I strongly agree with you here and look forward to reading the rest of your thoughtful post after breakfast and a walk.
I’m no expert on what Jesus communicated but what I’ve heard of it is good and as you say emphasizes relationship. I too am content with body status. There is more and better to hold the head position. Of course that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter what we do but a disposition to serve the truth we are given is of more value than own cleverness or any moral awards we may rack up in service to what is greater.
I think bodily instantiating is not immortal and neither is our biographical details as servers of lasting significance. What is immortal is the head which we serve and in our turn embody. I don’t imagine every raindrop’s pathway from sky to sea is a story worth preserving and don’t imagine what sets apart individuals matters much more than that.
Edited to say I did finish the post but didn’t have a response to anything else. Not sure I understand it either. Thanks for sharing.
@MarkD you’re right., I re-read it and it looks like a mess. I was hoping that Christians would enjoy it due to I use all Christian vocabulary. However I think I made a mess. I think I’ll only write a few sentence next time.
You know I think that is a good idea in general for this medium. In a discussion forum I think one should block it out over a number of posts in response to the quest and comments one gets. Essay writing isn’t generally a good fit.
@Jay313@Christy I love listening to this song, and I read all the words, but I don’t understand it. Can you help me understand it?
Here’s all the words
Turning and turning
Within the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart
The center cannot hold
And a blood dimmed tide
Is loosed upon the world
Nothing is sacred
The ceremony sinks
Innocence is drowned
In anarchy
The best lack conviction
Given some time to think
And the worst are full of passion
Without mercy
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely it’s the second coming
And the wrath has finally taken form
For what is this rough beast
Its hour come at last
Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born
Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born
Hoping and hoping
As if by my weak faith
The spirit of this world
Would heal and rise
Vast are the shadows
That straddle and strafe
And struggle in the darkness
Troubling my eyes
Shaped like a lion
It has the head of a man
With a gaze as blank
And pitiless as the sun
And it’s moving its slow thighs
Across the desert sands
Through dark indignant
Reeling falcons
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely it’s the second coming
And wrath has finally taken form
For what is this rough beast
Its hour come at last
Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born
Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born
Raging and raging
It rises from the deep
Opening its eyes
After twenty centuries
Vexed to a nightmare
Out of a stony sleep
By a rocking cradle
By the Sea of Galilee
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely it’s the second coming
And wrath has finally taken form
For what is this rough beast
Its hour come at last
Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born
Slouching toward Bethlehem to be born
From Josef Pieper’s excellent Guide to Thomas Aquinas:
“The two Spaniards, Dominic and Bishop Diego, realized that a tremendous task awaited them. They perceived that all previous attempts to win back these regions for the Church had been wrong in their whole approach. They themselves began the missionary work first of all by taking the injunction of evangelical poverty seriously, and above all by taking the heretics seriously as people sharing a common humanity with themselves.”
…
“That is the nature of teaching as Thomas understood it. In this procedure, therefore, the hearer has an absolute right to “speak up,” even if he does not actually take the floor. The teacher must give him the floor within the framework of his own lecture. Here, then, is the old SocraticPlatonic conception at work: that truth develops only in dialogue, in conversation. This, precisely, was what Dominic had striven for when, shocked by the violent methods being used against the Albigensians and convinced of the utter futility of a merely authoritative, merely judicial mode of establishing truth—the very opposite of “teaching”—he replaced interrogation by dialogue between equals in the famous disputation at Montreal.”
Pieper, drawing from Gilson, makes a wonderful distinction:
“The Christian West’s encounter with Plato, as it took form during the first millennium, was wholly different in structure from its encounter with Aristotle. The encounter with Plato was an encounter of two religious modes of thought; but the encounter with Aristotle was the encounter between religion and philosophy.”
Thank you, Christy, for explaining that it’s modernist poetry. I see and understand now that it’s all about impressions.
Thank you for this website. It helped me understand more as I was sensing the impression, until I read “a human head with a lion body coming to life.” What are your thoughts about this? I was curious to see if I could find it in the Bible.
