One of his literary mentors taught that properly communicated -- and received -- words could "open up, through the materials of this world, the realm of transcendent truth" and universal moral values.
Words are symbols for thought, the way we communicate ideas. However, I am not sure what John Paul means by "drama."
In the past we have written of how we are drawn to music because it discloses vital information about the nature of reality. If John Paul is correct, the same could be said of man's universal appreciation of, and need for, drama.
Music I can understand, for music is just a mathematical arrangement of the finite number of notes. Perhaps music is the emotional tie to mathematics, making math more than just dry equations, and maybe drama is the same, connecting emotion and therefore new meaning, to everyday experiences. Both allow us to experience new things vicariously, as do poems and novels.
And if the world of the stage "could unveil the deeper dimensions of the truth of things, might there be a dramatic structure to every human life? To the whole of reality?"
I could continue to do point/counterpoint but I will just say that although this is very informative and helpful it doesn't address my main point, at least that I can see.
However, it does make me think of one of my other beliefs that is not always shared by others - the belief that our minds are more than a genii-in-a-box or an expanded Magic 8 Ball. To me, this ties together the aforementioned interaction with music and drama. We already know that we remember things better that cause our emotional involvement, sometimes inaccurately though, and perhaps that plays into this.
Yet, what I am thinking is that, just as Jesus is our connection to God, that our minds transcend the assumed physical limitations of our brain and allow us to interact with the Holy Spirit and the universe. That ties back into what is above and to the rest of your post but I am not sure it addresses the change from our present selves into the Heavenly Eternal selves. Perhaps this does but I am not certain:
On the one hand, the drama "has a fixed shape -- it is always the same -- and yet it is inexhaustible and is ever new. It always leads us farther on. We are not just chained to a past in which there is nothing more to be discovered; rather, it is a whole country of discoveries, in which each of us can also find himself anew".
I suppose that unburdened by sin and temptation, we could find continuing adventure in God's Heaven and that if each day produced (are there days in Heaven?) new opportunities that time would pass rapidly. But eternity ....??
You wrote: “I am not sure it addresses the change from our present selves into the Heavenly Eternal selves... I suppose that unburdened by sin and temptation, we could find continuing adventure in God’s Heaven and that if each day produced (are there days in Heaven?) new opportunities that time would pass rapidly. But eternity ....??”
Just Thomism
http://thomism.wordpress.com/2009/02/21/3514/
February 21, 2009 at 5:09 am
St. Thomas claims in his five ways that an infinite regress of causes is impossible. The word “infinite” is unfortunate for us, since we immediately understand it in numerical terms, and no one has denied that there are limitless numbers. Ever.
The sense is that even if moved movers or caused causes are infinite, all causes cannot be such. Now denying that all in a series can “be such” is one way of saying the series is finite, but it certainly isn’t the claim that there must be some precise number that cannot be exceeded. Numbers, taken as such, obviously have no highest or last- and if one thinks of numerals (as most people do) there isn’t even a first.
Gagdad Bob said,
February 21, 2009 at 11:29 am
I think a “bad” or false infinite is to the true infinite as time everlasting is to eternity, i.e., timelessness. The former results in the nameless dread of the “eternal silence of the infinite spaces.”
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“Remember, eternity is not time everlasting, but timelessness.”
Saturday, October 21, 2006
Living in the Light of the Absolute, or Time and How it Gets That Way (9.27.08)
http://onecosmos.blogspot.com/2006/10/living-in-light-of-absolute-or-time.html
In any attempt to bridge the domains of experience belonging to the spiritual and physical sides of our nature, time occupies the key position. —A. N. Whitehead
I forget. Have we discussed the nature of time yet, except in passing? .....
“To beat this conundrum, you must understand the distinction between time and eternity. Eternity is not time everlasting, but timelessness. Time and eternity are actually aspects of one another—they are dialectically related. In one sense, time may be thought of as the serial deployment of something that lies outside time. Thus, eternity is not located in the past or future, because no matter how far you go, you are still dealing with chronological time. Rather, the only possible place it could be is now—not in a temporal now, but an eternal now. As it so happens, the mysterious now, so inexplicable in terms of any model physics has ever come up with, is the intersection of time and eternity, and human beings are the self-aware locus where this occurs—where the vertical meets the horizontal.
“So much trouble is caused by our reliance upon language, which, in its superficial sense, is geared to the problems of matter, not consciousness, much less the ground of consciousness. We often mistake a deficiency of language for a key to truth. In order to discuss these deeper ontological questions, language must be deployed in a special, nonlinear, non-dualistic and poetic way. ....
Clearly, time is at the heart of the mystery of existence. In fact, time is indistinguishable from existence, which is one of the things that makes it so difficult to describe. And yet, to a certain extent, you must be outside or “above” time in order to perceive it, which in itself provides a key to the mystery.
