Mars Hill Group, Feb. 15, 2020

“… arguably it is Francis Bacon who is the greatest herald of the modern age. Bacon is not remembered as a philosopher or a scientist, yet he planted the seed of a great idea that is central to the modern world. Knowledge gives us power over nature, thus the central criteria of deciding “is it true?” becomes “does it work?” Once this stance is accepted as valid, questions of metaphysics and theology are simply irrelevant to matters of public truth and technological power. Reason and knowledge can now be free from the restrictions and fantasies of speculative thought and religious power.”

Through wonder men began to philosophize, both now and in the beginning. (Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book 1, 982b)

For this is an experience which is characteristic of a philosopher, this wondering: this is where philosophy begins and nowhere else. (Socrates in Plato’s Theaetetus, 155d)

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed.” (Albert Einstein, in The World as I See It, 1949)

“The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility… The fact that it is comprehensible is a miracle.”

“that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know (ginosko) the love of Christ which surpasses (huperballo) knowledge (gnosis), that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.” (Eph. 3:17-19)

Dan. 2:21 He changes times and seasons;
 he sets up kings and deposes them.
 He gives wisdom to the wise
 and knowledge to the discerning.

 Prov. 2:6 For the LORD gives wisdom,
 and from his mouth come knowledge and understanding.

 Job 32:8 But it is the spirit in a man, 
 the breath of the Almighty, that gives him understanding.

 Prov. 9:10 “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom,
 and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding.

Isaiah 47:10 (to the Babylonians):
You have trusted in your wickedness
 and have said, ‘No one sees me.’ 
 Your wisdom and knowledge mislead you
 when you say to yourself,
 ‘I am, and there is none besides me.’ 

Psalm. 19:1-6
 The heavens declare the glory of God;
 the skies proclaim the work of his hands.
 Day after day they pour forth speech;
 night after night they display knowledge.
 There is no speech or language where their voice
 is not heard.
 Their voice goes out into all the earth,
 their words to the ends of the world.       
 In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun,
 which is like a bridegroom coming forth from his pavilion,
 like a champion rejoicing to run his course.
 It rises at one end of the heavens
 and makes its circuit to the other;
 nothing is hidden from its heat. 

“Newton was a mere materialist–Mind in his system is always passive–a lazy Looker-on on an external World.  If the mind be not passive, if it be indeed made in God’s Image, & that too in the sublimest sense–the Image of the Creator–there is ground for suspicion, that any system built on the passiveness of the mind must be false, as a system …” (From Mariner, a biography of Coleridge by Anglican priest Malcolm Guite, p. 400)

… that which the intellect first conceives as, in a way, the most evident, and to which it reduces all its concepts, is being. 

… there is something which is such that it agrees with every being. Such a being is the soul, which, as is said in The Soul, “in some way is all things.” The soul, however, has both knowing and appetitive powers. Good expresses the correspondence of being to the appetitive power, for, and so we note in the Ethics, the good is “that which all desire.” True expresses the correspondence of being to the knowing power, for all knowing is produced by an assimilation of the knower to the thing known, so that assimilation is said to be the cause of knowledge.

“In one of Shakespeare’s famous plays there is a scene in which some of Hamlet’s former schoolfellows flatter him about his breadth of mind. Hamlet’s response shows that he is well aware of the dark political subtext to this flattery, but his response also demonstrates precisely the kind of conceptual expansiveness he ironically denies. Refusing the compliment that Denmark is “too narrow for [his] mind” Hamlet says, “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell and count myself a king of infinite space.” [Act 2, Scene 2]”

… We must therefore assign on the part of the intellect some power to make things actually intelligible, by abstraction of the species from material conditions. And such is the necessity for an active intellect.  …

… [It is] necessary to assign to the human soul some power participating in that superior intellect, by which power the human soul makes things actually intelligible.  … Wherefore the human soul derives its intellectual light from Him, according to Ps. 4:7, “The light of Thy countenance, O Lord, is signed upon us.” …

… nothing prevents one and the same soul, inasmuch as it is actually immaterial, having one power by which it makes things actually immaterial, by abstraction from the conditions of individual matter: which power is called the “active intellect”; and another power, receptive of such species, which is called the “passive intellect” by reason of its being in potentiality to such species. …

“The imagination, then, I consider either as primary or secondary.  The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.  The secondary Imagination I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in the mode of its operation.”

God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM.” And he said, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘I AM has sent me to you.’” ¹⁵ God also said to Moses, “Say this to the people of Israel: ‘The LORD, the God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, has sent me to you.’

“For Coleridge, the physical universe, which is the supposed ‘object’ of our perception, is not something that merely strikes us from the outside, but something that is, as it were, being formed continuously, both from our side of it by our perceiving Imaginations, and from an apprehended but as yet unknowable other side beyond it.  … there is a deep connection between that which is below the level of our consciousness and is continually giving us the gift of ourselves and our mind, and that which is behind or beyond the phenomena and is continuously giving them their being, allowing them to well up from its own inexhaustible depths.  Even so seemingly so simple a thing as perception itself, let alone composition or art, results from the active powers of our imagination, meeting and reflecting the active power of that Imagination which is always causing all things to be.”

“Christianity, as taught in the Liturgy and Homilies of our Church, though not discoverable  by human Reason, is yet in accordance with it; that link follows link by necessary consequence; that Religion passes out of the ken of Reason only where the eye of Reason has reached its own Horizon; and that Faith is but then but its continuation: even as the Day softens away into the sweet Twilight, and the Twilight, hushed and breathless, steals into the Darkness.  It is Night, sacred Night!  The upraised Eye views only the starry Heaven which manifests itself alone: and the outward Beholding is fixed on the sparks twinkling in the aweful depth, though Suns of other Worlds, only to preserve the Soul steady and collected in the pure Act of inward Adoration to the great I AM, and to the filial WORD that re-affirmeth it from Eternity to Eternity, whose choral Echo is the Universe.”