- This topic is empty.
-
Posts
-
When we look at the task before us, it somehow becomes daunting. We draw on the words of the great thinkers in order to find a higher meaning in life and discover the pearls that have be trampled upon by those who have come before us. So many centuries have past since Origen, John, Paul, and Plato wrote down these words; how is it that we can expect harvest more wealth from them than all of those great minds that have come before us?
The only comfort that I have found in this vain is from Origen and his allegorical method of study. He did not look for ‘the meaning’ of scripture, but rather attempted to find all the pearls of wisdom hidden behind the original writer’s thoughts. As a scientist, Origen understood the spiritual laws which govern the writings of Prophets. Jesus said simply “Do not throw pearls to the swine.” He also said “Knock and the door will be opened.” For me this means that the Truth is something precious and it is something that must be searched for. It will not be written in neon lights for all to see, because it is also dangerous in the wrong hands.
This means that someone who has discovered the Truth is obligated under the laws which it contains to protect the Truth from robbers and counterfeiters. But in order to pass it along for future seekers safely, they need to hide it appropriately. So today when people look back at Origen’s attention to the finest detail, they often dismiss him as being obsessed or speculative. But, if my hypothesis is true, then Origen’s attention to names, places, directions and numbers makes perfect sense. He was therefore attempting to extract the nuances the writer’s words, hidden in the words as a deeper symbolism.
As I have told Shawn, I am not really a kindred soul to Origen or anyone. I am not a philosopher nor am I a religious thinker. I am a male but would I want to say I think like all males? I am of Irish descent but would I want to say I think as all Irish do? I am a Christian/Catholic but would I want to say I think as all Christian/Catholics do? I am an American but would I want to say I think as all Americans do? Perhaps there is both truth and falsity in such generalizations. But I do know one thing… beyond all those generalizations lies a unique life that is mine and mine alone. I am not sure anyone could really figure me out. I doubt I could do it myself!
I am a neurologist yet that word makes it sound as if I have figured out the brain. There are those who think they have. And once the brain is figured out perhaps we have the mind figured out. And voila…we have life figured out! I am just a human being, whatever that is. My struggle is the same as all humans who have ever lived. We are the created ones who may or may not marvel at their creation!
Can anyone really figure out this thing we call life? Many think we can. Yet who really knows our recipe?
So I enjoin in this discussion not to join any group of kindred spirits, nor to truly find the proper way towards true belief. But I am willing to discuss any and all topics that help people search for the holiness in life, something most people seem to pass blindly in their worldly pursuits without even a glance. I want them to be hit, perhaps even blindsided by it. Though they will shudder, it will be a shudder of great joy!There was a time that I thought that the intellect was something that gave man great hope. (Name someone in higher education who would think otherwise?) Yet in my travails through the education process I feel that something is lost when one tries to intellectualize everything into a rational system. This is true especially in our present day whereby the science of education is overwhelming its art. And that is very sad, in my view…. but systems seem to be our new way as well as our new curse. We have so easily forgotten that systems may exist only in general and only within the concaves of one’s mind. in some ways they are only imaginative inventions within our haughty minds whereby we think we have found rational and perhaps super-rational truth. Yet while we marvel over our invention something important is lost.What is usually lost is one’s ability to feel for the plight of an individual as well as the individual his or herself….and only in the individual does one face reality…everything else is imaginative idea… still we try through centuries of philosophies, psychologies to perfect our world when in fact it may not be perfectable…and if it is, it is not due to our ignorant natures…yet how we try…many of us say and perhaps Origen is one of them….they say something like this….
“If only there was a system perfected by humans that would enable all humans to rationally and peacably co-exist. One that allowed for great scientific inventions to serve us, great monetary systems to enrich us, great intellectual pursuits to occupy us, and great pursuits of pleasure that will satisfy us….”Yet I am reminded of the fall of Adam and Eve and the warning about reaching for things that are not in our sphere…
“And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die. ” Genesis 2:16-17
Tell me if I err here…. what is the intellect other than immaterial representations that can be of logic as well as things not of logic. Many definitions, equations, systems can easily be shown to hold logic but other definitions and systems are not of logic but of something else. Socrates told us in Euthyphro that men do not argue over what is easily measured but what man argues over is what is good, what is just, what is fine and visa versa. No different in our present era than 2500 years ago.
