The Theology behind the Culture War
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- čas přidán 11. 07. 2024
- One of the big problems people face today regarding religion or the notion of God, is the problem of what I would call the reality of God VS the reality of the world. This might seem abstract at first, but it ends up manifesting itself in everybody’s life, whether they’re religious or not. It ends up manifesting itself in opposites; on the one hand there is the argument of transcendence; that God is completely above the world. While on the other hand there is immanence; that God completely fills the world. Understanding this problem can help us understand some of the discourse people are using, and how we often feel trapped in extreme opposites.
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Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
01:50 Framing of the problem
09:48 How we are dealing with this
12:00 The solution
15:28 St. Dionysius the Areopagite
21:35 Conclusion
24:37 Outro
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My intro was arranged and recorded by Matthew Wilkinson.
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One side of the room is dark, the other is light.
Symbolism happens.
I've never clicked a video with such gusto.
I've never thought to ask what Gusto means until I came across this comment.
@@calummacritchie7840 oomph
@@calummacritchie7840 with speed or desire to like.
Same!
I detect Plato in Pageau. I detect Plotinus. I understand why the early church used the Greeks because God used the Greeks, because God lays the foundation. It is such a beautiful way to look at Being. God is so rational, so structural and so beautiful. "Chairness" verses wooden chair legs .. the formal cause verses the material cause. IMO understanding the four causes really can help us navigate the world. The Word, the Logos, causing the world to rationally unfold brings me comfort. Pageau really can hit the Greek cylinders. I wish I had more classical education.
Well early Church argues against Greeks too, Platonic misconceptions/misunderstandings in particular were the heavy topic
I think it was Clement of Alexandria who said something similar that the Jewish heritage of the Bible was only part of the revelations and the Greeks also played a role
I love the forms
You just solved philosophy in 25 minutes: "Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven."
Nominality vs. Univocity are each praising only a single attribute of God and making it the Absolute. The former worships God’s Transcendence, and the latter worships God’s Immanence. They both cut off the head from the body and break communion between the Divine and Creation.
To let there be a bridge between the two, for movements up and down as Jacob’s ladder, where God communes with Creation, is to see the source of all identities within the patterns eternally unfolding across reality’s grand design.
The shape of God’s heart is the cosmos deified.
This may be one the most evergreen videos on this channel, at least for me. Fractally true on different levels, across time, etc.
Beautiful video. Regarding your usual example of the chair, I imagine you could say it is held together by its chair-ity.
Pageau: Theology of chairs.
VSauce: Do chairs exist?
Your videos never fail to blow my mind. Thanks for your work Jonathan. God bless.
I'm reading The Orthodox Way right now and it's really helpful for breaking that dialectic frame.
I finished that about a month ago. So helpful!
Based book
Brilliant book. One of the reasons I've been attending orthodox church.
Huge fan of the "buh-bye" outro. Made me laugh out loud
I was putting an ikea chair together the other day, and I think I understand what you mean now! The symbol of the chair.
"Although corporeal things are said to be in another as in that which contains them, nevertheless, spiritual things contain those things in which they are; as the soul contains the body. Hence also God is in things containing them; nevertheless, by a certain similitude to corporeal things, it is said that all things are in God; inasmuch as they are contained by Him."
--
Summa Theologie Prima Pars Question 8, Article 1, reply to 2nd objection - Saint Thomas Aquinas
"Only the paradox comes anywhere near to comprehending the fullness of life"- Carl Jung
Ooooo that’s a good one.
Occultist Carl Jung
@@FirstnameLastname-py3bc Lol STFU, what are you a f ckin Jehovah's Witness?
Always a joy to see a new video
This is where I often try to get to with my God#1 and God #2 language. It's why I keep telling people there is no #3. It's not a Trinity mapping. The decay of Modernity is resurfacing God #1 for people to understand once more if only for a taste...
Right after the feast of Dionysius, no less!
I feel like arguments about God in extremes like that are basically in need of someone to point out that we are talking ABOUT God to each other while He's right here in the room, which is very rude.
Listening to you and reading philosophy I'm finding some ground for living that was hidden for too long. Spirit is coming back into this modern materialistic world. Thank you.
In my circle of Catholic friends, this is what we call the "Both And" aspect to our theology and religious prescriptions.
