MZ, I'm going to bow out of the devil's advocate role with regard to the larger issues your perspective raises and leave it to Curtis and at_man, for whom the advocacy is much more personal. I just don't have the investment to put up a good enough fight to provide the challenge you're looking for. I think my exploratory questions, and those of others, have elicited from you some very meaty rejoinders that have inspired the more sophisticated inquiries posed by Curtis and at_man. So I'll just sit back and follow those discussions with great interest.
I do have some comments on some of the peripheral issues we talked about, some loose ends that intrigue me: --- In [email protected], maskedzebra <no_reply@...> wrote: <megasnip> > [I wrote:] > AF: One comment noted that the word "straw" was "a > conventional metaphor for a literal reading of the > Bible. It expressed the conviction that a > straightforward treatment of scripture might provide > the believer with comfort, or some basic material > upon which to build their faith, but that such a use > of the Bible was at best a first step." > > If that's the case, then it appears Aquinas was > analogizing his own writings to a literal reading of > the Bible--not inaccurate per se, but only > preliminary and incomplete. > > RESPONSE 2: Have you cracked open The Summa, authfriend? > I think, if you had, you would quickly be disabused of > this notion that Aquinas was engaged in this enterprise > of feeding his readers the warm milk of literalness as > opposed to the strong meat of truth. No, I haven't read any of the Summa, but I didn't mean to suggest it was a literalist enterprise. Rather, when Aquinas referred to his writings as "straw," he was using that metaphor for a literal reading of the Bible to illustrate what he perceived to be the distance between his writings and his revelatory experience. IOW, the expression "A is to B as X is to Y" doesn't mean A and X are the same; it just means the relationship of A to B is similar to that of X to Y. > And No, I categorically reject there was anything "preliminary > and incomplete" about Aquinas's works {although he left The > Summa unfinished]. Well, *he* clearly thought they were inadequate to fully represent his revelatory experience, whatever adjectives you want to use to describe that inadequacy. <snip> > But my point here is that Anthony Campbell's Catholicism, > AS AN EXPERIENCE, was unlike Aquinas's experience. In the > case of Anthony Campbell, he could incorporate TM into > his Catholicism; indeed his Catholicism CAME TO LIFE UNDER > TM. But what came to life, if the truth be known, was not > AC's Catholicism; what came to life was Anthony Campbell's > religious experience of transcendence. According to his own testimony in one of his more recent books, he had almost nothing in the way of experience of the transcendent (that's via someone who read the book; I haven't). So the revival of his Catholic faith as a result of hearing MMY's teaching would seem to have been an intellectual phenomenon. But as I said, he's moved on from both and is now an unbeliever. If you're interested, here's his Web site: http://www.acampbell.ukfsn.org/ <snip> > Your assumed premise that such objectivity is impossible > vis-a-vis ultimate questions is itself a modern, and > especially, a postmodern dogma. It is inculcated into > you by all your education and experience. Protestantism > itself (the version of Christianity with which you are > familiar) is a religion born of the judgment of the > validity of the subjective. It (Protestantism) in its > more fundamental form requires one to have an EXPERIENCE > of Christ's salvific grace before one can considered > oneself saved. Sure, but Protestantism covers a very wide range. My family heritage (although not my upbringing, which eschewed religion altogether) is Calvinist-type Presbyterianism. The church of which I was a member for a time was interdenominational, affiliated with the UCC, and did not exalt the born-again experience. Its senior minister at the time was deeply suspicious of anything smacking of mysticism. So while I lean personally in the direction of the experiential, that owes nothing to my church involvement; in fact, it's what I found missing that caused me to leave after a few years. <snip> > AF: I'm beginning to see more clearly now what I was rather > blindly driving at to start with, which is the possibility > that a full-blown experience of Christ and a full-blown > experience of U.C. are the *same experience*. As long as > one is dealing with doctrine (including the quasi- > doctrinal version of U.C.), the two will appear to be > incompatible; but experientially, the differences vanish. > I haven't had either experience, so this is just my > speculation. > > RESPONSE 2: OMG! I can't shock you out of this confusion of > Catholic mysticism and Hindu mysticism. But the Catholic > mystic (the Saint version that is) has an experienceno > matter what Saint it is, and there are thousands of Saints > defined officially as such by the Catholic Churchwhich > contradicts the Hindu mystic. As in: the Catholic mystic > experiences his utter contingency and dependency as a > created being (his or her existence was not necessary); > his essential fallenness (without the supernatural help of > the Church he or she is outside the grace of God owing to > Adam and Eve's Original Sin); the undeservedness and > therefore gratuitousness of the grace that God is > conferring upon him or her; the absolute separateness > metaphysically between the soul and its Creator; the > absolute justice and lovingness of Godand how PERSONAL > all this is. > > Whereas the Hindu mystic (the one having a "U.C.