After I looked in the Bible, I went back to the website and read further down and found information about a human head with an animal body, which I shared further down this message, but first, here’s what I found in the Bible.
I found other creatures in the Bible, but I don’t think I found a human head with a lion body. Can anyone help me with this?
This is what I did find in the bible.
Ezekiel 1:10 As for the likeness of their faces, they four had the face of a man, and the face of a lion, on the right side: and they four had the face of an ox on the left side; they four also had the face of an eagle
Revelation 4:7 In the center, around the throne, were four living creatures, and they were covered with eyes, in front and in back. 7) The first living creature was like a lion, the second was like an ox, the third had a face like a man, and the fourth was like a flying eagle. 8) Each of the four living creatures had six wings and was covered with eyes all around, even under its wings. Day and night they never stop saying: “ ‘Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty,’ who was, and is, and is to come.”
I’m interested in seeing how these creatures would look as a painting or statue.
Added edit:
I understand poetry written 1919 soon after the end of World War I and comparing what was going on and the coming of Christ.
Further down it explains more about animal body and human head
From the website it explains: With its animal body and human head, perhaps this beast says something about the “nightmare” to come. Though humans have tried to civilize themselves and improve their world, perhaps their more beastly animal nature has only been hidden—not defeated.
In other words, the beast might symbolize that civilization itself is a kind of illusion. The human head has a “gaze” that lacks empathy, suggesting that the beast is ready to kill. Given that the poem was written between the two world wars of the 20th century, this surreal image seems to gesture towards humankind’s ever-improving capacity for self-destruction.
I had almost forgotten about this quote of Kierkegaard’s that appears in Patrick Gardiner’s VSI to Kierkegaard, and thankfully (at least to me) a conversation jarred my memory yesterday.
It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards.
(Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction, Bookshare edition 76%)
We don’t have a view of the end from the beginning but must go through it. We don’t have the opportunity to step out of our own lives and selves and take a completely detatched view.
I came across a quote from SK on time in a piece about how time has been thought about. Probably too long a quote but I’m too tired to pare it down and I don’t trust myself to come back to it so for what it’s worth:
In the first year of his thirties, Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) set out to investigate the inner structure of our existential anxiety. Invariably, he arrived at the perplexity of time:
[A human being] is a synthesis of psyche and body, but he is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal .
In using the eternal as one of our reference points, Kierkegaard observes, we create the central syllogism of our time-model:
If time is correctly defined as an infinite succession, it most likely is also defined as the present, the past, and the future. This distinction, however, is incorrect if it is considered to be implicit in time itself, because the distinction appears only through the relation of time to eternity and through the reflection of eternity in time. If in the infinite succession of time a foothold could be found, i.e., a present, which was the dividing point, the division would be quite correct. However, precisely because every moment, as well as the sum of the moments, is a process (a passing by), no moment is a present, and accordingly there is in time neither present, nor past, nor future. If it is claimed that this division can be maintained, it is because the moment is spatialized , but thereby the infinite succession comes to a halt, it is because representation is introduced that allows time to be represented instead of being thought. Even so, this is not correct procedure, for even as representation, the infinite succession of time is an infinitely contentless present (this is the parody of the eternal).
[…]
Thus understood, the moment is not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity. It is the first reflection of eternity in time, its first attempt, as it were, at stopping time.
This one is going to take me a few more times through to feel like I have a good grasp. Thanks, though. I’m finding that his work can be worth the work.
