by 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.