Posted on 11/10/2008 11:37:17 AM PST by betty boop
by Jean F. Drew
A friend asked for an explanation of a remark I recently made on a public forum that the great German philosospher, Hegel, was a “sorcerer.” I’m glad for this opportunity to respond. For the spirit of Hegel is alive and well today in the construction of any Second Reality, of which I regard the recent Obama Campaign to have been a splendid example.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a world-class philosopher — a master of classical philosophy, and a master system-builder. He is usually associated with the period of German Idealism in the decades following Immanuel Kant. The most systematic of the post-Kantian idealists, Hegel attempted to elaborate a comprehensive systematic ontology, or “science of being,” from a “logical” or “rational” starting point. He is perhaps most well-known for his teleological, “goal-directed,” even eschatological, account of human history — a model which was later appropriated by his notable follower Karl Marx, who developed Hegel’s “dialectical science” into his own theory of historical development (“dialectical materialism”), which by “historical necessity” culminates in communism.
Sorcery, or magic, is a conceptual system that asserts the human ability to control the natural world (including events, objects, people, and physical phenomena) through mystical, paranormal, or supernatural means — through, for example, magic words, or an ability to present compelling appearances of fictitious reality.
A Second Reality is such an ersatz reality. The term was coined by Robert Musil to denote a fictitious world imagined to be true by the person creating it, who will then use his construction to mask and thereby “eclipse” genuine, or First Reality.
In 1807, Hegel published his grimoire — i.e., a magician’s book of spells and incantations — the Phänomenologie, which takes as its main goal the transformation of philosophy, the “love of knowledge,” into the final, complete possession of “real knowledge,” by means of his system of “absolute science.” Of his accomplishment the great German-American philosopher Eric Voegelin (1901–1985) would write, “No modern propaganda minister could have devised a more harmless-sounding, persuasively progressivist phrase as a screen for the enormity transacted behind it.”
For Hegel, “‘Absolute knowledge’ was to be the form ‘in which the pure consciousness of the infinite is possible without the determinateness of an individual, independent life.’” In short, the Phänomenologie “admits no reality but consciousness…. [Yet] since consciousness must be somebody’s consciousness of something, and neither God nor man is admitted as somebody or something, the consciousness must be consciousness of itself. Its absolute reality is, therefore, properly identified as ‘the identity of identity and nonidentity.’ The substance becomes the subject, and the subject the substance, in the process of a consciousness that is immanent to itself…. The reader would justly ask what a consciousness that is nobody’s consciousness could possibly be?”[1]
And with that question, noetically astute observers realize we must be dealing with a Second Reality: It appears that “Hegel the sorcerer” wants to eclipse our image of reality by a counterimage conjured up to furnish a plausible basis for the action he calls for.
As Vöegelin notes, “in order to be effective as a magic opus,” Hegel’s system of absolute science had to satisfy two conditions:
(1) The operation in Second Reality has to look as if it were an operation in First Reality.
(2) The operation in Second Reality has to escape critical control and judgment by the criteria of First Reality. (I have noticed that President-Elect Obama excels in conducting both types of operations.)[2]
So, what is First Reality? In effect, it is the classical Greek (and Judeo-Christian) description of the context in which human existence is actually experienced and lived. That is to say, the human condition is specified by man’s participation in a Great Hierarchy of Being that extends beyond, encompasses, and shapes his existence as a man.
Being is a philosophical term referring to the fundamental structure or order of the world. Vöegelin, following the classical Greeks, defines being as “not an object, but a context of order in which are placed all experienced complexes of reality….” Thus the Great Hierarchy of Being consists of four partners: God, Man, World, and Society. The individual man, as “part” of this “whole,” finds his own humanity in his participatory experiences and relations with the other partners of the hierarchy, and most especially in his relation to God.
