UNDERSTANDING RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES

© 2006 by Orchid Land Publications

20061107, -08

     In contrast with Mark Johnson’s (cf. his The body in the mind:  The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason [Univ. of Chicago Press, 1987, esp pp. 28-33 “dynamic” schemata structuring our perceptions, the term paradigm is used here for ways in which cognition is structured by preconceptions that serve as axioms defining what can and cannot possibly be true.  As such, paradigms are abstract, not “bodily” in Johnson’s sense.  Both are relational, but in very different ways.  Where schemata consist of “parts and relations,” the structure of a paradigm consists of matter (or content) and an interpretative (cognitive) form, each of which is constituted of a few axiomatic assumptions about truth and reality.  The matter of a religious paradigm consists of axioms admitting what can be real in the sense of being integral to a religion—the dimensions of reality are materiality and temporality as well as mental and spiritual reality), while a paradigm’s form clothes its matter with an overall ontic, cognition, emotional, or volitional interpretation.  In the current treatment, cognition is married with truth in the sense that truth has to correspond to (ontic) reality, while volition is married to juridicality in the sense that rightness is based on moral power—enforcement, including penalties—material reality being irrelevant in contrast with spiritual reality, with willed (virtual) reality often being central.  Examples of the distinction involve

"goodness":  ontic holiness vs. virtual (imputed) righteousness

The contraries of the foregoing are interesting.  Whereas holiness is a condition of being deprived of holiness (or whatever energy makes things holy), a state called ‘amartía (in its singular form) in Greek, and unrighteousness, i.e. in the sense of a willed sin—Greek ‘amártēma.  The difference hardly exists in the juridical paradigm, where the inheritable state of ‘amartía is (however impossibly) routinely mistranslated as INHERITED “sin.”  This is a good example of how a paradigm determines the import of an idea, in this instance even against commonsense.

      When the ontic dimension is not purely “spiritual” (antimaterial), it can have various sides, e.g. a static essence and an energetic (creative, causative) nature through which it relates to the realities it creates.  Gen. 1:26 speaks of human creation in terms of an  essence “according to the icon of God” and a nature “according to the Assimilation," where the formation of the Greek word for “assimilation” is as clearly causative as fertilization  and intensification  are in English.  Greek uses phthorá to speak of the corporeal “perishability” ( or “transience, impermanence”) of human essence when when human nature has not been assimilated to the divine Energies.  Western paradigms translate phthorá in moral-juridical terms as “corruption.”  Where essence and energetic nature are confounded, ontic Divinization (by Grace, conceived of as the uncreated Energies of God’s Life and Nature) is not distinct from the unity of divine and human essences captured in the pagan idea of Deification. 

     Luther even redefined faith (Latin fides) in volitional terms as fiducia, “trust, confidence, loyalty.”  Contrary to Greek John 1:1,3 and I Corinthians 1:24 in Greek, the Creator became a "Word" in the West.  The nature of creation is presumably "wordy" if created by a "Word"; the Bible is "the Word" now.   The Greek Fathers, who understood the Apostle Paul's Greek in Paul's paradigm, upheld the ancient view . . . that because the Creator is Reason, the cosmos is logikós “intelligible,” amenable to scientific analysis.  They had no problem with time and development, i.e. with evolution in creation, revelation (tradition), and three phases of Salvation.  Given the rejection of materiality, sacrifice—the offering of a part of creation to the Creator in acknowledgment of His ownership over all that is—was banished from worship (which became entirely wordy); and the anti-temporal outlook dictated that a soterial Sacrifice is a one-time event—the unrepeatable Crucifixion.  Indeed a juridical Crucifixion, which in ancient Christianity had the negative aspect of expiating obstacles to bodily resurrection, became soterial to the exclusion (according to magisterial theologians of both Latin Christianity and Protestantism) even of resurrection:  Rejected was the biblical equivalence of bodily resurrection with salvation, . . . probably because material bodiliness is unspiritual.  The Patristic ideas (i) that the Incarnation was the proto-Mystery (or first sacrament) of Salvation (and hence the rôle of the Mother of God is essential to salvation) and (ii) that Divinzation (théōsis) is the ultimate Mystery (or sacrament) have had little place in much Western Christian thinking. 

This thinking was built on the teachings of North Africans, Tertullian and Augustine (before the Dark Ages) and (at the end of the Dark Ages) on the thought world created by Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek learning (these had been made at Damaskós by ca. 800 AD).  This Aristotelian outlook became more Neo-Platonic (quasi-gnostic) at the Renaissance because of the original Greek learning brought to the West by Byzantine scholars fleeing the Turks at the fall of Constantinople, previously raped and mortally weakened by Latin Crusaders in 1204.   Almost all of the major Protestant Reformers were humanists, i.e. scholars deeply influenced by the assumptions of reality put forward by Plato, Plotinos, and other Greek philosophers.  Luther was an exception; he was an Ockhamist, i.e. brought up in Ockham's will-based philosophy at odds with Aquinas' more cognitive outlook.  Like Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham were Vikings or Normans by birth; so was St. Vladimir who brought Russia into Christianity.

      At least in Christianity, a marriage of finite materiality (Jesus’s body and His bodily Resurrection) does not exclude a spiritual reality.  A Mystery has a necessarily material (corporeal) vehicle for the spiritual but ontic uncreated Energy of divine Life—Grace in Patristic Christianity.  (See earlier on the first Mystery, the Incarnation, and the ultimate Mystery, Divinization [théōsis]). The marriage of the created and uncreated is called a Mystery in Greek.  (The Apostle Paul called marriage a Mystery [sacrament], a union of bodies and of lives).  (Note that the West uses the originally juridical terms sacrament(al) and ordinance for Greek mystērion, the number of which is not defined in Eastern theology.)  While saving Grace is defined differently in Latin and Protestant catechisms, both agree that it is neither an uncreated something nor energetic; it is in fact a divine judgment (which would energetic in the East) in Reformation Protestantism to treat a sinner as virtually righteous.  (Only God is "holy" in some writings of this novel framework invented in the sixteenth century; of course God alone is essentially holy in all forms of Christianity; but many things are holy by energization in the East.)