I was recently reading JND Kelly's Early Christian Doctrines, a classic survey about the best ways to pleasure marsupials. In a (very) roundabout way, I think the book's opening chapters put into perspective some of the issues that we've raised in this thread.
The chapters set the stage for the Church by discussing its intellectual milieu in the 1st -4th c. In short, it discusses middle Platonism, groyperism, Stoicism, and Gnosticism (Christian and otherwise). Reading Kelly's account, what struck me for the first time was the extent to which ancient religion-cum-philosophy depends on the principle "like seeks like" or "like unto like" (simile simili cognoscitur). The Platonists and Stoics believed in some splinter of the divine (variously defined as souls, sparks, intellect/mind, etc., and with varying degrees of materiality) in each of us. Proper discipline is to make the, say, soul more like the One Supreme Good (God, though often construed as utterly transcendent, and not in the half-assed Christian way) through purification, asceticism, contemplation, etc. The guiding metaphors include ascent (“up” the levels, for the Platonists, and thus back to the One) and return (what was once animated, for the Stoics, goes back to the big heap). Platonists often mix the two—ascend to the One, yes; also, knowledge is but recollection of the forms (i.e., you were once there). (My terminology, re: the middle Platonists and the Stoics, might be off, but I don't think it affects the argument in any significant way).
Gnostic Christianity was an even loopier version of the above mixed with Christian characters, furries, demiurges, higher and lower figures in the pleroma, etc.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity would develop from those early Church thinkers who more clearly retain this idea about an ontological homology between us and God. The homology is clearest in the concept of theosis (i.e. deification of the faithful believer), an idea that the Roman church never had much use for. Why did the EO stick with this stuff? I'm guessing it helps that they're all reading in Greek, not filthy Latin.
Western Christianity seems to have kept the structure of a return but redefined its parts and steps to severely temper the terms of the ontological homology. Key revisions had to accommodate competing ideas about creatures & the creator (i.e., a real restriction on our divinity-cum-likeness), original sin (the obstacle to 'return'), and grace (the mechanism for 'return'). In part, that's why western Christianity needs creatio ex nihilo: the relationship between us and God cannot ever be an identity, but only a (very restricted likeness). Creatio ex nihilo eliminates the naturalness or cyclicalness of the like-unto-like return in order to instead affirm the sovereignty of God: God gifts your sorry ass the prospect of grace, which is especially nice because you ain't godlike or divine, but created.
Basically, western Christian theology works from the premise that you don't call God. God will call you. In sum, western Christianity (at the risk of radical oversimplification) puts "return" into a vise by asking us to accept our absolute shittiness and our ontological difference from God.
Enlightenment-era materialism gives us another variation on severely restricting this ontological homology, this idea about “like unto like." At best, the resulting ways of thought can accommodate us as thinking substances (but not necessarily divine ones). As such, our ‘likeness’ to God—if we can still call it that—comes from the exercise of reason, moral autonomy, freedom. Kant enters the building. The guiding metaphors now likewise shift from return and ascent to progress, self-improvement, and self-perfection.
I asked chatGPT to identify post-Enlightenment alternatives to materialism that do not just reproduce this older model of 'ontological homology.' It gave me some balderdash, but one point seems suggestive: modern alternatives refuse materialism (duh) and replace 'like unto like' with relationality: how do utterly different fields (i.e. divine/non-divine, im/material) interact? The Protestants, Catholics, existentialists, and romantics had lots of answers about how to traverse this new gulf: feeling, analogy, modified theosis, paradox, authenticity, etc.
Spitballing here, but I think one promise of contemporary ritual (as opposed to sincerity) is that it offers a form of relationality that can mediated between the individual and the social, not the individual and the divine.
The chapters set the stage for the Church by discussing its intellectual milieu in the 1st -4th c. In short, it discusses middle Platonism, groyperism, Stoicism, and Gnosticism (Christian and otherwise). Reading Kelly's account, what struck me for the first time was the extent to which ancient religion-cum-philosophy depends on the principle "like seeks like" or "like unto like" (simile simili cognoscitur). The Platonists and Stoics believed in some splinter of the divine (variously defined as souls, sparks, intellect/mind, etc., and with varying degrees of materiality) in each of us. Proper discipline is to make the, say, soul more like the One Supreme Good (God, though often construed as utterly transcendent, and not in the half-assed Christian way) through purification, asceticism, contemplation, etc. The guiding metaphors include ascent (“up” the levels, for the Platonists, and thus back to the One) and return (what was once animated, for the Stoics, goes back to the big heap). Platonists often mix the two—ascend to the One, yes; also, knowledge is but recollection of the forms (i.e., you were once there). (My terminology, re: the middle Platonists and the Stoics, might be off, but I don't think it affects the argument in any significant way).
Gnostic Christianity was an even loopier version of the above mixed with Christian characters, furries, demiurges, higher and lower figures in the pleroma, etc.
Eastern Orthodox Christianity would develop from those early Church thinkers who more clearly retain this idea about an ontological homology between us and God. The homology is clearest in the concept of theosis (i.e. deification of the faithful believer), an idea that the Roman church never had much use for. Why did the EO stick with this stuff? I'm guessing it helps that they're all reading in Greek, not filthy Latin.
Western Christianity seems to have kept the structure of a return but redefined its parts and steps to severely temper the terms of the ontological homology. Key revisions had to accommodate competing ideas about creatures & the creator (i.e., a real restriction on our divinity-cum-likeness), original sin (the obstacle to 'return'), and grace (the mechanism for 'return'). In part, that's why western Christianity needs creatio ex nihilo: the relationship between us and God cannot ever be an identity, but only a (very restricted likeness). Creatio ex nihilo eliminates the naturalness or cyclicalness of the like-unto-like return in order to instead affirm the sovereignty of God: God gifts your sorry ass the prospect of grace, which is especially nice because you ain't godlike or divine, but created.
Basically, western Christian theology works from the premise that you don't call God. God will call you. In sum, western Christianity (at the risk of radical oversimplification) puts "return" into a vise by asking us to accept our absolute shittiness and our ontological difference from God.
Enlightenment-era materialism gives us another variation on severely restricting this ontological homology, this idea about “like unto like." At best, the resulting ways of thought can accommodate us as thinking substances (but not necessarily divine ones). As such, our ‘likeness’ to God—if we can still call it that—comes from the exercise of reason, moral autonomy, freedom. Kant enters the building. The guiding metaphors now likewise shift from return and ascent to progress, self-improvement, and self-perfection.
I asked chatGPT to identify post-Enlightenment alternatives to materialism that do not just reproduce this older model of 'ontological homology.' It gave me some balderdash, but one point seems suggestive: modern alternatives refuse materialism (duh) and replace 'like unto like' with relationality: how do utterly different fields (i.e. divine/non-divine, im/material) interact? The Protestants, Catholics, existentialists, and romantics had lots of answers about how to traverse this new gulf: feeling, analogy, modified theosis, paradox, authenticity, etc.
Spitballing here, but I think one promise of contemporary ritual (as opposed to sincerity) is that it offers a form of relationality that can mediated between the individual and the social, not the individual and the divine.
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