Strangely, given his “revolt” against God and man and the world, Hegel was a man who not only insisted on his Christian orthodoxy up to his dying day; but as already mentioned, he was a master of classical Greek philosophy. So clearly he was aware of First Reality in the above sense. His “magical opus” is motivated fundamentally by a desire to overturn and supplant it with a plausible Second Reality of his own imaginative construction.
The first “partner” of the Great Hierarchy that had to go was God. This was necessary in order to make room for Hegel as the “new Christ” who would usher in the “third religion” of his System of Absolute Science, so to be the Messiah, the New Christ, of the new age a-borning. The point here is that with God “gone,” man himself becomes a pure abstraction and, as such, an ideologically manipulatable entity and nothing more.
As far as I know, it was Voegelin who first drew attention to the element of sorcery in Hegel’s work — even though the language Hegel had been using from the first was the language of the “magic word” and the “magic force” (Zauberworte and Zauberkraft respectively). Vöegelin indeed identified the Phänomenologie as a sorcerer’s grimoire. My sense is if Vöegelin was joking here, he was only half-joking: Something very serious is going on. So we need first of all to understand what Hegel intended by evoking such language. As for instance, here:
“Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity by which the world builds itself forth. The single man can elevate himself to dominance over an appreciable length of this chain only if he knows the direction in which the great necessity [i.e., the Geist of history] wants to move and if he learns from this knowledge to pronounce the magic words (die Zauberworte) that will evoke its shape (Gestalt).”[3]
We need to define our terms here: Geist can be translated from the German as either “mind” or “spirit”; but the latter, allowing for a more cultural sense, as in the phrase “spirit of the age” (“Zeitgeist”), seems a more suitable rendering for Hegel’s use of the term. Gestalt (plural: Gestalten) means the present historical configuration of events as the Geist inexorably moves or evolves in time towards the fulfillment of its final “absolute necessity,” at which point — in its final Gestalt, which in Hegel’s system is identified with the consciousness of Hegel expressing as the complete identity of absolute Self and absolute Idea — world history ends; and a “new age” of Man, “standing alone,” begins. Because man is now “alone,” Hegel teaches that now he has arrived at the point in history where he can grant “grace to himself,” to “save himself,” to perfect the human condition, without the salvific Grace of God.
And Hegel’s enormously influential student Karl Marx (1818–1883) took the lesson to heart:
“Philosophy makes no secret of it. The confession of Prometheus, ‘In a word, I hate all the gods,’ is its own confession, its own verdict against all gods heavenly and earthly who do not acknowledge human self-consciousness as the supreme deity. There shall be none beside it.”[4]
“A being regards itself as independent only when it stands in its own feet; and it stands on its feet only when it owes its existence to itself alone. A man who lives by the grace of another [including God] considers himself a dependent being. But I live by the grace of another completely if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life but also its creation: if he is the source of my life; and my life necessarily has such a cause outside itself if it is not my own creation.”[5]
And so the “outside cause” — God — must “die” in order for man to be “liberated” for self-sanctification and self-salvation.
In light of such expectations, first of all, we need to remember that a “magic word” in itself does not evoke an actual creative act. Rather, it is the invocation of appearances, of illusions. “Magic words” do not have the power actually to change the structure of being, of reality; but only the way the sorcerer wants us to see it. If he is successful, then we are grievously misled.
Hegel’s famous epigone Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) had a field day with Hegel’s insights. He not only declared God “dead,” but claimed that “we” had “murdered” Him. Mankind, on this view, has finally gained the existential status not only to be in a position to “kill God,” but also to grant itself “grace” and “salvation” via human reason alone. Of course, these are the maunderings of a person who sadly died in an insane asylum. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is splendidly honored by the “progressives” among us to this day….
It’s interesting to note that many students of the Phänomenologie consistently over time have reported that to be drawn into the “magic circle” of this enterprise is to enter into a perfectly logically self-consistent construction — so long as one does not use the criteria of First Reality to judge it. But finally, all criticism by appeal to reality itself, i.e., as actually experienced by human beings in contrast with being merely cogitated or thought, is foreclosed by Hegel’s rule that his construction need justify itself through nothing but “the presentation of the system itself.” Thus we have the case of the magically disappearing world.
