Relda,

Karen Armstrong (The Battle for God) presents the reign of Isabella and Ferdinand as one of modernity. Spain was increasing her horizons. The Christian Church was not left behind. In fact, for a while, the two seemed conjoined. Granada had been conquered. The Muslims were “flushed out of Europe” and the Jews, who did not convert to Christianity, were killed or expelled. For the Christian Spaniards change was “empowering, liberating and enthralling”. For the vanquished the experience was, “coercive, invasive and destructive”. For me, Spain’s Medieval History reads not unlike The Thousand Year Reich, a new order for the fortunate some and oblivion for the unfortunate others. Both Medieval Spain and WWII Germany seem to have reasoned God is always “on the side of big battalions” (Voltaire).

The push towards modernity gave birth to a Counter-Reformation. “Ad fonts,” “back to the wellsprings !” (Erasmus). So, in the sixteenth century, there was tension between those whom would have logos before mythos, ridding the Church of centuries of doctrinaire accretions and ordodox others, like members of the Council Trent (1545-1563), whom established the Catholic Catechism.

Throughout the centuries the tension between logos and mythos has been sustained. Significantly, fundamentalism appears to rise out of this tension.

Armstrong suggests mythos is in the domain of the psyche and hidden. Logos is in the domain of conscious and pragmatic. When logos encroaches on mythos, there is a fundamental revolt. When mythos encroaches logos, remarks are strongly critiqued. Yet, logos and mythos are complementary, as presented by Armstrong.

Even if Moses Parting of The Waters is myth, the myth is unimportant, because the people of the period knew what parting of the water stories (there are several) symbolised, to the pyche. The people indwell (Polanyi) in this realisation. Likewise, if I might take the liberty to extrapolate, Creationism, as a fundamentalist response, is inappropriate, because Creationism tries to counter Logos – but the locus of the Biblical stories does not stem from logos: This fundamentalist response is outside science (logos) and counter-intuitively is also outside of mythos.

Relda,
I must read up more on Sufiism. As a shopfront it is certainly more attractive than the present shrill contender in Islam. The gentle humour and poking fun at human frailty and deficiencies in human logic in tales of Mulla Nasreddin (eg in Idris Shah's books) is far indeed from the Taliban!

I was intrigued by Jalal ud-Din Rumi's division of the religious into two groups: lovers of ritual, and lovers of God. It's clear Sufiism is of the second group, contrasting with Islam seen as only a set of observances.

When I apply the dichotomy to Christianity, however, I get confused. A week ago, by invitation, I attended a High Mass at an Anglican church. It was all ritual, ceremony, vestments, incense, organ and choir - but spiritually dead: three scripture readings picked at random, totally unrelated, with no expository preaching. "Churchianity", not Christianity, I thought. No detectable element of "hunger and thirst for righteousness" which is the clear objective of more evangelical Protestantism.

I would put evangelical Protestantism in Jalal ud-Din Rumi's second group, with Sufiism. Would High Anglicans appreciate being included in the first group, with Wahhabi Islam? <Grin>

It's interesting that the West, while stripping itself of spirituality, nonetheless contains a fair number of people manifesting underlying spirituality, however anarchically they pursue it - the God meme, as Dawkins puts it. Many have abandoned traditional belief systems for "New Age", through a pick-and-mix bewildering variety of forms of self-obsession, in Eastern religions, Tarot, Astrology, channelling, numerology, Theosophy, Scientology, extraterrestrial fixations, "self-development" with as many varieties as cheese - and nature worship (Wicca and paganism). And they ask traditional Christians how can you be so gullible as to believe all that stuff?!

William James ('The Varieties of Religious Experience') said “Not God, but life, more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life, is in the last analysis, the end of religion.” A plausible summary, but not all embracing: it surely doesn't apply to Jalal ud-Din Rumi's first group?!

Thank you constance, relda (and Oliver, as far as I could understand you) for an interesting exchange of historical and biblical facts and interpretations.

Oliver,
>>By an abstract God, I meant something other worldly or super-mundane.<<

Again, if I understand you properly, you mean what others call the Divine, sometimes Godhead, or what Paul Tillich sees as the first (of three) meanings of the object of theism: "Theism can mean the unspecified affirmation of God. Theism in this sense does not say what it means if it uses the name of God..." (Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be, p. 183). It is what any educated 21st century theist, e.g. Christian, has to believe in as a necessary presupposition for his/her particular faith (determined by his/her personal cultural, educational etc background).

You still did not say what you would call an “abstract electron”, however I gather from what you wrote that you agree that there are different understandings (including misunderstandings and “non-understandings“) of both “God” and “electron”, these differences being given by the historical, educational etc context of the subject trying to understand these concepts.

