Tuesday, October 22
"the Sun rose in Florence sometime after Dante" ????
Friday, October 11
Conversion of Constantine
For the church, was this turnaround a providential sign, or a Trojan horse gift in which the church would now be so tied to the official culture that it would never be able to shake off Rome, administration, and bureaucracy to get back to its original, charismatic, individual, powerful foundations?
And hence a century later comes Saint Augustine.
Where in Manichaeism matter is evil and soul is good, neo-Platonism asserts the inferiority of matter and superiority of spirit as the spirit is eternal. Unlike Manichaeism everything is good in Platonism but there are inferior goods. Matter is not evil in itself, it is just inferior. Here, evil comes from the preference of the inferior to the superior. Evil comes from not realizing the superiority of the spiritual and not acting on it. In Platonism, evil is a falling away or turning of your vision; a misperception; a result of poor education.
And hence comes the evil as the absence of good and in a way the banality of evil.
Augustine: we, for all our learning, lie here groveling in this world of flesh and blood, while they storm the gates of heaven.
The problem of Evil occupies him. Why does an omnipotent and good God allows Evil to flourish? Further, compared to the Greek writings, the Bible seems rhetorically and conceptually very crude. Thus, he is shifted to the ideas of Manicheans where God is not omnipotent; there is another evil God: God of matter and flesh, Yahweh, the creator God, the God of the old Testament. But we are of the flesh, and hence Manichaeism offers an involvement in the world. In a way, Manichaeism is not a completely ascetic belief or world renouncing, but it identifies body as the source of Evil. This is different from Christianity in that the body is also exalted in Christianity. The body as well as the soul is resurrected, and there will be bodies after the last Judgement in heaven and in hell.
God hence has created the world and everything is good. He explains the nature of evil by turning to Platonism. Evil is not a thing in itself, it is rather the absence of Good. Evil then, a deprivation of Good, is nothingness; it is the absence of being and meaning. Now turning away from the Good, the Sun, and preferring things of the flesh over things of the spirit (lust and desire, ambitions and greed and material goods in comparison with spiritual goods) is a human problem. Humans generally do not understand what they are on Earth for, according to the Platonists.
And hence the metaphor of The Cave from the Republic, as the classic depiction of this wrong preference.
So for the Platonists, Evil is the result of this error in perception. How do you get rid of this? By education. This the whole point of Platonist Dialogue: dialogues with questions and answer; didactic dialogues. There is no dualism in Platonism. Evil is lower compared to Good in the hierarchy of values. Human beings are in the middle of this hierarchy and unlike mud, rocks, bugs, angels and demiurges and deities, they can move up and down the ladder.
And hence the free will; being humans.
Evil is ascribed to ignorance in Platonism; in Christianity it is ascribed to sin. Sin is deliberate unlike ignorance.
And hence the pear stealing. The pear stealing is the sin, a gratuitous act out of boredom. Human beings are hence sinful. How does he get out of sin? Not by education, but by feeling, by instinct, by conversion. Pontecianus had seen the shamens, uneducated Christian monks in Egypt, intoxicated with God and love, and was not just impressed by felt humiliated at the thought of himself still being concerned with his career. These uneducated monks do not know about the Republic, the Hortensius, the Satires of Juvenal, ..., yet they have an apprehension of the Divine that causes them to renounce the world.
otium cum dignitate: no no. He became a bishop, very much involved in the world. His understanding of a Christian's duty in the world is that we cannot lead a life of sin-free contemplation or perfection. We all are sinners. He becomes the philosopher, theologian who combats perfectionism. He becomes the philosopher of the irrational. He believes that humans are irrevocably sinful and cannot in any way earn salvation. They are saved by a mysterious process called grace. Grace by its very meaning is undeserved. There is no contractual relationship between God and men (Reformation believed this as well: good deeds and merits on Earth do not get you into heaven), but a generous arbitrary decision opens the doors of heaven to you. This is a very harsh doctrine of predestination; periodically rediscovered and dropped. This is at the heart of the people who settled Massachusetts and Connecticut. It is at the heart of Calvinism and Puritanism: the belief in the elect.