And so not only God is booted out of Hegel’s system; but also any sense of “objective reality.” The “world” is drawn into the sorcerer’s consciousness as conceptualizations only, as Gestalten, “shapes.” Once the sorcerer possesses the historical “shapes” in his consciousness, he has no further need of “the world,” of evidence from the side of actual experience of the world. Thus he intends to “eclipse” such experience by the force of reason alone, dispensing with human existential experience altogether through the power of “magical” imagination — which of course altogether destroys any avenue of critical judgment from the side of First Reality, which happily satisfies criterion (2) above.
Second of all, we need to appreciate the worldview implicit in Hegel’s remarks. Voegelin thinks the above-quoted passage — i.e., “Every single man is but a blind link in the chain of absolute necessity….” — reveals Hegel’s intense resentment of the human condition as well as its cause. Further, it is a key passage for understanding the diremption — meaning the tearing apart, or violent separation from all former historical notions of the human condition so characteristic of modern existence — at the foundation of Hegel’s enterprise:
“Man has become a nothing; he has no reality of his own; he is a blind particle in a process of the world which has the monopoly of real reality and real meaning. [Note it is not the world that has meaning; only its process has meaning.] In order to raise himself from nothing to something, the blind particle must become a seeing particle. But even if the particle has gained sight, it sees nothing but the direction in which the process is moving…. And yet, to Hegel something important has been gained: the nothing that has raised itself to a something has become, if not a man, at least a sorcerer who can evoke, if not the reality of history, at least its shape. I almost hesitate to continue — the spectacle of a nihilist stripping himself to the nude is embarrassing. For Hegel betrays in so many words that being a man is not enough for him; and as he cannot be the divine Lord of history himself, he is going to achieve Herrschaft [i.e., dominion, lordship, mastery, rule, reign] as the sorcerer who will conjure up an image of history — a shape, a ghost — that is meant to eclipse the history of God’s making. The imaginative project of history falls in its place in the pattern of modern existence as the conjurer’s instrument of power”….
Since the conjurer’s instrument of power is in this case to be obtained by the “perfection” of philosophy into a system of absolute knowledge, we need to define what philosophy is. The etymology of the word tells you the meaning of philosophy is “love of wisdom”: In the original Greek, philo refers to “love” or “lover”; sophia to “wisdom.”
Hegel’s main project, as it turns out, was to transform philosophy, the love of wisdom, into an instrument of Absolute Science, whereby “wisdom,” and all knowledge, are found to consist, not in the loving search or quest for divine truth, the complete possession of which is denied to mortal men in this lifetime; but in the “final possession” of absolute truth once and for all — the “absolute science” that can make men “immortal” in this world. In short, Hegel would like to transform philosophy into an exact science.
But if this were possible, then philosophy would instantly cease to be philosophy.
For although the insights of philosophy can advance, it cannot advance beyond its structure as “love of wisdom.” In the great tradition of the classical Greeks, eminently Plato and Aristotle (which Hegel had thoroughly mastered), philosophy denotes the loving tension of man “toward the divine ground of his existence. God alone has sophia, ‘real knowledge’; man finds the truth about God and the world, as well as of his own existence, by becoming philosophos, the lover of God and his wisdom. The philosopher’s eroticism implies the humanity of man and the divinity of God as the poles of his existential tension. The practice of philosophy in the Socratic–Platonic sense is the equivalent of the Christian sanctification of man; it is the growth of the image of God in man. Hegel’s harmless-sounding phrase [ i.e., philosophy must at last “give up its name of a love of wisdom and become real knowledge”] thus covers the program of abolishing the humanity of man; the sophia of God can be brought into the orbit of man only by transforming man into God. The Ziel [goal] of the Phänomenologie is the creation of the man-god….” — commencing with Hegel’s own self-deification as the redeemer of mankind now that the history of mankind, and notably his spiritual history, has been abolished by Hegel’s system of absolute science.[6]
In this, Hegel reveals his profound alienation from the idea of an established order of the universe. Indeed, he outright rejects any idea of order that has an origin other than in human consciousness, which he hypostasizes as “reason” or at least a facsimile thereof that the sorcerer can put over on his audience.
