Kojève’s critique of a Christianity that fails to overcome the fear of death resonates with a concept that I have entertained for a long time now, regarding the true character of the sacred. Rudolf Otto’s famous treatise on the Holy emphasizes that the sacred or holy involves… …, among other things, the experience of dread or terror. It is a fearful thing. Death and the sacred thus have a close link: facing the sacred should be something like facing death, beyond which is an unknown Nothingness. It is truly terrifying.

Each a whole universe unto itself

Brilliant lecture by a brilliant theologian Most species of atheism are just attenuated forms of negative theology. Their denials of God have in most instances already been uttered by theologians. Atheists are “but theologians in an arrested condition of denial.”

“Now that theologians once again make claims for an apophatic negativity, which in pre-atheistic cultures provoked no possibility of confusion with atheism, today there is an issue: what is it that the atheist denies which the apophatic theologian does not also deny?” “[It] is a matter of some interest that […] some of our radical deconstructionists [with considerable anxiety] have been caused by the encounter with a Meister Eckhart or a pseudo-Denys to question the ultimate radicalness of their own atheistic deconstruction.”

Dialectical materialism (as Boris Groys defines it), bearing a close resemblance to the practice of cataphatic theology: seeking a maximum of contradiction — a linguistic or verbal riot, an anarchic discourse.

From The Communist Postscript, 36-37. Cf. Denys Turner:

https://twitter.com/maestrojmc/status/1622091406574768128

Boris Groys on cataphatic theology:

As a representation of God, an icon in the Christian tradition is similarly an image for which there is no original, for the God of Christianity is invisible. The paradox that is discovered — or rather created — by the philosopher is… …an icon of the logos as a whole, and precisely for this reason the evidence it possesses and radiates is absolute, for this evidence cannot be obscured by any comparison to the original.”

— “The Communist Postscript,” 15-16.

The “absolute knowledge” which Kojève insists (contrary to Plato) must be truly attainable and possible for man might be compared to the “maximization of discourse” that constitutes the “cataphatic” mode of theology. A knowledge whose language expresses the Totality of Being,… …from which it draws all possible names for “God” or “the Absolute.” What Hegel/Kojève have thus honed upon is the cataphatic side of theology, but severed from its dialectical partner: the apophatic, which represents the silence into which discourse falls after it traverses…

Kojève: it is Woman who brings about the ruin of the pagan world, the world of Masters — and consequently the transformation of that world into a Bourgeois world, the Roman Empire. Girl Power. Nietzsche says somewhere that Christianity is the religion of women as well as slaves, and where derides it for this reason, it seems that Kojève would regard this as Christianity’s greatest strength.

In his “Basho” essay, p.57, Nishida critiques a certain type of metaphysical idealism that arises from seeking the ground of all consciousness in “nothingness” understood merely as the negation of being. Such a nothingness is still a kind of being — “latent being” in his words,… …resembling the Aristotelian notion of “potentia” (δύναμις) — and therefore still confined to the realm of thought or consciousness; and therefore not the true ground of consciousness, which must be a “true” and “oppositionless” nothing, i.e. not a nothing that is only defined…

Dignitatis Humanae 6, rather than being read as a repudiation of traditional integralism, can be read as explicitly seeking to reconcile Catholic integralism with the civil obligation to recognize the liberties of other religions in a modern pluralistic world. Notice how the circumstance of a confessional state shows up in this paragraph: “civil recognition is given to one religious community in the constitutional order of society.” This is not repudiated; rather, the duties of the state towards *other* religions are simply delineated.

A VERY interesting document that deserves some close reading and rereading. Suffice it to say that, as an official clarification of the meaning of Dignitatis Humanae, it confirms much of how integralists have interpreted the council.

https://twitter.com/Hasan22821492/status/1455759831298678792

One among many fascinating clips. I’ll be returning to this a lot…

As far as I can tell, many of the disastrous revolutions that define modernity were revolutions against a specific type of moral ideology. Kant is the best philosophical expression of that ideology, but it’s an ideology that once governed (and still does, in updated form)… …the lives of the proletariat classes: an ethic of duty, an ethic of the categorical imperative; rather than an ethic directed by love, or by the perception of what is worth loving (i.e. the Good). The stereotypical moral subject formed by this ideology is the worker who…

Dionysius the Areopagite, on how the different types of motion may and may not be attributed to God. St. Thomas's commentary. What is striking is how the distinction and multiplicity of all the types of motion are denied of God, only to be attributed to him in a transcendently unified way: what in creatures is distinct and multiple is unified and identical in God.

Some light reading Some simple but interesting comparative data

Joseph Schumpeter, on the meaning of Marx's "materialism," as a method of interpreting history. A summary and commentary on the obvious strengths of Marx's "materialist" science.

A thread, partly based on Marx, partly based on Pope Benedict XVI.

https://twitter.com/maestrojmc/status/1284216737081126912

Pope Benedict, in Spe Salvi, has what I think is the best critique of Marx that any pope (even JPII) has put forward.