Random Thread

[Raphael]

Also, if you read accounts of what Christians were fighting over in medieval times, it's all about how other groups were doing the rites differently. (Edit: Ok, this is an exaggeration. There were doctrinal fights too. I just get the impression that they were less common in the overall scheme of things.)

I thought that was mostly pretexts for various political struggles centered around things such as the power of the Pope or the Emperor.

Still interesting that out of all the pretexts they could have come up with, they used the specific pretexts which they used.

[bradrn]

Also, if you read accounts of what Christians were fighting over in medieval times, it's all about how other groups were doing the rites differently. (Edit: Ok, this is an exaggeration. There were doctrinal fights too. I just get the impression that they were less common in the overall scheme of things.)

I thought that was mostly pretexts for various political struggles centered around things such as the power of the Pope or the Emperor.

Still interesting that out of all the pretexts they could have come up with, they used the specific pretexts which they used.

Well, is it any less silly than, say, fighting over whether a transgender woman is allowed to enter a women’s bathroom or not? What seems petty to one set of people can be highly significant to another, as a marker of group distinctions as much as an issue in and of itself.

[Raphael]

What seems petty to one set of people can be highly significant to another, as a marker of group distinctions as much as an issue in and of itself.

Yes, that's kind of my point: what kinds of things people fight over tells us something about their priorities, or at least about what kinds of priorities they want to be seen as having.

[rotting bones]

Also, if you read accounts of what Christians were fighting over in medieval times, it's all about how other groups were doing the rites differently. (Edit: Ok, this is an exaggeration. There were doctrinal fights too. I just get the impression that they were less common in the overall scheme of things.)

I thought that was mostly pretexts for various political struggles centered around things such as the power of the Pope or the Emperor.

I'd say social dynamics like these have many moving parts. It's easier to work yourself up into a righteous fury when it benefits you materially. Some actors are more into the righteousness. Others are more into the free lunch bit. You can pick your poison. You can then argue with others in terms of what you think will best appeal to them. It's pretty much like coalition-building in contemporary politics.

In Sunnism, many different ways of praying are considered valid, but some are considered beyond the pale. IIRC Shias put a clod of earth from Karbala on the spot where their heads touch the ground. They say "clod of earth", but it's shaped into elaborate designs. This is analogous to idolatry. (Sunni law accepts analogy as proof.)

[rotting bones]

Regarding associations: Islam values intellectual activity so much, some Sufi sects traditionally regard coffee as a holy drink.

Now that's a doctrine I can get behind.

It sounds like an interesting idea until they make you stay up late drinking coffee, reciting increasingly elaborate prayers.

[malloc]

Regarding associations: Islam values intellectual activity so much, some Sufi sects traditionally regard coffee as a holy drink.

Now that's a doctrine I can get behind.

It sounds like an interesting idea until they make you stay up late drinking coffee, reciting increasingly elaborate prayers.

Leave it up to religion to ruin a good idea.

[rotting bones]

Now that's a doctrine I can get behind.

It sounds like an interesting idea until they make you stay up late drinking coffee, reciting increasingly elaborate prayers.

Leave it up to religion to ruin a good idea.

Technically, it's voluntary. They assume you joined a Sufi order because you want to be more religious. These practices supposedly bring you closer to Allah, granting you various divine favors. It's basically a shamanic initiation with different practices. You could also pay a Sufi initiate to pray for you in this way if you don't want to do it yourself. Or you could charge others for the service once you have been trained in these practices. Most importantly, not only could you affect an air of occult superiority, you could imply that you're entitled to do it by pointing to an ancient lineage and the sacrifices you made to join it. (Occult superiority takes a different form in Islam than in paganism. You have to affect a posture of total humility and service to the needy while hinting that you know more than you're letting on. Traditionally, having a righteous attitude was frowned upon. Recently, Islam is becoming more like modern Christianity in this respect.)