After all, animals are just as much entangled in time as we are, except that they don’t know it. Why? Because an animal is incapable of lifting itself above its own subjectivity, while humans are specifically capable of objectivity. We can “see” time “passing” so to speak, just as we can sit here on this bank of sand with Bob Dylan and watch the river flow. Except that we are also floating on the river we observe, and the river doesn’t run in a straight liner but in circles within circles.
As above, so below. Just as the cosmos contains circles within circles—the rotating earth circling around a star inside a galaxy that is also a revolving and rotating spheroid—our lives consist of circular days within weeks within years within a full trip around the block called a natural lifetime. Esoterists believe that our lives consist of fractal time cycles of varying length, each a reflection of the other; thus, a lifetime can also be thought of as a day, with the morning of childhood, the day of youth, the evening of maturity, the twilight of old age, and the night-womb of death. Or our lives can be thought of as a year: spring, summer, autumn and winter.
But the ancients believed only in the closed circle of eternal return, not the line of growth, which is to say the open spiral. Here again, what distinguishes man is not that we are immersed in the cycles of time, but that we may utilize time to experience endless cycles of growth, or what I call inward mobility. Doing so is the whole point of your existence.....
For I actually try, insofar as it is possible, to spend as much timelessness in eternity as I can, given the constraints of worldly existence. I was recently discussing this with a friend in a different context. I was trying to explain to him, without success, that there is no such thing as “quality time” with a child, only quantity time in which you will have randomly magical moments of quality timelessness, which is to say, eternity. ....
Well, it’s the same with the Divine, don’t you know.....
To live “within” religion is to find a way to be, or think, or feel, or act within eternity.
Now, no one has been more shocked than I have about what happens when you begin “thinking” within religion, because to a certain extent, this blog is nothing more or less than that. Like so many people in the modern west, I started off in a place that pretty much equated religion and ignorance. But as it so happens, knowledge of religion is knowledge that is both fruitful and efficacious, not to say transformational. It is nothing at all like “book learning,” or mere mental knowledge. If we grasp religion only with the mind, it is not really “interior” knowledge to which we may validly lay claim.
With the type of thinking I am describing, one is vaulted, so to speak, into a different space, the space from which the primordial mystery perpetually arises. What I have discovered, to my everlasting surprise, is that once in this space, one finds that it actually has its own very real characteristics and attributes. I know this because every day I receive confirmation from fellow explorers who see and experience the same thing. It’s as if we are all setting voyage into an unknown sea but all returning with vaguely similar—sometimes strikingly so—descriptions of the flora and fauna on the other side. I can only reemphasize that this is most mysterious indeed. ....
To summarise: time is not actually possible without eternity......
What is intelligibly diverse must be unified and whole, and only what is whole and unified can be intelligibly diverse. At the same time, only what is diversified can be intelligibly one.... The reality of time, therefore, establishes concurrently the reality of a whole which is nontemporal.... Time without eternity is strictly inconceivable. —Errol Harris
Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges. —Jorge Luis Borges
The mysterious now is the universal ordering principle which embodies the “processual flow” of eternity into serial structure. It is in this sense that human observers give rise to the cosmos that spawned them, and are the irreducible unit of there being a cosmos at all. ...
You wrote: "..Music I can understand, for music is just a mathematical arrangement of the finite number of notes. Perhaps music is the emotional tie to mathematics, making math more than just dry equations, and maybe drama is the same, connecting emotion and therefore new meaning, to everyday experiences. Both allow us to experience new things vicariously, as do poems and novels."
"...what eludes both atheists and religious literalists "is that form and meaning are complementary." For example, in order to play music, harmony, melody and rhythm are necessary. In their absence, there is only disorganized noise, not music. But to think that music may be reduced to musical theory is also wrong, for form is simply the vehicle but not the substance of music. ....
"To stop at the literal level of the text as a Rev. Jerry Falwell or Sam Harris would, is to leave most of the meaning out, and [to] deify the Bible itself for their purposes (either pro or con) and to miss out completely on the doing of its meaning being actively threaded through the reader's soul."
"Exactly, for the modern deviation of "fundamentalism" is no less a form of debased materialism than materialism proper. In fact, it represents the reaction of a weak soul to the abnormal conditions of modernity -- an attempt to combat materialism by fully conceding its assumptions.
"Quite obviously, the Bible is not "the word of God." It is not the logos. Rather, it is inspired words -- inspired (or even "authorized") by the Word -- about the Word.
"Once again, this conflation of the Bible and the Word -- or bibliolatry -- is a modern deviation that essentially concedes all ground to the horizontal flatlanders. It is a reduction of that which can only by understood by the nous to that which may be understood by the material ego. ...." ~ Gagdad Bob