Einstein said somewhere that his theory of general relativity had to be true because it was so beautiful. When I finished DBH’s book on universalism, my first thought was that he had to be right, because what he wrote was so beautiful in its arguments, and so beautiful in its picture of God. Thank you.
There are lots of examples of this in physics, incidentally, with Paul Dirac (whose theory of the electron, with minor reinterpretation, is used to this day) probably having the soundest grasp on the concept - his physics was primarily guided by his sense of aesthetics.
That's Keats, not Yeats: Ode on a Grecian Urn. And it's a mistake to read it literally. The lines must be taken with a heavy dose of irony, given the preceding stanzas.
Oh, my apologies! I comment on my mobile phone, and occasionally make typos. As for the latter comment, I suppose that’s up to one’s interpretation - but I do not read it as ironic in context. In any case, regardless of the wider poetic milieu, the lines express a timeless truth in a lovely manner in isolation.
Well, but it is the urn that says the famous lines at the end—they're in quotation marks—& the entire point of the poem is that the urn's truth is not ours. We exist in time, with death & "woe," unlike the urn, which presents the pretty illusion of a world without such unpleasantries (although with a surplus of sexual violence). I mean, that's just what the poem is about, what it says on its surface. The lines are therefore ironic of necessity. Beauty is certainly not truth in this world. Keats was no dummy.
Hmm. I’ve read it much more positively: despite the horrors of the world, the beauty of the urn serves as both perennial prophet and reminder of the Truth and Beauty that undergird and indwell it.
I would say that finite, worldly beauty is, in a sense, interconvertible with truth, though they are not quite synonymous in their impoverished kosmic instantiations.
However, seeing your qualifications below, I’ll submit to your judgement concerning its canonical interpretation - though I reserve the right to practice my customary anarchic eisegesis!
I always take it as the Keatsian equivalent of Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium: would that the perfect serene simplicity of a finished work of art were possible for the mortal imperfect things we are, and would that there really were no other truth than beauty...etc. Irony, but with a sincere longing.
God is One - every ‘subsistence’ of the Deity participates equally in the Essence.
Dr. Hossenfelder is very... idiosyncratic. Like most popularizing physicists, she tends to be both bombastic and rather inaccurate when presenting information to the general public. There are countless instances where good aesthetics has lead to good physics, and where good physics is almost painfully beautiful (there isn’t much in the heavens or on earth that I find more beautiful than classical electrodynamics in its more rarified formulations).
Most physicists are not string theorists (if memory serves, a solid third work in condensed matter theory at this point, which is certainly “down-to-earth” vis-a-vis energy scales). String theory (or theories, I suppose) may or may not be in a dead end - it’s not my field - but one (possibly rotten) set of theories doesn’t discredit the general principle of the use of aesthetics in physics.
At the same time, to her credit, just because one finds a theory to be pretty doesn’t make it true - we do live in a fallen world, after all (though, perhaps, much of this could be chalked up to bad taste).
Dr. Hossenfelder certainly knows a good deal of physics, but that does not translate to being a fine popularizer (Kaku is brought to mind).
Supersymmetry is beautiful in some ways, yes - but it mainly makes certain computations tractable and certain theories viable (string theory simply does not work without supersymmetry - the theory you write down without it can only account for one kind of particle, and I believe it does not have a well-defined vacuum).
I would and would not agree with her. It is not the case that the truth is always stunningly beautiful, even in physics - and yes, it is not the case that what is stunningly beautiful to one is true. However, this is merely a sign of a fallen world; finite truth and beauty are still, in some sense, interconvertible, and thus they are always found together to some degree. Sabine’s remarks seem rather banal to me - yes, the truth often is beautiful, but that’s due to a fundamental reciprocity grounded in God, not because of a subjective sense of aesthetics.
Thanks so much. I have your first edition on Kindle and it's been liberating to see how our typical translations have been rendered more with theological presuppositions and tradition instead of unapologetic honesty and careful research.
