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mutable things or things that are mutable

Postby Robert » July 22nd, 2008, 7:28 pm

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Postby cyranorox » July 22nd, 2008, 9:49 pm

re: angelic beings: that sounds odd, but i am perfectly content to imagine an angel for every real and imaginary number. Angel of the Square Root of Minus One may have astonishing wings, indeed. and the Angel of Pi's wings extend to the liimt of vision, like the Gryffon in Dante.
An angel of arithmetic; an angel of logic. No worse, really, than an angel for each star or stream.

Being in general: divided into the Creator and created. nothing created is eternal. It's been decades since my graduate philosophy classes and most of my reading has been in OC thought since then. Being, as the West used to think, is analogous. Being, absolutely, belongs to the Trinity and created beings have only an analogous, contingent being - Man, preeminently, as the Image and [originally] Likeness.

the Resurrection will renew the material creation, and mankind. However, one for one claims quickly run into trouble, since, as you know, material things have no fixed identity.

I take it you are principally asking if abstractions and ideas, or processes and the angels. I think the OC primarily views the invisible creation as the angelic powers, and any world or field they use in their own places. I dont think there is much warrant for believing these willl suffer essential change, though we have to be careful, because the influx of mankind, and the realization of the subordination of angels to men [i for one am not ready for this] may in fact be change of the sort you are considering.

The rest, what i think you mean by universals, are really subsets or dependencies of persons, as thoughts, energies, etc. and have no separate being. So, for example, Justice may exist as an angel [or many], and does exist as a non-essential contained in the being of men - and these are not the same, but not absolutely disjunct either.

For the OC, being is shared and interpenetrates. I don't stop at my skin, and men are members of each other, of Christ, and of human nature. The paradigm is the Being of Christ; as the Eucharist, as the members of the church, as the Resurrected Person, perhaps as the beggar you gave a buck. Things coinhere, as Chas. Williams put it.

An identity is that which is written on a white stone, that those who enter the kingdom will be given. It is also what we appropriate from Christ: "As many has have been baptized in to Christ, have put on Christ". And, it is the name and being we receive in baptism, which again is the first two examples, in a form, and from a point of view, possible in the narrative of our life.

Identity flows like a champagne fountain; the material world receives identities from man, as in the image of Adam naming the beasts. It attends us and depends on us; it is divided into beings, entities, identities primarily as we divide it.
Last edited by cyranorox on July 22nd, 2008, 10:37 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Postby postodave » July 22nd, 2008, 9:51 pm

If I can intrude, I think this has become an argument about values and if one person says they would only value life if it were eternal and another says they could value it if it were temporary then I don't see that either is likely to persuade the other. I think Lewis is very helpful on this because he believed in God and strove to serve him for a year or so at the start of his conversion to theism without any belief in any kind of afterlife; he always thought that helped him get his perspective right. He says the God of the Hebrews is like a fairytale king pretending to be a peasant who has all the riches of eternal life but asks for the devotion of his lover with no promise of reward. It's a nice image.

To cut back to something we were discussing lifetimes ago - last night - Robert you asked me what the alternative to creation ex nihilo was. Can I be clear that it is not a doctrine I doubt, though I think it and even its more radical companion pancreation, the belief that God created everything are taught in the New Testament. I think the Old Testament is less clear about this. As to what the Fathers before Athanasius thought I don't think they anymore than the earlier Jewish writers had a clear common teaching on this. Until recently I would have taken the view that Justin Martyr was an example of someone in the early Church who believed God created out of pre-existent chaotic stuff as several writers have affirmed but I have been given arguments that this was not the case on a rather good Orthodox site called Monachos: It's about third post from the end on this long page; the post is by M.C. Steenberg.

And now I have mentioned good old Justin I can't resist asking JRosemary whether she has read his dialogue with Trypho and what she makes of it.

