“We have come to a certain end of Western Civilization: Endings and Beginnings.” Concluding Lecture Foundation Year Programme 2016-17, the University of King’s College. April 10, 2017
Wayne J Hankey
Northrup Frye (U of Toronto † 1991) “Trends in Modern Culture,” The Heritage of Western Culture (1952), 110: on “Contemporary [American] Deism” “Wisdom is the human capacity to apply knowledge, and since knowledge is progressive, wisdom must be progressive too, so that the wisdom of the past derives its validity from its relevance to the present.” George Grant (Dalhousie and McMaster † 1988) from Technology and Empire: Perspectives on North America (1969). Charles Taylor (McGill & Oxford, born 1931) from The Malaise of Modernity (1991). Kant († 1801), Hegel († 1831), Marx († 1883), Nietzsche († 1900), & Heidegger († 1976). James Doull (Dalhousie † 2001), “Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?” (1970): “In antiquity Prometheus could be subdued and taught to live under the power of Zeus. But now he has captured the citadel of Zeus and founded technology on the sovereign right of the individual. The principle of the modern age is the unity of theoretical and practical. A more dangerous principle there could not be.” Frye writes: “liberal education, the pursuit of truth for its own sake … is an act of faith, a kind of potential or tentative vision of an end in human life.” (114) B. WESTERN CIVILIZATIONS: AN ALTERNATIVE STORY In 1997, we first started lectures on Plotinus († 270) and Neoplatonism. The lectures included not only blacks like St Augustine († 430; his mother, St Monica, was a Berber), but Persians: Al-Farabi († 950) & Ibn Sina († 1037); Syrians: Iamblichus († 330) & Dionysius (6th century); Jews and Moslems writing in Arabic in Spain: Moses Maimonides († 1204), Ibn Tufayl (12th century), Ibn Rushd (12th century); the greatest Neoplatonic syncretizing philosopher, Proclus († 485), was from Asia Minor, a religious and racial melting pot. As the Odyssey begins, Poseidon is visiting the pious Aethiopians for relief from the ever quarrelling Greeks. In the 4th century, Iamblichus used the Homeric types to mutually characterize Hellenes and barbarians. The old ‘pristine’ Eastern cultures give weight and wisdom. The Hellenes are “experimental by nature and eagerly propelled in all directions, having no proper balance,” they endlessly alter “according to [their] inventiveness and illegality.” Iamblichus, De Mysteriis, VII.5. I Hellenism in Arabic and Persian, our Forgotten Heritage. II. Jewish and Christian Hellenisms in Greek and Their Successors III. Bringing in the Latins IV. The modern western civilization of secularised Protestantism George Grant from Technology and Empire: “The absence of natural theology and liturgical comforts left the lonely soul face to face with the transcendent (and therefore elusive) will of God. This had to be sought and served not through our contemplations but directly through our practice. From the solitude and uncertainty of that position came the responsibility which could find no rest. That unappeasable responsibility gave an extraordinary sense of the self as radical freedom so paradoxically experienced within the predestinarian theological context. The external world was unimportant and indeterminate stuff (even when it was our own bodies) as compared with the soul’s ambiguous encounter with the transcendent.” Dr Eli Diamond on “Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age” (2007) in 2010: The ‘buffered self’, “is defined by its sense of self-completeness, invulnerability, being author of our own laws and master of the meaning of things. On the side of the self, through a gradual discipline, there emerges a rationality disengaged from powerful feeling and bodily processes, a narrowing of our sphere of intimacy and the emergence of an ideal of polite and civilized behaviour. On the side of the world, there is disenchantment of the world, a mechanized view of the universe, a view of time as homogeneous, and a leaving behind of a Platonic world of hierarchical complementarity. The result of this buffered self is the modern sense of power, an ability to self-govern, a feeling of self-reliance and self-sufficiency.” C. HOPE WITHIN AND WITHOUT I. Prince as the “Dionysian Christian”: an Itinerarium corporis in deum In “Prince as a Dionysian Christian” Dr Diamond says: “Dionysus is the God of the transgression of boundaries. And you see in Prince, embodied in his lyrics and his music and his person, the transgression of every single boundary imaginable. Between the sacred and the secular, and the body and the spirit, man, woman, racial divides and especially every single musical genre. … Prince, from the beginning, is intensely spiritual. But there’s a sense with him that you’re blocked from God if you’re living in the political, if you’re living in the social according to conventions, according to all these repressive binaries, and that it’s really by entering into and listening to our corporeal bodily nature that you actually have a feeling of self-transcendence through sexuality into the divine. II. The old west and Indigenous spiritualities Five aspects:1) Story and myth are essential and contain what reason cannot find or say on its own. 2) Philosophical or scientific reason is absolutely necessary and has its own laws, but it is not the highest form of knowing because inspired theologians tell the stories of spirit. Thus, reason and religion are different, but mutually necessary. 