The problem with any system of logic is it only takes you so far. It can never touch what is good, what is fine, or what is just. Such things are only in the Province of the Almighty, if we are lucky…That we try to make such systems through our own reasoning skills is quite scary as well as quite dangerous. So many humans have good intentions yet get lost in things they can NEVER truly understand.
Finally no matter what one reads of history, be it about this man Origen, or about George Washington, or Alexander the Great, one can never really know how such a man was or what obstacles he faced or what his goodness truly was or perhaps still is….
I have enough trouble with the present and the problems we currently face to waste any time on how an individual from the past will somehow be resurrected to assure our future. You are going to have a hard time showing me that you have found wisdom’s secret to man’s earthly as well as divine success…I truly wish we could soar above our limits. Each day brings new ideas and thoughts to all of us while each day’s measure brings us closer to our end. The sun draws from me the moisture of life yet still I am attracted to it. I want to defy the gravity that holds me earthbound. I wish for happiness for all humans yet how can such a thing be done when death lurks in the horizon…
I certainly understand why we wish to somehow escape within the ideas of our imaginations. But we remain mortal creatures, trapped within the moment of life,remembering the past, dreaming of a better future, yet always seeing so many of our ideas become something we never could imagine….
Again I do not know much about Origen but from what I found on the internet, he seemed to be a good gentle soul, a good priest who preached and lectured, perhaps never knowing what he said, quite naively, would be held against him three centuries later…
But that is what we do best, in this world- we destroy the past to make a better future, always thinking we somehow have the ability to UNDERSTAND EVERYTHING!This is a poem by Stephen Crane called The Wayfarer
The Wayfarer
Perceiving the path to truth,
Was struck with astonishment.
It was thickly grown with weeds.
“Ha!” he said
“I see that none has passed here
In a long time.”
Later he saw that each weed
Was a singular knife.
“Well,” he mumbled at last,
“Doubtless there are other roads…”The key to understanding Origen — and his importance for contemporary philosophy and theology — is to realize that his approach to biblical exegesis is dependent upon his largely Middle Platonic philosophical schema … a schema that he relied upon as a foundation for his allegorical approach to scriptural interpretation. As unique a thinker as Origen is, he was still part of a tradition extending back to the Stoics and Philo of Alexandria. These pagan and Jewish thinkers, respectively, approached the founding texts of their tradition (for the Stoics, the Homeric and Hesiodic texts; for Philo, the Hebrew Scriptures) in a manner that was not investigative but REVISIONIST — even though neither the Stoics nor Philo would have admitted such. They interpreted these texts in a fashion that did not reveal hidden truths but rather served to align these texts with the dominant philosophies of their time. In this sense, we may say that the approach of these ancient thinkers was CREATIVE, rather than descriptive or revelatory or what-have-you. In other words, the approach of the Stoics and Philo — and that of the Middle Platonists, Old Academicians, and even Pre-Socratics — precluded (again, whether they admitted it or not) any essentialism in which truth is understood as something existing for all eternity, independently of humanity, and awaiting discovery. Origen was indeed a systematic thinker; however, he was systematic in the ancient sense of a SYSTEMATICALLY SPECULATIVE thinker — meaning: one who offers a more-or-less cohesive body of OPINION that is to be either accepted, rejected or (more often than not) subtly revised and thereby distorted by his successors.
But enough of that. The importance of Origen resides in his yearning for infinity; his preservation of the historical dimension of our existence (for the first time in the history of Western thought); and, most of all, in his admirable humanism, a modern near-analogue of which is Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return of the Same. Indeed, we know that Nietzsche attended the Origen seminars of Steffenson, in which the replacement of God by the eternal human person was (anachronistically) preached as authentic Origen doctrine.
A more sober approach to Origen’s thought was undertaken by the Russian Existentialist philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, who adapted Nietzsche’s notion of Eternal Return to Origen’s concept of multiple ages. While Nietzsche had seen the Eternal Return as the most convulsive and yet most burdensome idea ever to enter into human thought, Berdyaev saw it as an invitation to HOPE in a divinity that seeks not to dominate, but to PERFECT humanity.
