THE KNUCKLEHEAD
'
S GUIDE TO COVENANTAL THEOLOGY
35
The proper technique, agenda, etc. of 'Today' <- - - - - -
Inevitable Good Things, Forever!
we can not actually do either of these things. The 'place' where those
"Inevitable Good Things, Forever!" reside is simply unavailable to us,
when what we are is one of the marks on the page. Marks on the page
can't 'travel' to other places, as our eyes can. These 'proofs' are -- at
best -- not proofs, and at worst, they are downright deceptive.
Temporal representations of the basic assumption under discussion
seem very popular these days. Nonetheless, the ancient Greek
philosophers already understood that representations of the basic
assumption along a temporal axis do not alter the basic situation, any
more than left-right, rather than up-down, spatial representations do so.
You have now completed Chapter 2, the kitchen-sink introduction
to a paradigm -- dehistoricized cosmology, a time-less explanation,
framework, or recipe for the cosmos -- that is utterly refused by the
Eucharist, according to Fr. Keefe. If you feel like you've just been
through a long language immersion class, in which energetic
instructors speak gibberish at you, except for brief moments during
which it almost seems that you can follow what they're saying a little,
unfortunately, that's probably about right. Chapter 2 was a 'don't worry,
just jump in' chapter, and you really shouldn't worry if not every single
word you read registered with you.
All your work is not for naught. I will be able to use some of the
vocabulary you very graciously immersed yourself in just now, to lead
you toward the ideas of a Catholic theologian who thinks like a child,
but not childishly.
I want to leave you with one last thought: consider how I tried to
hint at the vast scope and pervasiveness of the paradigm of
dehistoricized cosmology. The representation of the paradigm in the
problem of "The One and the Many" was familiar to the ancient
Greeks, but the same paradigm is represented in another way in a book
Mr. Steven Pinker wrote in 1997, as well as (in yet another way) in a
book written by Thomas Hobbes in 1651.
I can only hint at the scope and pervasiveness of the paradigm, but
I do want you to take the hint. As we will see in Chapter 3's brief
discussion of sex and marriage, representations of the paradigm far
pre-date even the birth of philosophy. Even more significantly for this
book, dehistoricized cosmology is also the bedrock philosophical
framework for the two great philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, whose
language formed the bedrock philosophical vocabulary for Catholic
theology.
N.B. This is an html-ized copy of a page from the pdf file, The Knucklehead's Guide to Covenantal Theology.