The Reality of Some Spiritual Abstractions

[Truthstalker]

In some way God is able to not only percieve but evaluate moral conditions and virtues, such as sinlessness or sinfulness, grace, love, faith, hope. Jesus spoke of faith growing, which means a dimension exists to faith that, although we cannot measure it, exists. I think in the heavenlies these things are more solid than the things of earth: these are real treasures, too solid and real for the wispy, soon to pass planet we live on

On the Tolkien and Sacramentalism thread, now gone, we discussed the embodiment of grace in physical objects, such as medals, water, crucifixes, etc. Grace has a physical dimension and can be attached to physical objects. There is no border between the physical and the spiritual; there is only one creation. I would like to explore this concept, or maybe be pointed in a direction where it has been fully explored. If grace can be incarnated, so to speak, so then can the other virtues, the other fruit of the spirit. They were all incarnated at one time in the Lord, and they are still incarnated in Him and He desires to make them become real in us.

Am I off base, is this new, or ground well traveled?

 

[Hastrman]

I think I see what you mean, but I don’t think you’re correct. It would help you think about it more clearly, and especially express it more clearly, to read some Scholastic philosophy. I recommend Jacques Maritain.

Anyway, you seem to be confusing Physical with real. There is no phyical dimension, not the first, second, third, or nineteenth, in which faith or grace grows; more that it increases in power. Faith is a faculty of the will, which is not physical, but it is real. A real thing is a thing that exists independently of whether someone is thinking about it, whether or no it is physical. A thing is physical if it is in its nature to have (or affect in the case of energy) three or more dimensions. A thing is spiritual if it is real, but does not have any dimension. Faith has no dimensions, nor does any other power of the soul, like love, hate, choice, or intention.

Grace has no physical dimension; it is solely the action of the will of God. Christ’s will, both His divine and human wills, are no more physical than anyone else’s. That said, grace can attach to physical objects, but that is because God wills it, and He can withdraw that grace at any time–it’s not magic. The grace attaching to the Eucharist, for instance, is not physical grace; it is the grace attached to God, which, in the case of the Second Person of the Trinity, includes matter, since Christ took on human nature and our nature includes matter. Eating the Eucharist is, mutatis mutandem, exactly like eating the Father or the Holy Spirit, except They have no bodies and thus cannot be eaten.

 

[Truthstalker]

Thanks. Scholastic philosophy is on my reading list and it sounds like I should wait until I get there. This may atisfy me until then except for the odd question.

I’m resurrecting what I can of the Tolkien and Sacramentalism thread at forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=108308. You might enjoy it as well as making substantial contributions. Most of the posts were lost in the Hackattack.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

I would love to get into some discussions about this with you.

I’ve worked on a great number of equivalences, and spent a great deal of time examining the boundaries between many seemingly opposite things such as real and imaginary, awake and asleep and all other states of consciousness, and the like.

Einstein theorized that matter and energy are interchangeable.

I have theorized that spiritual and real phenomena can also be interchanged.

Einstein started his theory by imagining what it would be like to ride on a light beam. My theory was kicked off big time a few years ago when my daughter asked, “daddy, how come things that I imagine seem more important than things that are real?”

Well, one reason is that imagination causes reality, and vice versa. For example, a car doesn’t just morph up out of the dirt; it is in the minds of many people who work together to incarnate their imaginary car. It takes some level of faith to move a mountain, and the imagination of the mountain moving is required before one can exercise faith in being able to order it around. The imagination is the realm in which our faith works, and our imaginations actually make us what we are – and even dictates whether we will be creative and productive, or just insane.

Once a person can cross certain rhetorical barriers with ease, it becomes much easier to characterize and understand spiritual and physical truths in light of each other.

Here’s another approach. Einstein taught that motion, in a straight line and at a constant speed, is undectable because such motion only has meaning when measured relative to something else. For example, looking out a train window at another train moving slowly, it is impossible to know whether it is the train I am in or the other train that is moving, unless there are “outside” clues such as “stationary” objects as visual references, bouncing around on the track, etc.