Wow, epic video! Christ Himself is the ultimate example, transcendent God fully contained in humble man, never confused, fully both at the same time
Jesus the "Christ" bearer.
Evocative of a ceaseless flow between the heirarchies .. earth-water-air-fire .. hell-earth-celestial .. bowels-heart-mind ... reminding us always have maintain high thoughts and seek holiness .. to RISE above as Christ has risen above
Hans-Georg Gadamer handles this really well in "The Idea of the Good in Platonic-Aristotelian Philosophy"
An analogy I use to understand the "invisible qualities" of God (as in Rom. 1:20) without using fancy words.:
My father died nearly 20 years ago. I can show you a picture of him and you will know what he looked like. But as a hobby, my father crafted and flew model airplanes. He made them from scratch-wood, metal, fabric and paint. I have two hanging from the ceiling. Should I place one in front of you, examine it closely. It will tell you more about my dad than any photo.
Consider ALL creation to be an expression of the One who created it. We have lots to praise the living God about, but this faith is to intimately know him. So look closely at the things he made-from the colors of the sunset to the trash on the ground. Then inquire of Him.
Ah! I love this! Thank you Jonathan! Commenting mostly for support, but also I am so enamored with the idea of living one part of God at a time, should we be so bold to trust our incompleteness.
Love your content. It's teaching more and more about embracing apparent "contractions" in Scripture and reality.
Trancendence vs Immanence. I wish I had heard these ideas contrasted when I was thinking about theology as a young person. My thinking would have been clearer.
I actually clicked this video specifically because we just talked about Transcendence and Immanence in my Lutheran intro theology class at college. It is very interesting.
Brings to mind the saying, "As within, so without".
Also the saying, "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"
John 15:5
Wonderful, Jonathan. Thank you.
Hadn’t checked in for a while. New intro looks great
Mainly, reality, life, The Church and God are not knowable in an Hegelian Dialectic...Truth is not a gnostic dualistic nor a materialist nor rationalistic ideology. Life is not an ideology at all. It’s an experience we must enter into and participate in.
Exactly. There's a big diffrence between religion and ideology.
God bless you.🙏❤
Hegelian Dialectic is a nondualist thrology. It affirms participation and the work of Chridt
@@christopherlin4706 Hegel's truth isn't rooted in Christ, it's somewhere in the future. All he can ever do is say something is relatively true.
@@bradspitt3896 he affirms ideological and ontological unity of the future Spirit. Jesus would represent the psychological unity necessary to bring forth the future United social framework
@@christopherlin4706 ...says Hegel in his particular moment in time.
The quote from St Dionysius reminds me of the way Ekart Tolle describes being aware without thought and his interpretation of "I am the light of the world"
i am at the right hand of the Father, moving through me forever and forever in the eternal heaven. i am you and you are me, i am the cause of you, and you are the cause of me. i have within me your name and the names of all. i embrace the struggle of life as well as my suffering, for the entire experience of my being is my heaven
17:30 Jonathan, is it not important, however, that the Fathers tell us the rest of Creation is deified **through** our becoming Christlike? When we fell, all things fell, and when we are deified, all things will move toward being deified through us. I've even heard that, as Christ let His energy flow out of Him at His baptism (since He did not need Baptism's inner sanctification). All material things go to Him as final cause, but we act as the Priests of reality; they go to Him **through** us as the highest of material creation.
Jonathan does mention this during his talk with Jay. But you're right.
We really need a semi-icon CHAIR shirt.
I think this breakdown of reality dates back to Ancient Greece.
Parmenides and Heraclitus argued about two opposite models of reality: essence and change.
To Parmenides, reality was made from a something all objects and things shared, yet at the same time it was different in each one of them: it was the inherent, eternal essence of all things. Essence was both eternal, as an ethereal set of rules that govern a body, and was in everything no matter how a particularity changed.
Heraclitus, on the other hand, argued that the only constant ever present in the world was 'fire', as in change. He was characterized as a revolutionary later on, and pretty much this constant of change is what started to break down the wordly manifestations of hierarchies.
Still, this video is excellent in explaining this consolidated, and mysterious nature God has, and was, too, one of the realisations I've been having recently.
"From the Tao comes the One. From the One comes the Two (chaos and order, essence and energy, body and soul, etc). And from the Two comes the Many."
Good ole Taoism to explain how the entire world reduces to dualism, and the dualism reduces to the entire system, and the system reduces to God.
