Autor: Walsh, David

Buch: The Third Millenium

Titel: The Third Millenium

Stichwort: Christus als Maß der Vernunft; Grenzen d. griechische Philosophie

Kurzinhalt: Why should God wish to leave his realm of perfection? The Greeks had finally not broken through to the full transcendence of God.

Textausschnitt: 131a This is the point of greatest divergence with the Greek world that preceded Christianity. The Incarnation, with its drama of suffering, death, and resurrection, was the major stumbling block. How can we accept a God who takes on the grossness of material flesh and blood to undergo the most degrading death that was conceivable? It seemed to fly in the face of all that we knew about the gods, who were characterized by their elevation above the contingency and mortality of our condition of existence. If anything was true of the gods, it was their ascent to the higher regions of the cosmos. The highest One dwelt beyond the cosmos itself in utterly detached, immovable perfection. Purified souls of men might aspire to travel toward that realm and ultimately could reach the highest possibility of standing on the rim of the cosmos, whence they could contemplate the eternal One (Phaedrus 247c-d). But why would anyone wish to reverse the direction, least of all the transcendent God? Why should God wish to leave his realm of perfection? The Greeks had finally not broken through to the full transcendence of God. He was still too closely tied to the cosmos, whose ascending ranks defined his perfection. They had not yet recognized that transcendent Being is utterly different from the cosmos, which would itself have no relation to him apart from his gift of self-disclosure. The accent still fell on their own experience of ascent rather than on the irruption of transcendent illumination from Beyond. They did not yet see that they would not even know about Being had it not made itself present within existence. Unable to recognize the degree to which the transcendent is always radically beyond the capacity of finite apprehension, they could not fully apprehend grace or the receptivity for it. (Fs)

132a By hewing more closely to the reality of the cosmos, the Greeks devalued this world. Despite the apparently more worldly character of Greek thought, it is ironically the full contingency of existence that is missed. In retrospect, the consequence is not surprising, given the preeminence attached to the being of the cosmos itself. As the perfect manifestation of the One, the divine icon, it provided the paradigmatic measure toward which all other reality must be directed. Without sharply differentiating between the transcendent Beyond and immanent existence incapable of its manifestation, it was inevitable that the latter would never be seen for what it is. Contingency and mortality are accorded only the negative tonality of what must be pulled against in the movement toward the higher cosmological actualization. The dynamics of the struggle for attunement to the higher attraction of the Good is well differentiated, but it falls far short of our understanding of a science of nature or of society. Greek science was bound to the model of cosmic perfection, therefore, its function was conceived to be the elaboration of the laws of rational necessity governing all things. This generated an elegant mathematical conception of nature, but not its empirical investigation. Precisely, the contingently factual relationships were considered not worth studying. It is only if nature is differentiated as a realm of its own that it can become a subject of empirical exploration. Contingency can be apprehended and its investigation considered a value only where the radical transcendence of Being has differentiated its openness and its worth. Nature, despite our translation of physis, does not mean the same thing.1 (Fs)