so which makes them, on account of their intelligence, far worse than beasts."
To paraphrase Burke, all that is necessary for barbarism to triumph is for civilized men to do nothing: but in fact for the past few decades, civilized men have done worse than nothing - they have actively thrown in their lot with the barbarians. They have denied the distinction between higher and lower, to the invariable advantage of the latter. They have denied the superiority of man's greatest cultural achievements over the most ephemeral and vulgar of entertainments; they have denied that the scientific labors of brilliant men have resulted in an objective understanding of nature, and, like Pilate, they have treated the question of truth as a jest; above all, they have denied that it matters how people conduct themselves in their personal lives, provided only that they consent to their own depravity. The ultimate object of the deconstructionism that has swept the academy like an epidemic has been civilization itself, as the narcissists within the academy try to find a theoretical justification for their own revolt against civilized restraint. And thus the obvious truth - that it is necessary to repress, either by law or by custom, the permanent possibility in human nature of brutality and barbarism - never finds its way into the press or other media of communication.
For the last decade I have been observing close-up, from the vantage point of medical practice, the effects upon a large and susceptible population of the erosion of civilized standards of conduct brought about by the assault upon them by intellectuals. If Joseph Conrad were to search nowadays for the heart of darkness - the evil of human conduct untrammeled by the fear of legal sanction from without or moral censure from within - he would have to look no further than an English city such as mine." (163)
"...a rejection of everything associated with one's childhood is not so much an escape from that childhood as an imprisonment by it." (25)
"To base one's rejection of what exists - and hence one's prescription for a better world - upon the petty frustrations of one's youth, as surely many middle-class radicals have done, is profoundly egotistical. Unless consciously rejected, this impulse leads to a tendency throughout life to judge the rightness or wrongness of policies by one's personal emotional response to them, as if emotions were an infallible guide." (26)
On D.H.Lawrence:
" Lawrence was was an earnest, but not a serious, writer - if by serious we mean one whose outlook on life is intellectually or morally worthy of our consideration. Lawrence put a lot of himself into Mellors (the protangonist in Lady Chatterly's Lover), who at one point in the book enunciates the essence of Lawrence's philosophy, the summary of all his reflections on human existence, his final testament to the world: "I believe in something, I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love. I believe that if men could fuck with warm hearts and women took it warm-heartedly, everything would be all right." The idea that social perfection is to be achieved through wonderfully sensual sexual relations between men and women is a fantasy unworthy of prolonged intellectual consideration. To call it adolescent tripe is to be unfair to many intelligent adolescents. The fact that so many eminent persons were willing to testify in court that Lawrence was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, worthy to be compared, say, with Conrad, is an indication of the elite's loss of taste and judgment. Their imprimatur helped transform a bad writer and a worse thinker into a major cultural influence: and his crude, egotistical literal-mindedness has been successively trumped ever since by yet cruder, more egotistical literal-mindedness.
Zen Catholicism -Dom Aelred Graham
Buy this book.
"According to Catholic tradition, man is a unity made up of soul and body; he is part spirit, part matter, but substantially a whole. The Church, not having defined the nature of either spirit or matter, this generalized description of man, while answering to common sense observation, permits of detailed filling in. Thus, from the psychological standpoint, we can look at ourselves in terms of our bodies, feelings, perceptions, volitional impulses, and consciousness - which are the chief aspects of the human personality as seen by Buddhism.
Feelings, perceptions, volitional impulses, and even our bodies manifest themselves at the level of our conscious egos. The level, that is to say, at which we are keenly aware of ourselves as distinct personalities, as separated from the world around us. This awareness is obviously of great importance. Without it we could not function purposefully, either in a manner leading to the gratification of our wishes as individuals, or as playing our part in the various groups - domestic, social, political, religious - to which we belong. The ego, aware of itself. is what places us in a subject-object relationship to ourselves, to other people, and even to God.