@@accuset
Indeed, duality is a hell of a concept.
A better contrast would be between Aquinas and Schopenhauer, where the contrast is properly between "Reality" and merely "World" (where the world is Will, i.e. the unchanging ground or essence of all change in space and time, *absent* of the Being of Reality)
And then Aristotle came along and told both of them 'You're idiots and here's why!' And then we get metaphysics.
Thank you, Jonathan!
I tried explaining my position on gender with the thing/concept divide. My dad didn’t get it.
What is a woman, outside of the particulars of individual women? It seems some aren’t afraid to say that there is a platonic form of “‘man” when we say “be a man” or “manly.”
But no one outside maybe a girl’s mother is allowed to call her unladylike. No one is allowed to say that men who try to appear as or live as women will always miss a fundamental aspect to womanhood, the same aspect that infertile women are missing some of.
Maybe try this vid for your dad: czcams.com/video/zWJYIi11-NY/video.html
I've always been fascinated by some of the art and icons in the background in your videos. Would be nice if you could go through what some of them means
Great video and well timed for me personally.
As an aside, I was expecting the terms apophatic and cataphatic approach where you said I believe nominalism and univocity
This was an interesting and useful explanation of theology, and I can see hints of how this applies to the culture war, but it would have been useful to bring this down a little more and show how it relates to the culture war explicitly.
Isn't it essentially the basic division between left and right that he always talks about? That one is obsessed with imposition of the higher rule on the lower reality (the right, absolute hierarchy) and the other obsessed with the deconstruction of that hierarchy (the left, absolute marginality, making all equal)?
cheers m8, i love this shit, im so glad i found your channel after seeing you on Mym8sTom´s podcast. Anywayz thank you brother for this!
Very cool, well said Pageau
It seems like the Holy Spirit may be a manifestation of that tension between the transcendence of the Father and the immanence of the Son. So fascinating!
This one is SO GOOD
I really need to read St. Dionysius
Man I'd love if you made a whole series on this. What you said at the end struck a chord with me. I believe in God but I think in the way Jordan Peterson believes. I can't seem to grt my head around the "particulars" as you said, why are these so important? I understand the role Christianity has played in civilising the Western world but I'm sure you would say thats only a superficial role of the particulars of Christianity.
this is such an important video
Man I've wanted to hear you talk about this forever now. David Bentley Hart also gives another great talk about this where he essentially lays Nihilism at the feet of the nominalists, but I had no idea univocalism played a role as well. It's talks like this that make me cautious of the ideas I communicate because you have no idea the unintended ways they can have body in my own life and in the world. Maybe one of your most profound talks yet.
Important discussion in interesting times. Thank you Jonathan. Shall we resolve our dualistic tendencies that divide us and walk with "I AM" who awaits us just out of sight around a corner?
To walk with God will be to take the next step in Human Consciousness. Our consent to God's Presence and Action within is crucial. I don't know how this is possible but with Faith, Hope and Love God, through us - in us, will find a way. I think this is where this conversation is heading.
In a way I am Grateful for the "culture wars". The gift of the culture war, is that it is forcing us to think about this stuff. Would we even consider this stuff if we weren't forced to hold it in our hands?
I hadn't thought it through this thoroughly. I often ruminate on ideas like God is the being that spoke being into existence with "a voice like many waters" and can "kill both body and soul in hell", as well as the God who designed tiny little butterflies wings and dew drops and snow flake patterns and the inner workings of single cells...
I have the minimum amount of intelligence required to understand this video; I am the dumbest person who has watched this video but does understand it.
Any chance you can make a video on the symbolism of Fight Club?
Plato framed the answer and Maximus and others took up the mantle. We have to see “through” things, to get to their transcendent nature. The world of appearances is shallow, but when we take the appearance alongside the depth the connection between the invisible and the visible becomes more like a connected spectrum rather than a dichotomy.
Perhaps Jungian synchronicity
@@m.thousands1848 Similar. I would say more along the lines of Jungian archetypes. But Jung stopped at the psyche. He didn’t complete his metaphysics by taking it beyond the mind like St Maximus did.
I prefer the French horns rather than the violins in the opening tune.
