Anthony66 wrote: ↑Mon Jul 24, 2023 5:19 am
AshvinP wrote: ↑Fri Jul 21, 2023 2:50 pm
Anthony66 wrote: ↑Fri Jul 21, 2023 9:06 am
Of course understanding varies between individuals and within individuals across time. But within our current morphic intellectual space we maintain concepts shared between people which carry a certain semantic range. Concepts like hell clearly have a referent which could be endlessly plumbed of meaning. But the centre of the semantic space is "a bad place or state". And salvation (another term worth plumbing!) from hell is found only in the RCC, at least according to traditional dogma. Of course there have been reflections, particularly from second Vatican, what actually constitutes being "in" the RCC. But esotericists, with their extreme stretching of the semantic range of a host of theological concepts, have not been looked favourably upon by the RCC.
That is true, there is a semantic range. But when we move from isolated concepts like 'hell' or 'heaven', which as you note are already quite deep, and move to the
relations of these concepts that constellate a semantic space like 'salvation through faith in Christ', or an even broader/deeper space like 'salvation through faith in Christ as embodied by the institution of the RCC', do you see how the issue becomes much more complex? It seems you implicitly acknowledge there are great mysteries surrounding such things, but you are still hesitant to renounce very firm and definite thoughts about what they mean. Both the fundamentalists and the atheists put themselves in the same position - they want these things to be very transparent to their modern conceptual understanding and then project that desire for surface-level transparency back through the entire history of the Church.
But any honest and effortful survey of the scriptures and the early Church writings, for ex., reveals that the mysterious character of such things was front and center in the early Christian consciousness. We could take the example of Origen, who surely must be considered influential in the organic development of the early Church and its traditional doctrine. What are your thoughts on the following passage?
Origen wrote:What John calls the eternal Gospel, and what may properly be called the spiritual Gospel, presents clearly to those who have the will to understand, all matters concerning the very Son of God, both the mysteries presented by His discourses and those matters of which His acts were the enigmas. In accordance with this we may conclude that, as it is with Him who is a Jew outwardly and circumcised in the flesh, so it is with the Christian and with baptism. Paul and Peter were, at an earlier period, Jews outwardly and circumcised, but later they received from Christ that they should be so in secret, too; so that outwardly they were Jews for the sake of the salvation of many, and by an economy they not only confessed in words that they were Jews, but showed it by their actions. And the same is to be said about their Christianity. As Paul could not benefit those who were Jews according to the flesh, without, when reason shows it to be necessary, circumcising Timothy, and when it appears the natural course getting himself shaved and making a vow, and, in a word, being to the Jews a Jew that he might gain the Jews— so also it is not possible for one who is responsible for the good of many to operate as he should by means of that Christianity only which is in secret. That will never enable him to improve those who are following the external Christianity, or to lead them on to better and higher things. We must, therefore, be Christians both somatically and spiritually, and where there is a call for the somatic (bodily) Gospel, in which a man says to those who are carnal that he knows nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified, so we must do. But should we find those who are perfected in the spirit, and bear fruit in it, and are enamoured of the heavenly wisdom, these must be made to partake of that Word which, after it was made flesh, rose again to what it was in the beginning, with God.
The foregoing inquiry into the nature of the Gospel cannot be regarded as useless; it has enabled us to see what distinction there is between a sensible Gospel and an intellectual and spiritual one. What we have now to do is to transform the sensible Gospel into a spiritual one. For what would the narrative of the sensible Gospel amount to if it were not developed to a spiritual one? It would be of little account or none; any one can read it and assure himself of the facts it tells— no more. But our whole energy is now to be directed to the effort to penetrate to the deep things of the meaning of the Gospel and to search out the truth that is in it when divested of types.
Origen. The Complete Works of Origen (Illustrated) (pp. 1450-1451). Delhi Open Books. Kindle Edition.
Perhaps an appropriate way to view all of this is via the mathematical concept of projection - reducing a higher dimensional space to a lower one. In terms of our day-to-day experience, we can similarly think of a 3-dimensional object casting a 2-D shadow onto the ground. In either case the projected image has lost information in relation to the higher dimensional counterpart.
We can agree that the various spiritual concepts have layers of meaning or depth. They lie in a high dimensional space. But my contention is that the RCC (and other denominations/communions) have mapped these meanings into a lower dimensional space, a crystallized space, where the meaning has been largely lost and most likely distorted. This latter is captured in the creeds and dogmas and is the space the exoteric churches operate in. It is the space which declares esotericism as heretical.
But you seem to be arguing that the richer meaning can be resurrected from the ashes of the projection after the information has been lost. In the mathematical world, this is known to be impossible.
Anthony,
The bold is the heart and soul of Christianity and what Christ accomplished for us, is it not? Our entire known personality is a 'projection' in the same sense. I'm not even sure it's impossible in the mathematical world, since there is the
holographic principle which says all of 3D reality can be recovered from a 2D hologram.
The holographic principle is a property of string theories and a supposed property of quantum gravity that states that the description of a volume of space can be thought of as encoded on a lower-dimensional boundary to the region — such as a light-like boundary like a gravitational horizon
If there is anything I have been trying to convey about the creeds and dogmas of the RCC, it's that they should not be treated essentially differently from any other natural or cultural forms that have been flattened and encrusted in the modern age through
our habits of thinking. Every form has an ideal archetype that emanates from the top-down, through human I-consciousness, and into the manifest world. The distortion always occurs in our particular mode of thinking, habits of soul, and myopic perspective rather than the ideal archetype itself. We need to learn to look upon even the forms that we find very disturbing or disagreeable as manifestations of ideal archetypes that are quite independent of human intellectual consciousness and that we have distorted through the latter. The process of redemption can only come from
retracing the process of descent, first in our thinking consciousness and later through the soul, life, and physical spaces. That is not only the heart of the Christian faith but also the heart of esoteric science.