Origen, of course, conceived of history as a spiral [an image incorporated by Marilynn Lawrence into a beautiful icon of Origen currently in production] in which the gradual education of human souls results in a totalizing ESKHATON in which humanity and historicity is neither overcome nor rejected, but fulfilled in the eternal possibility of/that is human creativity. Instead of Eternal Return we have a concept of eternal self-realization, with God being but a temporary (though paradoxically transcendent) part of the picture.
Our ETERNAL SELF-REALIZATION is the dynamic end of history, toward which the thought of not only Origen, but Joachim of Fiore, Condorcet, de Maistre, Marx, Nietzsche, Spengler, Berlin, Fukuyama, and others, is pointing.
Origen’s belief that the Church is the World is now challenged by militant Islam, which seeks the destructon of all otherness and, therefore, the demise of all human relationality. In the face of this horror, Origen’s doctrine of human equality based upon the universal possibility of intellectual perfection is perhaps more welcome now than at any other time in our history.
In Christ,
Edward
************
Edward Moore, S.T.L., Ph.D.
St. Elias School of Orthodox Theology
http://www.st-elias-edu.us
************I think that one great mistake we make is not recognizing the enormously negative effect that the Roman Empire has had on modern thinkers and scientists. The Nobel Prize winning physicist Erwin Schroedinger formulates this problem well in this book “Nature and the Greeks”:
“Dropping the metaphor, it is my opinion that the philosophy of the ancient Greeks attracts us at this moment, because never before or since, anywhere in the world, has anything like their highly advanced and articulated system of knowledge and speculation been established without the fateful division which has hampered us for centuries and has become unendurable in our days. … To put it dramatically: one can imagine a scholar of the young School of Athens paying a holiday visit to Abdera (with due caution to keep it secret from his Master), and on being received by the wise, far-travelled and world-famous old gentleman Democritus, asking him questions on the atoms, on the shape of the earth, on moral conduct, God, and the immortality of the soul-without being repudiated on any of these points. Can you easily imagine such a motley conversation between a student and his teacher in our days?”
Origen for me is not someone to place on a pedestal, but rather a rallying point. If we could recover all that he taught, then perhaps we could achieve the same level of harmony between science, Christianity and philosophy that he was able to demonstrate at his time. We have heard from Origen’s contemporaries what a truly great man he was; living the life that he was teaching and winning people to Christianity through his ‘sweet reasonableness’. When was the last time that any religion was able to do this? I do not say that through this we will be able to “know God” and the meaning of our life, but at least we could talk openly about the subjects.
We should take Orgen’s example and look to reconcile the differences between the religions of today, and not to magnify their differences. If we were all created by the same God, and as Origen taught, are all on the path of restoration to God, then we have no reason to encourage fanatical views or cut off any part of society. As children of the same God it is logical that we must “love our neighbors as ourselves” regardless of their current location on their own path of restoration.
We should not single out any one religion as being bad, but acknowledge the mechanism through which they became thus. Consistently through history materialistic men have misused spiritual or philosophical teaching to gain power. Blinded by greed and lust for power they have interpreted/re-written these teachings to be in line with their material goals. Origen shows how the Jewish scribes omitted sections of the Torah in which the Prophets admonished their deeds. The Christian church needed to condemn many of Origen’s core teachings in order to gain its enormous earthly power. By the time that Mohamed came as a Prophet, Origen’s reincarnation teachings were already lost and so they did not find their way into the new Muslim religion.
Andrew, thank you for bring us back down to Earth. I am sure this will not be the last time!
Yes, you are most assuredly right, intellect alone can get us nowhere, and this is the failure of many of the philosophers. Origen taught, and we know from the bible that there piece of God inside everyone of us. I have the tendency to call it the heart, as in the proverbial heart; but I mean the soul. If a person is able to connect their intellect with the wishes of the heart (soul), then you end with up with Origen’s ‘sweet reasonableness’. This is what you like so much about Socrates is it not? How many people today possess such a balance of wisdom and love? Yes, it is rare!
