Saturday, November 26, 2011
The Weapon of Self
Aristotle's definition of the great-souled (megalopsychis) person includes HUBRIS (if I remember) and hubris is related to PRIDE. Also of interest is that the Greek New Testament term for sin traces back to Aristotles' Poetics and is origin...ally a term from archery which means "missing the mark" : HAMARTIA. This may seem like quite a non sequitur but these days I study Chinese Hanji characters and the character for "I, self" 我 Wǒ INCLUDES on the right-hand side, the character for spear, weapon, 戈; pinyin: gē , halberd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halberd ... I suspect that the ancient notion of self/personhood involved a sort of egoism or pride which is at odds with the Christian notion of humility and especially with the notion of divine kenosis or emptying of self in death upon the cross. It is ironic that the Christian government closed the Academy and the scholars retired to Persia and Baghdad where the Muslims acquired the much of the learning to preserve it and bring it back to the West indirectly. Moses Maimonides did such a massive job of codification, redaction, consolidation of Jewish thought and died about 20 years before Aquinas was born. Aquinas in his Summa seems to quote Aristotle as frequently as he quotes Paul. The Greek Orthodox by contrast never seem to refer to Plato or Aristotle even once. One startling watershed/divide between East and West is if we compare what 6th century Maximus the Confessor (who wrote more than 1/3 of the Philokalia) says about faith with regard to understanding, which is DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSED to what Aquinas says in the Summa. Aquinas decides that understanding is prior to faith and that faith proceeds from understanding. Maximus states that faith comes FIRST as a gift from God given through God's foreknowledge from his pre-eternal vantage point beyond time/space and the causal matrix, give to certain individuals with the foreknowledge of how each individual will receive that give of faith with their free will (which is no way impaired by Gods foreknowledge) and that FROM THE GIFT of faith proceeds UNDERSTANDING, but ONLY as much understanding as is necessary to be salvific for that individual. It is also ironic that Maimonides great opponents in Muslim Spain were the Mutakallim who were a very Aristotelean Muslim sect and yet later Islam (and present day Islam) is very much unlike the Aristotelian Mutakallim.
