The historical conflict with transcendental delusion

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Transcendental illusion is the result of misapplying or miscomprehending the standards of evidence in the scientific and mathematical realms. It is less a culpable state of mind than it is like a judgment based off an optical illusion, say. Something understandable and more than forgivable.

Maybe transcendental delusion can be forgiven, maybe it's the secular equivalent of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. What it is, is the perversion of standards of moral evidence. When some New Testament doctrines speak of the simplicity of the Christian message, this should be seen as code for "these are for the most part metaphors for the moral order, not physically literal descriptions." The Spirit informs us of the transcendental law of Christ, which is not a yoke like the law of the original covenant. It is not a faith in Christ as we normally think of such a thing that we are informed of. It is a parable about a moral revolution in history, arising from the particular circumstances that Israel found itself in under Roman occupation. Jesus was fully man, and knew even so that if he took a certain kind of stand in that arena, he could make a difference, for good, in relation to all future history up until the desolation of the world (at which point, the story would restart, and he would either be remembered to his believers' benefit or forgotten to the unbelievers' detriment), should that such a terrible event unfold. If history merely continued without ending up with something like angelic or nuclear war, it would still be possible to represent the moral future of each individual person under the ideal, "To save a life is to save the world," in which case the eschatonic power of Christian ideality is not about ending the physical world in finite time, but about solving a general moral problem in eternity, one composed of an indefinite number of parts (all persons who will ever exist) that correspond and co-constitute various parts of the sempiternal world. Each person's actual death and quasi-metaphorical new creation relates to the sequence of this moral order, and not to a tangible resurrection--not directly.

But you don't have to be a Christian to make sense of the problem with transcendental delusion, however much the legend of Eden's garden can be made to correspond to this image of the fundamental form of wrongdoing being corruption of standards of moral judgment. For if we do not value the correct theory of value, then our awareness of all real value will be perverted, and we will miss the mark trying to accent and magnify the value of reality. If our standards of deciding our priorities are themselves false, then how will we ever make it a priority to correct the false premises or inferences of the rest of the system? It is a terrible paradox, but regardless, it just means that there's something very difficult about changing one's beliefs about what counts as moral evidence or proof (proof of a moral theory/judgment). And yet this is the thing that it would be best to change, out of all one's vices, in the sense that it singlehandedly underscores all the others (by leading to exaltation of physical pleasure, say).

Historically, it was the Franciscan Scotus who most perhaps most pivotal in the conflict with transcendental delusion. For from within the Catholic church, he proclaimed it a truth of natural reason that genuine knowledge of facts could be obtained without divine illumination--that there was, as St. Jerome had outlined with his image of synderesis, a concept of a function such as had been inherited by scholastic philosophy, and that this concept was of an incorruptible source of moral knowledge even in Fallen humankind. Thus he undermined the religious limitation of knowledge academically, at a pivotal point in time, and yet because he helped establish the doctrine of Mary's immaculate conception as a reasonable inference from the context, he is revered to this day in the Catholic church. So, he helped "win a major battle" in the "war with transcendental delusion," if you will, because he helped show that God does not have to exist in order for us to be able to know things.

[Linna Heartbooger]

...he [the Franciscan Scotus] proclaimed it a truth of natural reason that genuine knowledge of facts could be obtained without divine illumination--

This interested me when you posted it, because it was about divine illumination and knowing things..
but I didn't know you really well, so I didn't want to argue about stuff.

that there was, as St. Jerome had outlined with his image of synderesis, a concept of a function such as had been inherited by scholastic philosophy, and that this concept was of an incorruptible source of moral knowledge even in Fallen humankind.

Did not know this.
Wondering how large a set of the things that are necessary could be obtained from that source.

So, he helped "win a major battle" in the "war with transcendental delusion," if you will, because he helped show that God does not have to exist in order for us to be able to know things.

But that didn't sound like it was "God does not have to exist in order for us to be able to know things."

