some preliminary roughings out of my thesis


since the very dawn of philosophy, man has looked to mathematics to describe the world accurately. we rely on math for certainty. 


in chimes the frenchman. 
"we are not merely skeptics, nor only mathematicians. we are Christians. we can not only doubt, we may not only affirm. we must, somewhere, submit." - pascal, in a rough paraphrase of pensée 201.

 in the Christian cosmos, then, what abides? where can we stand? what abides? 


the jew. 
"So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love." - st. paul, 1 cor. 13:13
              
faith                 hope                          love                          -- normative aspect: philosophy of math
   |                       |                                 |
knowledge      truth                         wisdom                      -- situational aspect: physics (math applied)
   |                       |                                 |
grammar         logic                         rhetoric                     -- existential aspect: teaching math
   |                       |                                 |
   |                       |                                 |
   |                       |                                 |
arithmetic     algebra              quantum theory                   -- the kinds of mathematics we learn
                     calculus      non-euclidean geometries


math, at its foundation, is faith
               we have faith in God as the Creator, as the Constant One, the Righteous one. math is trustworthy not because it is self-evident, it is trustworthy because God is; because He loves us and does not lie to us. 2+2=4 because He is forever 1 which is always 3. 

math next is hope
               we hope to one day have dominion over creation. the Creator has hidden glories everywhere for us to search out. this means that when we do a calculus problem involving a decreasing mass, increasing acceleration, highly variable friction, and decreasing gravitational force, we simply hope that our rocket will actually escape the atmosphere. we have faith in the numbers working out, but there is only hope that it will actually describe the world. we hope in the righteousness, the trustworthiness of our God. 


and the greatest of these is love. 
               mathematics is the meter of creation, which was sung by God. and He is love. mathematics, then, is the meter chosen by love. and so, to choose the right meter, we must be loving. i declare to you a mystery. force is nothing more or less than the mass of a thing times its acceleration. always. most of the time. unless you're not on earth. then, at least you can be sure that the energy is equal to the mass of the thing counted as many times as light is fast squared. except, that's not really how it works all the time. because turns out there's something faster than light on the universe. truly, a great mystery, yet i give you a greater. my mother's forehead wrinkled between her eyebrows. it was a wednesday. my father says, "come on, let's grab lunch quick. you're getting a headache from not eating, aren't you?" my mother's forehead wrinkled between her eyebrows. this time it was a thursday. my father says, "hey let's get out of here. you're worried about eating too much. so let's go." 
               here is the riddle's heart, here the knot of the mystery: for the creation is our bride, and we are her husband. we must know her parts well enough to know which language we use to speak to her. we should love creation enough to know that the language of newton's calculus is wonderful, but creation doesn't like that language when we're speaking about black holes and electrons. what will happen on the day that we actually love the handiwork of our Creator? i daresay we'll fly faster than light, fall upwards, and burn things without them being consumed. i dare, even, to say that we shall be creators ourselves. that we shall give life at last, and not death. then, death, thou too shall die. 

Happiness is neither outside us nor within us. It is in God, and both outside and within us.

pensée 26, blaise pascal

When we want to think of God, is there nothing which turns us aside, tempts us to think of other things? All that is bad, and it is born with us.

pensée 14, blaise pascal

If man is not made for God, why is he only happy with God?
If man is made for God, why is he so hostile to God?

pensée 18, blaise pascal

For Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the gospel, and not with words of eloquent wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power. For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart." Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seek wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.

st. paul, 1 corinthians 1:17-25

remember Solomon. truly, all is vanity, and much studying is wearisome to the soul. 

To bow and sue for grace 

With suppliant knee and deify his power, 

Who from the terror of this arm so late 

Doubted his empire, that were low indeed, 

That were an ignominy and shame beneath 

This downfall, since by fate the strength of gods 

And this empyreal substance cannot fail...

john milton, paradise lost, I.111-117

St. Augustine was troubled in conscience whenever he caught himself delighting in music, which he took to be sinful. He was a choice spirit, and were he living today would agree with us. I have no use for cranks who despise music, because it is a gift of God.

luther, from here i stand by roland bainton, ch.18 p.266

God uses lust to impel men to marriage, ambition to office, avarice to earning, and fear to faith.

luther's table talk,

from here i stand by roland bainton, ch.17 p.230

When Luther looked at his family in 1538, he remarked, 'Christ said we must become as little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. Dear God, this is too much. Have we got to become such idiots?'