(Liberals believe in human perfectibility: if you educate, encourage and help people and provide government subsidies for them, they will become perfect and you will build a better society. Conservatists respond people are the way they are because they want to be that way or that they have made wrong decisions. Helping them will not change them. Education does not make people perfect. Hitler and Stalin were connoisseurs of art.)
Hence his opinion of forced conversion. He is behind 3 main ideas: opposition to perfectionism, exaltation of the grace, the notion of sin as indelible.
For the church, was this turnaround a providential sign, or a Trojan horse gift in which the church would now be so tied to the official culture that it would never be able to shake off Rome, administration, and bureaucracy to get back to its original, charismatic, individual, powerful foundations?
And hence a century later comes Saint Augustine.
Where in Manichaeism matter is evil and soul is good, neo-Platonism asserts the inferiority of matter and superiority of spirit as the spirit is eternal. Unlike Manichaeism everything is good in Platonism but there are inferior goods. Matter is not evil in itself, it is just inferior. Here, evil comes from the preference of the inferior to the superior. Evil comes from not realizing the superiority of the spiritual and not acting on it. In Platonism, evil is a falling away or turning of your vision; a misperception; a result of poor education.
And hence comes the evil as the absence of good and in a way the banality of evil.
Augustine: we, for all our learning, lie here groveling in this world of flesh and blood, while they storm the gates of heaven.
The problem of Evil occupies him. Why does an omnipotent and good God allows Evil to flourish? Further, compared to the Greek writings, the Bible seems rhetorically and conceptually very crude. Thus, he is shifted to the ideas of Manicheans where God is not omnipotent; there is another evil God: God of matter and flesh, Yahweh, the creator God, the God of the old Testament. But we are of the flesh, and hence Manichaeism offers an involvement in the world. In a way, Manichaeism is not a completely ascetic belief or world renouncing, but it identifies body as the source of Evil. This is different from Christianity in that the body is also exalted in Christianity. The body as well as the soul is resurrected, and there will be bodies after the last Judgement in heaven and in hell.
God hence has created the world and everything is good. He explains the nature of evil by turning to Platonism. Evil is not a thing in itself, it is rather the absence of Good. Evil then, a deprivation of Good, is nothingness; it is the absence of being and meaning. Now turning away from the Good, the Sun, and preferring things of the flesh over things of the spirit (lust and desire, ambitions and greed and material goods in comparison with spiritual goods) is a human problem. Humans generally do not understand what they are on Earth for, according to the Platonists.
And hence the metaphor of The Cave from the Republic, as the classic depiction of this wrong preference.
So for the Platonists, Evil is the result of this error in perception. How do you get rid of this? By education. This the whole point of Platonist Dialogue: dialogues with questions and answer; didactic dialogues. There is no dualism in Platonism. Evil is lower compared to Good in the hierarchy of values. Human beings are in the middle of this hierarchy and unlike mud, rocks, bugs, angels and demiurges and deities, they can move up and down the ladder.
And hence the free will; being humans.
Evil is ascribed to ignorance in Platonism; in Christianity it is ascribed to sin. Sin is deliberate unlike ignorance.
