Driving back from Nova Scotia listening to lectures on the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, I thought about the doctrine of your perfection, God, and about how uncomfortable I am with it. Over and over, Aquinas' argument is that if there were something you had to learn, or do, or become, you wouldn't be complete, wouldn't be perfect, wouldn't be the God the philosophers and the theologians posit as the final local reference point, the absolute.
Where does that leave you, I wonder, God, but trapped in a situation with no possibility of risk, nor of discovery, since you are all-knowing and all-powerful. For you, the future is already. You can never be surprised. There's a cool, crystalline rigidity to Aquinas' portrait of you that conflicts with the dynamism that characterizes world as I see it. Some of the most powerful responses we have to our world include curiosity and awe, but while you may be the object of these, you are never to feel these powerful drives which so often motivate us.
We live in time and you outside it. Through contemplation insight, some may experience trans-temporality, and even come to feel it more real than the perpetual change we endure or enjoy, how can it be that that which is so fundamental a factor in our experience cannot be a part of yours, and we to make common cause?
Contemplating the Thomist position is like having a grand piano fall on one's head, playing majestic chords all the while. It was an experience which took me some days to recover from. T. makes lots of interesting distinctions--actuality and potentiality, form and matter, essence and existence, substance--and they all work together to make an edifice which feels like it must be taken whole or not at all. That he assumes your existence before he argues for you isn't the problem; the cogency of one's arguments that matters in philosophy since nobody comes to the work without background or bias. No, it's the implacability of his logic herding me into the divine absolutism he attributes to you that made me uneasy, until I remembered the importance of novelty and discovery, and the need for an open future, for our sense of humanity.
Today's nihilisms and materialisms dismiss you, of course, but still have the power to trap us in an inescapable webs of propositions that leave us no future or reason for wanting one, and only the old stoicisms and epicureanisms to inspire us, duty or delectation and all the time dupes of our biology.
Perhaps with a more mystical bent, I might see you otherwise, but I prefer thinking of you as God-in-love, inviting me to share your hot-blooded striving to summon into fulfillment your Beloved other, certainly not frozen in the complacency of perfection.
Where does that leave you, I wonder, God, but trapped in a situation with no possibility of risk, nor of discovery, since you are all-knowing and all-powerful. For you, the future is already. You can never be surprised. There's a cool, crystalline rigidity to Aquinas' portrait of you that conflicts with the dynamism that characterizes world as I see it. Some of the most powerful responses we have to our world include curiosity and awe, but while you may be the object of these, you are never to feel these powerful drives which so often motivate us.
We live in time and you outside it. Through contemplation insight, some may experience trans-temporality, and even come to feel it more real than the perpetual change we endure or enjoy, how can it be that that which is so fundamental a factor in our experience cannot be a part of yours, and we to make common cause?
Contemplating the Thomist position is like having a grand piano fall on one's head, playing majestic chords all the while. It was an experience which took me some days to recover from. T. makes lots of interesting distinctions--actuality and potentiality, form and matter, essence and existence, substance--and they all work together to make an edifice which feels like it must be taken whole or not at all. That he assumes your existence before he argues for you isn't the problem; the cogency of one's arguments that matters in philosophy since nobody comes to the work without background or bias. No, it's the implacability of his logic herding me into the divine absolutism he attributes to you that made me uneasy, until I remembered the importance of novelty and discovery, and the need for an open future, for our sense of humanity.
Today's nihilisms and materialisms dismiss you, of course, but still have the power to trap us in an inescapable webs of propositions that leave us no future or reason for wanting one, and only the old stoicisms and epicureanisms to inspire us, duty or delectation and all the time dupes of our biology.
Perhaps with a more mystical bent, I might see you otherwise, but I prefer thinking of you as God-in-love, inviting me to share your hot-blooded striving to summon into fulfillment your Beloved other, certainly not frozen in the complacency of perfection.
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