Post 141.
For Christians, a relationship is at the center of everything. This relationship—The Father Loving the Son, and the Son Loving the Father—is expressed through an oft puzzling word: Trinity. God is one. God is three—creator, spirit, word. Centuries before the first Christian theologian was born, the Greek philosopher Plato reasoned the first part of the Trinity, that God is one. Plato’s monotheistic One, the perfect form of the good, the source of all reality, is infinite, simple, and unchangeable. The One is the standard by which all are measured. Plato’s One harmonized well, for many Jewish and early Christian authors, with the Abrahamic God of Israel, who is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). The I am who is (Exodus 3:14). Not a thing but Being itself. However, a God who is One without also being a relationship is experienced as distant, cold, and fixed. This is not the God of scripture, who relents and is altered out of His good sympathy (Jonah 3:10). In scripture is uncovered a God who is love. Not one who merely loves, but who is love. The Trinity.
In Plato’s most prominent myth, a man is chained in a cave, forced to watch shadows dancing on the cavern wall. For him, these shadows are the total of existence until one day, against his will, he is forced from the cave, past the figures and the fire in the cave, and out into the actual sun. He is in pain as he gazes upon the motionless but vivid sun. But eventually he comes to realize he has now seen the form of all light. The perfect form of light, the idea behind light that allows one to recognize imperfect light in the shadows of flames on a cavern wall. This light is flawless and frozen. This is the nature for all of Plato's forms—the form of dog, or the form of a chair—making up its -ness. E.g., dogness or chairness, which permit one to recognize a particular instance as a dog or as a chair.
If the ultimate transcendent description of God is Trinity—that God is Love is above the Platonic One who is the fixed Good—then at the center of everything is relationship. Somehow a perfect relationship. A perfect relationship which cannot be frozen. This activeness of God is what inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which he describes heaven as active, while in hell, Lucifer’s wings freeze everything. Ossified. Fixed. While Plato’s transcendental forms are frozen, with the full weight of that word, the Christian ideal transcendent must be the opposite—animated, stirring, everchanging, affectionate, and dynamic. While many authors have wrestled with Trinity as dynamic, few have gone beyond the Platonic ossified form of transcendent Beauty. Their descriptions of Beauty have more of Plato in them than the Trinity. As such, my recent work has aimed to understand what an ecological and praxial conception of transcendent Beauty—or Beautying as a transcendent verb—might mean for musicking and teaching.
DS
Image Link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif/640px-Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif
For Christians, a relationship is at the center of everything. This relationship—The Father Loving the Son, and the Son Loving the Father—is expressed through an oft puzzling word: Trinity. God is one. God is three—creator, spirit, word. Centuries before the first Christian theologian was born, the Greek philosopher Plato reasoned the first part of the Trinity, that God is one. Plato’s monotheistic One, the perfect form of the good, the source of all reality, is infinite, simple, and unchangeable. The One is the standard by which all are measured. Plato’s One harmonized well, for many Jewish and early Christian authors, with the Abrahamic God of Israel, who is one (Deuteronomy 6:4). The I am who is (Exodus 3:14). Not a thing but Being itself. However, a God who is One without also being a relationship is experienced as distant, cold, and fixed. This is not the God of scripture, who relents and is altered out of His good sympathy (Jonah 3:10). In scripture is uncovered a God who is love. Not one who merely loves, but who is love. The Trinity.
In Plato’s most prominent myth, a man is chained in a cave, forced to watch shadows dancing on the cavern wall. For him, these shadows are the total of existence until one day, against his will, he is forced from the cave, past the figures and the fire in the cave, and out into the actual sun. He is in pain as he gazes upon the motionless but vivid sun. But eventually he comes to realize he has now seen the form of all light. The perfect form of light, the idea behind light that allows one to recognize imperfect light in the shadows of flames on a cavern wall. This light is flawless and frozen. This is the nature for all of Plato's forms—the form of dog, or the form of a chair—making up its -ness. E.g., dogness or chairness, which permit one to recognize a particular instance as a dog or as a chair.
If the ultimate transcendent description of God is Trinity—that God is Love is above the Platonic One who is the fixed Good—then at the center of everything is relationship. Somehow a perfect relationship. A perfect relationship which cannot be frozen. This activeness of God is what inspired Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which he describes heaven as active, while in hell, Lucifer’s wings freeze everything. Ossified. Fixed. While Plato’s transcendental forms are frozen, with the full weight of that word, the Christian ideal transcendent must be the opposite—animated, stirring, everchanging, affectionate, and dynamic. While many authors have wrestled with Trinity as dynamic, few have gone beyond the Platonic ossified form of transcendent Beauty. Their descriptions of Beauty have more of Plato in them than the Trinity. As such, my recent work has aimed to understand what an ecological and praxial conception of transcendent Beauty—or Beautying as a transcendent verb—might mean for musicking and teaching.
DS
Image Link: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/cf/Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif/640px-Plato_Cave_Wikipedia.gif
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