After Crucifixion. Craig Keen
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say, a June bug tied by the leg to a long thread.
38. Thomas Aquinas, Nature and Grace, 76 [1.13.5]: “But when we apply the same name [ordinarily applied to a human being] to God . . . it leaves what it signifies uncomprehended, and beyond its power to denote.”
39. See Jaeger, In Search of the Divine Centre, 256–57. Parmenides, of course, most thoroughly and beautifully sublimates this notion.
40. See especially the last four books of The Odyssey: “Odysseus Strings His Bow,” “Slaughter in the Hall,” “The Great Rooted Bed,” and “Peace.”
41. The whole of the Apology could be cited and much more (certainly including the interchange at the end of the Symposium between Socrates and Alcibiades), but this little passage from the Apology, 28d–e (33–34) is perhaps illustrative: “This is the truth of the matter, gentlemen of the jury: wherever a man has taken a position that he believes to be best, or has been placed by his commander, there he must I think remain and face danger, without a thought for death or anything else, rather than disgrace. It would have been a dreadful way to behave, gentlemen of the jury, if, at Potidaea, Amphipolis, and Delium, I had, at the risk of death, like anyone else, remained at my post where those you had elected to command had ordered me, and then, when the god ordered me, as I thought and believed, to live the life of a philosopher, to examine myself and others, I had abandoned my post for fear of death or anything else. That would have been a dreadful thing, and then I might truly have justly been brought here for not believing that there are gods, disobeying the oracle, fearing death, and thinking I was wise when I was not.” Jaeger, In Search of the Divine Centre, 173: “[Socrates’] death is a sort of apotheosis, and he leaves his pupils with calm cheerfulness, like a truly free man. There knowledge is described as the soul’s collecting itself—one of the immortal psychological images invented by Plato: it ‘concentrates’ itself from among the dispersed senses, all pressing outwards to the sensory world, and bends to its own proper inward activity.”
42. For example, Plato, Republic, 469a–71e.
43. See Jaeger, In Search of the Divine Centre, 145–46, 173.
44. Plato, Symposium 221b.
45. See Plato, Timaeus 90c, and Liddell et al., Greek-English Lexicon, 792–93.
46. See Plato, Theatetus 176b; Republic 613a–b; Phaedrus 248a, 249c; and Timaeus 47c.
47. See Ritschl, Three Essays, 244, 255–56. Cf. Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:267; 3:191–93.
48. See Plato, Laws 716c–717a; and Jaeger, In Search of the Divine Centre, 285–88.
49. Plato, Laws, 885b; cf. Republic, 364b–365e.
50. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 269 [10.8:1179a]: “For if the gods have any care for human affairs, as they are thought to have, it would be reasonable both that they should delight in that which was best and most akin to them (i.e., reason) and that they should reward those who love and honour this most, as caring for the things that are dear to them and acting both rightly and nobly. And that all these attributes belong most of all to the philosopher is manifest. He, therefore, is the dearest to the gods. And he who is that will presumably be also the happiest; so that in this way too the philosopher will more than any other be happy.” See also 16–17 [1.8:1099a–1099b].
51. Members of the church who take on this divinely humane intellectual task are set to work. In their aspiration to the Goodness, Truth, and Beauty to whom they pray, they must specify—more diligently than did Plato or the Stoics—the way their God is to be conceived ontologically. God, they may say—without forsaking Plato or the Stoics—is (a word that may perhaps be used only in passing) “the Supreme Being,” “the ground of being,” “the cause of being,” “being itself”—perhaps even “beyond being” (a less ambiguously ontological assertion than it may seem). It is to this God who is that they then pray and in so doing look to obtain integrity themselves.
52. Perhaps it could signify “after,” as in “to pursue.”
53. Claiborne, Roots of English, 9. A “physician” in this sense would be one who served the cause of one’s “being,” swearing, e.g., to do no harm.
54. I admit that I am thinking of Heidegger’s most self-consciously “German” account of physis here. See, e.g., Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 14–19, 147–48, 167–72, 188–92, and passim.
55. As would their heirs, Hegel, Whitehead, and Heidegger, by the way.
56. See Plato, Theatetus 149a–152c, and Apology 29e–30b.
57. Integrity also signifies definiteness.
58. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, 21; Parmenides Fragment 8.
59. Cf. Luke 9:58.
60. Lloyd, Man of Reason, ix, 2, 11–13, 17, 103: “The maleness of the Man of Reason . . . lies deep in our philosophical tradition. . . . From the beginnings of philosophical thought, femaleness was symbolically associated with what Reason supposedly left behind—the dark powers of the earth goddess, immersion in unknown forces associated with mysterious female powers. . . . In Greek thought, femaleness was symbolically associated with the non-rational, the disorderly, the unknowable—with what must be set aside in the cultivation of knowledge. Bacon united matter and form—Nature as female and Nature as knowable. Knowable Nature is presented as female, and the task of science is the exercise of the right kind of male domination over her. . . . The dominance relation . . . now holds between mind and Nature as the object of knowledge. Knowledge is itself the domination of Nature. . . . Both kinds of symbolism—the Greeks’ unknowable matter, to be transcended in knowledge, and Bacon’s mysterious, but controllable Nature—have played crucial roles in the constitution of the feminine in relation to our ideals of knowledge. . . . Our ideas and ideals of maleness and femaleness have been formed within structures of dominance—of superiority and inferiority, ‘norms’ and ‘difference,’ ‘positive’ and ‘negative,’ the ‘essential’ and the ‘complementary.’ And the male-female distinction itself has operated not as a straightforwardly descriptive principle of classification, but as an expression of values.” Cf. Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said, 171–73.