Peter:
>So, what's a disbeliever? It's odd that it takes us time to think
>that disbelief might be as shut in on itself as belief.
Not that strange, is it? These mirror-dances are widespread
historically, a function of any dependency of opposition, surely?
While I don't get much from Sartre, I can sympathize with his refusal
to be labelled "atheist" on the grounds that it specified him in
relation to a nonentity.
>Which enables us to catch up with Thomas Aquinas for whom, strictly,
>God doesn't exist, as he is beyond or other than any order of
>existence by which he would already be mediated or calculated. Which
>opens the way towards gift.
Could you expand on what 'strictly' is doing there, Peter? I'm taking
you to be gesturing at God as transcendant, and hence unapproachable
by means of any human route available to us. (Am I presuming /
jumping too much there?)
Then there's the cut: something happens immediately. Yes, it happens,
but why adduce it to God? I suspect a dialectic that shuns one terms
as unavailable, but then oscillates to it utterly.
(Do you know the subitist / gradualist sectarian divide in Buddhism?
Though in these rough terms it may not be too different from grace /
works.)
I'm sure I'm being reductive here, but can you spell it out a bit
more? Or reverse me if I'm heading in the wrong direction . . .
> Trevor's idea of traces seems more fruitful as long as those
>traces are understood not to be residual and interminably fading
>away but the charged and redirectional horizons of finitude.
Yes, that's one of the ways I'd like to imagine this through. But as
yet I've only possibilities, suggestions.
>It is not that finitude accounts for God but more simply that it
>only comes to be itself in an excess which is not a plenitude of
>self-permutation but an active scarcity of turning-toward, a grammar
>or grain OF finitude. It's difficult to poise on such a cusp, and
>perhaps that's just not enough to sustain a traditional religiosity
>though it may be where spirituality mostly always was. Can prayer
>itself be that poise, an acceptance of an horizon which is
>encountered but not (however indirectly) grounded in what it is
>encountered by?
I like 'poise' here; not truth but comportment (okay, I'm smuggling a
little). But this goes back, for me, to my question to Alison. Since
I don't see God as made necessary within your argument, I'm left to
ask why you reach to prayer for that poise, rather than to poetry.
May I ask whether you would see poetry (however qualified as 'best',
'true', 'serious', . . . ) as subsumed under prayer? That's not how I
read your own work (i.e. as wholly subsumed). But maybe that's why I
keep returning without ever feeling I've 'got' it.
>I think we are living through a rich period of theology but so much
>poetry seems to condescend to it. There may be a richer tension to
>be had.
You've got me interested. Care to go on?
Best,
T
--
------------------------------------------------------
http://www.soundeye.org/trevorjoyce
|