Posted 17 December 2011 05:46 PM
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From a tad different angle, this may evoke for some the medieval musings regarding the primacy of knowledge/theoretical and the primacy of love/practical, which Bonaventure resolves triadically via wisdom/sapiental.
quote: In this line, we could also say that the highest category for St. Thomas is the true, while for St. Bonaventure it is the good. It would be mistaken to see a contradiction in these two answers. For both the true is also the good, and the good is also the true; to see God is to love and to love is to see. It is a question therefore of different accents in an essentially shared vision. In both the accents have formed different traditions and different spiritualities and thus they have shown the fecundity of the faith -- one in the diversity of its expressions.
Pope Benedict XVI On Theology According to Thomas and Bonaventure March 17, 2010
From a phenomenological perspective, most of Western Christianity is properly formed in the intersubjective stance BUT it is questionable how many are optimally realizing these intersubjective values because so many remain developmentally stalled at early stages of formation with dualistic, problem solving mindsets and do not move beyond to the nondual, relational approach, or, to put it another way, they get the moral and the practical and the logical, but they lose sight of the value to be realized in the relational, in intimacy, which is, indeed, a higher good. That's what we mean by the, sometimes funny, euphemism - to know someone in the Biblical sense. Knowledge of God must be in the Biblical sense, nothing less than Divine intercourse. Who is interested in anyone else's knowledge of their wife vis a vis her vital statistics, weight, height, hair color, eye color, metaphysical origin or other empirical, logical, practical or even moral measures? We are talking, rather, of an encounter with an Imago Dei who has an unfathomable depth dimension in whom we can swim around forever in love - a love we cannot begin to explain via apologetics. At the same time, our spousal love must not be arational or wholly nonrational but must be, instead, transrational. Once again, my mantra beyond but not without applies in that we must go beyond the problem solving dualistic mindset but not without it when we embrace the nondual, robustly relational approach to another person or Person, thereby realizing what is indeed a higher good.
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This is why I explicated elsewhere why we need to disambiguate nondual from category to category. In realizing the values of our intersubjective intimacy, it is a higher good vis a vis, for example, Bernardian love and love of God/other for sake of God/other [In this sense the dual vs nondual is analogous to the difference between eros vs agape, imperfect vs perfect contrition and what the dualistic approach, eros and imperfect contrition have in common, here, is problem-solving.] On the other hand, switching categories, it is no way to do metaphysics or science or speculative natural theology though!
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