MithrandirOlorin wrote: ↑Thu May 12, 2022 5:10 am
"How many people were either" almost everyone, in Acts 17 those two Schools were the only ones relevant, Platonism took over later.
And part of how things changed is how we define the very word "Spirit", no one in the first century AD used the word "Spirit" to mean non Corporeal.
It's not the modern conception of materialism that didn't exist back then, but rather the modern of "Spiritual".
No, they didn't mean it to be non-corporeal, but they didn't see the distinction between corporeal and non-corporeal to see materialism as we see it today.
Today's Moderns see "spirits" as like Ghostbusters ghosts, like material persons but not. They are like people inhabiting the Earth somehow bound to it, but not be gravity, they are like us to be able to interact with objects, but their interaction is to negate how we interact with them.
The same with modern conceptions around heaven, hell and other domains, they are more like science fiction dimensions or alternate forms of reality that have nothing in common with what people in Antiquity saw with any concept of the afterlife or the supernatural as we know it.
CS Lewis touched on this in Miracles:
Even if it could be shown, then, that the early Christians accepted their imagery literally, this would not mean that we are justified in relegating their doctrines as a whole to the lumber-room. Whether they actually did, is another matter. The difficulty here is that they were not writing as philosophers to satisfy speculative curiosity about the nature of God and of the universe. They believed in God; and once a man does that, philosophical definiteness can never be the First necessity. A drowning man does not analyse the rope that is flung him, nor an impassioned lover consider the chemistry of his mistress’s complexion. Hence the sort of question we are now considering is never raised by the New Testament writers. When once it is raised, Christianity decides quite clearly that the naif images are false. The sect in the Egyptian desert which thought that God was like a man is condemned: the desert monk who felt he had lost something by its correction is recognised as ‘muddle-headed’. All three Persons of the Trinity are declared ‘incomprehensible’, ^ God is pronounced ‘inexpressible, unthinkable, invisible to all created beings’.^ The Second Person is not only bodiless but so unlike man that if self-revelation had been His sole purpose He would not have chosen to be incarnate in a human form.* We do not find similar statements in the New Testament, because the issue has not yet been made explicit: but we do find statements which make it certain how that issue will be decided when once it becomes explicit. The title ‘Son’ may sound ‘primitive’ or ‘naive’. But already in the New Testament this ‘Son’ is identified with the Discourse or Reason or Word which was eternally ‘with God’ and yet also was God. He is the all-pervasive principle of concretion or cohesion whereby the universe holds together.^ All things, and specially Life, arose within Him, 2 and within Him all things will reach their conclusion — the final statement of what they have been trying to
express.^
It is, of course, always possible to imagine an earlier stratum of Christianity from which such ideas were absent ; just as it is always possible to say that anything you dislike in Shakespeare was put in by an ‘adapter’ and the original play was free from it. But what have such assumptions to do with serious inquiry? And here the fabrication of them is specially perverse, since even if we go back beyond Christianity into Judaism itself, we shall not find the unambiguous anthropomorphism (or man-likeness) we are looking for. Neither, I admit, shall we find its denial. We shall find, on the one hand, God pictured as living above ‘in the high and holy place’ : we shall find, on the other, ‘Do not I fill heaven and earth? saith the Lord’.* We shall find that in Ezekiel’s vision God appeared (notice the hesitating words) in ‘the likeness as the appearance of a man’. But we shall find also the warning, ‘Take ye therefore good heed unto yourselves. For ye saw no manner of similitude on the day that the Lord spake unto you in Horeb out of the midst of the fire — ^lest ye corrupt yourselves and make a graven image’. Most baffling of all to a modem literalist, the God who seems to live locally in the sky, also made it.’’
The reason why the modern literalist is^puzzled is that he is trying to get out of the old writers something which is not there. Starting from a clear modem distinction between material and immaterial he tries to find out on which side of that distinction the ancient Hebrew conception fell. He forget 3 that the distinction itself has been made clear only by later thought. '
We are often told that primitive man could not conceive pure spirit; but then neither could he conceive mere matter, A throne and a local habitation are attributed to God only at
that stage when it is still impossible to regard the throne, or palace even of an earthly king as merely physical objects. In earthly thrones and palaces it was the spiritual significance — as we should say, the ‘atmosphere’ — that mattered to the ancient mind. As soon as the contrast of ‘spiritual’ and
‘material’ was before their minds, they knew God to be ‘spiritual’ and realised that their religion had implied this all along. But at an earlier stage that contrast was not there. To regard that earlier stage as unspiritual because we find there no clear assertion of unembodied spirit, is a real misunderstanding. You might just as well call it spiritual because it contained no clear consciousness of mere matter, Mr. Bar- field has shown, as regards the history of language, that words did not start by referring merely to physical objects and then get extended by metaphor to refer to emotions, mental
states and the like. On the contrary, what we now call the literal and metaphorical’ meanings have both been disengaged by analysis from an ancient unity of meaning which was neither or both. In the same way it is quite erroneous to think that man started with a ‘material’ God or ‘Heaven’ and
gradually spiritualised them. He could not have started with something ‘material’ for the ‘material’, as we understand it, comes to be realised only by contrast to the ‘immaterial’, And the two sides of the contrast grow at the same speed. He started with something which was neither and both. As long
as we are trying to read back into that ancient unity either the one or the other of the two opposites which have since been analysed out of it, we shall misread all early literature and ignore many states of consciousness which we ourselves still from time to time experience. The point is crucial not
only for the present discussion but for any sound literary criticism or philosophy.