I grew up as a rigid calvinist protestant. When Michael Heiser (RIP) argued that election is not synonymous with salvation I eventually ended up at your writings. Really loved your point in Doors of the Sea that if we cannot imagine uttering the calvinist dogma directly to those who are suffering, then surely we must never speak it at all.
It's kinda like the equivalent of "showing your work" in grade school. When after doing your long division problem you must then show the teacher how you did the equation.
Also known as: The most boring part of school.
Say David, you mind showing us the 1,000 changes you made in detail? You could just put them all in another book companion work titled "how I made the first edition better." It won't sell as well, but it'll certainly put our minds at rest.
Thank you David. Very kind of you. I sometimes think that if we just keep saying it, tweaking here and there, folks (like Rooney) who don't see it will see it. The coin will drop in the slot. But being a moral argument, I suppose it is also aesthetic at bottom. And just as there is no syllogism (which is what Rooney wants) that will communicate the beauty of a Turner, a Sorolla, or a Monet canvas, perhaps there's no syllogism that will move one into seeing why divine beauty exposes eternal hell as the worst kind of art. Not familiar terrain for Thomists I take it?
Well, Rooney fails to understand the basic dialectical point as well. Yes, he’s a moral philistine; all manualists are. But the simple logic—that even scripture identifies the loss of a soul as a natural evil, that the direct willing of a natural evil is a moral evil, that the classical metaphysics of creation leads to an eschatological collapse of any distinction between will and permission, etc.—his failure to grasp that part of the argument is the result simply of very poor philosophical gifts.
The arguments in that thread are long and complicated, but did you all get Rooney to move from the clear atrocity of infinite torment to the mere absurdity of “infinite purgation?” I’m not sure this counts as a victory, but perhaps it’s something?
Your curt nod of the head causes me to imagine you in persona Iovis on an Olympian crag, slowly nodding your assent as Thetis (or in this case Tom Belt) begs you to honor Achilles and bring ruin on the Achaean Thomists.
I ordered mine off eBay. I didn't realize until recently that they sold brand new copies of books but I'm glad I discovered it. It will be fun having the first and second editions side by side and studying the differences between them since your revisions. I hope the proceeds from the sale of your book through eBay get to you somehow. If not, I'll make sure whatever book I buy of yours in the future does. For now, I've got some good reading coming up soon!
I was intrigued by your note about "epibalon" and Peter in the Gospel of Mark, 14:72 and wondered if you had any thoughts about the possible relation with the "neaniskos" and the nakedness after leaving the "sindon". Given the proximity, Mark seems like he might be making a point about Jesus' disciples and the shame of fleeing naked, compared with the shame of Peter's denial and covering/encowling.
I was reading in the introduction of The New Testament your concern about translation by committee and that had me wondering about what, if anything, distinguishes the Septuagint, or is it susceptible to the same pitfalls, and if not, in your estimation, why not? I recognize , of course, that it is a translation in very different circumstances, but it seems likely that many of same impulses that you reasonably decry would still obtain.
Alas, we in the UK must wait until 6th May for the 2nd Ed. to be released. Speaking of scripture, would you recommend The Orthodox Study Bible as an entry into EO approaches to scriptural interpretation?
Incidentally, Dr. Hart, do you know of any translations of the Deuterocanonical books in the line of, say, Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible or your translation of the New Testament? All I have to go on is my NRSV.
It’s a shame there aren’t any good ones on the market; after being spoiled with the aforementioned translations (and training in Attic), I’ve little patience for impoverished KJVs.
Considering the current options for the Septuagint, I certainly wouldn’t complain if you did translate it (Brenton is outdated, the NETS is a modified NRSV, and the LES was apparently forged by a computer rearranging an interlinear, which feels like a minor blasphemy). Still, that would be a Herculean labor - I’m sure your family wants to keep you reasonably sane!
question: david, tom quotes you as saying creation is not theogony but rather theophany. however, in “you are gods”, you write “creation is already deification—is, in fact, theogony”. would appreciate clarification. btw — your writing has been profoundly transformative to my faith & understanding — i give thanks to God for you.
