1. Posted 17 December 2011 05:46 PM
Hide Post
From a tad different angle, this may evoke for some the medieval musings regarding the
primacy of knowledge/theoretical and the primacy of love/practical, which Bonaventure
resolves triadically via wisdom/sapiental.
quote:
In this line, we could also say that the highest category for St. Thomas is the true, while
for St. Bonaventure it is the good. It would be mistaken to see a contradiction in these two
answers. For both the true is also the good, and the good is also the true; to see God is to
love and to love is to see. It is a question therefore of different accents in an essentially
shared vision. In both the accents have formed different traditions and different
spiritualities and thus they have shown the fecundity of the faith -- one in the diversity of its
expressions.
Pope Benedict XVI On Theology According to Thomas and Bonaventure March 17, 2010
From a phenomenological perspective, most of Western Christianity is properly formed in
the intersubjective stance BUT it is questionable how many are optimally realizing these
intersubjective values because so many remain developmentally stalled at early stages of
formation with dualistic, problem solving mindsets and do not move beyond to the nondual,
relational approach, or, to put it another way, they get the moral and the practical and the
logical, but they lose sight of the value to be realized in the relational, in intimacy, which is,
indeed, a higher good. That's what we mean by the, sometimes funny, euphemism - to
know someone in the Biblical sense. Knowledge of God must be in the Biblical sense,
nothing less than Divine intercourse. Who is interested in anyone else's knowledge of their
wife vis a vis her vital statistics, weight, height, hair color, eye color, metaphysical origin or
other empirical, logical, practical or even moral measures? We are talking, rather, of an
encounter with an Imago Dei who has an unfathomable depth dimension in whom we can
swim around forever in love - a love we cannot begin to explain via apologetics. At the same
time, our spousal love must not be arational or wholly nonrational but must be, instead,
transrational. Once again, my mantra beyond but not without applies in that we must go
beyond the problem solving dualistic mindset but not without it when we embrace the
nondual, robustly relational approach to another person or Person, thereby realizing what is
indeed a higher good.
1

2. This is why I explicated elsewhere why we need to disambiguate nondual from category to
category. In realizing the values of our intersubjective intimacy, it is a higher good vis a vis,
for example, Bernardian love and love of God/other for sake of God/other [In this sense the
dual vs nondual is analogous to the difference between eros vs agape, imperfect vs perfect
contrition and what the dualistic approach, eros and imperfect contrition have in common,
here, is problem-solving.] On the other hand, switching categories, it is no way to do
metaphysics or science or speculative natural theology though!
2