DB> Even among the ancients, I see a degree of evolution in the perception
 DB> of underlying reality and the nature of God.  In some repects, it
 DB> reminds me of the constant morphing of the Deity by Hindu scripture.  In
 DB> any one author, of which we still have a fair collection of work, I see
 DB> these changes over time.  I don't see any council of Nicea trying to
 DB> nail down a definition for all men for all time.
   Voegelin constantly uses the term "differentiation" which I see as not
quite the same thing as an "evolution" and yet as long as they symbolize
something of the same thing I see no difficulty.   Why do you need to qualify
"reality" with "underlying?"  Surely you're not suggesting there is more than
one reality even though among human beings there are varying experiences of
it.  I think the later church councils (such as Chalcedon) were trying to
straighten out the doctrinal mess that issued from the attempt of a good deal
of derailed philosophical thought among some of the "church fathers" to
resolve the problems of a new theophany and a primary exprience of it by
"doctrinizing" it in order to make it palatable and available to the
non-spiritual masses of the Roman ecumene just as fundamentalism continues to
do today whether of the secular-ideological or religious movements.  The
experience of Divine reality by a Thomas Aquineas certainly did raise for 
im,
the the currents of contemporary thought in which he operated  to worry about
a "nature of God" and he wanted to make "Christ" the "head of ALL people
within all TIME, not just the "church." For achieving this, he found and used
the Aristotelian solution of a regression that had to stop somewhere and thus
did stop in a "prima causa."  
 DB> The idea that God is immortal, did not necessarily include the idea that
 DB> he created the universe, just that he was in it before we were, and
 DB> would be here long after we were all gone.
   That is true and in the popular mind of Plato's era certainly the gods are
not quite as "immortal" as the higher god of the hyperouranian.  Gods could
also have generations because in Plato's myths it was "Formerly in the age of
Cronos but more recently in the age of Zeus" etc., and Plato was, of course a
"son of Zeus."  Immortalizing however was a Platonic experience of reality.
Paul later agrees when he appears later in the process of ecumenic 
estruction
of ancient societies but Paul's vision carries him to the untenable point 
hat
"immortality" can be within the grasp of those who accepted his "Christ" (the
Divine in the poles of tension) WITHIN THE LIFETIME OF THOSE LIVING!!  That
was the mistake with which St. Augustine had to deal when he saw the
destruction of Rome and compared it to the _Civitas Dei_.
 DB> Among the philosophers, I do not see the idea that we are all here to
 DB> fulfill some plan of God's, but that since we do find ourselves here, we
 DB> would do well to do good.
   If they did, it would, in my opinion, be going beyond that which
philosophers could reasonably affirm.  It would be the setting up of a system
as Hegel did and that is untenable (it is also what makes ideologies
untenable) because as Plato might say to us "things divine or not for humans
to know" so we do not know the structure of reality, only a little of our
experience of it and we do not experience it as an object or series of 
bjects
that could be within the grasp of any one of the PARTS of that same reality.
 DB> These assumptions are so deeply embedded in Christian and Hebrew
 DB> cosmology, that as a member of this culture, it had never even occurred
 DB> to me to raise the question. I have to give credit to Neitzsche and
 DB> Campbell to make me aware of the fact that these assumptions were not
 DB> classic Aryan.
   I join you in owing tremendous debt to ALL of those, living and dead, who
have experienced and symbolized their experience.  Sincerely, 
                                     Frank
                                                                              
                                                       
--- PPoint 2.05
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