Voegelin provides some helpful insights into the consciousness of the sorcerer and his project:
“…Hegel experiences his state of alienation as an acute loss of reality, and even as death. But he cannot, or will not, initiate the movement of return; the epistrophe, the periagoge, is impossible. The despair or lostness, then, turns into the mood of revolt. Hegel closes his existence in on himself; he develops a false self; and lets his false self engage in an act of self-salvation that is meant to substitute for the periagoge of which his true self proves incapable. The alienation which, as long as it remains a state of lostness in open existence, can be healed through the return [to God], now hardens into the acheronta movebo of the sorcerer who, through magic operations, forces salvation from the non-reality of his lostness. Since, however, nonreality has no power of salvation, and Hegel’s true self knows this quite well, the false self must take the next step and, by ‘the energy of thinking,’ transform the reality of God into the dialectics of his consciousness: the divine power accrues to the Subjeckt that is engaged in self-salvation through reaching the state of reflective self-consciousness. If the soul cannot return to God, God must be alienated from himself and drawn into the human state of alienation. And finally, since none of these operations in Second Reality would change anything in the surrounding First Reality, but result only in the isolation of the sorcerer from the rest of society, the whole world must be drawn into the imaginary Second Reality. The sorcerer becomes the savior of the ‘age’ by imposing his System of Science as the new revelation on mankind at large. All mankind must join the sorcerer in the hell of his damnation.”[7]
In classical Greek philosophy, and especially in Plato, the epistrophe or periagoge in the above passage refers to the “turning around” to God (the transcendent Beyond of the cosmos) in open existence, in loving response to His call. The terms are analogous to the Christian “born again” experience. The term acheronta movebo means “If I cannot bend the Higher Powers, I will move the Infernal Regions.” It is the satanic declaration of the sorcerer who chooses to close all of reality in on himself, the Subjekt. Given the classical experience, this can only be a system of anti-philosophy.
In [Plato’s] Republic, the Beyond is imagined as the ultimate creative ground, the Agathon, from whom all being things receive their existence, their form, and their truth; and since by its presence it is the origin of reality and the sunlike luminosity of its structure, the Agathon-Beyond is something more beautiful and higher in rank of dignity and power that the reality that we symbolize by such terms as being, existence, essence, form, intelligibility, and knowledge. In the myth of the Phaedrus, then, the Beyond is the truly immortal divinity from whose presence in contemplative action the Olympian gods derive their divine and men their human immortality. In the puppet myth of the Laws, finally, ‘the god’ becomes the divine force that pulls the golden cord of the Nous that is meant to move man toward the immortalizing, noetic order of his existence. In this last image of the noetic “pull” (helkein) Plato comes so close to the helkein of the Gospel of John (6:44) that it is difficult to discern the difference.[8]
It appears that Hegel’s “revolt” is above all finally a revolt against, a rejection of the human condition, of the fact that a human being is never consulted about the terms of his coming into the world, nor of his departure from it. It is the essence of the human condition that a man is neither the origin nor the “end” of himself — “end” in the sense of telos, meaning purpose, or goal. Meanwhile, in between birth and death, there is a litany of evils to which mortal human nature is subject. “The life of man is really burdened,” as Voegelin put it, “with the well-known miseries enumerated by Hesoid. We remember his list of hunger, hard work, disease, early death, and the fear of the injustices to be suffered by the weaker man at the hands of the more powerful — not to mention the problem of Pandora.”[9]
Notwithstanding, Voegelin reminds us that “as long as our existence is undeformed by phantasies, these miseries are not experienced as senseless. We understand them as the lot of man, mysterious it is true, but as the lot he has to cope with in the organization and conduct of his life, in the fight for survival, the protection of his dependents, and the resistance to injustice, and in his spiritual and intellectual response to the mystery of existence.”[10]
Now the “lot of man” as just given is a description of the condicio humana, the human condition. It is the very basis for the idea of a universal, common humanity, of the brotherhood of mankind. It is my conjecture that it is possible for a person to take great umbrage at this condicio humana, to deplore and reject it, to see it as a grievous insult to one’s own assumed personal autonomy; and so to take flight in an alternative reality that can be structured more according to one’s own wishes, tastes, and desires. And thus, a Second Reality is born.