Similarly, I don’t think there is any way for the human mind to prove to itself conclusively what is actually real and what is imagined. For example, I can imagine that only I exist and everybody else is in my mind – that’s because it is my mind itself that applies “reality” to those other people so the “reality” of other is, in fact, in my mind. I can choose to pretend they aren’t there and they will interact with me – but then again the same thing happens in dreams so again how do I know at any given time whether I am awake or dreaming?

That is enough for starters. I’m looking forward to hearing where you might want to take this discussion.

Alan

 

[Truthstalker]

I would love to get into some discussions about this with you.

I’ve worked on a great number of equivalences, and spent a great deal of time examining the boundaries between many seemingly opposite things such as real and imaginary, awake and asleep and all other states of consciousness, and the like.

Einstein theorized that matter and energy are interchangeable.

I have theorized that spiritual and real phenomena can also be interchanged.

Einstein started his theory by imagining what it would be like to ride on a light beam. My theory was kicked off big time a few years ago when my daughter asked, “daddy, how come things that I imagine seem more important than things that are real?”

Well, one reason is that imagination causes reality, and vice versa. For example, a car doesn’t just morph up out of the dirt; it is in the minds of many people who work together to incarnate their imaginary car. It takes some level of faith to move a mountain, and the imagination of the mountain moving is required before one can exercise faith in being able to order it around. The imagination is the realm in which our faith works, and our imaginations actually make us what we are – and even dictates whether we will be creative and productive, or just insane.

Once a person can cross certain rhetorical barriers with ease, it becomes much easier to characterize and understand spiritual and physical truths in light of each other.

Here’s another approach. Einstein taught that motion, in a straight line and at a constant speed, is undectable because such motion only has meaning when measured relative to something else. For example, looking out a train window at another train moving slowly, it is impossible to know whether it is the train I am in or the other train that is moving, unless there are “outside” clues such as “stationary” objects as visual references, bouncing around on the track, etc.

Similarly, I don’t think there is any way for the human mind to prove to itself conclusively what is actually real and what is imagined. For example, I can imagine that only I exist and everybody else is in my mind – that’s because it is my mind itself that applies “reality” to those other people so the “reality” of other is, in fact, in my mind. I can choose to pretend they aren’t there and they will interact with me – but then again the same thing happens in dreams so again how do I know at any given time whether I am awake or dreaming?

That is enough for starters. I’m looking forward to hearing where you might want to take this discussion.

Alan

I don’t know enough about it. Sounds like the intersection of word-faith theology under Catholic constraints and postmodernist relativism revisited in a scholastic framework and one particular episode of Star Trek the Next Generation… But I’m just muttering. Faith causes stuff to happen: mountains move, for example, and raising the dead and healing the sick. If that makes any sense let me know.

Gotta go. I will probably mutter again when I reread when you wrote.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

I don’t know enough about it. Sounds like the intersection of word-faith theology under Catholic constraints and postmodernist relativism revisited in a scholastic framework and one particular episode of Star Trek the Next Generation… But I’m just muttering. Faith causes stuff to happen: mountains move, for example, and raising the dead and healing the sick. If that makes any sense let me know.

Gotta go. I will probably mutter again when I reread when you wrote.

I love your muttering! Some of these ideas are so beyond what I’ve seen discussed that I’ve only known a couple people who can even hold such a conversation. I do think your answer reflects the spirit in which I made some of the comments; I have truly become integrated in all my experiences and learning, to the degree I can sense. I have cross-referenced many boundaries to redesign my sense of reality by changing the way I think about things, in such a way that my weakness of faith did not matter; once I did that I began finding my faith.

When there is so much to say that I want to shout from the mountaintops how the Lord has healed me and clearly can heal others too, anything can be a starting place and this thread is no exception. That is my faith at its current level; the first time in 47 years I’ve come to a way of looking at things that even allows me to allege that I have faith. Now I got all the faith I need – sometimes even annoyingly so as now I have to take responsibility for certain attitudes and feelings that used to control me.