here i stand by roland bainton, ch.17 p.236

Luther was not concerned to philosophize about the structure of Church and state; his insistence was simply that every man must answer for himself to God.

here i stand by roland bainton, ch.8 p.109

In 2003 Southern opposition found a visible face in Peter Jasper Akinola, the primate of the powerful Church of Nigeria, who expressed implacable opposition to Anglo-American sexual liberalism. At every point, he stressed that he was objecting not to specific policies or actions, but to what he viewed as a Northern betrayal of the most basic tenets of Christianity, a literally diabolical lurch into non-Christian heresy. Responding to the proposed elevation of Jeffrey John, Akinola thundered, "This is an attack on the Church of God -- a Satanic attack on God's Church." To the prospect of gay unions, he warned that "If England adopts a new faith, alien to what has been handed to us together, they can walk apart.... No Church can ignore the teaching of the Bible with impunity, and no Church is beyond discipline."

philip jenkins, the next Christendom, p.236-237

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.

1 john 4:18-19

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made. In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness, to bear witness about the light, that all might believe through him. He was not the light, but came to bear witness about the light.

The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made through him, yet the world did not know him. He came to his own, and his own people did not receive him. But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth. (John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”) And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known.

st. john's Gospel, 1:1-18

the Light has shone in the darkness, and we have seen His glory where we are. we have seen Him coming afar off, and now through the mirror of faith dimly, yet soon face to face. for like He did this day, we too shall rise unto Life eternal. today is the day that puts all may days and earth days and arbor days to shame, for today is the day of Life. today is the day that death lost and earth, the earth, was given Life. Happy Easter.

It can be said that God in the first creation of things decided to produce effects regularly in the presence of, and not in the absence of, certain things and each thing of the same species. And it belongs to these things to be a cause by their nature, i.e., by that nature in which they were constituted at their creation. And the term 'regularly' is used because God did not tie His power down to the creatures.

gabriel biel, whether the sacraments of the new covenant are effective causes of grace p. 4

And so it is not the case that heat is a cause of heat because of some other power that exists in it; rather, it is a cause of heat solely because God has so determined Himself that in the presence of heat-- and not unless it is present--He regularly wills to produce heat. And if He had not so decided, then the very same heat, which would in that case exist without any change, would be heat and yet would not be a cause of heat. Hence, God does nothing through a secondary cause without its being the case that He does it through Himself just as principally and no less so than if He were doing it alone.

gabriel biel, whether the sacraments of the new covenant are effective causes of grace, p.3

This argument seems strong to me and sufficiently plausible for us to conclude that if God were to decide that from this day forward He is going to will to send rain at the utterance of some word pronounced by someone, then that word, once uttered, would be just as properly a cause of the rain brought about by God at its utterance as heat is a cause of heat. And this seems altogether true. For a creature has nothing except from God's will alone, which grants it to the creature freely and contingently.

gabriel biel, whether the sacraments of the new covenant are effective causes of grace, p.3-4

For you have not come to what may be touched, a blazing fire and darkness and gloom and a tempest and the sound of a trumpet and a voice whose words made the hearers beg that no further messages be spoken to them. For they could not endure the order that was given,"If even a beast touches the mountain, it shall be stoned." Indeed, so terrifying was the sight that Moses said, "I tremble with fear." But you have come to Mount Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God, the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel.

hebrews 12:18-24

Nowhere in the New Testament, in fact, is Christianity presented as a cult or as a religion. Religion is needed where there is a wall of separation between God and man.

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.5, p.19

All rational, spiritual and other qualities of man, distinguishing him from the other creatures, have their focus and ultimate fulfillment in this capacity to bless God, to know, so to speak, the meaning of the thirst and hunger that constitutes his life. 'Homo sapiens,' 'homo faber' ... yes, but, first of all, 'homo adorans.' The first, the basic definition of man is that he is the priest. He stands in the center of the world and unifies it in his act of blessing God, of both receiving the world from God and offering it to God - and by filling the world with this eucharist, he transforms his life, the one that he receives from the world, into life in God, into communion with Him. The world was created as the 'matter,' the material of one all-embracing eucharist, and man was created as the priest of this cosmic sacrament.

alexander schmemann, for the life of the world, ch.1.2, p.15

"Because here's something else that's weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness."

-David Foster Wallace

via gibbs