THE REUNIFICATION OF CATHOLICISM WITH ORTHODOXISM - EPISODE III Perceiving God (1)

This article, which has now reached the 3rd episode, has taken a structure on its own, when I wasn't looking:

- The launch of Episode I ("The religious crisis, pressured by the financial crisis"/BURSA/09.12.2014) was caused by the certain intention of Pope Francis to reunite Catholicism and Orthodoxism, which has been announced both explicitly, and through telling behaviors, during his visit in Istanbul, at the end of last month, where he met Patriarch Bartholomew the 1st of Constantinople; I showed that the reason for his intention is demanded by the need for a moral alternative to the believers' stupefaction at the crisis of the system (the credit-based civilization) - social, economic and financial -, wrecking the axiology generated by the system, which placed a heavy responsibility on the Churches, as they are themselves going through a turmoil that has only been seen in the first Christian centuries.

- The second episode (" Humanity's clinging to the back of man"/BURSA/ 15.12.2014) showed that the differences between Catholics and Orthodox that are noticeable to an outside spectator are expressions of the differences between the ways they relate to divinity: the Orthodox place it somewhere beyond human reason, while Catholics try to provide a rational explanation for it, which creates availability for the effectiveness of the practical action and for individual discipline, in favor of the overall organization (that is the idea in the title of the episode).

- In the third episode, the one herein, I promised I would show the consonance between the Orthodox intuition and the theory of scientific knowledge (epistemology), concerning the limitations of reason, which (I have not said so far, but I am saying it now) can smooth the confluences between the two churches on a dogmatic level, with spectacular shifts in everyday life; due to the nature of its core idea, the text would have been eclectic (calling upon distant disciplines, and clearly distinct forms of consciousness, the union of which would cause rejection among those that support the other, separately), had I not applied a meta-theoretical treatment (the article goes into more intricate details in this section); the length of the text, which is makes it unfit for printing in a newspaper, has caused me to split this episode in two, to allow for its publication.

Just like last time, for continuity's sake, I will reproduce the last relevant paragraph from the previous episode.

• CATHOLICISM: THE DIVINE STRUCTURE OF MAN

In spite of the fact that Catholic religion, driven by rationalism, discipline and pyramidal structure, favors the development of science, of the economy and of statal structures, completely paradoxically, it is the Orthodox confession that promotes the correct attitude towards them, as it is closer to humanism, to the authentic "nature of man", in consonance with the limits of human reason which have been proven even theoretically, beyond any reasonable deniability.

The West carries the legacy of the gloomy, implacable God perceived by Augustine of Hippo, called "Saint Augustine" (a bishop in Hippo Regius, Numidia, nowadays Annaba-Algeria, who lived between 354 -430), who has made humanity carry the stigma of the original sin which is hereditary (and hence even the new-born are guilty of it), and women are twice outcasts, as they are to blame for the perpetuation of sexual temptation (to which there is also to add their inferior social status, in the patriarchal societies of any confession, including the Orthodox ones, thus shaping up the infernal condition of the woman).

NOTE 1

I take the liberty of noting the lack of rigor in the justification of religious idiosyncrasy when it comes to sex, because, in the Old Testament, the divine restriction concerns the forbidden fruit, not sex, which is only the result of the breaking of the Commandment; the correct thing to do would have been to blame nutrition, not sex, if they were going to blame one physiological function (which is strange enough in itself, if we are to accept that we have been created based on a divine program).

The contemporary speculations (which I for one do not reject), claim that the misogyny of the Church (which did not exist in Jesus' attitude, which, considering that he was God taking the form of a man, should also lead to the body being praised) originates in the conception that the Church and women are "rivals", as women naturally tend to monopolize the focus of men's emotions, (and perhaps cause "apotheotic ones", like the ones described in the verses of the Song of Songs).

The doctrine of sin will receive a reasonable response from the British Ranters (a sect with outrageous mores, whose members were considered heretics, starting with middle of the 17th century): sin can not be considered an action, but a state, it is the state of the absence of sacredness.

Catholicism bears the seal of Saint Augustine, who claims that the Divine Trinity can be noticed by man because our souls are structured in the form of a trinity as well - memory, comprehension and will, each of them meshing with the other two and together being one, the whole of our mind - a structure "...in his guise and likeness".

Theoretically, we have a structure along a divine model, and sin is our responsibility.

• ORTHODOXISM: THE DEIFICATION OF MAN

The theology of Saint Augustine is a branch of the Neoplatonism of Origen (185 - 254), which considers the body to be the punishment (constantly created by God, pure spirits become souls and get a bodily container), but also the supporting factor of the soul's elevation.

