I appreciate the insights that folks like Campbell & Jung brought to anthropology. They are important & deserve serious consideration from a scientific perspective. However, I’m not among those who consider them theologically competent.
For some, all religious myth is mythopoeia, God’s expressions thru the minds of poets.
For the Christian, the
true myth of Christ is God’s expression of Himself through, with & in Himself.
For the Christian, for whom God’s moral nature was revealed in Christ, God’s essential nature remains an unfathomable mystery. We do NOT, however, say that God is inapprehensible (in part) even as we maintain that God is wholly incomprehensible.
We do not consider mystery to be wholly unintelligible even as Yahweh remains the UnNameable One.
This discussion continues at this link:
We do not say that anything is ONLY a metaphor, neither in physics nor theology; we understand, rather, semiotic reality. IOW, we avoid a radical apophaticism every bit as much as we eschew a kataphaticism. Our religion has some descriptive, some normative & some interpretive content even if, in the end, we must move beyond them (but not w/o them) to the evaluative stance. Our religion has evidential, rational & presuppositional elements, even if we must move beyond them (but not w/o them) to an existential orientation.
The Reality of God is wholly incomprehensible but this does not mean that it is unintelligible or not partly apprehensible. And its intelligibility goes beyond mythopoeia to include not only the truth of fragmented truth, beauty, goodness & unity but also some very real historical persons, places & things, very tangible realities like a
People Gathered, very evidential and rational and presuppositional
propositions in addition to our otherwise participatory social
imaginations.
An overemphasis on the kataphatic & speculative is rationalism. An overemphasis on the kataphatic & affective is pietism (& fideism). An overemphasis on the apophatic & speculative is encratism. An overemphasis on the apophatic and affective is quietism.
This is all very highly nuanced and carefully developed and many have engaged and dismissed, strawman style, but a caricature of it all. And they have done so with an overemphasis on the reductive (scientism) and on the paradoxical (radical apophaticism).
Paradox, in my view, does not exhaust all meaningful & intelligible approaches to Primal Reality. It is necessary but not sufficient. It seems more accurate to say that we are trapped in tautologies, some more taut than others, and cannot prove the axioms of our tautological systems within those systems, themselves. This is not to a priori rule out the possibility that we might not be able to otherwise SEE the truth of such axioms. To equate accessing such truth with proof would be empiricistic and rationalistic, indeed.The difference between me and Hegel is that I do not aspire to a complete system, only a consistent system (Godel). I believe that a system is possible but do not a priori decide which part of it is inaccessible due to methodological thwarting, epistemically, or due to ontological occulting, metaphysically, which would be a mysterian cul de sac.
I am a great believer in common sense. To paraphrase the late, great WmFBuckley:“I’d rather entrust the religion of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
In other words, I believe that there is a GREAT deal of unconscious competence, that most people GET reality and PRIMAL reality right and are mostly responding appropriately even if fallibly as people of large intelligence (read = common sense not university learning) and profound goodwill (read = good old middle American values), even if they cannot articulate their epistemological stance in academic jargon. The overemphasis on rationalistic approaches (critical thinking) is not mine, here. Instead, I applaud the social imaginary that has formed most peoples.
There is all the difference in the world between a response to the postmodern critique which concedes that our epistemic grasp is problematical and adopts a contrite fallibilism and one that capitulates to its more corrosive extreme and eschews metaphysical & moral realisms, sawing off the epistemological branch where one’s ontological eggs are nested.
It may be that our differences are thus naunced: I believe that there is One Story and that all of the great traditions and indigenous religions, too, are in touch with it. At the same time, I believe we can reasonably and good-heartedly seek the most nearly perfect articulation of its Truth, celebration of its Beauty, preservation of its Goodness & enjoyment of its Unity and that, in these regards, all creeds, cults, codes and communities are not equal.
The darkness is NOT a Divine attribute in our view!
“It’s been said that the dominant note of the traditional Catholic liturgy was intense longing. This is also true of her art, her literature, her whole life. It is a longing for things that cannot be in this world: unearthly truth, unearthly purity, unearthly justice, unearthly beauty. By all these earmarks, Lord of the Rings is indeed a Catholic work, as its author believed: But it is more. It is this age’s great Catholic epic, fit to stand beside the Grail legends, Le Morte d’Arthur and The Canterbury Tales. It is at once a great comfort to the individual Catholic, and a tribute to the enduring power and greatness of the Catholic tradition, that JRRT created this work. In an age which has seen an almost total rejection of the faith on the part of the Civilization she created . . . Lord of the Rings assures us, both by its existence and its message, that the darkness cannot triumph forever.” Charles A. Coulombe
http://bit.ly/35iixi
Tags:
apophaticism,
Carl Jung,
Charles A. Coulombe,
encratism,
fallibilism,
Hegel,
Joseph Campbell,
Kurt Godel,
mysterian,
myth,
mythopoeia,
pietism,
quietism,
rationalism,
scientism,
social imaginary,
William F. Buckley