Only for fun I’m looking for paintings. And is this still Pithy quotes when showing paintings, let me know. This is Christianity and Artist when reading scriptures’ shows us visually
Ezekiel 1:5-28 …‘Also from within it came the likeness of four living four living creatures creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man. Each one had four faces, and each one had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the soles of calves’ feet. They sparkled like the color of burnished bronze. The hands of a man were under their wings on their four sides; and each of the four had faces and wings. Their wings touched one another. The creatures did not turn when they went, but each one went straight forward. As for the likeness of their faces, each had the face of a man; each of the four had the face of a lion on the right side, each of the four had the face of an ox on the left side, and each of the four had the face of an eagle. Thus were their faces … As for the likeness of the living creatures, their appearance was like burning coals of fire, like the appearance of torches going back and forth among the living creatures. The fire was bright, and out of the fire went lightning. Now as I looked at the living creatures, behold, a wheel was on the earth beside each living creature with its four faces. The appearance of the wheels and their workings was like the color of beryl, and all four had the same likeness. The appearance of their workings was, as it were, a wheel in the middle of a wheel. When they moved, they went toward any one of four directions; they did not turn aside when they went. As for their rims, they were so high they were awesome; and their rims were full of eyes, all around the four of them. When the living creatures went, the wheels went beside them; and when the living creatures were lifted up from the earth, the wheels were lifted up. The likeness of the firmament above the heads of the living creatures was like the color of an awesome crystal, stretched out over their heads. A voice came from above the firmament that was over their heads; whenever they stood, they let down their wings. And above the firmament over their heads was the likeness of a throne, in appearance like a sapphire stone; on the likeness of the throne was a likeness with the appearance of a man high above it. Also from the appearance of His waist and upward I saw, as it were, the color of amber with the appearance of fire all around within it; and from the appearance of His waist and downward I saw, as it were, the appearance of fire with brightness all around. Like the appearance of a rainbow in a cloud on a rainy day, so was the appearance of the brightness all around it. This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory of the LORD.’
Some quotes from David Bentley Hart’s The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss
So much of what we imagine to be the testimony of reason or the clear and unequivocal evidence of our senses is really only an interpretive reflex, determined by mental habits impressed in us by an intellectual and cultural history. Even our notion of what might constitute a “rational” or “realistic” view of things is largely a product not of a dispassionate attention to facts, but of an ideological legacy.
The very notion of nature as a closed system entirely sufficient to itself is plainly one that cannot be verified, deductively or empirically, from within the system of nature. It is a metaphysical (which is to say “extra-natural”) conclusion regarding the whole of reality, which neither reason nor experience legitimately warrants.
Well I’m intrigued. I went to Goodreads to scan some quotes after seeing a list of the thirty books Iain McGilchrist cites as most influential to the writing of his book The Matter With Things. Unfortunately reading his own book at my glacial rate and the actuarial tables makes it a poor bet that I’ll ever get to it. Especially as I find myself missing good fiction more and more.
Edited to alert @Klax and @Kendel to this book which promises to illuminate so many of our common interests.
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Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
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I’m happy with my ideological legacy of rationality. As for the second paragraph, it lacks personal pronouns and adjectives.
I never heard of David Bentley Hart 'till now from you @MarkD
I’m curious about David Bentley Hart, and I’m listening now https://youtu.be/uPwnE_DNgBw I’m still towards the beginning of video David Bentley Hart: Being, Consciousness, Bliss: Beauty as Knowledge of God
@bharatjj Have you ever heard of David Bentley Hart’s thoughts about about Bliss? I remember you sharing about Bliss.
Thanks for the pointer, Mark. I have to admit, I’m squirming a bit with that second paragraph, and my brain is doing a lot of "yes, but"ting with the first. I’ll see if I can find the broader text they came from. I am interested in his justification.
Later, though. Back to work now. @Klax i don’t know anything about Hart or his politics. Anything you can direct me to to read? Thanks.
This is a critique I am only a little familiar with from my brushes with PoMo and would like to investigate and evaluate more. Some white feminist critics I’ve read would heartily concur, but also maintained inconsistent views on areas such as oral traditions and the acceptance of traditional religious beliefs and practices. I was struck, for example, that beliefs about menstrual blood were referred to uncritically, but would never actually have been relied on. In such cases, I found dubious their critique of empirical methods as solely based on cultural norms. Shamanism may have felt like a source of knowledge, or served a temporary psychological purpose, but was not seen as a genuinely reliable source of objective information.
