Grace?

[ish mailian]

And this Preterit stuff turns Thomas and Descartes back through the
NeoPlantonists to Saint Augustine and Free Will, the politics of
America and Newton/Leibniz. Fun fun.

On Fri, Aug 11, 2017 at 7:54 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thomas,
>
> Theological concepts indeed. As far as I can tell, the key figure here
> is Descartes, who studied with Jesuits, thus  Aristotle/Thomas and
> then applied his Subjective *I*  to Thomas's defense of God's
> existence, not to deny it, but, as his Meditations  argue, to shift
> the proof of existence from God's Nature/Action to Man's thinking.
>
> As far as I can tell, P does not use Grace or any other concept  to
> make of Man a thinker who in the act of thought has an equivalency of
> knowledge of the essences, that is to say, humans are not, even with
> the shift to Descartes, privy to the knowledge of Thomas's God.
>
> As far as what we or the Chums fly toward? Well, Grace, of course.
> Something we move toward by God and God alone, something we may want
> to know by can not. And since we can not know it, how can we know we
> want it? Because it is God's will. or will be when He elects us. Of
> course, this is why Pynchon finds the Preterit so compelling.
>
>>
>> In theological/philosophical terms, seeing things as they are means
>> understanding things in their quiddity or "whatness", perceiving their
>> essence and not their outward appearance. We know, from his essay on Sloth,
>> that Pynchon is familiar with Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica (and Aquinas
>> turns up in his writings as early as "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna").
>>
>> Cf.:
>>
>> "But the angelic and the Divine intellect, like all incorruptible things,
>> have their perfection at once from the beginning. Hence the angelic and the
>> Divine intellect have the entire knowledge of a thing at once and perfectly;
>> and hence also in knowing the quiddity of a thing they know at once whatever
>> we can know by composition, division, and reasoning. Therefore the human
>> intellect knows by composition, division and reasoning. But the Divine
>> intellect and the angelic intellect know, indeed, composition, division, and
>> reasoning, not by the process itself, but by understanding the simple
>> essence."
>>
>> Summa Theologica, I, Question 85, Article 5
>>
>> Against this background, seeing things in their quiddity would mean to see
>> things like God or angels do, having "the entire knowledge of a thing at
>> once and perfectly". Is this not the state of mind (or grace) that befalls
>> Lew and that Gottfried aspires to?
>>
>> We don't know what "flying toward grace" means for the Chums, but we know
>> that they have to shield their eyes against the revelation (against the
>> day/light?) that is to come:
>>
>> "They will put on smoked goggles for the glory of what is coming to part the
>> sky. They fly toward grace." (1085)
>>
>> As usual, exactly what kind of revelation is to be expected remains unsaid
>> -- the blinding Glory of God, Rilke's terrifying angels, "the light beyond
>> metaphor" (Derek Walcott)...
>>
>> I also hear echoes of Fausto Majistral's confessions, in particular "life's
>> single lesson:  that there is more accident to it than a man
>> can ever admit to in a lifetime and stay sane" and the task of the poet to
>> invent "pious metaphor" to cloak the isolated and accidental nature of
>> things.
>>
>> I suspect that Aquinas may also be helpful in understanding the "unsought
>> good" becoming "more accessible" to us at the end of AtD. There seem to be
>> some important theological concepts at play here.
>>
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l