Yesterday I spoke of an entire universe spanning the distance between the Either/Or of Relativism and Fundamentalism. That is, between Relativism, which reduces all spiritual truth to pure subjectivity - and Fundamentalism, which amounts in practice, to the most rigid idea of Absolutism: that there are absolute truths, which can be absolutely defined, with no element of relativity.
I want to briefly say something to just **suggest** this vast span of universe between these two positions. Positions often entirely collapsed ... so that anyone, who does not describe herself as a relativist, becomes - ipso facto - tarred as a fundamentalist. In a short space, here is one way again to simply *suggest* this great intervening universe:
There is truth beyond the threshold of what can be perceived empirically or rationally. Truth does not simply stop and become **nothing at all**, where the senses and logic leave off.
This truth beyond the threshold of senses and logic is no less pure or absolute, than the truth of empiricism and mathematics.
BUT as pure or absolute as this truth is, it is not possible to represent it absolutely to the ordinary human mind.
The ordinary human mind deals in empiricism and logic. Truth that is beyond the empirico-rational threshold, is - of necessity - limited in the process of being represented to the ordinary mind.
Thus, while absolute, pure truth can be said to exist, that truth can never be formulated or represented absolutely. Limitation and relativity will always be present in virtually any representation of absolute truth.
(Virtually any, I say, because perhaps the most general of tautologies – eg. “God is love”... ‘love is God’ - might be exempt).
Thus paradoxically, we must aspire to absolute truth, while knowing that we can never adequately present absolute truths in absolute terms.
And yet despite this limitation, it is the aspiration of Christian thinkers as diverse as Rudolf Steiner and Benedict XVI to say: our culture demands the work of such conceptualisation – of trying to name matters of the absolute. And as diverse as they are, both are convinced that failure to at least try, will lead to the gravest of tragedy for the world.
Our Lord Jesus Christ said to us ‘the truth will set you free’. But today, we are not only denied liberating truth, but the possibility of even aspiring to such truth. Such truth being seen as impossible. And such aspiration as something to be mocked – as fundamentalist or worse. And our world becomes ever less free …
Tomorrow I will address some implications of all this in more **personal** terms.
1 comment:
I agree that there is a sea of grey between the black and white of relativism and absolutism, and that this grey area is where we live our lives. Even the most absolute realities can only be perceived through our subjective consciousness. Yet I don't think we need to know everything with absolute certainty, we only need to know enough.
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