"Spem in alium"
("Hope in any other")
("Hope in any other")
Wikipedia
"Spem in alium"
Performance with 40 virtual singers (comprising five choirs with bass, baritone, tenor, alto and soprano voices), each voice broadcast from its own dedicated speaker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZXBia5kuqY
In Luke 17:20-21 -- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+17%3A20-21&version=KJV -- we read three renditions of a verse whose meanings, at least on the surface, are antithetical:
Alan: The role of "self" and "other" is centrally important in the Jewish and Christian traditions.
Carl Jung observed that oriental religion is based on "interiority," while in the west, religion predicates "exteriority."
Carl Jung observed that oriental religion is based on "interiority," while in the west, religion predicates "exteriority."
Jung emphasizes his point by spotlighting a fundamental difference between oriental and occidental iconography.
In "The East," religious icons, particularly those of the Buddha, are figures with lowered eyelids as if religious devotees are properly determined to "exclude the world" - to keep its illusory intrusions at bay.
In "The West" - particularly in Christian iconography - eyes are wide open, often blazingly so, as if outward focus is the true path to penetrating life's mystery - probing as deeply as possible into the "external" world, the incarnation/enfleshment of Reality where God's own "body" "dwells among us."
This relationship between "self" and "other" is an ongoing theological debate, a core component of which involves variant translations of a crucial gospel verse in Luke (the only New Testamental author, who unlike all other authors and the Jew Jesus himself, was not a devout Jew by birth and upbringing).
In Luke 17:20-21 -- https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+17%3A20-21&version=KJV -- we read three renditions of a verse whose meanings, at least on the surface, are antithetical:
1.) "The Kingdom of God is within you."
2.) "The Kingdom of God is among you."
3.) "The Kingdom of God is at hand."
In this intertwined semantic domain, one other gospel verse begs inclusion: "Where two or three of you gather in my name there am I with them." https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+18%3A20&version=NIV (Alan: Given the complex and culturally-alien meaning of "name" in the Semitic world, I take "Jesus' name" to mean "the full manifestation of incarnate love".)
In Judaism and Christianity, it is not humanity's business to turn inward upon one's indivisible individuality but to meet others "out there."
Relationship -- the "place" where we meet -- is where divinity manifests, where divinity actually comes into Being "as we know it."
In "the west," religion (and here I refer to the three Abrahamic religions) tends to concern itself with the social world, whereas in "the east" (and recalling that one of Buddhism's "three refuges" is the "sangha" or "community of like-minded believers") religion has its apogee in "retreat" from the world, in the sadhu's individual withdrawal from "outer space" into "inner space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadhu
Afterthought...
G.K. Chesterton (by my lights one the 20th century's most seminal thinkers) notes that in Christianity, the trinitarian Godhead -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- is essentially a community (which is to say a "social, interactive body") even before one can argue how God might be a single indivisible "Unit" as well.
Second afterthought...
Luke was a pagan Greek physician whose gospel is routinely considered the most "artistic" of the four canonical gospels, a fellow whose aesthetic sensibilities contradict the core moral norm of Judaism. According to Judaism, any and all "representational" art is strictly prohibited by the First Commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lordwill not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&version=NIV
The First Commandment is emphatic: there is NO place for artistic representation of human or animal forms, which is why geometric patterns suffuse Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques. (Early "iconoclasm" -- with its signature destruction of noses on Greco-Roman statues -- arose from the incandescent Jewish impulse to be true to The First Commandment.)
The "upside" of Judaism's artistic "abstraction" is that humans must not risk replacing Reality with representations, but rather must meet Reality in its immediate, unmediated, wholeness. Therein lies a whole other view of whole-liness -- of "the holos" -- but that's another story.
In this intertwined semantic domain, one other gospel verse begs inclusion: "Where two or three of you gather in my name there am I with them." https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+18%3A20&version=NIV (Alan: Given the complex and culturally-alien meaning of "name" in the Semitic world, I take "Jesus' name" to mean "the full manifestation of incarnate love".)
In Judaism and Christianity, it is not humanity's business to turn inward upon one's indivisible individuality but to meet others "out there."
Relationship -- the "place" where we meet -- is where divinity manifests, where divinity actually comes into Being "as we know it."
In "the west," religion (and here I refer to the three Abrahamic religions) tends to concern itself with the social world, whereas in "the east" (and recalling that one of Buddhism's "three refuges" is the "sangha" or "community of like-minded believers") religion has its apogee in "retreat" from the world, in the sadhu's individual withdrawal from "outer space" into "inner space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadhu
Afterthought...
G.K. Chesterton (by my lights one the 20th century's most seminal thinkers) notes that in Christianity, the trinitarian Godhead -- Father, Son and Holy Spirit -- is essentially a community (which is to say a "social, interactive body") even before one can argue how God might be a single indivisible "Unit" as well.
Second afterthought...
Luke was a pagan Greek physician whose gospel is routinely considered the most "artistic" of the four canonical gospels, a fellow whose aesthetic sensibilities contradict the core moral norm of Judaism. According to Judaism, any and all "representational" art is strictly prohibited by the First Commandment: “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery. You shall have no other gods before me. You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments. You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lordwill not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name. Remember the Sabbath day by keeping it holy. Six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a sabbath to the Lord your God. On it you shall not do any work, neither you, nor your son or daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your animals, nor any foreigner residing in your towns. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the sea, and all that is in them, but he rested on the seventh day. Therefore the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy." https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus+20&version=NIV
The First Commandment is emphatic: there is NO place for artistic representation of human or animal forms, which is why geometric patterns suffuse Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques. (Early "iconoclasm" -- with its signature destruction of noses on Greco-Roman statues -- arose from the incandescent Jewish impulse to be true to The First Commandment.)
The "upside" of Judaism's artistic "abstraction" is that humans must not risk replacing Reality with representations, but rather must meet Reality in its immediate, unmediated, wholeness. Therein lies a whole other view of whole-liness -- of "the holos" -- but that's another story.
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