Most skeptics are scarcely skeptical of their own beliefs, truly, it's as if they never even questioned them.
This is because we usually believe what we desire to believe, and what we desire is dependent upon how we live. If you wish to desire to believe or know a thing, you must live a certain way.
Indeed, the liturgy is to form us into the types of people who desire to know God, and then are capable of receiving His spirit.
Rituals do not express belief, they shape how we know. It is impossible to understand religion without FIRST being formed in worship, HERE Peter Leithart remarks :
"....we do not find Israelites in the Hebrew Bible described as thinkers who then act. Rather, the prophets’ expect Israel to practicea nexus of ethically-induced rituals aimed at intellectual formation.
Israel’s rituals—are meant to form knowers and not merely express what is already believed or known..
False worship blinds Israel so that she can no longer discern YHWH’s actions from her false gods’ actions we will come to understand our world through our ethical behavior and our rituals. Whether they are prescribed by our culture or the prophets.
The question centers on whether we will know foolishly or wisely, and whether or not we will bring a life trued to God’s instruction to the rituals of the church.”
One truly only knows what one loves, this is true even of mathematical propositions.
This is why truth always must begin with beauty, to evoke desire, one must want to know a truth, and for this one must perceive it somehow as beautiful, or else one's consciousness will never intend toward the horizon of that truth to begin with.
As Plotinus discovered, love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential "mood" that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it.
Only once the senses are “rendered rational” by ascetic education is the "ontologically erotic" gaze, which loves and desires being, able to receive creation as gift within the vision of love.
This is true, and also why knowledge of God must, *begin with desire, and beauty, neither of which is contained within dialectical reason, it requires a subjective *intention on the knowers part.
Hence the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing.
I’ve written how reality itself must be trusted to be known HERE
Esther Lightcap Meek in his “A Little Manual for Knowing” explains how we can adopt a posture that will bring us into contact with God:
“We love in order to know. Love, not bare information amassing, should characterize the way we relate to the world.
The goal is no longer comprehensive, mystery-eliminating, reality-denuding information. The goal is communion—the communion of knower and known. Communion is the fulfillment of love. The goal is ongoing friendship. Friendship requires our ongoing pledge.”
We pledge to give ourselves to the yet-to-be-known, and to consent to its being. We pledge to take the risk to follow something that may prove not to be there, something that may prove to be way different from what we imagine. ”
We pledge also to open ourselves to the transformation and to the new reality that the yet-to-be-known will bring us. We must be willing to have it change us, without specifying or holding at arm’s length the change we will undergo. ”
The goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.”
She says elsewhere,
“…philosophical arguments aren’t the natural foundation of religious belief, so ‘God exists’ gains its meaning not from philosophical arguments but from how people experience human life.
….people don’t normally acquire religious beliefs by argument or testing evidence. Instead, they come to an understanding of the world that is expressed in values and a way of living. When someone converts to a religion, what changes isn’t so much intellectual beliefs, but their will, what they value, how they choose to live”
Some things can only be known in this way, from within a commitment to them, a commitment which may be called ‘faith.’
When first I entered the Faith, I did not believe in the physical resurrection of Christ. God does not require that, he condescends to us.
To have a relationship with God, as with anyone, one needs to offer small tokens of trust.
"God is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.”
- Olivier Clement
Walk with God and you'll come to know Him, the person of Christ is embedded within the rhythms of the liturgical calendar.
The resurrection may have happened 2,000 yrs ago. I think it did. It would explain a lot, like how entire civilizations bloomed alive over the breaking of bread to some dead backwater peasant.
But, it's happening today. You can actually do this. Marry the rhythms of your deadened life onto the life-giving movement of God’s, tuning your soul to the music of paradise.
You can practice the resurrection, perform theology, live with God.
Discursive knowledge, in every realm, will never be certain, but, cleanse the nous, and direct perception of Gods beauty can be apprehended.