[zompist]

It occurs to me that pre-modern nomadic peoples couldn't actually have been Christian in its Western form and self-sufficient at the same time. Even if they managed to gather all the accoutrements of ceremonial magic, where would they have gotten the wine? They were nomads. They didn't have grapes. Could wine have been substituted with fermented mare's milk?

I think you'd have to do some research to see if this was a real problem. The actual Christians in West and Central Asia at that time were Nestorians, who didn't answer to Rome or Constantinople. (Other Christians were terribly worried about their Christology, not their rites.) I Googled a bit but couldn't find out if they even practiced communion, much less how.

I'd be surprised if it was a real obstacle. E.g., I was just reading about women in the British American colonies were were abducted by Natives... and then refused to come back; the Native lifestyle was better. A side point was that many of the Natives in question had been converted to Catholicism. This was the 1600s and early 1700s; they were not seeking out a priest once a week to administer the wine and wafers.

[Ares Land]

The problem is that wine was part of a ritual that was thought to produce magical effects. For example, the redness of the wine is associated with the redness of blood in a system of sympathetic magic. Similarly, the buzz of intoxication that removes you from your present condition is associated with the salvific power of Christ.

The symbolism allies with the practical in interesting ways. Altar wine is usually white wine. In Catholicism and I thibk Orthodoxy obly the priest drinks the wine.

I do wonder how the nomads handled the logistics. But they were at the heart of a major trade network; maybe buying the wine wasn’t that complicated.

Also, if you read accounts of what Christians were fighting over in medieval times, it's all about how other groups were doing the rites differently. (Edit: Ok, this is an exaggeration. There were doctrinal fights too. I just get the impression that they were less common in the overall scheme of things.)

I thought that was mostly pretexts for various political struggles centered around things such as the power of the Pope or the Emperor.

I just finished a book on Byzantine history, funnily enough. A lot of that history is fighting over obscure points of theology
religious factions did align with political factions, but it seems that besides that people (at least the elite) did care.

(I still can't tell how or why the Nestorians differ from regular Christianity.)

I'd say doctrinal fights were more important than the rites (but these are also important). Christianity is somewhat unusual among religions in caring a lot about you believe and less about what you do.
In fact everything is true at one: people cared about all three: the politics, the doctrine and the ritual.

Though the Cathars are different, they’re just weird. Historians will point out though that the common woman are man often didn’t know if their priest was a heretic or not.

[rotting bones]

I think you'd have to do some research to see if this was a real problem. The actual Christians in West and Central Asia at that time were Nestorians, who didn't answer to Rome or Constantinople. (Other Christians were terribly worried about their Christology, not their rites.) I Googled a bit but couldn't find out if they even practiced communion, much less how.

I'd be surprised if it was a real obstacle. E.g., I was just reading about women in the British American colonies were were abducted by Natives... and then refused to come back; the Native lifestyle was better. A side point was that many of the Natives in question had been converted to Catholicism. This was the 1600s and early 1700s; they were not seeking out a priest once a week to administer the wine and wafers.

I did say "Christian in its Western form". By that, I mean Western priests might have despised them for administering the rites differently.

My understanding is that there were many kinds of early Christians. Some of them might have been administering secret underground masses. Others might have been following different rites that would be recognizably heretical to Christianity in its Western form.

I have heard a later heresy, the Cathars, only required one rite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consolamentum

[bradrn]

(I still can't tell how or why the Nestorians differ from regular Christianity.)

Oh, it’s all very simple: Nestorians believed that Christ had two natures, one divine and one human, in two different substances united into one person, whereas Dyophysitists believe that Christ is in two natures, one divine and one human, united into one substance in one person; neither of which should be confused of course with the Miaphysitists, who hold that Christ is of two natures, one divine and one human, united into one substance in one person, nor with the Monophysitists who believed that Christ is of two natures yet in only one, and which are of course all fundamentally different to the Arians, who held that Christ was of two natures, one divine-ish and one human, and the Modalists, who hold that Christ was merely one mode of three in a single nature, and…

(No, I never have understood the idea of the Trinity myself. As far as I can tell all the comprehensible interpretations have been rejected as heretical.)

