(June 11, 2023 at 9:39 am)emjay Wrote: pretty much static,
Yes, it's a strange sort of idea. They say that God takes no action at all, yet causes all things to happen.
This is because, as the Good, and the end point of all our desires, all our actions are aimed ultimately toward God. You were right, earlier, when you said that any action we take, even scratching, is aimed at achieving some kind of good result. It is our nature to move toward the good, so that even if the Good is static, it is the cause of our motion. Not as something that pushes us, but as something toward which we are motivated to move.
Quote:and thus very hard to conceptualise.
Extremely hard! I agree!
We have to talk of it through allegory, symbol, what-it-is-like, rather than what-it-is. This is frustrating for people who want all truth to come through simple declarative sentences.
Ultimately I think the apophatic Christians have the right idea -- they admit that they just can't say it.
This is not only Christians, though. Kobo Daishi, who brought esoteric Buddhism to Japan, said that reading the esoteric scriptures was too hard, and that we understand it best through painting. Not because the paintings are diagrams, like Ikea instructions, but because they give us the image of the truth. (A year ago I visited Ishiyama Temple outside Kyoto and felt a kind of Platonic experience -- it was so fantastically beautiful that I felt I had understood something metaphysical, which I know I will never be able to verbalize adequately.)