St. Paul wrote:Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. For by it the elders obtained a good report.
Through faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God, so that things which are seen were not made of things which do appear...
Through faith... Women received their dead raised to life again: and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance; that they might obtain a better resurrection: And others had trial of cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover of bonds and imprisonment: They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword: they wandered about in sheepskins and goatskins; being destitute, afflicted, tormented; (Of whom the world was not worthy:) they wandered in deserts, and in mountains, and in dens and caves of the earth. (Hebrews 11)
The creeds and dogmas were not made by human concepts 'which do appear' from the bottom-up but through top-down ideal impulses which are 'not seen'. We should try to notice what we are subtly doing in our thinking when we locate the source of problems in the creeds and dogmas and traditions themselves, which is similar to the spiritualist/mystic/fundamentalist who locates the source of problems in the perceptual world and the physical body. Practically, we are forsaking our faith in the Spirit that lives in our thinking consciousness and is alone capable of redeeming the ashes of the World from the deserts, dens, and caves of the modern age. These things remain pretty abstract until we also explore concrete examples through our imaginative and intuitive thinking. I previously shared an example of a dogma that I had found disagreeable and even irredeemable to some extent, i.e. that of the Virgin Birth. At that time, I was thinking that it could only refer to the purity of Mary's soul and had nothing to do with the biological process of reproduction, i.e. it couldn't be the case that Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of Jesus.
Ashvin wrote:Here is a simple example - that of the 'virgin birth'. The evangelicals dogmatically hold that the Bible teaches Mary was impregnated by the Holy Spirit and Joseph had nothing to do with the conception of the Jesus child. Yet when we look at the actual content of the Gospels, particularly Luke and Matthew, we find genealogies traced out in great detail for the precise purpose of showing how the lineages of Jesus go through Jospeh (and another father, since there were in fact two Jesus children to begin with). What would be the point of all that if Joseph actually had nothing to do with the birth of Jesus? We don't need clairvoyant perception here, just simple and sound reasoning. Do the critical scholars fare any better? No, they hold to the exact same dogmatic interpretation and then use that as a reason for dismissing the content, because it is absurd that a human child could be physically born without a human father. So the evangelicals and critical scholars are arguing over their own dogmatic illusions and the actual content has fallen by the wayside. We will find the same thing applies to many other aspects of scripture as well.
The above is not necessarily incorrect, but I have since intuited with the help of Tomberg that the dogma of the Virgin Birth is not so simple. There is a biological dimension to it that indeed makes it unique from all other human births and is entirely aligned with esoteric science. I can't really go into the details of that because it is still a hazy intuition for me that I cannot usefully condense into conceptual terms. I think it would take quite a few posts to meaningfully convey what I am referring to. Suffice it to say, what I wrote above was equally an expression of my own cognitive limitations as it was of the shortcomings of the Christian faithful who hold fast to the Virgin Birth dogma or the skeptics who believe such a dogma clearly has a biological component. I was separating out the "biological" from the spiritual in an unwarranted manner. These are things we need to pay attention to and strive to overcome through faith in our living spiritual principles of redemption and resurrection. Our Hope is in the fact that even the densest, most hardened thing of all, our physical bodies and mineral nature, is being raised back to life through us.
We usually feel that the esoteric understanding of the Christ events and scripture is something more recent, added on top of the "traditional" dogmas of the Church, but that's an inversion. The esoteric understanding came first and only later hardened into exoteric forms. That is how the progression goes for all natural and cultural developments - things are occultly prepared and then outwardly manifested. But the esoteric stream continued throughout the centuries of Christian history and we find more or less direct references to it in the theological writings of the
saints of the RCC. We mentioned Origen, Dionysius the Areopagite, Aquinas, and John of the Cross already, and could add many more names to that list (I realize not all of them were deemed saints by the Church). Who is to say that the creeds and dogmas are to be universally interpreted by the rules of modern theology and we are to exclude all the earlier theologians, mystics, and saints who thought through and inwardly experienced the truths of Scripture and held fast to their outer expression in dogmas? We would only do that if we are seeking to locate the blame for these interpretations in our cultural institutions rather than in our own thinking consciousness. Only when we permeate the exoteric with the esoteric do we get something whole and all our judgments in the World should strive for wholeness.
The quote you provide from Origen is fascinating. Of course much of what Origen said was viewed with suspicion and declared as heretical by the latter church councils. But I'd love to know how much the sense of a spiritual Gospel (whatever is meant by this term) permeated the thinking of the early church and of Jesus' teaching itself versus "knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" which became the central teaching of Christianity.
Yes, that is a great question to explore and we should do so
before casting out our judgments. Again, we can only say "knowing nothing but Jesus Christ and Him crucified" became the "central teaching of Christianity" if we have excluded everything 'not seen', or even things seen but not paid attention to, from the teaching. Everything is fluid, mobile, in process of development through rhythms of descents and ascents and the more we deepen our own intuitive thinking, the more we will notice how the 'teaching' once was and could again be much more than we currently assess it to be.