(A thought for the Christmas season…)
Love is an emotion, not a rationale. It can’t be explained by reason, in other words, it is incomprehensible. Therefore, God’s love is a conclusive evidence of irrationality being one of His attributes.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved.” (John 3:16-17)
Having studied theology more, rather than less, diligently, I must confess that Christ as the Agnus Dei is as much incomprehensible to me as God The Father. Unless God had a sense of a personal responsibility and some “legal” obligation on account of the faultiness of His Creation, the Sacrifice is very hard to explain in rational terms. It can only be understood in terms of a parent’s love for the child, which, to me, is an irrational mystery, having perhaps as much connection to the logic of protecting one’s own procreation, as the mathematical number “i” [the square root of (-1)] to a rational number.
The question can thus be settled--- whether God is Pure Reason or has feelings too--- in favor of the latter supposition, except that there may exist a supernatural link between reason and emotion (that is, rationalizing emotion), which we are not capable of discerning and understanding. For instance, the word instinct may contain evidence to the existence of such a link, but how this can be helpful for making the next step, I do not know.
In our down-to-earth everyday life, the subtle question I have in mind, which is still rather poorly formed, to be asked, let alone answered, is whether our human sense of caring for a fellow human being, the so-called “compassion,” can be transferred to the impersonal world, making us care for the world at-large, beyond the sense of kin and volk, and even beyond gens una sumus, thus challenging Plato, who says, in Politeia, that “nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety,” not for the purpose of refuting him, but in countering his logic with our emotion, our love for an entirely unworthy object, even as obviously squalid as… “human affairs…” Wouldn’t such a terrible irrationality somehow raise us to the level of emulating our Creator, and, paradoxically, make the Sacrifice of his Son--- the Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi--- RATIONAL?…
…MERRY CHRISTMAS!
Love is an emotion, not a rationale. It can’t be explained by reason, in other words, it is incomprehensible. Therefore, God’s love is a conclusive evidence of irrationality being one of His attributes.
“For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son to condemn the world, but that through him the world might be saved.” (John 3:16-17)
Having studied theology more, rather than less, diligently, I must confess that Christ as the Agnus Dei is as much incomprehensible to me as God The Father. Unless God had a sense of a personal responsibility and some “legal” obligation on account of the faultiness of His Creation, the Sacrifice is very hard to explain in rational terms. It can only be understood in terms of a parent’s love for the child, which, to me, is an irrational mystery, having perhaps as much connection to the logic of protecting one’s own procreation, as the mathematical number “i” [the square root of (-1)] to a rational number.
The question can thus be settled--- whether God is Pure Reason or has feelings too--- in favor of the latter supposition, except that there may exist a supernatural link between reason and emotion (that is, rationalizing emotion), which we are not capable of discerning and understanding. For instance, the word instinct may contain evidence to the existence of such a link, but how this can be helpful for making the next step, I do not know.
In our down-to-earth everyday life, the subtle question I have in mind, which is still rather poorly formed, to be asked, let alone answered, is whether our human sense of caring for a fellow human being, the so-called “compassion,” can be transferred to the impersonal world, making us care for the world at-large, beyond the sense of kin and volk, and even beyond gens una sumus, thus challenging Plato, who says, in Politeia, that “nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety,” not for the purpose of refuting him, but in countering his logic with our emotion, our love for an entirely unworthy object, even as obviously squalid as… “human affairs…” Wouldn’t such a terrible irrationality somehow raise us to the level of emulating our Creator, and, paradoxically, make the Sacrifice of his Son--- the Agnus Dei, qui tollis peccata mundi--- RATIONAL?…
…MERRY CHRISTMAS!
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