[Man in Space]

The symbolism allies with the practical in interesting ways. Altar wine is usually white wine. In Catholicism and I thibk Orthodoxy obly the priest drinks the wine.

I'm Lutheran. The congregants drink the wine, which IME is red wine. (Pastor and whoever is helping him distribute the sacrament also eat and drink, but at the end after everyone else has come up.)

[rotting bones]

The symbolism allies with the practical in interesting ways. Altar wine is usually white wine. In Catholicism and I thibk Orthodoxy obly the priest drinks the wine.

I'm Lutheran. The congregants drink the wine, which IME is red wine. (Pastor and whoever is helping him distribute the sacrament also eat and drink, but at the end after everyone else has come up.)

Traditionally, it's red wine. I think that in some regions, they are using local white wine, taking advantage of the fact that it doesn't say anywhere that you must use red wine.

[rotting bones]

(No, I never have understood the idea of the Trinity myself. As far as I can tell all the comprehensible interpretations have been rejected as heretical.)

Basically, the Trinitarians are saying that the Father who exists in heaven is not the sekina (shekhinah/Holy Spirit) that comes down on your mind when you pray, but they are both God. They are not two different things, but the Father doesn't literally vacate heaven and come down into your mind either. That's all they're trying to say.

As for Jesus, they think that humans try to sacrifice their belongings to appease the divine. They think God killed Himself to repay your debt, so the next time you feel like sacrificing something, recall Jesus with gratitude and don't do it.

Jesus bears a similar sort of relationship to the Father as the sekina. The difference is that the name of the relationship of the Father to Jesus is "begetting", while the name of the relationship of the Father and Jesus to the sekina is "proceeding" IIRC. As in the Father "begot" Jesus, whereas the Holy Spirit "proceeds" (IIRC) from the Father and the Son. These relationships are not unlike how the supernal wine flows down the Tree of Life in Kabbalah.

The Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son because recalling Jesus with gratitude forgives your sins and the sekina comes down on your mind.

As you can see, this is more of a phenomenological description of the experience of worship. It's not an abstract theory.

[zompist]

Oh, it’s all very simple: Nestorians believed that Christ had two natures, one divine and one human, in two different substances united into one person, whereas Dyophysitists believe that Christ is in two natures, one divine and one human, united into one substance in one person; neither of which should be confused of course with the Miaphysitists, who hold that Christ is of two natures, one divine and one human, united into one substance in one person, nor with the Monophysitists who believed that Christ is of two natures yet in only one, and which are of course all fundamentally different to the Arians, who held that Christ was of two natures, one divine-ish and one human, and the Modalists, who hold that Christ was merely one mode of three in a single nature, and…

In my religion book, I included a list of heresies about Christ, plus the orthodox position. Re-reading the book, I find that I've forgotten which position is orthodox.

Perhaps it's worth pointing out that even the terms of the debate only make sense if you accept Aristotelian metaphysics. (E.g. what is a "nature", or a "soul", or a "will".)

(No, I never have understood the idea of the Trinity myself. As far as I can tell all the comprehensible interpretations have been rejected as heretical.)

For a modern I think the easiest path is to start with Hinduism. Pretty often Vishnu lives a life as a human— an avatar. The best known are Krishna and Rama, but there are many more. They are humans but also they're Vishnu. So far as I know Hindus don't overthink the concept. Gods can do anything and this is one of them.

So, the Christian idea is that Jesus is an avatar of God. Pretty easy, though don't tell an Evangelical. '

(Personally I wonder if there's a connection. An avatar is a very weird idea for a 1st century Jew to come up with. On the other hand India was not that far away and the Hellenic states were an intermediary.)

The Trinity itself is an attempt to make sense of Jesus' own statements about the Father and himself as the Son. I think it looks a lot less weird once you look at multiple religions. There was a pagan Greek trinity, there was a Hindu trinity. There are a few bitheistic religions. Or heck, read up on Kabbala— are the tenfold sephiroth that different from a trinity?

