Monday, October 22, 2007

TRULY CREASED LIVING

"Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what's going on here."
- Annie Dillard

2 comments:

Paul said...

Kermit the Frog wonders if you teeter on the brink of panentheism or even pantheism... (it makes sense in light of my current post...)

--Kermit
(I am using a Paul Martin icon.)

Simon Barrow said...

No... Annie is using a metaphor not making a metaphysical statement!

Panentheism (the notion that God is embodied in all of life without being exhausted by it) has a lot to commend it, but some real problems, which have been identified by Ruth Page in 'Ambiguity & The Presence of God' (SCM) and elsewhere. I generally think that the phenomenology and linguistic philosophy routes into God-talk are better than metaphysical propositions which rely too strongly on analogies of being. Apophosis comes first.

And I am most definitely not a pantheist, as should be clear from pretty much anything I've written about religion!

Stay green, Kermit! ;)