{"id":7071,"date":"2010-01-11T00:00:14","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T04:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=7071"},"modified":"2010-01-11T00:00:14","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T04:00:14","slug":"michael-dolzani-spiritual-otherness-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/01\/11\/michael-dolzani-spiritual-otherness-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Dolzani: Spiritual Otherness (2)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"samson\"<\/p>\n

Von Carolsfeld, Samson Destroys the Temple, 1880<\/p>\n

Responding to Matthew Griffin and Clayton Chrusch<\/a>, regarding my earlier post<\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Matthew, I am moved by the warmth and generosity of your response.\u00a0 I’m very glad what I wrote was useful to you, all the more because there is a reciprocity:\u00a0 your response was what chiefly inspired a follow-up posting of mine that I’ll be sending along as soon as I’m sure it’s entirely coherent.\u00a0 The Hebrews passage<\/a> is indeed a key, and I thank you for reminding me of it.\u00a0 Epiphany<\/a> is a perfect time to be discussing these things–I hadn’t even thought about that!<\/p>\n

Second, to Clayton Chrusch:\u00a0 Wow.\u00a0 I admire the marriage of articulate intellect and emotional intensity in this response.\u00a0 Literary criticism could use more of this directness.\u00a0 You raise issues so immense that I know I haven’t thought through them completely yet, but you deserve at least something of an immediate response.\u00a0 Concerning God, yes, as Jesus he is an object, a historical personage–and therefore bound up with all the ambiguities of our relationship to objects, starting with the fact that there is no historical evidence that he even existed.\u00a0 The quest for the historical Jesus leaves us more distanced from God than ever.\u00a0 God could also be considered as a subject, but not as what we usually mean by a subject, namely, the ego of the natural man.\u00a0 Jung’s Self\/ego distinction is helpful here, and the Jungian Self is in fact a God-image.\u00a0 If God is a person, it is not the same sense in which I am a person.\u00a0 For example, he is not limited by time and space, those conditions which define ego-consciousness.\u00a0 When Paul says, “I, yet not I, but Christ in me,” he is speaking of the person of Christ as dwelling within him, an interpenetration that the ego or natural man is not capable of.\u00a0 I’m sure you know all this; I’m just struggling to clarify my vocabulary.<\/p>\n

I absolutely agree with you that “real” and “true” are words that may be applied to the imagination; otherwise, the imagination’s products are just beautiful illusions, and that gets us nowhere.\u00a0 I was just trying to make the distinction that “real” and “true” here must mean something other than “objectively factual.”\u00a0 A scientist or historian means something else by these terms.\u00a0 That’s why the reality and truth of the spiritual world cannot be proved by scientific or historical methods.<\/p>\n

As for suffering, I don’t think you misspoke–in fact, that was probably the part of your response that I admired the most.\u00a0 I see why you qualify the response, though:\u00a0 yes, there are things more important than avoiding pain.\u00a0 Though I’m sure you’d agree that we have to be careful to state this precisely, because what we’re really talking about here is martyrdom.\u00a0 For the Tibetan monks, or the early Christian martyrs, this meant accepting their own suffering for the sake of something more important.\u00a0 But when I teach Milton’s Samson Agonistes<\/em>, I ask students the troubling question:\u00a0 what makes Samson different from a suicide bomber?\u00a0 Samson too experiences “a renovation of the will so complete and so secure that it doesn’t matter any longer what place” he is in (marvelous passage, by the way).\u00a0 But he also finds acceptable the suffering of the Philistines who will die along with him when he pulls down the Temple, just as the suicide bombers felt when they brought down our Temple, the World Trade Center.\u00a0 Anyway, thank you for a searching and stimulating response.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Von Carolsfeld, Samson Destroys the Temple, 1880 Responding to Matthew Griffin and Clayton Chrusch, regarding my earlier post. Matthew, I am moved by the warmth and generosity of your response.\u00a0 I’m very glad what I wrote was useful to you, all the more because there is a reciprocity:\u00a0 your response was what chiefly inspired a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[130,150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7071","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-religion","category-spirtual-vision"],"yoast_head":"\nMichael Dolzani: Spiritual Otherness (2) - The Educated Imagination<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/01\/11\/michael-dolzani-spiritual-otherness-2\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Michael Dolzani: Spiritual Otherness (2) - The Educated Imagination\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Von Carolsfeld, Samson Destroys the Temple, 1880 Responding to Matthew Griffin and Clayton Chrusch, regarding my earlier post. 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