And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left. A friend of mine remarked in conversation yesterday, that he perceived people were of two types: to wit, the ones who seemed to be making some kind of emotional demand on others’ attention, and those who weren’t. Earlier, he had commented that personal development is often the wages of tribulation whereas pleasant times yield little fruit, to which I had affirmed that, indeed, we almost never bother to extract a lesson from pleasurable experiences because we are too busy enjoying them. Meister Eckhart says that “if the only prayer you ever say is ‘thank you,’ that is enough.” And yet people often only pray when they want something to change. To illustrate his point, I offered the anecdote of an epiphany of sorts I experienced last summer, around this time. I was in the midst of a somewhat intensive fasting regimen and on the morning of the third day, I awoke feeling hungry and, moreover, feeling sorry for myself in my plight. Not unlike the hypocrites, who put on a long face, “that they may appear unto men to fast,”
Permit me an extended meditation provoked by your thoughts; there are always levels of meaning. There is much insight here. One cannot develop a theological anthropology in a terse message, but my view is that at the highest anagogic level, judgment is eschatological, and that as you also implicitly recognize, the sheep and the goats are intrapersonal as much as interpersonal. The division of the two is equivalent to the separation of the wheat from the tares.
I believe the burden of the wise man or woman is to preserve this awareness, and that the breath of prayer is the weaving spell of the Holy Spirit. I think relation is a primary constituent of Being, not merely elective, so that persons, indeed, the entire cosmos ultimately is the unbroken wedding robe of Sophianic beauty.
The act of division and separation is intimately a sword that pierces every heart. What this means is adverted to in Pavel Florensky's The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. There are effigies, dead letters, the evil mask of our fallen existence. We all bear them as burdens, these parasitic lies that feed upon vain desire with craven egoic weakness. In order to live, one must be broken, cured of attachment to the unreal shadows that nonetheless pretend at life.
This pretense has its own metaphysics, which like all error, proliferates into bad infinity, a wandering multiplicity. Living death is what modern and postmodern epigone champion as spontaneous, voluntarist choice, the caprine mimic of freedom. To choose life is pleromic abundance that can only be attained in obedience to the demands of Love. The mysterious sacrificial obedience of Abraham and Isaac prefigures the Christ who achieves victory over our sin and death on the Cross.
For the sake of Creation, which is called to theosis, the Christ bears our evil dreams into the abyss of oblivion. Only when ascesis separates us from identification with the evil dream does the wonder of Gifted Natures radiate Resurrected Life, the very goodness that God declares as the truth of our destiny.
Admittedly, I had to look up the meaning of bifurcation, and then, after reading your words about Genesis here, it caused a remembrance of a prior conversation:
"Genesis begins with God progressively speaking the world into existence through his Word; a sequence that concludes with the Creation of Man on the Sixth Day. The next chapter of Genesis seems to take up the same narrative but with a sort of variation on the theme, and a retelling of the Creation of Man in much greater material intimacy; here, God gets his hands dirty, as it were, by forming Adam out of the dust of the Earth and inspiring into him the breath of life from his own mouth, and later carving Eve out of his very rib. Already in the second chapter, Man is collaborating in the ongoing process of Creation, as when Man as Adam names the animals after Man....."
Now, I maintain, as previously discussed, that herein in Genesis that we are dealing with the most seminal of all bifurcations, i.e., God and Lord God. God is Father of the first six days, which includes Man in the Image of God, but not the Likeness, which requires a material creation. Thus, a Lord God appears at the point of Genesis 2:4. Identified variously as YHWH, Jehovah, Demiurgos, Divine Architect, etc., this is the One who forms Man from the dust of the Earth (now a mineral sphere) and breathes the life of the soul into his nostrils. Now, it seems to me, *Likeness* can truly begin because an Earth bearing the Laws of Nature is required. And, we know the Lord God made this happen. The Geosphere of God was added on to by the Biosphere of the Lord God.
How else could there be any meaning to what Christ tells His disciples in the Gospel of John, chapters 14 to 17? He goes to the Father; no two ways about it. That becomes the security of their salvation, including the Holy Spirit.
Permit me an extended meditation provoked by your thoughts; there are always levels of meaning. There is much insight here. One cannot develop a theological anthropology in a terse message, but my view is that at the highest anagogic level, judgment is eschatological, and that as you also implicitly recognize, the sheep and the goats are intrapersonal as much as interpersonal. The division of the two is equivalent to the separation of the wheat from the tares.
I believe the burden of the wise man or woman is to preserve this awareness, and that the breath of prayer is the weaving spell of the Holy Spirit. I think relation is a primary constituent of Being, not merely elective, so that persons, indeed, the entire cosmos ultimately is the unbroken wedding robe of Sophianic beauty.
The act of division and separation is intimately a sword that pierces every heart. What this means is adverted to in Pavel Florensky's The Pillar and Ground of the Truth. There are effigies, dead letters, the evil mask of our fallen existence. We all bear them as burdens, these parasitic lies that feed upon vain desire with craven egoic weakness. In order to live, one must be broken, cured of attachment to the unreal shadows that nonetheless pretend at life.
This pretense has its own metaphysics, which like all error, proliferates into bad infinity, a wandering multiplicity. Living death is what modern and postmodern epigone champion as spontaneous, voluntarist choice, the caprine mimic of freedom. To choose life is pleromic abundance that can only be attained in obedience to the demands of Love. The mysterious sacrificial obedience of Abraham and Isaac prefigures the Christ who achieves victory over our sin and death on the Cross.
For the sake of Creation, which is called to theosis, the Christ bears our evil dreams into the abyss of oblivion. Only when ascesis separates us from identification with the evil dream does the wonder of Gifted Natures radiate Resurrected Life, the very goodness that God declares as the truth of our destiny.
This is an instant classic of Theoria, Max. It inspires me to read those stories again.
thanks, Steve
Admittedly, I had to look up the meaning of bifurcation, and then, after reading your words about Genesis here, it caused a remembrance of a prior conversation:
"Genesis begins with God progressively speaking the world into existence through his Word; a sequence that concludes with the Creation of Man on the Sixth Day. The next chapter of Genesis seems to take up the same narrative but with a sort of variation on the theme, and a retelling of the Creation of Man in much greater material intimacy; here, God gets his hands dirty, as it were, by forming Adam out of the dust of the Earth and inspiring into him the breath of life from his own mouth, and later carving Eve out of his very rib. Already in the second chapter, Man is collaborating in the ongoing process of Creation, as when Man as Adam names the animals after Man....."
Now, I maintain, as previously discussed, that herein in Genesis that we are dealing with the most seminal of all bifurcations, i.e., God and Lord God. God is Father of the first six days, which includes Man in the Image of God, but not the Likeness, which requires a material creation. Thus, a Lord God appears at the point of Genesis 2:4. Identified variously as YHWH, Jehovah, Demiurgos, Divine Architect, etc., this is the One who forms Man from the dust of the Earth (now a mineral sphere) and breathes the life of the soul into his nostrils. Now, it seems to me, *Likeness* can truly begin because an Earth bearing the Laws of Nature is required. And, we know the Lord God made this happen. The Geosphere of God was added on to by the Biosphere of the Lord God.
How else could there be any meaning to what Christ tells His disciples in the Gospel of John, chapters 14 to 17? He goes to the Father; no two ways about it. That becomes the security of their salvation, including the Holy Spirit.