Supernatural truth and cognitive process /part 5/

in #godflesh6 years ago (edited)

Everything Jeremiah prophesied at the cost of his own life collapsed, no purpose, no way, no sense ... (This is precisely the border situation of existentialism). But there is something new going on here. God's prophet exclaims: "Lord, it is enough that you exist! "There is something invincible in the ruins, which rises with colossal power and overcomes the impudence of logic. Faith gives the new dimensions of the hope and outlines of further prospects. The struggle is over, it is just beginning - a struggle for "the possibility of the impossible".

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Jaspers, who has perceived the real existential moment of the surviving supernatural truth, does not stop there. He is best known for his Theory of the Comprehensive (das Umgreifende) and for the "ciphers" as the language of the transcendent. God - Jaspers determines - is not the subject of knowledge and sensory experience. Faith does not originate from the knowledge of the world, but it grows from the freedom of man. God is thinking in the images taken from our surrounding material reality or in the analogies with the human personality. Any idea of ​​his nature, however, is like a cloak that comes down to our sight. God is not always, what we are imagining for Him. The true attitude of man to God is expressed in the Bible: "Do not make a poem and no image of what is above the heavens that are down to the earth, and what is in the water under the earth; do not worship or serve them! for I am the LORD your God. . . "/ Ex. 20: 4-5), that is to say, for God, which is invisible to the ordinary human eyes, no idol must be raised, neither of a material or an intellectual nature. It is unthinkable and exalts any human notion, so no comparison would correspond to His incomprehensible nature. "Transcendence is no longer transcendence if caught in images. Just as a cipher we understand its language, but it itself is beyond every cipher. "

Jaspers maintains that understanding the meaning of the secret and symbolic language of the ciphers, casting light on the essence of the Comprehensive, is the key to understanding the transcendent with the forms of logical thinking. "The codes are objective - they belong to something that, as an objective reality, faces people. The codes are subjective - the person creates them according to the way of presentation, the way of thinking and the power of their own understanding. " No rationality can be applied to these "ciphers," Jaspers thinks; only existential experience can reveal their meaning. Here is a remarkable similarity. Originally this way of revealing God's outer universe belongs to a certain trend in patristic thinking / Aeropagates, Rev. Maximus Confessor, St. Gregory Palamas /, according to which man reveals the traces of the creative Logos as a cryptogram, equivalent to the term "cipher" used by K. Jaspers. Mr. Tilich (1965) believes that faith is true to the extent that it is a true expression of the Unconditional, of God. However, the truths of faith can be expressed only symbolically. The main symbol, invariably and unconditionally related to human existence, is God. But it would be completely wrong, Tilich explains, to ask the question of what God is a symbol of, for the answer would be only one of Himself.

"God is a symbol of God". This means, according to Tilich, that in our perceptions of God two elements should be distinguished: the first is related to the unconditionalness which is revealed in the immediate experience and in itself is unselfish, and the second is the concrete element taken away from our usual experience and rendered symbolically to God. But which of the multiple symbols correspond most to the meaning of the faith? In other words, according to Tilich, "Which symbol of the Unconditional expresses the Absolute free from those elements that do not correspond to its true nature?" /



part 1

part 2

part 3

part 4

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