Daily Advice 12.19.20
Dec. 19th, 2020 07:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
readoldthingsLet's begin to wrap up the treck through Seneca's De Providentia with an unfamiliar idea:
I'd like to suggest that, in this passage from Seneca, we see Christianity's great strength-- and also one of its great weaknesses, at least in its popular form.
The weakness first. Contemporary Christians, at least here in the US, tend to think of God as an all-powerful puppet master, pulling everyone's strings all the time. The far richer and more diverse world of pre-modern Christianity, peopled with angels and demons, saints and spirits, of every sort, is either forgotten, or downplayed-- or deliberately denied.
The result of this denial is a monstrous absurdity. God becomes the author not only of every good in our lives, but every evil as well-- an omnipotent monster, like a child crushing ants and setting his toys on fire.
It is far wiser, in my view, to take something more like the view that Seneca shares elsewhere in this essay. As he writes, "Although the great creator and ruler of the universe himself wrote the decrees of Fate, yet he follows them." God himself is bound by fate. Or-- and this seems to me to be best of all-- God has essentially emptied himself into his creation. The result of this is that the answer to the question, "Can God make a stone so heavy even he can't lift it?" is "Yes. You are that stone." You-- or rather, your will, and the will of every other conscious being, the spiritual hierarchies of angels and demons; gods, demigods, saints and spirts very much included.
All that said, this passage does, as I said, highlight what I consider to be Christianity's central virtue.
For the Christian, it is not true that God is exempt from evil. Instead, God has descended into existence to suffer the worst sort of evil, enduring betrayal, abandonment, pain, humiliation, and, finally, death.
Now, this story, too, can be turned into something awful, by regarding it as a blood sacrifice, or a ransom payment. This has been what you might call "the majority view" in Catholicism and many Protestant traditions.
There is an alternative point of view, however. Drawing on the work of the medieval Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus, radical Franciscan priest Richard Rohr describes it this way:
On this view God, though exempt from suffering, suffers anyway, as a final blood sacrifice to end the time of blood sacrifice.
I'm not trying to convince you to become Christians. I consider interfering in people's religious lives to be roughly on a level with interfering in their marriages, and for the same reason. My own Christianity is about as far from orthodox as one gets; "Iamblichean Catholicism" is a term I've been using for it lately. Still, this seems to me to be the very best case one can make for the worship of the divine through the person of Jesus Christ: Though divine and exempt from evil, he descends into the world of mankind, to suffer the worst we can suffer.
'Yet,' you say [that is, you say to God], 'many sorrows, things dreadful and hard to bear, do befall us.'
"Yes, because I could not withdraw you from their path, I have armed your minds to withstand them all; endure with fortitude."
In this you may outstrip God; he is exempt from enduring evil, while you are superior to it.
I would be very surprised if the majority of the people reading this blog were Christians. Most of the works I quote are pagan in one sense or another, and many of you probably found your way here via John Michael Greer. "Yes, because I could not withdraw you from their path, I have armed your minds to withstand them all; endure with fortitude."
In this you may outstrip God; he is exempt from enduring evil, while you are superior to it.
I'd like to suggest that, in this passage from Seneca, we see Christianity's great strength-- and also one of its great weaknesses, at least in its popular form.
The weakness first. Contemporary Christians, at least here in the US, tend to think of God as an all-powerful puppet master, pulling everyone's strings all the time. The far richer and more diverse world of pre-modern Christianity, peopled with angels and demons, saints and spirits, of every sort, is either forgotten, or downplayed-- or deliberately denied.
The result of this denial is a monstrous absurdity. God becomes the author not only of every good in our lives, but every evil as well-- an omnipotent monster, like a child crushing ants and setting his toys on fire.
It is far wiser, in my view, to take something more like the view that Seneca shares elsewhere in this essay. As he writes, "Although the great creator and ruler of the universe himself wrote the decrees of Fate, yet he follows them." God himself is bound by fate. Or-- and this seems to me to be best of all-- God has essentially emptied himself into his creation. The result of this is that the answer to the question, "Can God make a stone so heavy even he can't lift it?" is "Yes. You are that stone." You-- or rather, your will, and the will of every other conscious being, the spiritual hierarchies of angels and demons; gods, demigods, saints and spirts very much included.
All that said, this passage does, as I said, highlight what I consider to be Christianity's central virtue.
For the Christian, it is not true that God is exempt from evil. Instead, God has descended into existence to suffer the worst sort of evil, enduring betrayal, abandonment, pain, humiliation, and, finally, death.
Now, this story, too, can be turned into something awful, by regarding it as a blood sacrifice, or a ransom payment. This has been what you might call "the majority view" in Catholicism and many Protestant traditions.
There is an alternative point of view, however. Drawing on the work of the medieval Franciscan theologian John Duns Scotus, radical Franciscan priest Richard Rohr describes it this way:
Jesus did not come to change the mind of God about humanity (it did not need changing)! Jesus came to change the mind of humanity about God.
On this view God, though exempt from suffering, suffers anyway, as a final blood sacrifice to end the time of blood sacrifice.
I'm not trying to convince you to become Christians. I consider interfering in people's religious lives to be roughly on a level with interfering in their marriages, and for the same reason. My own Christianity is about as far from orthodox as one gets; "Iamblichean Catholicism" is a term I've been using for it lately. Still, this seems to me to be the very best case one can make for the worship of the divine through the person of Jesus Christ: Though divine and exempt from evil, he descends into the world of mankind, to suffer the worst we can suffer.