As I said, I do not expect to resurrect any historical figure, but when you look at the history of Christianity it was after the time of Origen that it started to become less Christ-like. So the obvious place to pick up the search for the Christianity that Christ intended is with Origen.
Since you brought up the Garden of Eden from Genesis, I would like to digress somewhat and attempt to demonstrate Origen’s Allegorical method on this passage. As I said, Origen paid close attention to detail. We know that this story takes place in Paradise, and if this is the same Paradise that Jesus referred to on the cross, then it is a spiritual place and not a physical one. If that is the case, then how could Adam or Eve die? Origen defines this ‘die’ as when an immortal soul falls away from God. Now, surely it is not an orange or mango that would make them fall away from God. In the description of the garden, we find also the ‘tree of life’, which we recognize as symbolic for Jesus. So who has been tempting mankind from the time of Adam and Eve? ‘The tree of the knowledge of good and evil’, Baal, Amon, and Poseidon are just a few of Lucifer’s (Death’s) many names.
Now why did I have to go and bring him into it? Origen did not see Earth as place where perfection could ever be achieved, because of the constant temptation that the material world possesses. But rather, Origen saw the Earth as a place where each of us, through difficult tests, can slowly become reconciled with God. This does not happen in one lifetime, one generation or even two millennia; but rather unintelligibly slow.
If one is a Christian, then one is connected to the G-d of the Jews. If one believes in the G-d of the Old Testament, then one believes in Moses and that he received the Ten Commandments. If one follows these Ten Commandments,, with one’s heart, you realize that the most important lessons they teach one and all is our relationship with Our Creator as well as with each other. Most importantly have no false idols…
To think we can logically figure out life through equation is to not just know logic but to believe in logic. To think we can discover the essence of life through science is to not just know science but to believe in science.
Religious people who truly are religious are often accused of being believers in things that are superstitious etc. Yet, if we are honest, scientists, and logicians, and philosophers, as well as politicians, lawyers, doctors, engineers all believe in things too.
Much of our physical world has been explained via hypotheses. We have defined such hypotheses now as facts when, truly a hypothesis remains a hypothesis forever. Thus our scientific knowledge can never be first hand, at least in my opinion.
The step that takes hypotheses to facts is not one of first hand knowledge-it is a step of belief. Thus the scientist finds himself in the same position as the religious person. he has stepped into something because he believes in it.Now I said at the start that perhaps what I have to say here may not go over very well. And that is because i am stepping into the realm where men want to believe what they want to believe- that they can come up with the answers.
And thus certainty becomes a muddle of belief. This is what I think the real Socrates said-“I am ignorant!”
Now I am a great believer in the tools of science and logic and politics etc etc. But tools have a limit with their use. We have figured out the physical sciences to a great degree but perhaps not to the extent we think we have. If one thinks about it, in all our discoveries of the majesty of creation, does it humble us or make us haughty? Such creation is so vast and intricate and we are so hopeless to discover its true source other than to just admit our hopeless situation if we are truly honest and humble.
Now the mind is certainly not in the realm of science, in my opinion, though again we want it to be. Tell me how can it be measured?
Yes we have discovered much about the brain and how it works in many ways, yet I will tell you as a neurologist… we have an exceedingly impossible task on our hands despite advances in neurology,psychiatry, neurobiology, PET, MRI etc etc…and i am not the only neurologist who feels this way…. trust me on this…Much of our grasp of knowledge is illusory, in my opinion. What is real is life and existence, as it is, not as we perceive it only. Just today I read where they have measured that the sun is just getting hotter irregardless of what is going on here on earth. So who really is in charge?
