Good points. Richard Mouw talked about our definition of being in orientation to God. I think that can be freeing in contrast to the “doing” value to others. Interesting!
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As far as I understand Heidegger is nearly incomprehensible to native German speakers, attempting to read his work in German, Heidegger’s first language. I can only hope that he has been faithfully represented by the author of the encyclopedia’s entry.
Whatever Heidegger would or wouldn’t think of your point, I agree with it.
All of this gets at, in my view, considerations of meaning of life, what it may be, how we evaluate it, what the implications are for how we conceive of it, why we even ask about it.
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(190) Caution
But far higher will the doing of the least, the most insignificant duty raise him.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
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I’ve been thinking of some of MacDonald’s notes–and wonder how this quote from Lewis’ “Screwtape” in regard to “Christianity-and-water” would be relevant.
The senior devil writes to his apprentice,
“Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades, matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours – and the more ‘religious’ (on those terms) the more securely ours."
I think Macdonald would say that all good things are shadows from above–and are good, as long as one recognizes them as merely shadows that need ultimate redemption and smelting to look at the goal. I think! I’d be interested in others’ musings.
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I know I’ve repeated it around the forum before - but a wise young history teacher friend of mine once observed to me that he felt the full gut-punch when someone told him: “If your hopes or fears rise and fall with each new political cycle and election, that tells you what your god is.” That quote seems to be warning against the same sort of thing that Lewis warns of through the mouths of the demons.
And serves as the counter-answer to the drum I’ve heard banged lately (and done some considerable banging on it myself) of needing to not write off this world, but needing to take care of it and the people in it as an act of love and as a training ground of love. So … shouldn’t that involve political action and involvement? voting? attending meetings and policies? Both the religious left and right have certainly answered that affirmatively! (Something they agree on! 
)
I think the trick may be in the phrase:
If all that stuff becomes my locus of worship - the exclusive focus of my labors and very thoughts, even over the consideration of why I might actually be doing it (real charity - love - toward my neighbor or needy brother) then, it has become idolatry.
The middle ground might be that I pray about it - consult with wise community, and especially listen to those on whose behalf such labors might be performed, and then obediently follow the laws of love into that labor as far as love would have me go, and no farther … then maybe it is kept within that higher context of love, and directed by God.
I must say, though, just speaking for myself personally, I’m pretty sure I’ve rarely been in danger of engaging in too much hard work. I think I have quite a caste of other idols that need casting out - or to be reduced to their proper places.
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(191) Duties
As regarded merely by the intellect, these relations are facts of man’s nature; but that they are of man’s nature makes them truths, and the fulfilments of them are duties. He is so constituted as to understand them at first more than he can love them, with the resulting advantage of having thereby the opportunity of choosing them purely because they are true; so doing he chooses to love them, and is enabled to love them in the doing, which alone can truly reveal them to him, and make the loving of them possible. Then they cease to show themselves in the form of duties, and appear as they more truly are, absolute truths, essential realities, eternal delights. The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of it.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
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To share a bit more on this theme of a person’s ‘being’ and ‘doing’ - this entire sermon of MacDonald’s is rich with relevant content. Indeed I’ll share much of the paragraph that directly preceded this morning’s text shared above (and which I might just as well have included were it not for unwieldy length). But these are the words directly preceding the morning’s shared excerpt (“Duties”) above.
Man is man only in the doing of the truth, perfect man only in the doing of the highest truth, which is the fulfilling of his relations to his origin. But he has relations with his fellow man, closer infinitely than with any of the things around him, and to many a man far plainer than his relations with God. Now the nearer is plainer that he may step on it, and rise to the higher, till then the less plain. These relations make a large part of his being, are essential to his very existence, and spring from the very facts of the origination of his being. They are the relation of thought to thought, of being to being, of duty to duty. The very nature of a man depends upon or is one with these relations. They are truths , and the man is a true man as he fulfils them. Fulfilling them perfectly, he is himself a truth , a living truth.
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So it seems for MacDonald, a person’s “doing” is the threshold or doorway toward their “being”, at least towards become a ‘living Truth’. That there are many states of being prior to that also seems clearly acknowledged - and allowed for, which is fortunate since most of us are probably living there most of the time, given that we are not anywhere close to perfect. And happily, love reaches all the way down, through any and all these layers of being, reaching down to the darkest or most hellish depths.
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(192) Why Free Will Was Permitted
One who went to the truth by mere impulse, would be a holy animal, not a true man. Relations, truths, duties, are shown to the man away beyond him, that he may choose them, and be a child of God, choosing righteousness like him. Hence the whole sad victorious human tale, and the glory to be revealed!
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
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(193) Eternal Death
The moral philosopher who regards duties only as facts of his system; nay, even the man who rewards them as truths, essential realities of his humanity, but goes no farther, is essentially a liar, a man of untruth. He is a man indeed, but not a true man. He is a man in possibility, but not a real man yet. The recognition of these things is the imperative obligation to fulfil them. Not fulfilling these relations, the man is undoing the right of his own existence, destroying his raison d’etre , making of himself a monster, a live reason why he should not live, …
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
Ouch! … This one is harsh.