Indispensable as is this self-conscious ego to our well-being, it is also the condition and focal point of our deepest distress.By it we function, but by it we also suffer. We suffer the sense of alienation inherent in the subject-object relationship: alienation from self, alienation from the natural world and other people, alienation from God. The feeling of not knowing where one is, of not belonging, being ill-adjusted, forces us to play a part, more or less successful according to circumstances. We prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet. On the basis of such insight that we have, we come to a working compromise with life, adapting ourselves as best we may to the social round, to the "one damned thing after another" which largely makes up the world of space and time.
Daily life, for most people, consists of a series of personal encounters, pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. The original meaning of the word "person" (persona) - as distinct from the technical sense which it has acquired in Catholic theology - is that of a mask used by actors. A person is someone who assumes, in however slight degree, a disguise. As soon as the word is extended to "personage". we have no difficulty in seeing the point. A personage is an individual with a role; he must, like an actor, project himself in accordance with the appropriate "image". An aspiring politician is obliged to appear as simultaneously cheerful, confident, and statesmanlike; a movie star as arresting and sexually attractive,; an ecclesiastic as at once grave and benign, with perhaps a hint of a bright clerical smile. These conventions are well understood and acceptable enough. They only become tiresome when the individuals concerned, forgetting that from the basic human standpoint they are merely playing a part, identify themselves with their role. This invariably leads to trouble both for them and for those associated with them.Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
(T.S.Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)
2.3.10
Mysticism, Sacred and Profane -R.C.Zaehner
-Buy this book.
-About the author (wikipedia)
On Aldous Huxley:
-About the author (wikipedia)
On Aldous Huxley:
"Huxley's outlook is preconditioned by his intellectualism. In the best tradition of intellectuals he started off as a rebel. His rebellion seems to have gone through two stages: first he revolted against the established form of society and its conventions, and when this revolt only involved him in new and deeper bondages, he rose in revolt against and from himself. The second rebellion really developed out of the first; for, as Huxley himself says in Ends and Means, although this revolt against the 'political and economic system' may have been justified on the ground that it was unjust, he and his friends had nothing to put in its place. It was a revolt into meaninglessness; and it is not in the nature of persons so markedly cerebral as Huxley to live in a vacuum for long. His revolt against sexual morality was equally unrewarding, as, in th elong run, it always is. It is easy to become impatient with the Evangelical Counsel of chastity, and it is even easier to flout it and tread it under foot. Huxley, however, found that by so doing he enmeshed and entangled himself further in the material world which nauseated him and from which even then he longed to escape. He slowly came to realize, what all the great religions have always taught, that bondage to the passions is as harsh a slavery as that imposed by any political system. Or, to put it in a more practical way, in the long run it is less trouble to be chaste. Huxley's whole career then predisposed him to conversion to a type of religion that would provide him with a way of escape from a world in which he had found is so extraordinarily difficult to fit himself. He had, it seems, not been a happy man; and because he was both unhappy and introspective, he needed a philosophy or religion that would deliver him from both his unhappiness and himself. Being a highly intelligent man he realized that the unhappiness and the self were in some way connected; and this is the beginning of religion. What Huxley calls the 'poisonous fruits' of the philosophy of meaninglessness forced him to look beyond himself for something a little more satisfactory. Realizing that preoccupation with the self is the source of all unhappiness, he turned towards the two religions which made this connection most clear, - Hinduism and Buddhism. He was right to do this: for though the Gospels teach that one must die to oneself in order to live, this is only one of many Christian teachings, whereas both Hinduism and Buddhism regard the elimination of the ego as the sine qua non of 'liberation' or 'enlightenment' and never tire of saying so. Moreover, a return to Christianity would have been difficult for Huxley since he remembered it only as something dry, moralistic, and Pharisaical, as part and parcel of an inhuman and mechanistic society against which he, like Kierkegaard before him, had revolted. There would have been no sense in returning to a religion that seemed to have become ossified into a not very indispensable adjunct of a questionable social system. There was the further point too that Christianity was far less clear in teaching that unhappiness and the ego are one and the same thing than was either Buddhism or Hinduism. There are, of course, texts in the Gospels which say very nearly this; but modern Christianity has not been at great pains to emphasize them.Buddhism, on the other hand, emphasizes and constantly reiterates that since all phenomenal things are impermanent and in perpetual flux, there can be no real happiness in them, and that impermanence is therefore identical with pain. The cause of pain is 'craving' and release from pain can only be obtained by stamping out all craving, that is, by suppressing all desire. It is against this background that Huxley can write of the urge to escape and the longing to transcend oneself as being one of the principle appetites of the soul." (16-17)
1.3.10
American Babylon; Notes of a Christian Exile -Richard John Neuhaus
-About the author (Wikipedia)
- Profile: He threw It All Away, by Robert P. George
-Richard John. Neuhaus Online Archive
-NEWSWEEK Obituary by George Weigel
"Even in the Babylon of the present, the New Jerusalem that "comes down from above" is anticipated. The word for this is prolepsis, an act in which a hoped for future is already present. The entirety of Christian existence and of our efforts in this world can thus be understood as proleptic.