But, from the same Origen stems the branch of the mysticism of Dionysius the (Pseudo)Aeropagite (apparently a Greek who lived in the sixth century, who kept his anonymity - the name is actually a pseudonym which he hid behind), successor to the Cappadocian parents, who just like the Bible adds the New Testament to the Old, adds the Greek (Neoplatonic) perception of divinity on top of the Judaic one, thus sowing the seed for the spirit of the orthodoxy.

Dionysius claims that "God" is an erroneous name, because god can not be named, as it is "the mystery beyond being" (just like Jews use the YHWH thetagram as a symbol, rather than a word, as it is prohibited from being spoken, and when speaking, they use the expression "My Lord" - Adonai); being above any suspicion of atheism, Dionysius says it would be more appropriate to call him "Nothing" (according to Karen Armstrong/"The history of God" - a book on the comparative history of religions, which I heartily recommend to our readers, because it has served me in understanding the importance of the changes in the way God has been perceived; see the explanations it contains, in NOTE 2).

NOTE 2

"God is not one of the things that exist and it is not comparable to anything we have in our lives. In fact it would be more appropriate to call it "nothing" - we shouldn't even call it a trinity, because it is not "a unity, nor a trinity, within the meanings of those terms that we know". It is above any name, just as it is above any being. But we can still use our inability to speak about God as a method of being united with it, which does not mean less than "the deification" (theosis) of our own nature. God had revealed some of its names to us in the scripture, namely "the father", "the son" and "the holy ghost". But the goal had not been to give us information "about" himself, but rather, to attract people and to get them ready, to bring them to his divine nature as well."

("The history of God", p.161)

God does not "exist" as part of the series of known entities, it is so far "beyond them", that even denying the things that are not about him are it is erroneous to deny even what he isn't.

To Dionysius, reading the scriptures does not bring information, it is "theurgy" ("white magic", bright, specific to the Hellenistic Hermeticism - the summoning of divinity for one's own ascension to its level, in an ecstatic union with divinity), a guide for going from discourse, (kerigma), to soul living (dogma).

Perhaps it is not the most appropriate (within the meaning of logic) to call this passing from speech to experiences of the soul as "paradoxical", but the "paradox" term is part of the topic of the article and I am paying special attention to it.

Six centuries later, the brilliant Islamic metaphysicians (whose level Europeans have never been able to match), picked up again the mystical line opened up by Dionysius the (Pseudo) Aeropagite and through Ibn al-Arabi (Seville, 1076 - Fez, 1148), have claimed that the most appropriate way of referring to divinity is silence, and in the case of the obligation to communicate, the self-contradicting reference is the most appropriate: "God is nothing and everything", affirming and denying its qualities, simultaneously.

In order to see the consequences of the different ways that God is perceived by the catholic and the orthodox, in social, economic and financial life, please re-read the articles of the Special Edition of BURSA published three years ago called "The crossroads" (BURSA / 07.11.2011), which illustrate the opposing solutions to the financial crisis, which the two Churches are proposing.

I would kindly ask my readers to please consider that the Introduction and the three articles in the special published back then ("Towards the reform of the international monetary and financial monetary system in a manner that answers the needs of all peoples" ; "To the people"; "A few Christian reference points") are an integral part of its episode, at this very specific point.

From the point of view of those articles, it becomes unclear whether the union between Catholicism and Orthodoxism, intended by Pope Francis, represents a turning point in the political conception of the Vatican, or if it simply represents the continuation of the idea of pyramidal globalization, under a global government, an idea explicitly stated in the documents published by BURSA and which is logically argued by the social studies institute of the Vatican.

• THE ORTHODOX AND ISLAMIC POSITION ON LOGIC

The mysticism of Dionysius the (Pseudo) Aeropagite and of the Muslims from the beginning of the first second millennium deliberately violates the principles of Aristotelian logic - the law of identity, the law of non-contradiction and the law of the excluded middle -, which are the foundation of the ancient "forms of correct thinking" (the recouping of the original Aristotelianism by the Europeans, is the result of how strictly it was preserved unchanged by the Arab world, whose mentality is dependent on Aristotle; in my opinion, the mentality of Islamic fundamentalism is governed by the "logic of solid objects" - see NOTE 3 -, which is what I call the Aristotelian one).

NOTE 3

I want to warn my readers that this NOTE is a bit more difficult reading for those who are less familiar with the literature on logic and philosophy, as it is a foray into the history of logic (of my own interpretation); going through it is not truly necessary to grasp the meaning of the article, it just provides a wider context for future arguments.

I repeat, its reading is not necessary.

Listeners spontaneously admit that a statement is itself, that it either is or it isn't asserted, as it can't be both.

The three logical principles represent the reaction of human experience to the "solid body", which is qualitatively identical with itself, as its existence calls for the nonexistence of its nonexistence and the becoming of which is impossible, a reflex which represents the core of the mechanism of logical thinking and the defining characteristics of the underpinning of the world, as the Greeks had conceived it (the assertion is assisted by genetic epistemology, studying the mutual influence between the motor development of children's bodies and their thought structures, in line with their physiological evolution; if rhymes could develop a logic, than it would definitely be different from ours, as the sinuous continuity of travel would generate other mathematical structures than our shaking, crawling on all fours or the lively discontinuity of the steps).

