The horoscope in a newspaper I chanced upon yesterday says this is going to be a good week. I don't see how that is going to happen.Today, after a week of finishing my monumental (heh, there's a private joke nobody's going to get. smug eh?) 9708 word gibreel gibberish on Marcus the Brutus bastard son of Iulius the Caesar ideological and genetic descendant of Iunius who pushed Tarquinus off the throne, how free is my will? (there, that's another smirk at myself).
Incidentally, Lorenzo Valla (or was it Levinas?) cites Tarquinus talking to Apollo as an illustrative example for his psychologically deterministic theory of action. To put it plainly, if you're fucked, you stay fucked. He then proceeds to make a characteristic ultra-subtle distinction between divine foreknowledge (which is necessary and deterministic) and the divine will (which is contingent, flexible, pliant). I can't remember exactly how at the moment.
In his Very Short Introduction to Free Will (Oxford '04), Thomas Pink (aside: God bless MLA, God bless automatic citations on Office '07) somewhat snidely remarks on the ingenuity of these Humanists in finding a long, winding road around the knotty question; i.e., how can human freedom be reconciled with an omnipotent, omniscient, impassable providence?
Well, Valla did well, obviously. Or else he wouldn't have dour Reform and zeal sorts like Luther and Calvin going ga ga over him.
Oh by the way, I happened to be reading up on Mani's organisational structure and stuff. In Chadwick's expanded Early Church, now The Christian Church in Late Antiquity, if I remember right. According to Mani, Adam and Eve were not created by God, but are really the children of the demons who are the prince and princess of Darkness, the male Asaqlun or Saklas and the female Nebroel or Namrael. Also, the Manichees were reputed to have occasionally used menstrual blood in their rituals, which is only marginally less weird than Origen (God bless his poor soul) castrating himself voluntarily to avoid "temptation", deluded by The Sentences of Sextus, a gnostic tract of obscure Pythagorean provenance. When Origen was ordained as a priest in Palestinian Caesarea, the Bishop of Alexandria protested strongly, questioning repeatedly how an eunuch could possible be ordained as presbyter. Apparently, the scandal calmed doen enough for Origen to write a voluminous Origen contra Celsum.
Celsus, a smug contemporary Platonist (like Porphyry) of Origen's, had mocked the poor Christian laity who were convinced that the fires of hell described in Scripture were literally true. It took the intervention of Origen, by now theological authority par excellence to rebuke Celsus in turn by saying that the fires might just as well be real, because the real significance lies in the purpose of suffering, rather than its form. Both Origen and Celsus were highly righteous Platonists, of course.
I think I'd better stop. These missives are best sent in mild doses imo.
di la grandi sigh

yak yak