AshvinP wrote: ↑Sat May 08, 2021 1:18 pm
Simon,
I am sure Cleric will offer a more helpful response later, but I just wanted to remark briefly... it is very interesting that what you consider "so important the rest is trivial", i.e. "
god being entirely 'other'", is what I find so important in the complete opposite direction. That God is
not other feels so important to me, not merely intellectually, but actually
feels. I am sure you could have guessed that from my posts and essays, otherwise I would not bother writing them. It is true that your view has a strong foundation in the early Church, but it is equally true that another understanding was already present at that time and runs through the entire history of the Western Church, although was almost eradicated in the last few centuries.
I would further argue that many of those Christian theologians you may think support your view are not quite as supportive as imagined due to the metamorphic spiritual progression we are involved in. Many theological views we find so "central" to Christianity are artifacts of the modern age. I will be posting the first part of my last part
of the essay today, and I hope you get a chance to read it, because I would love to hear your thoughts. Obviously I feel these are the most important questions we could be asking and exploring as humans, let alone humans interested in idealist philosophy.
I agree these are important questions. In some ways it’s a subtle difference between us. Divinisation is a core part of christian belief, and always has been. It’s mentioned in scripture, it mentioned by the church fathers right from Irenaeus. It’s in the catechism, it’s mentioned at every mass, and is seen as the pinnacle of the spiritual journey. But for those who achieve it in this life, it’s not a realisation of existing divinity, but rather a merging of the whole person (lower and upper self!) into the divine. In the words of John of the Cross;
In thus allowing God to work in it, the soul ... is at once illumined and transformed in God, and God communicates to it His supernatural Being, in such wise that it appears to be God Himself, and has all that God Himself has. And this union comes to pass when God grants the soul this supernatural favour, that all the things of God and the soul are one in participant transformation; and the soul seems to be God rather than a soul, and is indeed God by participation; although it is true that its natural being, though thus transformed, is as distinct from the Being of God as it was before.
Nonetheless, I agree that the process is one of ‘becoming god’. I guess the biggest concern I have with the ‘subtle’ difference, is that there is a risk that if people see Christ as their higher self, the relationship is not right. We can’t just expect this to happen, nor will it just happen by intellectually understanding anything. As Theophilus of Antioch put it in the second century;
Neither, then, immortal nor yet mortal did He make him, but, as we have said above, capable of both; so that if he should incline to the things of immortality, keeping the commandment of God, he should receive as reward from Him immortality, and should become God...