Of course, you have to educate your senses to receive God, generally, people know what they desire to know, desire intends consciousness
Yes, as if yearning itself was not a religious experience, and although we cannot grasp God, our desire exceeds what's possible for conceptual knowledge, erotically beckoning us to leap into the Divine unknown…
Participative knowing requires personal transformation, and living the virtues can disclose more of reality.
The virtue of humility is central to this unbounded receptivity so as to be filled with more.
Reminds me of Larry Hurtado's insight, the first Christian's sang God, it's only when we try and speak of Him, utilizing not our hearts and desire, but our intellect, that the trouble begins.
Met Hilarion Alfeyev once said,
"The theological authority of liturgical texts is, in my opinion, higher than that of the works of the Fathers of the Church,
"...The lex credendi grows out of the lex orandi, and dogmas are considered divinely revealed because they are born in the life of prayer and revealed to the Church through its divine services.”
And Francis Martin says,
"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."
David Bentley Hart puts the problem well :
"In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or “adequate” a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic.
*********************************************************
For Christian thought, then, delight is the premise of any sound epistemology: it is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation’s beauty – only in seeing that creation truly is beauty – does one apprehend what creation is.
*********************************************************
Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason”, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. "
Paul Tyson has written on how, for the ancients, philosophy wasn’t about thinking, which can bring no truth :
“….right action and right feeling in an actual lived life are clearly a more significant measure of philosophical validity to Plato than smart thinking.
Merely intellectually “believing” in the transcendent existence of the form of “The Table” does not make you either a philosopher or a Platonist.
Plato refuses to put his philosophy in clear propositions before us for the very specific reason that he mistrusts written statements as being “dead” propositional substitutes for the communal and individual spiritual practices of the truly philosophical life.
Other than as an active, affective, aesthetic, and embodied existential stance…such spiritual formation cannot be imposed by mere argumentative force and cannot be “obtained” with a mere proof.
Thus receptive prayer, quiet attention, and right worship are keys to truth and success in the active pursuit of meaningful knowledge.”
So Faith is a means of perception that requires a change in the agent of perception.
By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.
These things are not anti-reason, they complete reason itself.
As Plotinus discovered, love is necessary first, before beauty can be seen, for love is that essential "mood" that intends the world as beauty and can so receive it.
Only once the senses are “rendered rational” by ascetic education is the "ontologically erotic" gaze, which loves and desires being, able to receive creation as gift within the vision of love.
This is true, and also why knowledge of God must, *begin with desire, and beauty, neither of which is contained within dialectical reason, it requires a subjective *intention on the knowers part.
Hence the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing.
I’ve written how reality itself must be trusted to be known HERE
Esther Lightcap Meek in his “A Little Manual for Knowing” explains how we can adopt a posture that will bring us into contact with God:
“We love in order to know. Love, not bare information amassing, should characterize the way we relate to the world.
The goal is no longer comprehensive, mystery-eliminating, reality-denuding information. The goal is communion—the communion of knower and known. Communion is the fulfillment of love. The goal is ongoing friendship. Friendship requires our ongoing pledge.”
We pledge to give ourselves to the yet-to-be-known, and to consent to its being. We pledge to take the risk to follow something that may prove not to be there, something that may prove to be way different from what we imagine. ”
We pledge also to open ourselves to the transformation and to the new reality that the yet-to-be-known will bring us. We must be willing to have it change us, without specifying or holding at arm’s length the change we will undergo. ”
The goal of knowing is not complete information; it is communion.”
She says elsewhere,
“…philosophical arguments aren’t the natural foundation of religious belief, so ‘God exists’ gains its meaning not from philosophical arguments but from how people experience human life.
….people don’t normally acquire religious beliefs by argument or testing evidence. Instead, they come to an understanding of the world that is expressed in values and a way of living. When someone converts to a religion, what changes isn’t so much intellectual beliefs, but their will, what they value, how they choose to live”
Some things can only be known in this way, from within a commitment to them, a commitment which may be called ‘faith.’