For Christians, the supreme act of prolepsis is the Eucharist, in which we take braed and wine in obedience to the command of Jesus and "do this" in remembrance of him. Thus is the Eucharist, in the words of the Second Vatican Council, , the "source and summit" of the Church's life. It is a supremely political action in which the heavenly polis is made present in time.The eucharistic meal here and now anticipates, makes present, the New Jerusalem's eternal Feast of the Lamb. So it is that in the eucharistic liturgy Christians say that they join their song to that of "the angels and archangels and all the company of heaven" around the throne of the Lamb, meaning Christ the lamb of God who was sacraficed for our salvation. In this act, past and future are now because, as the Lamb says of himself, "I am the Alpha and Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end." Christ is the A and the Z of the human alphabet construed to tell the story of the world.
In this understanding, it is not a matter of balancing the other-worldly against the this-worldly, or the this-worldly against the other-worldly. Each world penetrates the other. The present is, so to speak, pregnant with the promised future. "The world is charged with the grandeur of God," declares the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Charged as in electrically charged; the present is given new urgency, raised to a new level of intensity, because it is riddled through and through with what is to be." (14-15)
"The earthly city of Augustine's time was the Roman Empire. The earthly city to which this book attends is chiefly, but by no means only, America. Augustine's City of God provides a conceptual framework. Literary critics speak of an "inhabitable narrative," which catches the matter nicely. For Augustine, the biblical narrative provides the drama of which we are part. City of God weaves into that narrative Augustine's penetrating insights into the possibilities and limits of the human condition. He is a master of subtlety in analyzing the desires, both rightly and wrongly ordered, of the human heart. He provides arguments, interpretations, principles, and rules, but - and this is most important - one derives from his writings what is best described as an "Augustinian sensibility". It is the sensibility of the pilgrim through time who resolutely resists the temptation to despair in the face of history's disappointments and tragedies, and just as resolutely declines the delusion of having arrived at history's end.
This sensibility builds on Peter's understanding of Christians as "aliens and exiles." It is a way of being in the world but not of the world that is finely expressed in The Letter to Diognetus. This letter was written by a Christian, possibly toward the end of the first century, to Diognetus, a pagan who was curious about the way Christians thought of their place in the world. The author explains: "Though they are residents at home in their own countries, there behavior there is more like that of transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything and everything as if they were aliens. For them, any foreign country is a homeland, and any homeland is a foreign country."
The author goes on to point out that Christians reject certain practices of the Roman world. For instance, they refuse to abort their children or to practice infanticide by exposing their children to the elements, as was common among the Romans. Christians recognize, says the letter writer, that they are viewed as alien and are not intimidated by that. On the contrary, they rejoice in it. As the soul is to the body, so are Christians to the world. As The Letter to Diognetus puts it, "The soul is captive to the body, yet it holds the body together. So Christians are held captive to the world, and yet they hold the world together." And that is because they are the bearers of the true story of the world, whether the world wants to know it or not." (23-4)
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