-type > experience") experiences his necessary existence in the > form of the Self; the oneness of this Self with everything; > the sense of God (the Self) being 'in' everything; the > divinity of this Self (his own ultimate identity and > nature); the unborn, undying reality of this Self; and > finally, the illusory existence of the individual person. > Unity Consciousness essentially is the confirmation that > you were never really born at all and that your idea and > experience of being a separate and distinct individual > person is a lie. > > You must see, then, authfriend, the mutually exclusive > truths of these two forms of experience. Ergo, the truth > of one, the falseness of the other. This is an entirely > objective determination. It's a determination based on language, though, on words, and is therefore *linear*. Mystical experience, whether Catholic or TM-type, is not linear, which means any verbal description of it, any attempt to describe it in terms of doctrine, is inevitably inadequate. The best it can do is point. And we didn't even get from Aquinas a verbal description of his experience; he deliberately refused to provide one. So I leave the door open for my speculation that his experience and the U.C. experience may be identical--just subject to different-seeming verbal descriptions, of different parts of the elephant, so to speak. <snip> > But the question "why couldn't Aquinas write something that > passionate" is not the right questionalthough Aquinas did > write poems to God, and they are quite passionate and beautiful > in their own way, although admittedly not like this one of > Pascal's. Because, you see, Aquinas was a 'Teacher" of Catholic > philosophy and Catholic theology. It was not his predestined > vocation to write poetry while being a brilliant scientist. OK, granted, not a fair question. But it was more an expression of frustration at Aquinas's silence regarding his own experience. <snip> > RESPONSE 2: I am thinking, authfriend, based upon you > response to Pascal's FIRE, that I may have formed an > incorrect judgment at the beginning of this post: that you > are not given to being drawn out of yourself by anything. > Clearly your experience of Pascal in this instance points > to the religious yearning in your soul, and I must be > respectful of thisnot to say, delighted and moved by it. > Which I am. I wouldn't call it "religious" yearning per se, but yes, I can certainly be drawn out of myself. What tends to do it is a particularly pure kind of emotional expression that approaches the transcendent. So I find it most commonly in music (especially Bach and Wagner) and sometimes in the written word (as with Pascal). The *subject matter* is almost irrelevant; it's the quality of the emotion that makes the difference. But it is indeed frequently associated with spirituality. <snip> > AF: That's when you think God withdrew, before the First > World War? Any speculation as to why? Was the war the > consequence of God's withdrawal? > > RESPONSE 2: I pinpoint it (this is reckless of me I know; > it is based purely on an intuitive reading of how the Church > behaved after this, and later, how I experienced the world I > was born into as opposed to the world described explicitly > and implicitly by Catholic philosophers, theologians, saints, > scholars, poets prior to my birth) at the time of the bombing > (by the Allies) of the great monastery of Mount Cassino in > Italy, which occurred towards the end of World War II. I don't know your specific reasons, but that seems a bit arbitrary to me, as awful an event as it was. I should think it would more likely have been the occasion of the genesis of Hitler's "final solution" to the "Jewish problem" and the lack of resistance to the intention to wipe out God's Chosen People on the part of the rest of the world (including the Roman Catholic Church). Anthromorphizing: Were I God, the notion that my "New Covenant" somehow meant that the people of my "Old Covenant" could be exterminated without consequence, discarded as garbage (granted, Hitler wasn't thinking in terms of competing biblical covenants), would make me seriously rethink my determination to keep the promise of the rainbow. <snip> > AF: Do you think there's any chance of ever getting that > presence back? > > RESPONSE 2: Oh, what a question! No, I don't. But the > reality and person of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (and TM) somehow, > in my intuition at least, augurs for SOMETHING big and > miraculous to happen. I just don't know what it is or could > be. Because Maharishi was the pseudo-Christ as it were, the > ironic version of the Second Coming. Reading between the lines, would I be incorrect in thinking you're imagining this as something that we humans will not necessarily perceive as positive? > Meanwhile no one can write FIRE and we have only something > like this Web/email forum within which to try to hammer out > the truth. And a real gift it is, even if we don't get very far.