[rotting bones]

For a modern I think the easiest path is to start with Hinduism. Pretty often Vishnu lives a life as a human— an avatar. The best known are Krishna and Rama, but there are many more. They are humans but also they're Vishnu. So far as I know Hindus don't overthink the concept. Gods can do anything and this is one of them.

It depends. I think uninformed Christians do sometimes think of the Son as an avatar of the Father. However, the Western Neoplatonic theory is somewhat different from from the avatar.

Briefly, Neoplatonists thought the world of ideas works in threes: The One, the Proceeding, the Returning.

Islam is like the original theory of Plotinus. What proceeds from the One is the Soul, which then returns back to it.

Later philosophers like Proclus extended chains of threes all the way down to the material world. Christianity is similar in some ways to these theorists, but it rejects the maximalism of threes. It says what proceeded from the Father is Jesus. Jesus then returns back to the Father, taking all his faithful back with him. This gets rid of the problem of henads Proclus had to contend with. There is only one triple unity, and its reach extends over all creation.

What interests me are what look like traces of Pythagorean speculations in these religions. For example, the Quran says Allah created "gardens of entwined growth". It repeatedly associates Oneness with Allah and Twoness with creation. This is similar to the indefinite dyad in Plato's secret doctrine. Maybe I'm reading too much into it.

The Trinity itself is an attempt to make sense of Jesus' own statements about the Father and himself as the Son.

Of a Neoplatonist posing as Jesus, yes. There's no way the Gospel of John is legit. Jews in Palestine saying the logos was with God and the logos was God? Please.

[Raphael]

(Personally I wonder if there's a connection. An avatar is a very weird idea for a 1st century Jew to come up with.

Well, reading your and bradrn's posts on all this, there's one specific 20th century Jew whom I could imagine having come up with stuff like that...

The Trinity itself is an attempt to make sense of Jesus' own statements about the Father and himself as the Son.

Was it, perhaps, a kind of committee compromise between the different ideas about the nature(s) of God and Jesus that were sort of floating around in the general atmosphere of the time? It would be kind of fitting if the Trinity would be a deity designed by a committee.

[rotting bones]

Was it, perhaps, a kind of committee compromise between the different ideas about the nature(s) of God and Jesus that were sort of floating around in the general atmosphere of the time? It would be kind of fitting if the Trinity would be a deity designed by a committee.

There were several spurious gospels floating around, most of which were rejected. The Gospel of John just happened to fit Greek educated opinion at the time.

[zompist]

For a modern I think the easiest path is to start with Hinduism. Pretty often Vishnu lives a life as a human— an avatar. The best known are Krishna and Rama, but there are many more. They are humans but also they're Vishnu. So far as I know Hindus don't overthink the concept. Gods can do anything and this is one of them.

It depends. I think uninformed Christians do sometimes think of the Son as an avatar of the Father. However, the Western Neoplatonic theory is somewhat different from from the avatar.

There's a Neoplatonic influence on the later doctrine of the Trinity, sure. The avatar part isn't Greek though.

I'd say, don't underestimate influences from the East just because Westerners do. The Gospels themselves have the birth of God blessed by magi-- that is, by Zoroastrian priests. Jews were quite familiar with Persia-- a large number of them lived there-- and were grateful to the Persian Empire for ending the first Exile. I suspect they felt validated by Mazdaic monotheism.

The Trinity itself is an attempt to make sense of Jesus' own statements about the Father and himself as the Son.

Of a Neoplatonist posing as Jesus, yes. There's no way the Gospel of John is legit. Jews in Palestine saying the logos was with God and the logos was God? Please.

The timing doesn't work out. John was written before 100; Plotinus wasn't born till 205.

It's been decades since I read Plato, but I don't think he talks about a trinity-- that was the Neoplatonic (over)interpration.

