Conversation with Fred Lawrence

Sunday, August 25, 2013

Conversation with Fred Lawrence on the return journey from Galilee.

FL suggested a paper on the Trinity. I could not follow all of what he said, but this seems to be it: most people begin with persons and go on to the three relations which are persons. They tend to forget the relations of origin – which are two. These are the intelligible emanations. This would not be so bad if it were not for the fact that this governs most of what follows. “The hypothesis [which one?] governs most of what follows.” Lonergan: about the most blessed Trinity: 4 relations, 3 persons, 2 emanations, 1 God, no understanding. Notional ?? something.

This probably in connection with my remark that Ratzinger and Augustine / Thomas / Lonergan are asking different questions.

Augustine: the first person to come up with an analogy that is properly spiritual.

Remarks on Al Ghazali: he respects reason, but also knows that one has to go beyond reason. Meaning? [not supernatural but] that beyond reason there is love, the love of God.

About Heidegger. Leo Strauss, being a Jew, said that H was the greatest philosopher of the 20^th century. Hannah Arendt and Hans Jonas found a way of forgiving and reconciling with H: he did not know what he was doing.

H was ambitious as a young man. he was small of stature, but he could, already when young, wrap people around his little finger. He was the bright young thing as a Catholic seminarian, chosen for ?? by his bishop.

He told Engelbert Krebs: the system of Catholicism is something I cannot accept. But I do not stop being Christian.

1919: the reading of Augustine. He found all his key BT concepts in Augustine. The next year: Aristotle. He said he found many things of Augustine in Arisottle, minus the Christian context. So he found a way of pulling Augustine out of his Christian context. That was BT.

Later he rejected the transcendentalism of BT: Dasein was too much the centre. Man is more receptive than at the centre. That is one of the reasons why he was unable to apologize for his Nazi involvement.

Why did he go with the Nazis? Because he had ambitions. One of them being that of being Plato’s philosopher king. He hoped that by joining a political wagon, he might be able to transform German education. In 3 months he was disillusioned. He went to a meeting of top German educationalists, and found that they wanted something completely different from what he wanted.

And John of St Thomas / Deeley. Representationalist. Mirroring. They do not know the activity of questioning and insight on the two levels. They place all their weight, the weight of objectivity, on the representation, and they do it by trying to reduce all the subjective side. That is why the phenomenologists reject them: they neglect the intentionality side of things.