Posted by on September 14, 1998 at 10:49:37:
In Reply to: BACKGROUND MATERIAL posted by on June 19, 1998 at 21:58:59:
Just found a very interesting paper online. It tells a bit about the Greek idea of a Single Creator/Absolute (sometimes called "Form of the Good").
It's kind of impartial between Chrisitan and Greek, because it's by a Hare Krishna. :-) But very well written, summarizes a lot of Lovejoy's /Great Chain of Being/.
From
http://www.netreach.net/~vrndavana/hist1.htm
The Form of the Good is perfect, self-sufficient, self-contained, and needs
nothing other than
itself. Yet this self-sufficient Absolute boils over, as
it were, effervesces, and out of the
immutable One devolves the world of
changing things. Here's a single entity, without name,
form, diversity,
multiplicity of any sort, and then out of it wells, in a falling away
from
perfection, a multiplicity--initially a multiplicity of abstract
essences, the realm of the forms.
Those forms then engender a further
multiplicity and instantiate themselves into a gross material
world of
concrete individuals. Lovejoy points out that two contrary tendencies are fused
in the
Platonic idea of the Absolute. On the one side, there is an
"other-worldliness" which produces
the idea of a remote, detached,
self-contained, self-sufficient Absolute in no need of any other
creature,
any other thing, indeed of any world at all. On the other side, there is the
idea of an
Absolute that needs to create, to express itself, to bubble over
with joy or zest, to become
many. In the Platonic scheme, the impersonal
Absolute cannot of course at some point make a
free decision to create;
rather, the world flows from it out of its own necessity.