I do not say I am right on all of this, but I hope i open up roadblocks in our minds that we just never really think about. I would recommend buying Dr Maurice Drury’s book Danger of Words … he goes through all of this quite magnificently… I think Stephen Crane was on to this also and countless others …. I know it is a hard thing to digest because all of us are trained not to think this way. But I think we are told in the Ten Commandments to believe in God and God alone … I know that tells me MY limit …. everything else is simply a tool and i must be careful not to make it into fixed beliefs….One short note
life is learning about suffering….was it not a Greek who said through suffering comes understanding….things have not changed since the days of Aeschylus
I wish it wasn’t so but in my day to day work I see it always … what matters is not that we suffer but does it give us strength and courage to truly view life honestly…….the problem is the solution!Andrew, I just wanted to clarify. Yes, I agree with you wholeheartedly that mankind will never know the true meaning of life. I do not say this out of fatalist perspective, but rather out of a logical one. If the Earth is the proving grounds that Origen says it is, then it would not be a test of faith if we all knew God’s intentions. Origen, and the other Ionian Greeks, required knowledge of the physical sciences before attempting to delve into philosophy. (I can assure you that if you use this measuring stick, you will find who was a real philosopher ‘love of wisdom’ and who was just a ‘sophisticate’.)
My knowledge of the physical sciences gives me assurance that great wisdom and order are behind its creation. I do not, in my wildest dreams, imagine that I will ever know that wisdom in any one lifetime. But it serves as a great comfort to know that it exists. It gives me great pleasure to search for it in all I do; to look for the root causes of pain, suffering and chaos. Until we recognize that an adversary of Jesus exists, we cannot properly understand the widespread discord that exists; and most importantly, we cannot start to do something against it.
The discussion does not seem to be developing. Perhaps it is because you have three people who do not view life or the study of life in the same manner, even if we all would like to think so. All of us are trained in various ways and our so called intellects develop in different ways. In medicine I am amidst women and men with great capacities of theoretical and practical thought and we all take the same subjects though some of us spent more time on the art side of education than the science side. Still very similar once we get to medical school. Yet once in practice, once we form a group, once we have common principles of care in a similar economic structure … one would think a certain rational light would go off amidst us. One would most definitely think that…
But it does not occur as we would think. We have a term for this in medicine and it is one made of use by medical personel and administrators- getting doctors to agree on things is as impossible as herding cats… we all think differently. It is both amazing and frustrating. We talk about it, especially in this era where we are being pressured from all sides to lower costs, give excellent care, do research that is meaningful etc etc. You would think our wonderful minds would run circles around those that do not appreciate us … sadly it is not true. Despite years of education and training we remain some of the world’s most naive individuals … I think such naivite is seen in the movie Dr Shivago … how little the young Doctor understood how the ideas of a few would wreak havoc within his world… and he tacitly agreed with them emotionally at the start … ah but he never saw how such ideas could be so evil … that he never saw…
I must admit that I did not feel comfortable with the first topic of discussion of truth going straight to the answer. As I have told Shawn from the beginning that I am not sure that this will be as open as we wish it to be. Origen could write the most wonderful, the most beautiful allegorical prose/poetry explaining the gospels yet I am not moved by such and such an approach- it does not appeal to me. That is my honest answer.
But our chasm does point out one of our human frailties that makes ideas difficult to come to fruition, especially ones that will reportedly better our insight and our lives regarding this human situation. They depend on us being on the same wavelength of emotion and thought, not to mention practical experience. I think that is why there are so many philosophies of life … similar people band together and forge them … in philosophy itself … in politics … in countries … etc . Then somehow one can fool oneself that such reasoning then becomes rational only… when in truth such reasoning remains very dependent on something we refuse to admit to-we all are very emotional in every thought we ever have…Reasoning does exist but it is not as objective as we would like it to be…it is as beauty is … in the eye of the beholder…
Both Shawn and Edward see such beauty and reasoning in Origen. And I think they were hoping to persuade me along the same lines. But I am unmoved by such an approach. This may end our attempt to discuss issues of life. But from the first I have been uncomfortable with the approach of acquiring true belief in any manner. Philosophically it is futile in my opinion. My reality tells me that truth is something very hard to grasp, especially by the rich and the educated (that is an education where one haughtily thinks the truth is obtained versus classic western education in which we learned about the mind and the heart and the difficulty that the ages have with certainty)…. I am reminded of that line in the Gospel that goes something like this … it is easier for a rich man to pass through the eye of a needle than to enter into the kingdom of God … that has always been a frightening line to contemplate, in my opinion…
…well perhaps this may end our discussion on this aspect. I am sorry I was not of better assistance but I must be true to my beliefs …
- The forum ‘Dialog towards the true belief’ is closed to new topics and replies.