Statues, Etc.

In case you haven't noticed, I tend to be a little bit obsessive compulsive.

So if someone says something which bothers me, it doesn't just bother me for the nonce or even for a little bit. It keeps coming back at me. I can bat it away, but its ensuing flight is only temporary.

So when I had coffee with that friend and he (strongly) implied that my comments about the churches I visited indicated that I was primarily interested in superficialities, even though I did attempt to explain why I was attracted by statues and stained glass windows and incense and choirs...his criticism still hurt me. And his words have come back to me again and again.

Which could be indicative of my own uncertainty about my motivations and perceptions, I suppose...but I don't think that's it.

Today I made it to page 3,200 (of  5,344...so about 60% of the way) in Frederick Copleston's A History of Philosophy. And a lot of what I read today had to do with Hegel's ideas on the manifestation of The Infinite in The Real (for lack of a better term) World. Lots of interesting things there that I wish I had someone to talk to about, but here's the one that meant the most to me in terms of my preoccupation with Friend's Barb:

"...the Absolute is manifested first of all in the form of immediacy, under the guise, that is to say, of objects of sense."

The same idea was expressed in other ways, but this one really locked into the whole I Like Pretty Churches thing. It is actually the same concept that I tried to express to Friend, but much more profoundly expressed. My translation goes like this:

"God manifests Himself in the Statues, in the Stained Glass, in the Incense, in the Choir...."

Come to think of it, that's not quite the same thing that I attempted to express to Friend. I told him that I felt that those things gave me access points to the spiritual realm...they let my brain know that I wasn't in The Real World anymore. But this Hegel thought goes a step farther than that, doesn't it? It's not that those Statues etc. give access to the spiritual realm, it's that they are manifestations of that realm. They actually are, in a sense, the presence of God in the material world.

That's big.

And of course that could lead right into the old Idolators argument, but that's really just Protestants being envious. Because you aren't worshipping the Statues etc. You are worshipping God.