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What Hacker News says
- Glory to God! I agree with you about the reality of Christianity. It took a long time (and I'm still working on it) for me to see the broken nature of my materialist viewpoints. By "broken" I mean there were SO many facets of my life as a human that I could not account for materialistically without invoking magic words like "emergence". Reading the Life of Moses by St. Gregory of Nyssa is what really started helping me understand the traditional worldview, and thereby understand scripture as well.
I would like to go to Mt Athos soon, but international travel is getting more and more tricky.
- No need, I have read David Bentley Hart's sources: Gregory of Nyssa, Isaac the Syrian [1], Maximus the Confessor, Symeon the New Theologian, Gregory Palamas †. Great thinkers, the "fathers", they really did a bang-up job merging Judaism and Greek Neoplatonism. Can't say you can't hear Plotinus' One every time Christians speak of God's Unity 3-in-1 and Filioque [2]. Lev Shestov's classical Athens and Jerusalem is a good summarization of the whole process.
My absolute bang-up theologian is however Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, he/they really took Plotinus to the max: "God is not only the cause of all being, but also of all non-being.", "The Divine Names", Chapter IV, section 7. That Greek ouden, non-being, taken shamelessly from the thoughts of Anaxagoras and Parmenides.
However, all these great Generative Pre-trained Transformer ramblings of the theologians (ChatGPT is the best theologian of all times, it can go on and on, till the gods come home) have nothing to do with the practice of religion. For all the books that I have read and hoarded, all the major religions, and some minor ones, would burn me at the stake, they are very jealous of each other.
The fact of the matter remains: for the past 3-4,000 years, probably as a side effect of humans coming together in such large numbers (5,000 years ago, the city Uruk had 50-80,000 inhabitants, absolutely unimaginable how they lived), this mental parasite, this bug (as in software) of a "Beyond", probably a remnant from the hundreds of thousand of years of searching for food beyond that hill, has plagued everything about us: our behaviour, our mores, our concepts. And in more recent times, it has allowed for the most vile of us to control all of us, from the Borgias to the House of Saud, not forgetting the local pedophile priest.
† I have also read Mr. Hart, of course, his best work is probably his thesis "Beauty, Violence, and Infinity: A Question Concerning Christian Rhetoric", all the core ideas are there: the atemporal fall, the salvation as free for all eschaton.
[1] I particularly remember this quote from Isaac the Syrian: "There will be a time when even the word 'god' will be forgotten". In one of his Ascetical Homilies.
[2] "The One is the absolute principle of all things, the ultimate ground of being, the transcendent source of all existence. It is the beginning and end of all things, the unchanging and eternal reality that underlies all that is mutable and transitory." (Enneads, V.3.1) The Enneads were written around the year 240, 400 years before Maximus the Confessor.
[3] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CE%BF%E1%BD%90%CE%B4%CE%AD%C...