As for me, all things considered, I’ll take First Reality, the Great Hierarchy of Being — God–Man–World–Society — any day, any time. I believe that human beings were put in this world to be creative actors, even if they never get to design the stage on which the acting is being done, nor to control the writing of the script by which the play unfolds. And meanwhile they not only act, but suffer the actions of other actors or forces — personal, natural, social — from outside themselves.
Yet to recognize all this is to recognize the very basis of one’s own existential humanity. And to realize that the lot of any other man is no different. To be part and participant of this divinely constituted, dynamic “sub-whole” of a yet greater Whole is a glorious privilege. To go hole up in a Second Reality, to me, would be to lose one’s reason and probably one’s soul as well….
Indeed, that appears to be the conclusion reached by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), the great French poet, a noetically and spiritually sensitive person who understood himself to be living in an age of great noetic and spiritual disorder:
“A man who does not accept the conditions of life, sells his soul.”
And he penned these lines that make it crystal-clear to whom our soul is to be sold:
Sur l’oreiller du mal c’est Satan Trismégiste
Qui berce longuement notre esprit enchanté,
Et le riche metal de notre volonté
Est tout vaporiseé par ce savant chimiste
C'est le Diable qui tient les fils qui nous remuent.[11]
[“On the pillow of evil is Satan Trismegistus
Who long lulls our minds delighted,
And the rich metal of our will
Everything is vaporized by the scientist chemist.
“It is the devil who holds the son who we move.”]
[1] Eric Vöegelin, “On Hegel: A Study in Sorcery,” Collected Works Vol. 12, 1990.
[2] Ibid.
[3] G. W. F. Hegel, MS, Fortsetzung des “Systems der Sittlichkeit,” c. 1804–06.
[4] Karl Marx, Doctoral Dissertation, 1840–41 (quoting a passage from Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound).
[5] Karl Marx, “National Ökonomie und Philosophy,” Der Historische Materialismus: Die Früschriften.
[6] Eric Vöegelin, “On Hegel,” op. cit.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Eric Vöegelin, “Wisdom and the Magic of the Extreme,” Collected Works, Vol. 12, 1990.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Charles Baudelaire, “Au lecteur,” introducing the Fleurs du Mal, 1857.
©2008 Jean F. Drew
Socialism is in reality a second reality.. a closed system, that many buy into.. Ronaldus Maximus said it quite simply..
"How do you tell a Socialist:- It's someone who reads Marx and Lenin. And how do you tell an Anti-Socialist.... someone who understands Marx and Lenin" -Ronald Reagan
However, there is a vast difference between hearing about Jesus and knowing Him.
hosepipe often puts it something like this: "Jesus: you MUST be born again."
Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and [of] the Spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again. - John 3:5-7
Totally agreed that historical knowledge is a distinct part of reality. It must be a substitute for direct experience since it deals with vast stretches of the human past in which we were not living. But history is susceptible to "doctrinalization," which may deform or even misrepresent the actual historical record. For instance, Marx's Communist Manifesto is essentially an elaboration of Marx's theory of history, which in many ways is the projection in retrospect of his own personal character, beliefs, and aspirations onto the actual historical record. In Marx's case, this deformation is so extreme that we can call it a "second reality."
