Become wise as serpents and innocent as doves.
Joined August 2024
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Based on recent reflections on language, I have put together an analysis of the meaning of talking animals in story telling.
Link below!
Sympractical retweeted
Honeycomb icecream as a christological symbol.
Christological symbolism in the food the Christ-child ate:
"Foods made from butter and milk were exalted in the biblical tradition; Isaiah prophesied that the Savior as a child born of a virgin, would be fed on butter and honey. While the honey symbolized his divine nature, butter in this passage from the Old Testament was interpreted as an indication of Christ's humanity."
- Piero Camporesi (The Anatomy of the Senses, p. 58)
Such a simple and intuitive interpretation of honey and butter when you think about it.
“The way in which men think about the outer world determines, in the long run, the way in which they perceive it also. Indeed it very largely determines what they perceive.”
- Barfield, Israel and the Michael Impulse
A simple summary of Barfield’s work is that there is a direct relationship between what nameable and what is perceivable. Thus any change in language has a corresponding effect on perception, and vice versa.
Barfield’s definition of poetry is language which produces a “felt change in consciousness.” In other words, it is the use of names, either old or new, which modify the readers or listeners perception. For example, Shakespeare supposedly “invented” or popularized over 1700 English words, thereby producing new percepts, or phenomena.
In Saving the Appearances, Barfield follows Aristotle in splitting the world by into the actually phenomenal and the potentially phenomenal, with perception being the actualization of the potentially phenomenal. The kind of poetry performed by the likes of Shakespeare shifted the domain of the “potentially phenomenal” by providing new names. And with a shift in the potentially phenomenal comes a shift in the actually phenomenal—the perceived. It is by this process that the poet participates in ποίησις (poiesis), or “making.”
The work of the Inklings in general is a self-aware attempt at recovering this kind of ποίησις and protecting it from evil. The imagination lies at the heart of the Inklings due to its relation to the “potentially phenomenal” as opposed to the perceived. Using the imagination, Lewis and Tolkien in particular reshaped the public field of potential phenomena in the modern world, reintroducing angels, demons, and the spiritual world as a whole.
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“Those who truly practice philosophy practice dying, and death is least of all frightening to them.”
- Plato, Phaedo 67e
οἱ μὲν ὡς ἀληθῶς φιλόσοφοι ἀποθνῄσκειν μελετῶσι καὶ τὸ τεθνάναι ἥκιστα αὐτοῖς ἀνθρώπων φοβερόν
I can’t watch the first Harry Potter movie without thinking about Jordan Peterson ranting about the golden snitch being a meta-game
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Eat a star, lose your heart,
That only love can restore, for “a heart’s a heavy burden”
…
“Sophie. Your hair is like starlight. It’s beautiful.”
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I don't expect to be believed, but from the ancient western mystery school perspective, technology, natural science, the material world, democracy, and the panopticon are all matriarchal total victory conditions.
More on this: Calvin apparently never actually had access to the Summa, and in his Institutes blatantly misrepresents the transubstantiation position on the dimensions of Christ’s body. Thomas answers this in Part 3 Q. 76 Article 4
It seems to me that Luther and Calvin’s issues with the doctrine of transubstantiation had far more to do with what they deemed superstitious and idolatrous Eucharistic practices than they did with the specific metaphysics. Luther wasn’t a fan of using Aristotle and Calvin made a brief comment about the metaphysics in the Institutes, but both of them made lengthy critiques of Eucharistic procession, communion under one kind, etc. They saw the liturgical changes as the fruit of the doctrinal changes.
Given how often Aquinas references Dionysius the Aereopagite it is honestly shocking that he claims God is pure being
Sympractical retweeted
As for the timelines, I'm unwilling to debate them unless you've read Locke and Kant's work on time duration in lieu of a conscious perceiver. Melville advises caution, however, as Locke and Kant are explicitly defined as the Right Whale and Sperm Whale respectively.
It seems to me that Luther and Calvin’s issues with the doctrine of transubstantiation had far more to do with what they deemed superstitious and idolatrous Eucharistic practices than they did with the specific metaphysics. Luther wasn’t a fan of using Aristotle and Calvin made a brief comment about the metaphysics in the Institutes, but both of them made lengthy critiques of Eucharistic procession, communion under one kind, etc. They saw the liturgical changes as the fruit of the doctrinal changes.
I just saw this and from the “who’s on first” scene onwards I was completely locked in. Completely insane movie. Felt like a psychological thriller. Highly recommend.
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