(no subject)

My favorite part of seven years of Catholic school was learning about the various heresies. I've been "researching" them online as I've since forgotten which was which. Here's a description of Arianism, the most popular one:

Arius taught that only God the Father was eternal and too pure and infinite to appear on the earth. Therefore, God produced Christ the Son out of nothing as the first and greatest creation. The Son is then the one who created the universe. Because the Son relationship of the Son to the Father is not one of nature, it is, therefore, adoptive. God adopted Christ as the Son. Though Christ was a creation, because of his great position and authority, he was to be worshipped and even looked upon as God. Some Arians even held that the Holy Spirit was the first and greatest creation of the Son.

At Jesus' incarnation, the Arians asserted that the divine quality of the Son, the Logos, took the place of the human and spiritual aspect of Jesus, thereby denying the full and complete incarnation of God the Son, second person of the Trinity.

In asserting that Christ the Son, as a created thing, was to be worshipped, the Arians were advocating idolatry.

http://www.carm.org/heresy.htm

This website's particularly amusing because it throws in those huffy comments about why each heresy was wrong, according to the churches' version of propositional logic.

Anyway funnier still is how close Arianism sounds to Husserl: consciousness makes intentionality makes world.

(no subject)

Gnosticism (I've talked to some of you before about this) is hard to knowledgably condemn because in its broad form it's just about synonymous with knowledgable condemnation. An evil/damaged world, the possibility of connection through knowledge to a truer and better thing...these are the implications of the simple statement, "There's something you need to know." I suppose the real ground for argument here is which world is damaged, the internal or the external, and how damaged that world is exactly--do we abandon or repair? If you think there's something in society, or in every individual, that's the problem, and there's nothing too bad in the unpeopled parts of nature, you might be happier identifying the problem areas as dross or mindless recalcitrance rather than as an active malignant principle. The orthodoxy of revolution, I guess you could call this: the land's just more seafloor awaiting the wave. Gnosticism is taken to imply a secret knowledge, a door opening out sideways, a small countercurrent removing you from any memory of land. Something elite, non-evangelical. This seems paradoxical to me; do we think anything everyone needs to know has to be spread by directive rather than explanation--that revolutionaries must be Dostoevsky's Inquisitors? Or is the distinction between a knowledge that shows the disease and a knowledge that cures it.

I think about Milton's strange little stage God and his pampered warhappy Son. Maybe the surface and secret/involuntary theologies (as interpreted by Blake and Shelley) of Paradise Lost clash so weirdly not because Milton couldn't reconcile his own deist and gnostic tendencies but because he needed revolution's success to be certain, needed it to be the orthodoxy of eternity, with all the trappings of mastery and priority: fathers and thrones and chariots and prophecies. On our earth his God would look something like the Satan of the early books; while the flies of time mock His proper authority from their many seats of usurped power. A rhetorical reversal, made confusing by his artistic sympathy with the rebel position (or perhaps even with the escape position: leaving the land and making a new one, Paradise Lost itself a Pandaemonium). Maybe Milton's God is divided not into the Gnostic true vs. impostor duo, but into the good place (the inner light?) and the means of getting everyone there (Heaven as armed camp). Notice how Satan never gets to run Earth onscreen: he goes directly from invading threat to smooshed, mocked effigy. It reminds me of how chat people talk to their enemies, that alternation of you-are-an-evil-force rhetoric (jerk, asshole, cunt etc.) and you-are-impotent rhetoric: What did you say something because nobody cares and your mother hates you and I'm ignoring you now.

So maybe we can divide our gnostics up into instant gnostics and process gnostics? Here it is off to the side! There it is in the distance! Are the latter inevitably false gnostics, since they need something more than the knowledge, some faith in an agency? If they can hold to the knowledge without the faith they are a brave bunch. Maybe the real gnostics, as once here-it-is-ers find their nook they need no -ism.