Jumping back to the point. The suggestion Karen Armstrong made was that by emphasizing creation ex nihilo Athanasius made creation seem fragile. Following on from that you can say that creation which has its own non-eternal nature is made eternal when it is taken into Christ. The divine became man that man and all creation might become divine.
So I drew my sword and got ready
But the lamb ran away with the crown
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Postby cyranorox » July 23rd, 2008, 5:57 pm

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Re: mutable things or things that are mutable

Postby Adam » July 24th, 2008, 3:28 am

"Love is the only art that poorly imitates nature."
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Postby cyranorox » July 24th, 2008, 5:02 pm

Adam, we generally agree. Creation, from the view of eternity, is not a trajectory, but a landscape, as it were. That also entails the view that the Creation is not like a man launching a ball, ie, not like God at the beginning of a sequence, but God seeing all spacetime at a coup. For us, that equates to instantaneous creation - creation in the living moment, not the farthest past.

But are we events? [when people refer to Christ as 'the Christ-event' it sets my teeth on edge] Are we only experiences and ideas? Mutability is not change only, but change into another kind of thing. We do change in baptism, in the sacraments, so I count human hypostases as mutable, but the wear and tear changes of biography don't seem to me to constitute change away from the original kind. Death is the great mark of mutability, but death is changed, and the tearing apart of a man, the period of separation of spirit and body, may, in view of the relation of time to eternity, have no duration.

But i still think mutability depends on categories we apply. It is not obvious to me that electrons are mutable. If it all comes down to strings, though they be the harps of the angels, there is nothing in the theory to show them as mutable. Constructions and agglomerations from the strings, from atoms to tangible objects, are certainly mutable, but if you drill down to the least units I think the concept of mutability fails.
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Postby JRosemary » July 24th, 2008, 9:01 pm

Postodave--I'll look up that dialogue and report back.

Adam--I haven't seen you in ages! I missed you--welcome back!

Robert--I find your proposal that anything that is not eternal lacks value...well, shattering. (I think you're falling too hard for Plato here!) I don't think the question has ever been, 'Is there life after death?' The question is, 'Is there life before death?'

(The person who can't bring herself to love something unless she's certain that it will never pass away is a person who is, I think, experiencing death in the midst of life. There are no guarantees about any world to come. But we know that we're alive here and now. In my view, we might as well thank God for giving life to us and make the most of it.)
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Re: mutable things or things that are mutable

Postby mitchellmckain » July 25th, 2008, 12:02 am

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Re: mutable things or things that are mutable

Postby Adam » July 25th, 2008, 3:20 am

::Interesting. I take the opposite view that all things when their totality is included are immutable. This is because change can only occur within some larger structure. What makes the things of this created universe seem so temporary and mutable is that they are all part of a single whole with a very well defined (even mathematically defined) strutures (physical law) of space and time, which all this change and mutability are a well defined part of.

Alteration can only occur within a larger structure, but mortality is a function of an individual event, and the mutability of all created things demands that we view all things truly as events, strung together by conception.

::I deny that God is incapable of creating anything permanent...

I did not assert that God is incapable of creating anything permanent, though I shall now, in a roundabout way, by claiming that "creating a thing that is permanent" is parallel to "creating an impermanent thing that is permanent," because I believe that things are events.

::...and so I see absolutely no justifications for such claims.

We are simply theorizing here, and frankly this is the sort of theoretical exercise in which I have no actual opinion staked. The idea that I was asserting "justification for claims" seems to take the matter a bit too seriously.

::Just because this seems to be the nature of this physical world does not mean that everything created must have the same nature.

I have not asserted empirical evidence to be inducted to a larger principle; it seems a gross underestimation of my theory to contend that I am essentially claiming that eventually my pet animals always die and therefore everything is mutable. Instead I have moved from one theory to another, that all things are mutable because all things are events, words from a speaker.

::Indeed I do not believe that what you say is in any way applicable to the angels, for example.

I do have a personal opinion staked in this particular matter: I certainly do not believe in angels. Different activities of God are assigned to different creatures, given different names; angels are a perfect illustration of impermanence.

::The physical world is indeed one in which dynamic structures play a very significant role and this is because this universe was created for the purpose of life and dynamic structure is the basis of life.