The Christian doctrines, and even the Jewish doctrines which preceded them, have always been statements about spiritual reality, not specimens of primitive physical science.
Whatever is positive in the conception of the spiritual has always been contained in them; it is only its negative aspect (immateriality) which has had to wait for recognition until
abstract thought was fully developed. The material imagery has never been taken literally by anyone who had reached the stage when he could understand what ‘taking it literally* meant. And now we come to the difference between ‘explaining’ and ‘explaining away*. It shows itself in two
ways, (i) Some people when they say that a thing is meant ‘metaphorically’ conclude from this that it is hardly meant at all. They rightly think that Christ spoke metaphorically
when he told us to carry the cross : they wrongly conclude that carrying the cross means nothing more than leading a respectable life and subscribing moderately to charities.
They reasonably think that hell ‘fire’ is a metaphor — and unwisely conclude that it means nothing more serious than remorse. They say that the story of the Fall in Genesis is not
literal; and then go on to say (I have heard them myself) that it was really a fall upwards — ^which is like saying that because ‘My heart is broken’ contains a metaphor, it therefore means ‘I feel very cheerful’ . This mode of interpretation I regard,
frankly, as nonsense. For me the Christian doctrines which are ‘metaphorical’ — or which have become metaphorical with the increase of abstract thought — ^mean something
which is just as ‘supernatural’ or shocking after we have removed the ancient imagery as it was before. They mean that in addition to the physical or psycho-physical universe known to die sciences, there exists an uncreated and unconditioned reality which causes the universe to be ; that this
reality has a positive structure or constitution which is use- fully, though doubtless not completely, described in the doctrine of the Trinity; and that this reality, at a definite point in
time, entered the universe we know by becoming one of its own creatures and there produced effects on the historical level which the normal workings of the natural universe do not produce; and that this has brought about a change in our relations to the unconditioned reality. It will be noticed thatour colourless ‘entered the universe’' is not a whit less metaphorical than the more picturesque ‘came down from Heaven . We have only substituted a picture of horizontal or unspecified movement for one of vertical movement. And every attempt to improve the ancient language will have the same result. These things not only cannot be asserted they cannot even be presented for discussion— without metaphor. We can make our speech duller; we cannot make it more literal
The etymological root of the word spirit is "breathe" and "wind": just as a breeze blows through trees to make them move unseen things move matter. The distinction between material and immaterial became very pronounced about 500 years ago but not it's breaking down. The different between spirit and information, for instance is almost irrelevant, and you can see that especially with people caught up in the fervour of anything, such as becoming a zealous ideologue.
This is hardly a new observation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demons_(Dostoevsky_novel) The original Russian title is Bésy (Russian: Бесы, singular Бес, bés), which means "demons". There are three English translations: The Possessed, The Devils, and Demons. Constance Garnett's 1916 translation popularized the novel and gained it notoriety as The Possessed, but this title has been disputed by later translators. They argue that "The Possessed" points in the wrong direction because Bésy refers to active subjects rather than passive objects—"possessors" rather than "the possessed".[3][4] 'Demons' in this sense refers not so much to individuals as to the ideas that possess them. For Dostoevsky, 'ideas' are living cultural forces that have the capacity to seduce and subordinate the individual consciousness, and the individual who has become alienated from his own concrete national traditions is particularly susceptible.[5] According to translator Richard Pevear, the demons are "that legion of isms that came to Russia from the West: idealism, rationalism, empiricism, materialism, utilitarianism, positivism, socialism, anarchism, nihilism, and, underlying them all, atheism."[6] The counter-ideal (expressed in the novel through the character of Ivan Shatov) is that of an authentically Russian culture growing out of the people's inherent spirituality and faith, but even this—as mere idealization and an attempt to reassert something that has been lost—is another idea and lacks real force.