Was just think that (that I liked the old intro better)
I’m going to have to strongly disagree, very little trumps violin. The new intro is epic🤟
@@nathanielharmon7167 yeah, do that with your demon horns on the Christian theology channel
I think the new one gives me game of thrones vibes
Imminence vs Eminence seems to always go back to the seminal nature. To be 'transcendent' or beyond into a form of infinity, you must be inherently in/of the thing in question. Like the tree makes the seed from within itself and pushes it out, the seed pulls from within itself another tree and repeat the process. God must have to be seminal to a degree as well
Thanks!
commenting to support the video
More theology please!
I read something similar in the kybalion. It says like okay God is transcendent, is beyond our underdtanding since is infinite. But at the same time we can't act here in this plane of reality like everything is "an illusion"... Like we don't matter, like the creation is not real. It won't work for us.
So God is inmanence too... He is the source of all. So everything matter. We matter, so creation is real.
We have to live between these so called "opposites".
Catholics see humans as trinitarian, in the image of God , Body, Soul, Spirit. When we make the sign of the cross we profess the Trinity of God but also our own trinity. Pagans and Neo - pagans don’t understand this
The pagan world is only one , and at best two dimensional. This makes for a terribly flat and tight existence, where everything is controlled by the medicine man or Pharma, whichever you prefer
@@afieds6845 a pagan world is a very violent one and extreme emotional thinking
@@savagetv6460 indeed , this is where we are now
@@afieds6845 yep. It's funny how all of these people demanding Christians follow passages that they say are progressive are all non religious. They just want no responsibility
God the Father is transcendence. God the Spirit is immanence. God the Son is the reconciliation of the two, where the universal joins with the particular, where myth joins with reality, where the divine joins the mundane.
Algorithmic support comment :)
The world wants to put everything in either/or when it’s both/and.
So it's either both/and or nothing.
That would still amount to either/or.
@@jeffmccoy1700 That is one of the paradoxes; using dialectic against dialectic. Using it to take you higher, not lower. And to bring things together, not fragmented.
Thanks
i wish to speak as the source, who i truly am one day. my sin makes me unworthy, but i shall move myself within myself and trust myself both inside and outside my thoughts and my ideas of my capability.
"The chairness of the chair"...such a great metaphor xD
I can see this is clearly something you are passionate about. I would love if you broke this down slightly more, because in this video your passion comes across much like rambling, for my simple brain at least.
Just a question, now that I see you use the term "Immanence"... Is there a connection between this one-sided perspective and "Immanuel"? Or is "Immanuel" pointing to something that is balanced?
Re: what you call nominalism vs univocalism
I think what is better characterized as the distinction between those who hold to the analogy of being and those who hold to the univocity of being.
Nominalism (anti-realism about universals), on the other hand, is better contrasted to various realist positions about universals (e.g., Platonic idealism and moderate realism)
The reality of universals is a related but distinct issue from the analogy or univocity of being.
In fact, if anything, some may argue the denial of universals (Ockham's nominalism) is derivative of Duns Scotus's univocity of being.
The analogy of being, I would say, is very much related to the solution you are drawing out regarding the transcendence of God vs His imminence. To speak analogically about being is to go beyond both speaking equivocally (roughly what you characterize - may I respectfully say mischaracterize - as nominalism) and speaking univocally.
Moderate realism is the way to go in my opinion. A balance between Platonic realism/Platonic idealism and nominalism/anti-realism
Mind = Blown
Hey Jonathan, have u ever read french philosopher Louis Lavelle?
Regarding the unity through the multiplicity, I wonder if the Orthodox position that anyone outside the Orthodox Church is not a Christian is that same mistake of focusing on the multiplicity without seeing the unity. It strikes me as a bit odd in light of that passage where Jesus says "anyone who is not against us is for us."
BINGO! Thank You.
An incredible example of this is Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West, in which the author describes a uniquely Western tendency toward misguidedly seek out and affirm universal laws, including the universal law of dialectical opposition…and then goes on to set up exactly that in the dialectical opposition between Christ (religion/science/theory/truth) and Pilate (skepticism/history/fact/subjective truth). He had no interest in Orthodox Christianity and I think that’s partly why he wasn’t even aware of this mistake. This also relates to Leo Strauss but that would need a longer comment…
Yeah, we have a very distorted understanding of Good. Basically, Good means - how things are supposed to be. Like a synonym to "Proper." (To paraphrase the saying "all things in the world moves towards God.")
when i look at the great differences between translations i think maybe we should not overthink it so much.
