Wholesale Angels
All men crave knowledge by nature, that is the opening statement of Aristotle’s Metaphysics. Yet the good chunk of that great work, as well as some of the best passages ever written in metaphysics and theology, rather deal with the discipline of putting this craving in its natural confines, than attempting to incite it further.
In this podcast – an appendix to our ongoing series on traditional notions of destiny and Providence – we focus on attempts of those who try to cross this boundary and take more than is due to them; overstep the bounds of knowledge by not understanding its nature and its limits.
Strangely enough, those are people whose activities somehow always end up in a sort of religious marketing rendering them into wholesale agents on “the market of truth” with a claim to knowledge traditionally ascribed to angels – an total intuitive perception of the truth of the given subject and claim to prophetic insight.
They are wholesale angels, indeed. And they are so full of “spirit of prophecy”, that they cannot help but confuse the sound of expiration coming from their bowels for the pouring forth of the Holy Spirit.
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Branko Malić
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This is, in my view, the most crucial topic addressed here (and no comments so far..!? 🙂 ), and that is of course topic of “limits of knowledge”.
There is a great divide on that question on many levels across ideologies, religions, sciences etc.
So, of course it is not possible to exhaust it in format such as this namely, only scratch the surface. So, in principle, there are those who tend to put limits to human knowledge and those who argue there might be limits but we don’t know where they are, and those who argue there might not be limits. But, end the end of the day, we cannot form an epistemology of Angels, but only can attempt on epistemology of human knowledge.
So, what constitutes the nature of human knowledge and does it have limits?
Church makes big deal around that, they are very keen on keeping the limits in place. And everyone who tends to buy this way of thinking will nod to the advice of the wise Church fathers – keep away from the “vanity” that goes with the knowledge, human!
On top of that we have Kant and other “gatekeepers” who tried to keep those limits at the point where science started to threat good’ol limits to what can be known, e.g. how many teeth a horse should have.
So, there was always this problem and it became urgent and critical with explosion of science and technology or, as some might say – Modernity.
And, it will not be resolved by reminding that somewhere it is written that Angels have goods given knowledge unlike us humans.
No one believes in Angels in anycase, so statements about their knowledge made few thousand years ago doesn’t mean much.
So, all that is just same old tune we hear from the altars of our beloved mother Church – beware my children of seeking the knowledge, look only to this what was “given” to you, and that is exactly what you can hear from our altars.
So, here we have that one and same problem that modernity causes with all its sciences and gadgets and God knows what not.
Let’s say it: knowledge comes from devil as we know from the story from Eden.
But this whole construct of limits of knowledge is simply insufficient to defend us from the onslaught of irritating advance of materialistic science. Faith is to weak, revelation versus knowledge is to weak. All these are pseudo answers, last remaining holes where those who afraid of the knowledge could hide.
So, there is this fear obviously, where does it come from?
It probably was justified since there is a notion of “danger” that goes together with Promethean spirit.
All in all, this is topic of topics, and rightfully so. Because we all claim something that we know even when we claim that we know that we don’t know or *should* not know.
All that is claim to knowledge and claim to knowledge is the starting point. If we break the first step the journey is over before it started.
*some typos corrected in this version
” Let’s say it: knowledge comes from devil as we know from the story from Eden.”
Does it? Atheists or anti-christians in general as well as some pietistic Christians have a habit of misreading that one passage in Genesis and speak about the forbidden fruit of knowledge in general, when the text clearly speaks of a special type of knowledge- that is the knowledge of good and evil. This type of knowledge, to put it simply, is not knowledge in the true sense, but more like an intelligent ignorance.
Real knowledge comes only from God. Tiny bits of it, reflected in a dark mirror, are offered by the devil and called “The Knowledge”. But that is just a deceit.
@Mihai: fair enough, that is valid point but not essential. If you try to imply that the whole “complex” of the limits of knowledge and especially on certain types of knowledge doesn’t exist, I hope you can agree that on any level of analysis, that would not be the case.
I pick Bible or Church in general just to make some most prominent point and stir the controversy, so to speak.
I believe we could arrive to the same symptoms of the complex of limits to knowledge from various directions,and Church and its doctrine is only example. Perhaps even more interesting are examples coming from various new age/mystical conceptions of “direct knowledge”, which I think Branko moistly referred to in his critique, and I, for instance fully agree with such critique.
I don’t think tendencies Branko justifiably describes as “wholesale knowledge” are healthy, but I would differ in the general approach to certain types of knowledge.
For instance we see all those tendencies of destruction of every meaning or order, or even the attack on the thought itself from postmodernist thinkers. This certainly leads to chaos and nihilism and is quite devilish tendency in itself.
However, we cannot approach full merit by stopping at this critique of postmodernism (as only possible consequence of modernism).