And hence the pear stealing. The pear stealing is the sin, a gratuitous act out of boredom. Human beings are hence sinful. How does he get out of sin? Not by education, but by feeling, by instinct, by conversion. Pontecianus had seen the shamens, uneducated Christian monks in Egypt, intoxicated with God and love, and was not just impressed by felt humiliated at the thought of himself still being concerned with his career. These uneducated monks do not know about the Republic, the Hortensius, the Satires of Juvenal, ..., yet they have an apprehension of the Divine that causes them to renounce the world.
otium cum dignitate: no no. He became a bishop, very much involved in the world. His understanding of a Christian's duty in the world is that we cannot lead a life of sin-free contemplation or perfection. We all are sinners. He becomes the philosopher, theologian who combats perfectionism. He becomes the philosopher of the irrational. He believes that humans are irrevocably sinful and cannot in any way earn salvation. They are saved by a mysterious process called grace. Grace by its very meaning is undeserved. There is no contractual relationship between God and men (Reformation believed this as well: good deeds and merits on Earth do not get you into heaven), but a generous arbitrary decision opens the doors of heaven to you. This is a very harsh doctrine of predestination; periodically rediscovered and dropped. This is at the heart of the people who settled Massachusetts and Connecticut. It is at the heart of Calvinism and Puritanism: the belief in the elect.
(Liberals believe in human perfectibility: if you educate, encourage and help people and provide government subsidies for them, they will become perfect and you will build a better society. Conservatists respond people are the way they are because they want to be that way or that they have made wrong decisions. Helping them will not change them. Education does not make people perfect. Hitler and Stalin were connoisseurs of art.)
Hence his opinion of forced conversion. He is behind 3 main ideas: opposition to perfectionism, exaltation of the grace, the notion of sin as indelible.
Tuesday, October 1
-self coercion vs coercion coming from outside-
man doesnt know what he wants; man wants what he doesnt want; man doesnt want what he wants; man wants to want and cannot achieve it; he feels within himself a force more powerful than himself.
if he is wise, he cries out and says who will rescue me from this.
if he is stupid, he gives in, and calls his weakness happiness.
-immigration of free thought-
Why do these people come? They come because they are a shiftless element. They come because they are not happy at home. Persons of good character who possess property, believe in law and order, and are virtuous citizens do not emigrate.Persons who emigrate have something wrong with them, and by allowing in all these immigrants, by allowing in all these persons who are evidently not happy at home, who are fidgety and unable to establish themselves, you are simply importing a disintegrating element which in the end will prove the undoing of your great empire.
-repository of tradition and wisdom vs language of science-
But an international language would shed precisely those peculiarities, precisely that accumulation of what might be called local, provincial, historical accretions which gives each language its unique quality and produces those words which
shape our minds, which shape us educationally along those
traditional lines along which the natural development of human
beings and societies must lie if they are to be traditional, if they are to be peaceful, if they are to have regard to their own past, if they are not to be left without ideals and without principles.
Jacobins, socialists, liberals, scientists, Protestants, Jansenists, perfectibilians, Jews, Freemasons, atheists, freethinkers, those who made the French Revolution, those who made the American Revolution.
man doesnt know what he wants; man wants what he doesnt want; man doesnt want what he wants; man wants to want and cannot achieve it; he feels within himself a force more powerful than himself.
if he is wise, he cries out and says who will rescue me from this.
if he is stupid, he gives in, and calls his weakness happiness.
-immigration of free thought-
Why do these people come? They come because they are a shiftless element. They come because they are not happy at home. Persons of good character who possess property, believe in law and order, and are virtuous citizens do not emigrate.Persons who emigrate have something wrong with them, and by allowing in all these immigrants, by allowing in all these persons who are evidently not happy at home, who are fidgety and unable to establish themselves, you are simply importing a disintegrating element which in the end will prove the undoing of your great empire.
-repository of tradition and wisdom vs language of science-
But an international language would shed precisely those peculiarities, precisely that accumulation of what might be called local, provincial, historical accretions which gives each language its unique quality and produces those words which
shape our minds, which shape us educationally along those
traditional lines along which the natural development of human
beings and societies must lie if they are to be traditional, if they are to be peaceful, if they are to have regard to their own past, if they are not to be left without ideals and without principles.
Jacobins, socialists, liberals, scientists, Protestants, Jansenists, perfectibilians, Jews, Freemasons, atheists, freethinkers, those who made the French Revolution, those who made the American Revolution.