Alan

 

[nobody]

In some way God is able to not only percieve but evaluate moral conditions and virtues, such as sinlessness or sinfulness, grace, love, faith, hope. Jesus spoke of faith growing, which means a dimension exists to faith that, although we cannot measure it, exists. I think in the heavenlies these things are more solid than the things of earth: these are real treasures, too solid and real for the wispy, soon to pass planet we live on

On the Tolkien and Sacramentalism thread, now gone, we discussed the embodiment of grace in physical objects, such as medals, water, crucifixes, etc. Grace has a physical dimension and can be attached to physical objects. There is no border between the physical and the spiritual; there is only one creation. I would like to explore this concept, or maybe be pointed in a direction where it has been fully explored. If grace can be incarnated, so to speak, so then can the other virtues, the other fruit of the spirit. They were all incarnated at one time in the Lord, and they are still incarnated in Him and He desires to make them become real in us.

Am I off base, is this new, or ground well traveled?

One similar, if not the same, ground is found in the sacraments:

**SACRAMENT: **An efficacious sign of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us through the work of the Holy Spirit (774, 1131).

The Eucharist, especially, yes?

I’ve also heard of references to “windows” and “veils” to what lies beyond our physical world. We are given glimpses, but cannot fathom the reality. Imagine being someone that cannot feel heat, and someone tries to explain it to you by letting you see the sun and listen to a fire.

 

[Truthstalker]

I love your muttering! Some of these ideas are so beyond what I’ve seen discussed that I’ve only known a couple people who can even hold such a conversation. I do think your answer reflects the spirit in which I made some of the comments; I have truly become integrated in all my experiences and learning, to the degree I can sense. I have cross-referenced many boundaries to redesign my sense of reality by changing the way I think about things, in such a way that my weakness of faith did not matter; once I did that I began finding my faith.

When there is so much to say that I want to shout from the mountaintops how the Lord has healed me and clearly can heal others too, anything can be a starting place and this thread is no exception. That is my faith at its current level; the first time in 47 years I’ve come to a way of looking at things that even allows me to allege that I have faith. Now I got all the faith I need – sometimes even annoyingly so as now I have to take responsibility for certain attitudes and feelings that used to control me.

Alan

I think I need to read Aquinas before tackling this any further.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

I think I need to read Aquinas before tackling this any further.

Yesterday I saw a book in the bookstore by some scientist that runs the human genome project, called “The Language of God.”

I just glanced through it, and it looked good and it was all about science and religion complementing each other instead of fighting each other.

Alan

 

[CathCentrist]

Since we are to believe there is a spiritual dimension and its part of reality we normally cannot see unless God allows it, then God is manipulating reality.

 

[AlanFromWichita]

Since we are to believe there is a spiritual dimension and its part of reality we normally cannot see unless God allows it, then God is manipulating reality.

Then would you then think God chooses whom, if any, will be able to detect His work in areas normally beyond our perception directly?

When you say manipulating reality, are you referring to the direct involvement in these normally inaccessible dimensions, or indirect effects that show themselves tangibly, or both?

I’m interested in hearing more about this viewpoint you’re presenting.

Alan

 

[CathCentrist]

Ithink its direct manipulation and regardless of what or who interprets the bible, God may “love us all” but he clearly has favorites. Its just like a parent who loves all his kids equally, but he/she does have their favorite and I feel and believe God acts like this as well.

Also, in the Fatima miracles, which I believe, I also dont believe that the sun itself actually moved from its set position and hurdled to the people. Their reality was manipulated by God into seeing the sun do that. If the sun really did that, then around the world it would have been reported - or for that matter, the world destroyed by such a scientific event. And for sake of argument if it did happen, then God still manipulated reality by keeping things in their proper place and life existing in the face of such an event. But boil it down to which route would take in doing a miracle? Though both ways would be simple for him, I still think he picked the easier one and thats manipulating those peoples view of reality instead of needing to do a miracle such as actually removing the sun from its set position.