[rotting bones]

There's a Neoplatonic influence on the later doctrine of the Trinity, sure. The avatar part isn't Greek though.

The issue with the avatar hypothesis is that Jesus doesn't behave like an avatar of Yahweh. Krishna plays the flute like Vishnu, strikes the poses of Vishnu and does the same things as Vishnu: serenade women and defeat evil. Instead, Jesus is more like a "procession" from the One, which involves hollowing out its powers and falling far away from it. He is a scapegoat, a lamb led to slaughter. In the Christian story, the purpose of all this is the sacrifice that redeems creation. This is of course followed by Jesus returning to the Father.

There are many stories of gods walking among men, men living with the gods, etc, all over the world including Greece and Judea. One is the prophet Enoch, who became the angel Metatron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metatron Some stories even suggest he became a lesser Yahweh.

One distinctive factor about the Jesus story is that his followers admit his helplessness against the powers of the world. This is what suggests a Late (Middle and Neo-) Platonist framing. To use a slightly anachronistic example, the analogy is that Jesus bears the same relation to Yahweh that an isoceles triangle drawn with chalk does to the figure that's described by its equations.

I'd say, don't underestimate influences from the East just because Westerners do. The Gospels themselves have the birth of God blessed by magi-- that is, by Zoroastrian priests. Jews were quite familiar with Persia-- a large number of them lived there-- and were grateful to the Persian Empire for ending the first Exile. I suspect they felt validated by Mazdaic monotheism.

Did Zoroastrianism have avatars?

My understanding is that the magi were thought to have occult knowledge back then. The contemporary equivalent would be a story about Tibetan lamas coming in and pronouncing that your child will grow up to be a great sage.

The reason I can't take these stories seriously is that I grew up in India. Pamphlets about purported miracles circulate all the time. They are all lies cobbled together from miscellaneous mythological tropes. Some of them happen to be slightly better constructed than others. They take off until people get tired of them. Then the whole process starts over. They're like urban legends, except they are actual, mythological legends.

If you look into esoteric texts, you'll find similar examples that have survived from the ancient Western world.

The timing doesn't work out. John was written before 100; Plotinus wasn't born till 205.

You are right, but the Middle Platonists already talked like Neoplatonists before Plotinus. What Plotinus did was work out the kinks, shore up gaps with arguments and regularize the system. You can still see the broken bits of the old system in the Christian Trinity, which almost but doesn't quite fit the Neoplatonic schematic.

Under true Neoplatonism, you'd have to say the Holy Spirit is the procession from the Father and Jesus is the return to Him. (Sounds right, except the Holy Spirit happened first.) If you switch the order, you get: Jesus is the procession from the Father and the Holy Spirit is the return to Him. (Whatever that is, it's not Christianity.) Or possibly Jesus proceeded from the Father and then returned to Him. (Yes, but that story leaves out the Holy Spirit.)

Instead what you get in Christianity is Constantine's lawyers grafting a Neoplatonic Trinity onto the Middle Platonic Gospel of John.

It's been decades since I read Plato, but I don't think he talks about a trinity-- that was the Neoplatonic (over)interpration.

The Neoplatonists believed in a theory of time which said that the more ancient a thinker, the better their theories. They didn't apply this to the Milesians. Instead, they thought Pythagoras was the greatest sage. After that, Plato was a great dialectical expositor of the True Meaning of Pythagoras, but which left out Pythagorean depth. After that, Aristotle captured aspects of Plato's system in various technical schemes like logic, but he produced a more superficial system than Plato.

They were trying to restore the Original Meaning of Plato by applying his ideas to Pythagoras.

Ridiculous as this sounds, they weren't entirely wrongheaded about everything. Plato did have unwritten doctrines that had a deliberately Pythagorean ring to them. (You see, Plato also had the same notion that earlier sages must have been wiser.) Of course, these weren't much like what the Neoplatonists produced in their details.

I don't think Christianity is much like the original Plato. It's more like the late Academic zeitgeist.