3) Effective healing and union with divinity comes through practices that cooperate with the natural rhythms, sacred places and times of the cosmic order, implanted by the Creator. Theory is not enough. The one who discerns and can invoke these realities is demanded, be she, or he, called priest, theurge or medicine man. 4) The cosmic mediating and animating spirits are manifold: saints, heroes, and daimonic beings. 5) Finally, the modern Disenchantment of the material cosmos is blindness. The cosmos is, as Thales, the first philosopher, said, “full of gods”. It is the living appearance of divinity, theophany, not dead matter. III. Jean Trouillard: Authentic Neoplatonism in a French Seminary Augustine, Confessions: “The three aspects I mean are being, knowing, willing. … Knowing and willing I am. I know that I am and I will. I will to be and to know. In these three … contemplate how inseparable in life they are: one life, one mind, and one essence, yet ultimately there is distinction, for they are inseparable, yet distinct. The fact is certain to anyone by introspection.” Jean Trouillard (Sulpicien † 1984) judged: “The danger is … to reduplicate the distinctions inherent in created spirit in order to found them in the Absolute. One of the weaknesses of the Augustinian tradition is … not to have understood that the requirements of criticism and the necessities of religious life converge in order to liberate Transcendence from all that would draw it back within what we can know. Without this transcendence we perpetually risk the quiproquo [exchange], as it results in the Hegelian dialectic where no one is able to say if this is of God, or this is of man, and which plays upon this ambiguity.” Stanislas Breton (Passionist † 2005), De Rome à Paris. Itinéraire philosophique (1992), 154: “What they inaugurated under the appearance of a return to the past was well and truly a new manner of seeing the world and of intervening in it, of practicing philosophy, of comprehending the givenness of religion, both in its Christian form and in its mystical excess; since, and I hasten to add, they reconnected the old West to its Far Eastern beyond.” IV. Eriugena’s Neoplatonism: A cultural miracle Philosophy turned from seeking rest and security above change and fate to the most radical creativity and humanism. What is before thought and being, the Nothing by Excess, Uncreated Creating, founds reality by creating itself in the human as its workshop. All things were created in the human. This optimistic unity, of physics, psychology, and theology, & of East and West, became the underlying assumption of every future western total system. A freedom within Neoplatonic western civilization opens it to the spirituality of the indigenous in this land where we can only live if both live in harmony. The Middle Ages seemed to be an end of civilization, in fact, there contemplation built a new one. Silence is the place where hope opens.
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Revitalizing religious studies for the twenty-first century and beyond: Why religious studies in western universities and elsewhere need a foundational overhaul
Sujay Rao Mandavilli
SSRN, 2024
The core objective of this paper is to infer and deduce why we believe there is a need to revitalize religious studies for the twenty-first century and beyond, and it is of paramount and extreme importance for society and science as a whole. The chief and principal objective therefore is to show and explain why we believe religious studies in western universities need a foundational overhaul, and doing so could be of vast and immense benefits to science and to allied fields of study. Therefore, we begin this paper by tracing the history of western universities from around the tenth century after Christ, and explore the impact they have had on scholarly thought-the history of writing and education and literacy in general is ignored for the purpose of this paper given the fact that we have already dwelt on it several times before, in our multiple papers and books. Likewise, the history of religion is also given the short shrift given the fact that we have probed and investigated in multiple times earlier. The very nature of religious studies are explored in this paper in a fairly great level of depth, and in granular detail, and along with it, the various schools of thought are also explored. Likewise, the interface between religious studies, and other fields of study such as anthropology, sociology, psychology and economics are also explored. The weaknesses of current approaches as we see them are suitably investigated and analyzed, and remediation measures are also recommended from our perspective. We hope, expect and believe that this will constitute a very important paper in twenty-first century social science.
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