Also take the example of Karl Jasper's axial time, in which he segregates the historical period roughly 800–200 B.C., focusing on ~500 B.C., noting that at this time certain great yet quite similar irruptions of the human spirit took place via such figures as Confucius, Lao-Tse, the Buddha, Deutero-Isaiah, Heraclitus, and Pythagoras — a striking contemporaneity that cannot be explained by cultural diffusion. Jaspers on a look-back sees axial time as a distinct "era," carving it out, as it were, from the stream of history; and then imbuing it with the éclat of being the very period in human history in which the few seminal, constituting thinkers established the lasting cultural bases of their respective societies.
There are two things "wrong" with Jasper's idea of axial time as the seedbed of the great historical human cultures. (1) In his search for meaning in history, he relies on his own rational criteria and lived experience (as indeed he must), backloading them onto a period when men then living would never have seen them as relevant to their own lived experience (there being no Protestant, post-Enlightenment thinkers back then). In short, this procedure is anachronistic. (2) Axial time completely omits Moses and Christ (who of course did not live in this "era") — without whom the 2000-year-old Western culture would be utterly unintelligible.
You are absolutely right to say that historical events actually provide concrete meaning to our experiences. Certainly this was true for Marx and Jaspers. My only point is that the overlay of our own personal rational criteria and experiences backwards onto history in our search for the meaning of it may distort history and the conclusions we reach about it. "History" can be distorted, deformed by "historiography." This is equally true whether we are speaking of history in general or evolution theory in particular.
I never intended anyone to think I was speaking of "language games" in my last. When I said that "experience, self-reflection, and articulation are the very foundations of everything we know or think we know," by "articulation" I meant "language." Language is not a "game." It is the only means by which human beings can communicate their experiences to one another, the only way knowledge can be conveyed and preserved. There is no other.
Note the "category" of self-reflection. It is here that men become aware of spiritual experience (if they ever do). It is here where the God–Man relation is sensed, where we encounter the divine, where we meet Christ.
the_conscience, thank you so very much for your penetrating essay-post!
Thanks, AG. Without trying to parse your statement too closely I'll only add that all men know the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost through nature, conscience, and providence to leave them without excuse. The fact that many suppress the truth only adds to their condemnation (Rom 1).
bb,
What you highlight and examine is true and accurate. But I wonder do not all men engage in a second reality? Getting to first reality is knowing God accurately and I’m afraid we all fall short of that mark. The unbeliever will reside in second reality while, perchance, he might at a point reflect and turn for a moment to first reality, but like the prodigal son he will headlong to the pig trough.
As to the spiritual experience, well, I guess i like to be concrete and where the existential is examined it is always the history of the existential in light of the transcendent law. If the existential is not fully perceived in light of the transcendent law than the spiritual becomes merely creature worship.
Happy Providence!
The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge. [There is] no speech nor language, [where] their voice is not heard. – Psalms 19:1-3
My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: - John 10:27
And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father. - John 6:65
Therefore speak I to them in parables: because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand. And in them is fulfilled the prophecy of Esaias, which saith, By hearing ye shall hear, and shall not understand; and seeing ye shall see, and shall not perceive: For this people's heart is waxed gross, and [their] ears are dull of hearing, and their eyes they have closed; lest at any time they should see with [their] eyes, and hear with [their] ears, and should understand with [their] heart, and should be converted, and I should heal them.
But blessed [are] your eyes, for they see: and your ears, for they hear. – Matthew 13:13-16
Which things also we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual.
But the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness unto him: neither can he know [them], because they are spiritually discerned. – I Corinthians 2:11-14
But ye are not in the flesh, but in the Spirit, if so be that the Spirit of God dwell in you. Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his. – Romans 8:9
The gestalt of identity is what being born again is all about.. Do you identify with the "flesh" or do you identify with the "spirit"/Spirit?.. What "are" you?.. Flesh?... spirit?.. both or neither?.. What is at stake is not only your lifestyle.. but the spirit of your awareness..
