encyclopedia eidolica

theology, again

I’ve tried to articulate this before but I feel like it’s continually evolving. In various conversations with others I feel like I diverge in some areas and now feel compelled to write a bit more about where I am.

  • I very clearly am inspired by Origenist eschatology. He posits (very loosely) that all souls were created by God at the start of the universe (and Christ’s never fell away from God), and being in motion they fell away from God, initiating the Fall itself. Insofar as we contemplate God, or participate in God, that is to say, through love (sola caritas), we return to Him, un-hardening into that enormous Fire. As our existence is based on God’s Breath hardening into a soul and then hardening again into a body, as the body falls away, if the soul itself has not returned enough to God, it will fall away too and all will reharden again, implying a reincarnation process. 1
  • Participation means that loving-action is of paramount importance in this world. Insofar as we are here, now, we are inside of linear time, where love is in the process of being performed2, at some point we will die, and exit linear time, and what will be left is the love we have performed, the ways we have participated, the way love begot love through our will.
  • I also believe in divine consent — that is to say, that God won’t override our will if we turn from Him, and that a true miracle requires both divine and human will.3 Hell is a state of separation from God that we put ourselves into, and purgatory is the state of inbetween, where one may still turn to Him or else fall away again.
    • But overall, I do not think God would destroy anything He has made.4 God loves us, and the project of existence is the perfection of all things.
  • I believe that we also have to empty ourselves to allow God to appear through us, as he is already in us, underneath us, the substrate of all existence and yet above and beyond existence, both Being and beyond Being. I pointed to this in the Thoughts on Cybertext, but I first read it in Augustine and then again in Thomas Merton, quoting Eckhart.5 What this is pointing to is the underlying Ground of the Soul, the birth of the Christ inside of oneself comes from one no longer being a ‘self’ as such.
  • This also informs a kind of Christian panentheism I have via Eckhart’s implications and the modern Jesuits a la Richard Rohr. Hurting you hurts me because we’re both already {,in,of?} God. This nondualist perspective also ends up tying heavily into Buddhism too which isn’t helping the Buddhist allegations.
  • I think that beyond that I use my body to love and serve others, there is not a mortal sin attached to usage of one’s body so long as it does not degrade it or other people. Maximus the Confessor wrote that the punishment for defying nature is just not being able to use all the powers of one’s nature. Insofar as defying nature is not as good as being in union with it, I can attribute the higher good as being preferable; but I do not think that by not procreating, I am committing an enormous sin that will separate me forever from God. I just am not thoroughly convinced by appeals to natural law or to Aristotelian ideals of being in accord with nature here.
  • I really like the ransom theory of atonement, but this is influenced on my reading of “I See Satan Fall Like Lightning” by Girard where he describes Christ’s death as necessary for exposing the cycle of Satanic violence through the scapegoat mechanism.6 This inexplicably also finds its origin in Origen as Girard describes.

So, I don’t know. What are the nouns here? I don’t think this goes too far astray inside of Anglicanism, but cites a lot of the Neoplatonist tradition, adds synergism, theories of sacred magic, appeals to detachment and self-emptiness7 more normally in accord with Buddhism … I think I am more of a purgatorial universalist than an absolute universalist, but I think overall it involves the human will to turn to God who will wait, no matter how long it takes, for He is with us, has always been with us, and will always be with us, “even to the end of the age.”8 So on a long enough time scale … maybe it’s all reconciled, anyway.

Footnotes

  1. I will also note that the anonymous author of the Meditations on the Tarot points to this: “Just as one does not make propaganda for or against the fact that we sleep at night and wake up anew each morning—for this is a matter of experience—so is the fact that we die and are born anew a matter of experience, i.e. either one has certainty about it or else one does not. But those who are certain should know that ignorance of reincarnation often has very profound and even sublime reasons associated with the vocation of the person in question. When, for example, a person has a vocation which demands a maximum of concentration in the present, he may renounce all spiritual memories of the past. Because the awakened memory is not always beneficial; it is often a burden. It is so, above all, when it is a matter of a vocation which demands an attitude entirely free of all prejudice, as is the case with the vocations of priest, doctor and judge. The priest, doctor and judge have to concentrate themselves in such a way on the tasks of the present that they must not be distracted by memories of former existences. […] For reincarnation is neither a dogma, i.e. a truth necessary for salvation, nor a heresy, i.e. contrary to a truth necessary for salvation. It is simply a fact of experience, just as sleep and heredity are. As such, it is neutral. Everything depends on its interpretation. One can interpret it in such a manner as to make it a hymn to the glory of God—and one can interpret it in such a way as to make it a blasphemy. ↩

  2. Julian of Norwich writes that “love uncreated” is God, “love created” is the soul within God, and love given is virtue, a gift of grace or deeds. This is also translated as ‘charity’ which is itself sort of a difficult term to translate. So, eg. loving-action is one way I describe it. It’s both love for God and love for Man at once, turning your will to act as God does with love for others, interpersonally, yourself. ↩

  3. That’s right! Meditations on the Tarot again: “No, the work of the Redemption, being that of love, requires the perfect union in love of two wills, distinct and free—divine will and human will. The mystery of the God-Man is the key of divine magic, being the fundamental condition of the work of the Redemption, which is an operation of divine magic comparable only to that of the creation of the world. Thus miracles require two united wills!” ↩

  4. via Meister Eckhart himself, in the Talks of Instruction. ↩

  5. Merton — “only when there is no self left as a “place” in which God acts, only when God acts purely in Himself, do we at last recover our “true self” (which is in Zen terms “no-self”).” Augustine — “Therefore, as long as I journey away from thee, I am more present with myself than with thee”; “You were more inward than my most inward part and higher than the highest element within me”, from various translations. ↩

  6. Describing the fishhook theory originally posited by Origen, Girard writes, “The Passion accounts, allowing us to understand the single victim mechanism and its mimetic cycles, enable us to find and identify our invisible prison and to comprehend our need for redemption. Since the “princes of this world” were not in communion with God, they did not understand that the victim mechanism they unleashed against Jesus would result in truthful accounts. If they had been able to read the future, not only would they not have encouraged the Crucifixion, but they would have opposed it with all their might. When the princes of this world finally understood the real import of the Cross, it was too late to turn back: Jesus had been crucified, and the Gospels had been written. Thus Paul is right to affirm: “If the princes of this world had known [the wisdom of God] they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.”” ↩

  7. I genuinely think / thought Psalm 23’s opening, “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want” was announcing the abolition of all desire. This makes my girlfriend laugh a lot. ↩

  8. Matthew 28:20. ↩