You are right–that is harsh. I kind of think of how I do my work sometimes out of duty–but honestly, it’s starting to do our duty that we learn contentment–and eventually learn how to operate, more like adults and less like children–with the spirit, not the letter, of the law.
If we refuse to learn the spirit, and constantly complain, trying to inhabit the world with fulfilment of selfish desires rather than the maturity of finding happiness in serving first God, and then others–then that’s going to be pretty hard. It might even be hell.
I’m not sure I’d go as far as MacDonald does, though. It’s a hard one.
Thanks.
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(194) The Redemption of our Nature
…when [a man] is aware of an opposition in him, which is not harmony; that, while he hates it, there is yet present with him, and seeming to be himself, what sometimes he calls the old Adam , sometimes the flesh , sometimes his lower nature , sometimes his evil self ; and sometimes recognizes as simply that part of his being where God is not; then indeed is the man in the region of truth, and beginning to come true in himself. Nor will it be long ere he discover that there is no part in him with which he would be at strife, so God were there, so that it were true, what it ought to be–in right relation to the whole; for, by whatever name called, the old Adam, or antecedent horse, or dog, or tiger, it would then fulfil its part holily, intruding upon nothing, subject utterly to the rule of the higher; horse or dog or tiger, it would be good horse, good dog, good tiger.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
(195) No Mystery
When the man bows down before a power that can account for him, a power to whom he is no mystery as he is to himself; a power that knows whence he came and whither he is going; who knows why he loves this and hates that, why and where he began to go wrong; who can set him right, longs indeed to set him right, making of him a creature to look up to himself without shadow of doubt, anxiety or fear, confident as a child whom his father is leading by the hand to the heights of happy-making truth, knowing that where he is wrong, the father is right and will set him right; when the man feels his whole being in the embrace of self-responsible paternity–then the man is bursting into his flower; then the truth of his being, the eternal fact at the root of his new name, his real nature, his idea–born in God at first, and responsive to the truth, the being of God, his origin–begins to show itself; then his nature is almost in harmony with itself. For, obeying the will that is the cause of his being, the cause of that which demands of itself to be true, and that will being righteousness and love and truth, he begins to stand on the apex of his being, to know himself divine. He begins to feel himself free. The truth–not as known to his intellect, but as revealed in his own sense of being true, known by his essential consciousness of his divine condition, without which his nature is neither his own nor God’s–trueness has made him free. Not any abstract truth, not all abstract truth, not truth its very metaphysical self, held by purest insight into entity, can make any man free; but the truth done, the truth loved, the truth lived by the man; the truth of and not merely in the man himself; the honesty that makes the man himself a child of the honest God.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
Curiously, Lewis not only excerpted just the bolded part above, but drew a complete and concluding thought from it, capitalizing “Man…” and putting a period after “…is to himself.” Which to me appears to be a different truth claim in its own right than MacDonald’s. Perhaps it was to rescue MacDonald from his contest with the good Apostle for who can muster the longest run-on sentence.
[This is posted from a friend’s house - after which we will be continuing our journey on train - maybe with spotty connectivity. So if I don’t post or interact here for a while, it isn’t because I’m withdrawing - just unavailable for the moment.]
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Haha–I remember Michael Phillips, the editor of some of his novels, saying something like that!
I am not sure I understand–maybe he’s thinking of how Christ covers us. However, one of the things for which I’m constantly grateful is that I’m not God. We’d be in a pretty bad state if I were.
Thank you for continuing; but please feel free to enjoy yourself, as well, without obligation to post!
(196) The Live Truth
When a man is, with his whole nature, loving and willing the truth, he is then a live truth. But this he has not originated in himself. He has seen it and striven for it, but not originated it. The one originating, living, visible truth, embracing all truths in all relations, is Jesus Christ. He is true; he is the live Truth.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
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SK all the way. : )
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(197) LIkeness to Christ
…his likeness to Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower is the truth of a flower. Every man, according to the divine idea of him, must come to the truth of that idea; and under every form of Christ is the Christ. The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected Christ in him. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
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(198) Grace and Freedom
He gives us the will wherewith to will, and the power to use it, and the help needed to supplement the power, whatever in any case the need may be; but we ourselves must will the truth, and for that the Lord is waiting, for the victory of God his father in the heart of his child. In this alone can he see of the travail of his soul, in this alone be satisfied. The work is his, but we must take our willing share. When the blossom breaks forth in us, the more it is ours the more it is his, …
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
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Thanks for this, Merv.
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Any time, Kendel! Interactions with you and others mean a lot to me.
(199) Glorious Liberty
When a man is true, if he were in hell he could not be miserable. He is right with himself because right with him whence he came. To be right with God is to be right with the universe; one with the power, the love, the will of the mighty Father, the cherisher of joy, the lord of laughter, whose are all glories, all hopes, who loves everything, and hates nothing but selfishness, which he will not have in his kingdom.
From MacDonald’s sermon: The Truth.
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