When you look into a mirror do you see yourself?.. or merely the container of yourself?.. Are you happy with the packaging or do you want(seek after) the contents of the packaging.. Large questions requiring answers about "identity"..
What is God, Angels, spirits, demons, the devil? are distant answers to personal identity.. cause what "you" are determines what those things(beings) are.. in your world..
Personal Indentity is at the base of who you think you are.. Metaphorically being born again is mandatory to your world view.. What Hegel missed (I think) is after becoming sure of who you(anyone) think you are.. you might be WRONG!.. I love the verse of I Cor 2;9..
Identifying with God (on any level) is a mind blowing event..
Are you a primate?... or something else entirely..
the_conscience, I'm intrigued by your use of the word "existential" here. Are you referring to subjective experience? Or did you intend something else by this term? I just want to be clear that I'm understanding you correctly.
Trying to attain wisdom apart from the spiritual (God) has been a temptation from the beginning. The results are always the same; a lack of understanding and separation from God.
Thank you so much for sharing your insights!
For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling.
And my speech and my preaching [was] not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God. – I Corinthians 2:1-5
But unto them which are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God. - I Corinthians 1:24
Thank you for bringing it back to Jesus, Alamo-Girl!
BTW your new book is on my Christmas "wish list."
“Are you referring to subjective experience?”
Yes.
weston wrote: Trying to attain wisdom apart from the spiritual (God) has been a temptation from the beginning. The results are always the same; a lack of understanding and separation from God.
Beautiful insights both! It seems we're all seeing the same thing here though perhaps from slightly different perspectives. Ultimately it's called "soul," and our common concern is with what constitutes its good order.
Man is more than a "creature," i.e., in the sense of having a finite physical body. God created him in His own image, i.e., as an eternal soul, a spiritual entity whose essential nature is liberty and understanding. Created man is "psyche in soma," as the Greeks put it — embodied, incarnated spirit — the implication being, as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out, that psyche is the senior partner, the specifying order of the corporeal body, and that without the soul there could be no soma, no corporeal body, in the first place.
Soul is moreover the seat of all subjective experience whatsoever: It is where the light of the transcendent law can become luminous in human consciousness, mediating all true understanding and knowledge.
A soul closed to God means a deliberate separation from God's order, which involves a sort of collapse back into one's own creatureliness. The soul becomes disordered, because closure to God means that the soul loses connection to its own innate principle of order. When this happens, we begin to "devolve" into brute animals.
Man was made for God, not God for man. We can reject our God-given nature by denying the soul. We are at perfect liberty to do that. But in doing that, in effect, we reject our own divinely-constituted humanity as well, notably including reason and free will....
Typically we humans take pretty good care of our bodies. But what are we doing for the good order and care of our souls?
Just some ruminations, FWIW. Thank you weston and one_conscience for your excellent posts!
So odd you would say this today, betty. This evening as I drove back to my hotel, I was busily building a mental list of things I need to do before retiring. I was thinking about working out in the gym, checking email etc; at the same time searching for a good radio station (I'm in a new city today). A station was playing some sort of Gregorian Chant type music which sounded rather soothing and I continued to let my mind race. But this song kept saying the same thing over and over "for the beauty of your mercy and passion, we thank you Lord for ourselves and the world" After 4 or 5 times I sort of got irritated because it was interrupting my thoughts. Suddenly the words shook me awake and something in my spirit stirred. A little voice in my head said almost your very exact words! You're taking care of your body and your business, but what are you doing to care for your soul?
I've been trying to figure out how I ended up on this thread, because I would not consider myself a deep philosophical thinker like the rest here. But today I think I know why. This may be TMI, but I thank you for your post.
Thank you so very much for sharing your testimony and insights, dear brother in Christ!
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