It sounded to me more like, "a given person doesn't have to experience divine illumination through the Holy Spirit to know that various things are true" - and this includes moral knowledge.

It still may require the ordered structure of creation as a prerequisite for the world to have sanity and not chaos... for things to be knowable as opposed to hopelessly muddled.

"For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse."
(Rom 1:19-20)

The link I put in points to a sermon about the limits of what we can understand without divine illumination.
Here is a teaser to it. (Coz I know I'm not willing to commit to 25 minutes of audio unless I'm convinced I actually want to listen to it!)

Does nature point to a creator?

So David Attenborough, the presenter of the "Life" natural history series, thinks not.
He [Attenborough] says, "My response is that when creationists talk about God creating every individual species as a separate act, they always instance hummingbirds or orchids or sunflowers and beautiful things.
But I tend to think instead of a parasitic worm that's boring through the eye of a boy sitting on the bank of the river in West Africa, a worm that's gonna make him blind, and I ask them, "Are you telling me that the God you believe in, who you also say is an all-merciful God who cares for each one of us individually - are you saying that God created this worm that can live in no other way than in an innocent child's eyeball? Because that doesn't sound to me to coincide with a God who is full of mercy."

However, this view is a misunderstanding of what the Bible claims.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I've always implicitly accepted deistic evolution as an appropriate (if not the only appropriate?) reconciliation of the divine act of generation with evolution by natural selection. Basically, from God's POV, since He's outside time, His intercession--Incarnation--in time is an eternal act, an eternal "event" if you will, so it gets transposed onto the entire timeline of possibly created history. But that means the creation of the line works the same way, so God basically creates the world as a natural sequence (as it goes in the TCoTC, the law is the Creator's self-command). It's like God is writing the story of the world from the middle/end, using the advent of Christ as the natural coincidence of an enormous course of events in the story's history. Retconning time, if you will. It is true that if minerals could develop into organic material naturally and over time evolve so that one day this one man would appear and make the ultimate stand of all time, this would still completely be to the glory of God, I would think.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

The thing to remember is that the Person of Christ is fully human as well as fully divine. His human nature has the same moral value as His divine nature, an infinite amount, or else His human actions would not be the source of the Atonement. For He, though being God by nature, did not think to abuse His equality with God, but emptied Himself, taking on the form of a human servant. God is what God does (He is impassible), so God the Son is the Incarnation.

Therefore, it is not that spiritual cleansing from sin enables us to supernaturally perceive the truth. Rather, spiritual cleansing allows our natural means of perceiving truth function correctly. Therefore when our corrupted standards of moral evidence are cleared away, we then know things truly by nature, for the substance of the world God created as good, to be in harmony with our good, even if primarily intellectually (to say, "The world was created as good," is to say, "The world can be understood by good reasoning").

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

In fact, kenosis is what exactly explains the Trinity, on a certain level. For it's a kenotic perichoresis, whereby each divine Person sacrifices Their essence into the others, expresses this "emptying" and humility in relation to the others. The Father cannot be known except through the Son, the Father hands all judgment to the Son, etc. The Son only does what the Father does, etc. The Spirit speaks only of the Son, etc. It's just that the particular form of the Son's kenosis is the Incarnation.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Wondering how large a set of the things that are necessary could be obtained from that source.

Anselm had quite an interesting argument for the Incarnation...

[Linna Heartbooger]

Nice. Which work(s) of his did Anselm especially lay out that argument in?

(sorry; not ready to tackle your earlier conversations now. also want to re-read a decent source of mine on the "emptying" thing, cause people mess that up a bunch.)

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Cur Deus Homo. Along with a tangent on the relationship between the number of fallen angels and the number of predestined redeemed humans, and a horrifyingly strange remark about the morality of allowing an infinite number of universes to self-destruct rather than move one's eyes in the opposite of a certain God-commanded direction, the book is nice enough, though I think the debaters are someone "A"-something first, and I believe "Boso/Bozo" or something second.