“…shall we admit the nebula, and that potter’s wheel on which planets are supposed to have molded themselves? Could we dream that seeds of worlds, buried in chaos, might have acquired a shape and have developed, like a crystal that creates and a plant that grows? [...] The day is the earth wallowing in the [...]
Archive for the ‘shoulders of giants’ Category
temporarily, from Paul Claudel (1868-1955)
Posted in shoulders of giants on May 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
on the contrary…
Posted in shoulders of giants on May 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“For the trumpet of God is a blessed intelligence and so are all the instruments of heaven. For God the father Almighty plays upon the Harp of stupendous magnitude and melody. For innumerable Angels fly out at every touch and his tune is a work of creation. For at that time malignity ceases and the [...]
the re-enactment of the fall as a (supposed) autonomatizing of creation from God, reiterated
Posted in shoulders of giants on May 20, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“the complex legacy of dualism and nominalism in Western Christian theology, through which the sensible and intelligible realms, history and eternity, were thrust away from each other, and creaturely forms (language, action, institutions) denied any capacity to indicate the presence and activity of the transcendent God. The ramifications are felt throughout the corpus of Christian [...]
neither was language exempt
Posted in shoulders of giants on May 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Ockhamism – and this is a symbol of a larger evolution – stripped discourse of its ultimate verification, allowing for the progressive separation that took place between an unknown absolute of the divine will and a technician’s freedom, capable of manipulating words that are no longer anchored in being” (Michel de Certeau The Mystic Fable [...]
the voluntarist birth pangs of nihilism, cont.
Posted in shoulders of giants on May 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“Since the only source of certainty was God’s omnipotent will, then all other beings (since man cannot share God’s consciousness) are incapable of certain knowledge. Man has then to be content with mere conjecture and hypothesis about what he is given in intuition and experience. He can of course generalise from these intuitions, but since [...]
the voluntarist birth-pangs of nihilism
Posted in shoulders of giants on May 12, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“And in truth, Western theology made its own, quite substantial contributions to modern ‘nihilism’: when nominalism largely severed the perceptible world from the analogical index of divine transcendence, and thus reduced divine freedom to a kind of ontic voluntarism, and theophany to mere legislation, such that creation and revelation could be imagined only as manifestations [...]
another’s thoughts on late-medieval voluntarism
Posted in shoulders of giants on May 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
“The fall can be thought of as the attempt to find ‘a part of the world apart from God,’ to assume a given object without the support of a transcendent depth to uphold the object’s actuality [...The late-medieval] conception of God in voluntarist terms (however slight) marks, one might say, the first moment in an [...]