"Life" is a dynamic structure: it is a conceptual construction placed upon distinct events; "life" is like "history," not a thing, but a narrative.

::Woa... Whenever there is someone saying that some aspect of the reality that is experienced by others must be a delusion, I have to shake my head and heave a big sigh. However, it behooves to try and see some truth in this in order to attempt some passage beyond the implicit communication barrier.

Shall I be grateful that you are willing to entertain my apparent falsehoods in order that conversation can proceed? I do not see the intellectual relevance of this paragraph.

I used the word "trick" to emphasize the subconscious activity of conceptualization; the act of perceiving passes imperceptibly into the act of conceiving. I was not suggesting that it was a delusion from which we need to be freed.

::And so I will point to what I said previously that dynamic structure is the basis of life, and thus we can say that from the perspective of human existence which we require to be a living existence, we can indeed say that looking for immutability and stasis is delusional (is misguided) in the sense that life is not found in these things, but that these actually represent a form of death.

We agree that immutability is death, not because I believe life is itself a thing that must change, but because I believe life is a multiplicity of events which are structured and ordered into linear time by the limits of perception, and immutability would be the cessation of events.

::That is not even what I would call eternal existence let alone eternal life. The only thing that could possibly call life is something that includes growth, excitement, creativity, love, wonder, challenges, passion, and learning. So "eternal life" would have to be an experience of these things that is limitless and neverending.

If God is the ultimate mind, and individual things are constructed into complex identities by the conceptions of minds, then the remembrance of God is the activity that will perpetually group and regroup events into a personhood: the river will continue to be a river because I will be there every spring to call whatever water happens to be running through a particular place to be that same river: the river lives forever as an identity constructed by the conceptual activity of my mind.

::Thus it is my metaphysics that by our spiritual existence we already have an immutable or eternal nature but this offers no hope or promise because the interest of human existence is not in being some frozen statue in a museum for others to admire, but in being alive and that we cannot have by our own nature by ourselves but (ultimately) only in a mutable (growing) relationship with the infinite - i.e. with God.

The only eternity is death. Life is change, and change is the progressive occurrence of individual events. Words will continue to be spoken and the sentence will go on.

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Postby Adam » July 25th, 2008, 3:30 am

::But are we events? [when people refer to Christ as 'the Christ-event' it sets my teeth on edge] Are we only experiences and ideas? Mutability is not change only, but change into another kind of thing. We do change in baptism, in the sacraments, so I count human hypostases as mutable, but the wear and tear changes of biography don't seem to me to constitute change away from the original kind. Death is the great mark of mutability, but death is changed, and the tearing apart of a man, the period of separation of spirit and body, may, in view of the relation of time to eternity, have no duration.

We are not things that change in baptism. Our name is a conception that is reassigned to an entirely different thing.

This is not to say that our identity is indistinct: there is nothing faint about being a conception in the mind of the Lord Almighty. But nonetheless that is what we are, beads strung together on a string.

::But i still think mutability depends on categories we apply. It is not obvious to me that electrons are mutable. If it all comes down to strings, though they be the harps of the angels, there is nothing in the theory to show them as mutable. Constructions and agglomerations from the strings, from atoms to tangible objects, are certainly mutable, but if you drill down to the least units I think the concept of mutability fails.

German philosophy has a tendency to treat characteristics or potentials as essential but purpose or activity as nonessential: Jim is not "a person who makes jokes," Jim is a "funny guy" and funny people have the potential to actually make jokes. Electrons as units maintain their character, but if their activity changes, then they are not merely the same thing doing a different activity, they are a different thing. At least, according to my initial assertion that all things are events.

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Postby Adam » July 25th, 2008, 3:31 am

"Love is the only art that poorly imitates nature."
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Postby Adam Linton » July 25th, 2008, 4:01 am

we have not loosely through silence permitted things to pass away as in a dream
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Postby Robert » July 25th, 2008, 5:04 pm

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Postby Robert » July 25th, 2008, 5:10 pm

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Postby Robert » July 25th, 2008, 5:24 pm

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