Unboundedly Rational Religion

CONTENTS

PART ONE
Preface
Introduction: How Real Are We?
1. Faith as Thinking with Assent
2. Trinitarian Philosophy
3. The Identity of All Being(s)
4. Creation, Exemplarism and Divine Ideas
5. Creation stricto sensu
6 . Metaphysics and Creation
7. Infinity and Created Being
8. Rethinking God
9. From Soul to Self
10. Transcendent Immanence, Immanent Transcendence
11. Precepts and Inclinations
12. Beyond Natural Law
13. How to Deconstruct Human Rights
14. Dialectical Reason
15. Grace and Ecumenism
16. Religion and Freedom
Epilogue: A Cultural Basis for the European Union?

PART TWO
1. Christian Traditions and Living Philosophy
2. Reintegration
3. Beyond the Sin-Paradigm
4. The Self-Explanatory?
5. The One and the Many
6. Absolute and Trinity: Logic at the Crossroads
7. From Shadows to Reality
8. Divine Simplicity - not so Simple?
9. Reconciliation
10. Where we may be at
11. Beyond Theism and atheism
12. Ideas or Spirits? Ideas as Spirits
13. Circularity, Series
14. On Fossils
15. Essence, Esse, Simplicity
16. Signum formale
17. Necessary Creation?
18. Beyond Infinity
19. Angelism
20. Becoming
21. Aboriginal Perennial
22. Infinite Incarnation
23. Eros
24. How it Might Be
25. Christianity without (or within) God?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

Preface

Monotheism might be regarded as the absolutisation of the absolute point of view with which both modern philosophy and modern science have striven to identify themselves, to the point of eschewing merely natural certainties. Thus it has in a sense preceded these two phenomena as condition for their birth, a condition they not unnaturally seek ceaselessly to improve upon, in an at least partial rejection. This is captured by the notion of differentiation and reintegration as one operation, arguably the essence of the ancient three-termed syllogism.

This book therefore attempts the ultimate reintegration of recasting the spontaneous religious movement of monotheism, of Judaism developing into Christianity, arguably a form of atheism, in scientific or absolute mode. Islam, where touched upon, is treated under its aspect, incidental it may be but undeniable historically, of one of the many variants upon Christianity.

It does not ignore the previous attempt by Hegel to do precisely the same but rather builds consciously upon it. An experience of neo-Thomism virtually unknown to Hegel is also brought to bear, leading to the conclusion that it is Hegel rather than the neo-scholastics or Jesuits or even Kant who develops the Thomist Augustinian Aristotelian developments. If it was Kant who differentiated here then Hegel reintegrated, while we here have performed a further reintegration, centring ultimately upon Parmenides. The final position though, as stressing human command over the material presented to thought, freedom over being, is distinctively post-modern.

An introductory chapter loads the scales in favour of an idealist approach in quasi-Quinean sense, in that being is called in question, as it is throughout the book. After a chapter revising the best expositions of faith as a possibly rational attitude the Christian discovery or intuition of intra-divine events or processes, held compatible with divine infinity and immutability, is treated under the rubric of a Trinitarian philosophy. This leads to analysis of notions of being (identity in difference) and, above all, of creation, viewing this as freed from the historic dualism which has contradicted the necessary infinity of the first principle. Creation is not thereby denied but seen as truly a constituent of the divine life. The picture is thus monistic, which is to say scientific as presenting a holistic system or way of seeing things absolutely or beyond appearance merely.

The consequences for human metaphysical and moral nature are rigorously drawn, freed from all anthropomorphisms so as better to illuminate the insights of religion and philosophy. The relevance for contemporary movements from palaeontology to Church ecumenism is brought out, while a concluding epilogue attempts to shed light on the vexed debate on Europe in relation to the Christian inheritance. Other concluding chapters treat of both sacramental religion and of dialectic as the method of reason, whether in theology or in the world. For the world without the reason is not an object of thought, any more than you can wash the fur without wetting it, in G. Frege’s words.

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