Yes - absolutely
Big fan boy echo chamber here. Brilliant guy, but forgive my reductive response: Gurdjieff meets Deepok Chopra.
RIP to Averroes who is never mentioned on that Raphael painting
🙏
Another exploration of this same theme in philosophy can be found at czcams.com/video/FEJnydUMDFk/video.html. Thanks Jonathan. Also similarly, today I was reading Camus's Nobel prize acceptance speech where he captured this same sentiment in the phrase "his (humanities) double existence" . A lot of people are working to bring this home . Love and luck to everyone involved.
More Christians need to understand apophaticism. Glorious vid, cheers.
I loved this explanation for all the theological implications, but still I don't get how does this relate to the Culture War. How do we stop the inconoclasts from burning everything? how do we stop the fetishization of symbols and outright idolatry? How do I mediate between this combative identitary impulses in society and the elitist globalism? How do I avoid seeing everythting I love thrown under the wheels? Should I become a monk? I am on the brink of it lmao.
correct me if i'm wrong, but is st. dionysius the areopagite alluding to some kind of a kenotic panentheism?
also to whoever's interested, please check out "History of Christianity: Univocalism, Voluntarism, and Nominalism" by William Rhea on CZcams. not sure why he has so little views/subs, but his content lines up so well with Jonathan Pageau/John Vervaeke's content. Great lecturer, plus he sheds more light and touches directly/more explicitly on the culture war stuff
and as always, thank you for your video, Mr. Pageau
14:44 This is St Denis of Paris?
The cross, is the ultimate symbol, with regards to balance of conflicting views,
sacrifice is made when you hold yourself in the center of the cross, you are holding the world together.
You are going to freak a lot of Protestants out with this one, but I approve. You are talking about Sophiology. Anyone who loves Maximus really should read Bulgakhov. I sent John Vervaeke a copy of Sophiology of Death, maybe he will lend it to you when he's done.
Read Florensky*
I approve of this message.
Subscribed
Someone just watched Midnight Mass and understood what it was about...
You can chart epistemology onto the political compass and it explains each quadrant perfectly. You can also do this with levels of measurement i.e. NOIR to the same effect. It's a breakthrough heuristic for political psychology.
But CZcams has shadowbanned this account so idgaf.
💜
I don know how what's the difference of the Tao of Lao Tse and what Dionisio says.
Perhaps it's because the fallen mind wants to possess completely its guiding concepts, as in various philosophical systems which try to account for every movement of perception in some unified theory. So Man reflexively tries to make verbal formulas, so that remembering the words he will remember God. Thus he is causing a semantic blockage to actual experience, which always remains wordless.
By using the chair analogy, are you suggesting God is basically the platonic form of everything?
God is a conceptualization of Plotinus' the One (which is what Pythagoras and Plato were really going for) . Used the analogy of the individual soul to get people closer to transcendance
Interesting, fr. Marko Ivan Rupnik sees the Russians as antinomic thinkers instead of aporetic as in "two opposites together express the truth". I guess Western theology had succeeded to translate dogmatism to guide every aspect of Catholic life very conclusively. There should have been more open cliffhangers to leave space for movement.
Jonathan comes close as an Orthodox dares to St. Thomas Aquinas, haha. Aquinas' analogicity of being is the traditional Catholic way of mediating between univocity and nominalism. Our words truly refer to God because his glory is what fills the world, but they don't fully refer to God or his qualities because he is transcendent.
Yeah I saw a remote viewing that showed Moses communicating with UFOs at the Red Sea.
♡
@Jonathan Pageau please give some real world examples to folks of how this manifests itself as a cultural issue.
i like this explanation a lot, i just still have trouble with the problem of evil in the world if God is supreme. i understand free will, but how does an evil thought even exist if God is good and his creation is good. i don’t get it :(
God banged the big bang and set in motion existence. In order for there to be anything there has to be a limitation, that is, that which has structure has inbuilt limitation and finitude (the necessity for biological entities to require food and water, for example). Conversely, god is without limitation and therefore without structure. In order for the structure of a biological being that can act to exist, there is the limitation of choice, and the fact that choices can have positive and negative implications, and in order for this choice to exist the biological being must be free to choose between love and destruction.
♥️
I wonder if Pageau is talking about Dyer and Alex Jones when he talks about those that see satanic rituals everywhere