When first I entered the Faith, I did not believe in the physical resurrection of Christ. God does not require that, he condescends to us.
To have a relationship with God, as with anyone, one needs to offer small tokens of trust.
"God is not exterior evidence, but the secret call within us.”
- Olivier Clement
Walk with God and you'll come to know Him, the person of Christ is embedded within the rhythms of the liturgical calendar.
The resurrection may have happened 2,000 yrs ago. I think it did. It would explain a lot, like how entire civilizations bloomed alive over the breaking of bread to some dead backwater peasant.
But, it's happening today. You can actually do this. Marry the rhythms of your deadened life onto the life-giving movement of God’s, tuning your soul to the music of paradise.
You can practice the resurrection, perform theology, live with God.
Discursive knowledge, in every realm, will never be certain, but, cleanse the nous, and direct perception of Gods beauty can be apprehended.
Of course, you have to educate your senses to receive God, generally, people know what they desire to know, desire intends consciousness
Yes, as if yearning itself was not a religious experience, and although we cannot grasp God, our desire exceeds what's possible for conceptual knowledge, erotically beckoning us to leap into the Divine unknown…
Participative knowing requires personal transformation, and living the virtues can disclose more of reality.
The virtue of humility is central to this unbounded receptivity so as to be filled with more.
Reminds me of Larry Hurtado's insight, the first Christian's sang God, it's only when we try and speak of Him, utilizing not our hearts and desire, but our intellect, that the trouble begins.
Met Hilarion Alfeyev once said,
"The theological authority of liturgical texts is, in my opinion, higher than that of the works of the Fathers of the Church,
"...The lex credendi grows out of the lex orandi, and dogmas are considered divinely revealed because they are born in the life of prayer and revealed to the Church through its divine services.”
And Francis Martin says,
"For the religious, knowledge depends not only upon rationality and clarity but also upon ethical living, participation in prayer and liturgy, practices of fidelity, and openness to the Spirit. This is chiefly because in knowing God, we seek to know a person and persons must reveal themselves through cultivated relationships."
David Bentley Hart puts the problem well :
"In reality, subjective certitude cannot be secured, not because the world is nothing but the aleatory play of opaque signifiers, but because subjective certitude is an irreparably defective model of knowledge; it cannot correspond to or “adequate” a world that is gratuity rather than ground, poetry rather than necessity, rhetoric rather than dialectic.
*********************************************************
For Christian thought, then, delight is the premise of any sound epistemology: it is delight that constitutes creation, and so only delight can comprehend it, see it aright, understand its grammar. Only in loving creation’s beauty – only in seeing that creation truly is beauty – does one apprehend what creation is.
*********************************************************
Thus, for Christian thought, to know the world truly is achieved not through a positivistic reconstruction of its “sufficient reason”, but through an openness before glory, a willingness to orient one’s will toward the light of being, and to receive the world as gift, in response to which the most fully “adequate” discourse of truth is worship, prayer, and rejoicing. "
Paul Tyson has written on how, for the ancients, philosophy wasn’t about thinking, which can bring no truth :
“….right action and right feeling in an actual lived life are clearly a more significant measure of philosophical validity to Plato than smart thinking.
Merely intellectually “believing” in the transcendent existence of the form of “The Table” does not make you either a philosopher or a Platonist.
Plato refuses to put his philosophy in clear propositions before us for the very specific reason that he mistrusts written statements as being “dead” propositional substitutes for the communal and individual spiritual practices of the truly philosophical life.
Other than as an active, affective, aesthetic, and embodied existential stance…such spiritual formation cannot be imposed by mere argumentative force and cannot be “obtained” with a mere proof.
Thus receptive prayer, quiet attention, and right worship are keys to truth and success in the active pursuit of meaningful knowledge.”
So Faith is a means of perception that requires a change in the agent of perception.
By participating in the rhythms of religious ritual we order our modes of perception to receive the world as sacrament.
These things are not anti-reason, they complete reason itself.
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