This doesn’t offer refuge as long as on the opposite side of spectrum we have (materialistic) science who claims the right too all “real” knowledge, where implication is that all non-sensible conceptions of knowledge are unreal – including all sorts of metaphysics!
The only way to confront and go beyond the materialistic science is to claim ground of supra-sensible knowledge as legitimate and valid ground of human cognition. Certainly not yet fully developed. but still something worth pursuing.
So, I am talking about that point of distinction, I am certainly not in bed with wild newagers who obtain their limitless cosmic whatever in their weekend courses.
So, my point is more towards the finding the fertile ground between mad newagers extremes , as well as those who would like to put arbitrary boundaries of what is knowledge and what could be known.
I think the only open road is to push from present science towards Spirit by evolving the thought to next level – and that is making unity through cognition of relatedness of observable and supra-sensible.
@Coco il Subitaneamente Superbo, Cavaliere InterErrante,
By using the limitless possibilities of the human intellect and the enlightenment provided by my very own, unusually UGE intellectual capacity I’d wager that you, my dear chap, plopped out of your mother’s vazhine In the year of our lord Y2K, give or take one year(at most). And I achieved this amazing insight trough veneration and contemplation over the entrails of your late chicken, or comment, whatever. How amazing the deeds of great, ha? Such limitless potential, much wow, one chicken, one post. Thank you for showing me the boundless possibilities of this flesh of mine. Mortal man becomes an immortal god, check mate CHURCH FAGGS!
ECCE STARFUCKER! DAS COCO!
… aaand his faithful chicken, Subita Superbia the Wise.
Oh my dear @Vodoslav i think you missed the whole big circumference of the ball of theology, angeology, scientology, ideology, epistemology and , give or take, Augustinology and gnoseology. Anyway, Let us mortals remember how all those high flying angels ended up in the past! Vodoslav and mother Church is here to remind us. All in all, same paradigmatic situation repeats itself today as in the past: there are hopefull Galileos inviting fellowmen to look through the telescope to see Jupiter moons, and there are always those who would refuse the invite cause they already know what they need to know. Did someone mention indifference?
Let me get this straight. If a person, deeply aware of and deeply repelled by contemporary “magic pot” of universal gratification, makes a conscious decision to seek out a living, extant traditional faith based culture with the intent of becoming a part of it, we’re supposed to take such a motive as not being genuine enough? I’m sorry but I can’t agree with this. You not only cast doubt on the sincerity of the convert, but also on the faithful representatives tasked to induct him into the religion. In the case of Christians, it is the officially sanctioned priest and sponsor who introduce the neophyte to the basic tenets of the faith during the catechumen period, as well as the ceremony of baptism. Last but not least, there’s a certain implicit understanding that the conversion process itself represents the convergence of rational and conscious will with the supernatural force imparting upon it the status and quality of a faithful, with all the dues and privileges involved. At least that is what as far as I know is repeated every Sunday at Mass or Liturgy in “I acknowledge one baptism for the remission of sins…”
It is not my intent to “equate” religions, but I think the same case applies to a person who chooses to join a different tradition active in another part of the world.
So what exactly are we doubting here? The process of conversion itself or the decision to undergo it? If a person’s choice in this does not make them morally better off, then pardon me for asking, what good is your religion? Is it not the case that a daily repeated affirmation of self denial, humility and service to others, are apt to quickly knock these maximalist ideas out of one’s head? As for carrying, in the eyes of the mainstream, an unacceptable political system of beliefs, you the author and any sincere reader of this site are already complicit of this in good measure.
There do exist people whose flavor of political extremism (or occultism) melds into an ebullience of religious sentiment. Case in point is the legacy of the handsome and mysterious Corneliu Codreanu, who to this day still inspires legions of youths with passionate fantasies of spamming blessed hammer on the secret Jew level. You sometimes see such individuals on message boards where esoterically minded persons congregate. Their choice of spiritual identification is mostly confined to the fake identity they create on the internet, rather than any deliberate choice on their behalf to adhere to its strictures and moral limitations.
In truth, there is a threat of religiously motivated political extremism independently manifesting, as can be often seen, in any tradition regardless of how “true” or orthodox it sees itself.
No, haven’t meant that.
Interestingly enough I’m in the midst of a book right now by Mark Sedgwick which traces the life stories of many key figures of the Traditionalist so called movement, especially the way they jump from one religion to another in search of whichever one represents the “primordial truth” for them. But as far as I can understand, the appeal of people like Guenon is precisely in that he gives something for the modern minded reader to turn his head towards, concerning the hermeneutical approach by which past cultures can be assuaged, which is taken to be almost completely succeeded by the current way of thinking. This approach can very easily be misleading, but one can also notice that without it, we might as well forget about how the “present perfect” influences our modernity to this day.