From a philosophical perspective, logical principles are isomorphous with known theses of Eleaticism, concerning the equalizing sphericity of the world, the homogeneousness of its existence, its perpetual stillness: "The world is a limited whole and evenly balanced in relation to the middle", Eleaticist Melissos (5th century BC) says.

Making the opposite reasoning of the claim that "nothing of what has a beginning ends up being a whole", (which predates by two millennia and a half the incompleteness theorem of Kurt Godel, which I will be discussing in more detail in the second part of this episode), it follows, from the thesis advanced by Melissos that the world, as a whole, does not have a beginning, and being spherical, homogenous and still, it is all-encompassing, meaning that "the Eleaticist atom" is nothing else but the foundation, as a world.

Starting off from the same human experiences, but going the other way, Aristotle (Stagira 384-322 bC) completes logic, by putting at its core the laws of identity, of the excluded middle and non-contradiction, and compliance with them must ensure the validity of inference-based demonstrations.

It is to be assumed that the way for most of Aristotle's results had been paved by the efforts of the thinkers that preceded him or were his contemporaries; his very effort to distinguish between syllogisms and sophisms ("The sophistic rejections"), show that he had a benchmark system to which he compared his creation of logic principles (as opposed to Kant's claim, that Aristotle had created logic out of nothing).

I think I can still say, in a rather uncertain manner, bearing any transformations (on condition of the veracity of the results), having a consistency - I would call - "fluid", logic has always been involved in the controversies of the sophists, which is shows through meta-logically.

This "fluidity" of pre-logic was a natural consequence of the frailty of the vehicle that carried it - verbal disputes, which led to the two opposing schools of logic that shared the stage in Ancient Greece:

1. The prophylactic one, the "Organon" - the Aristotelian effort to set and concentrate the sophistic pre-logic into a "solid", hence implicitly written, form;

2. The one that pursues fluidity: the logic of sentences of the stoic Chrysippos (279 - 206 BC), whose work was lost because of the "efforts" of the Medieval Church, which was hostile to the Aristotelian line of thinking, because his "Organon" served as a tool to Italian catholic (Dominican) monk Thomas of Aquino (1225-1274) in logically proving the existence of God; the Thomas of Aquino's sanctification has trickled down on Aristotelianism, which meant that the works of the opponents of Aristotelian logic were destroyed; Diogenes Laertius said that Aristotelian logic was brilliant, but Chrysippian logic was divine; it seems to have been a probabilistic logic, perhaps modal, introducing several forms of truth (the shortage of information about stoic logic allows us to imagine almost anything about it); I will mention here the opinion of I.M. Bochenski that stoic logic includes a thread from the Megarian School (the roots of the hypothesis based logic in the Megarians are certain), to whom the formulation of the "Liar's paradox" is ascribed, because I will use that paradox as an argument in the article.

The Orthodox and the Muslim agree that no certainty (neither intellectual, not sensory) comes from faith, only an elevated experience, of a moral nature, beyond logic and reason, which involves imagination and art.

Their intuition, predates, by more than a millennium, the contemporary conclusion on the condition of theories, and implicitly of reason, which suggests we keep some reservation when it comes to their hubris.

Modesty.

POST SCRIPTUM

I do not claim, in any way, that the present article is in any way a study, instead it represents the journalistic representation of an idea (perhaps to be studied); that is why the information that the articles comprises was already out there (which is why I don't usually present any bibliographic references) which the idea builds on, without exhaustively examining the others, (that do not serve my idea) nor the consequences of this rearrangement.

In general, such a procedure is considered "speculative", but I have accepted that (in some places, not just in the logic and meta-logic texts), because I don't even intend to be persuasive, but rather (if I succeed), to offer the glimpse of hope, in the context of a beginning of social chaos.

And one more thing: NOTE 1, about "sex", was not necessarily needed for the basic idea of the text, but I couldn't refrain myself; besides, none of the NOTES are needed for the consistency of the text.

I hope that after New Years' Eve, I will be able to publish the second part of the Third Episode (which is predominantly dedicated to the coincidences between mystic and logic).

If I don't do it, it will mean I wasn't up to the task.

Still, the idea of the article has been clearly enough hinted and I can afford not to continue it at this point, especially since, in this third episode, it seems to have inappropriately distanced itself from the event and the profile of our readers, (and it would do so even more in the second half).

We will see what happens, provided the readers still have patience for me.

It is appropriate to thank the BURSA editorial office for having tolerated my relative avoidance of dealing with the day to day publishing issues, to grant me the time needed for writing this text.

To all our readers, Happy Holidays!