Excuse me if a do not comment on your excursions into mathematics. Mathematics is simply the third level (after sensual perception and instruments) that we need to contact, understand and interact with the material world around us. It is irrelevant to a belief in God, in whatever form you conceive Him, except as the vehicle for logical thinking.

Only on a very private level can mathematics serve as the repository of concepts and relations helping the subject to understand, to explain to himself/herself, metaphysical concepts. The ability to communicate these private insights to others presupposes a proper understanding of the mathematics involved.

It has been an interesting and educational thread.
Oliver, your earlier statement:
"The Greeks and Romans did not see their gods as elusive, e.g., Priam sees* Hermes in The Iliad and to Romans the Idea of a divine emperor was not blasphemy"
made me remember Julian Jaynes. I have often wondered if (and I mean no offence to any contributor to this thread) there are not more than a few bicameral minds still out there.

Oliver,

Karen Armstrong, as a former Catholic nun and now religious historian certainly gives insight and some provocation on “the long battle of mythos and logos”. Armstrong contends that the world's great belief systems - first, Judaism, Confucianism, Buddhism and Greek philosophy, thereafter Kabbalah, Christianity and Islam - spring from, then reject, the mythological element in the human imagination, preferring the abstract, the rational, the ethical - that which Armstrong defines as Logos. Despite his probable aversion toward Armstrong, Sells was perhaps attempting to get this point across when referring to the West’s loss in emphaisis on Eastern Christian mysticism and the Cappadocian Fathers (or Cappadocian philosophers), particularly Gregory of Nyssa.

I certainly agree with Armstong when she says, “...Muslims should be allowed to come to modernity on their own terms and make a distinctive Islamic contribution to it" – just as Christianity has.

The fundamentalist response (i.e. Creationism) is, I agree, what you term “inappropriate”. Logos, as Armstong contends, must correspond to facts, while mythos she says, is yoked to transformative ritual – so yes as you more or less suggest, Fundamentalists don’t tend to be all that deeply intuitive.

Glorfindel,

I think there a many nominal Christians who are indeed ‘confused’ by their own ritual and ceremony. ‘Churchianity’ seems only to further layer this confusion. As Karen Armstrong has been brought into the dialogue, it’s perhaps worthy to note her argument of myth as being inseparable from ritual, and that both are a kind of practical psychology. For her, myth is a symptom of our metaphysical anxiety, an unreciprocated appeal to god/s ‘who have let us down’.

Perhaps educated people from scientific cultures tend to think of myths as either upmarket fairy-stories, primitive attempts at history-writing or simple-minded efforts to explain why there are seasons and rainbows etc. – but they miss the point. Even if, “a myth”, as Thomas Mann once said, “is a lived fiction” they continue, in their combination with ritual, to give meaning and value in the face of death and suffering

George,

My trek into mathematics was an endeavour to relate to your interests. I did so, on the assumption Christian mathematicians might feel that an atheist* would better understand God, if said atheist understood deep mathematical concepts. Here, as stated, I see abstract concepts in mathematics a weak metaphor for the transcendental. Yet, I agree, the simple understanding of God (Abraham) can be likened to seeing an electron as a small, solid ball.

As for an abstract concept of the electron, I might try the impossible and envisage an electron’s position and velocity at once or, as a buddle of quarks having bounded energy and charge, negative for matter or a positive charge for antimatter (positron).

It is very hard to conceive of an electron, without a (false) mental image. In my mind’s eye, I see a blurred white ellipsoid against a dull black background - Surely, an impoverished vision. The abstract electron might be described in terms of an internal truth, i.e., its constitution and its energies; or, alternatively, an external truth - its manifestations at the atomic level. Basil of Caesarea in describing God made a similar distinction between ousia (essence) and energeiai (operations). Mathematics objectifies the electron, yet its essence emerges from a quantum world and the Electron itself is a part of the Gestalt of a larger reality.

Envisaging the abstract electron might be compared with trying to see all surfaces of a cube at the same time or the Trinity of Gregory of Nazianizus:

“So sooner do I conceive of the One than I am illumined by the splendour of the Three; no sooner do I distinguish Three than I am carried back to the One. When I think of any of the Three, I think of Him as the whole, and my eyes are filled, and the greater part of what I am escapes me.” (Oration 29:6 – 10)”

In sum, contemplation (theoria) of either the Christian Trinity or the abstract election is challenging. Both have a reality in more than one realm.

[* I see myself as a sceptic rather than an atheist.]