I look forward to my updated copy. Had your previous one next to me whenever I did a paper while getting my MTh. BTW, was there anything that jumped out at you in your second go-around. Something that changed you a bit?
Einstein said somewhere that his theory of general relativity had to be true because it was so beautiful. When I finished DBH’s book on universalism, my first thought was that he had to be right, because what he wrote was so beautiful in its arguments, and so beautiful in its picture of God. Thank you.
There are lots of examples of this in physics, incidentally, with Paul Dirac (whose theory of the electron, with minor reinterpretation, is used to this day) probably having the soundest grasp on the concept - his physics was primarily guided by his sense of aesthetics.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
-Yeats, Ode on a Greek Urn
We should expect this from divine simplicity, if one thinks about it - Beauty and Truth are, in their most splendid and fullest forms, One.
That's Keats, not Yeats: Ode on a Grecian Urn. And it's a mistake to read it literally. The lines must be taken with a heavy dose of irony, given the preceding stanzas.
Oh, my apologies! I comment on my mobile phone, and occasionally make typos. As for the latter comment, I suppose that’s up to one’s interpretation - but I do not read it as ironic in context. In any case, regardless of the wider poetic milieu, the lines express a timeless truth in a lovely manner in isolation.
Well, but it is the urn that says the famous lines at the end—they're in quotation marks—& the entire point of the poem is that the urn's truth is not ours. We exist in time, with death & "woe," unlike the urn, which presents the pretty illusion of a world without such unpleasantries (although with a surplus of sexual violence). I mean, that's just what the poem is about, what it says on its surface. The lines are therefore ironic of necessity. Beauty is certainly not truth in this world. Keats was no dummy.
Hmm. I’ve read it much more positively: despite the horrors of the world, the beauty of the urn serves as both perennial prophet and reminder of the Truth and Beauty that undergird and indwell it.
I would say that finite, worldly beauty is, in a sense, interconvertible with truth, though they are not quite synonymous in their impoverished kosmic instantiations.
However, seeing your qualifications below, I’ll submit to your judgement concerning its canonical interpretation - though I reserve the right to practice my customary anarchic eisegesis!
I always take it as the Keatsian equivalent of Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium: would that the perfect serene simplicity of a finished work of art were possible for the mortal imperfect things we are, and would that there really were no other truth than beauty...etc. Irony, but with a sincere longing.
God is One - every ‘subsistence’ of the Deity participates equally in the Essence.
Dr. Hossenfelder is very... idiosyncratic. Like most popularizing physicists, she tends to be both bombastic and rather inaccurate when presenting information to the general public. There are countless instances where good aesthetics has lead to good physics, and where good physics is almost painfully beautiful (there isn’t much in the heavens or on earth that I find more beautiful than classical electrodynamics in its more rarified formulations).
Most physicists are not string theorists (if memory serves, a solid third work in condensed matter theory at this point, which is certainly “down-to-earth” vis-a-vis energy scales). String theory (or theories, I suppose) may or may not be in a dead end - it’s not my field - but one (possibly rotten) set of theories doesn’t discredit the general principle of the use of aesthetics in physics.
At the same time, to her credit, just because one finds a theory to be pretty doesn’t make it true - we do live in a fallen world, after all (though, perhaps, much of this could be chalked up to bad taste).
Not to imply that God is three things participating in one essential Form or whatever - language is imprecise.
Dr. Hossenfelder certainly knows a good deal of physics, but that does not translate to being a fine popularizer (Kaku is brought to mind).
Supersymmetry is beautiful in some ways, yes - but it mainly makes certain computations tractable and certain theories viable (string theory simply does not work without supersymmetry - the theory you write down without it can only account for one kind of particle, and I believe it does not have a well-defined vacuum).
I would and would not agree with her. It is not the case that the truth is always stunningly beautiful, even in physics - and yes, it is not the case that what is stunningly beautiful to one is true. However, this is merely a sign of a fallen world; finite truth and beauty are still, in some sense, interconvertible, and thus they are always found together to some degree. Sabine’s remarks seem rather banal to me - yes, the truth often is beautiful, but that’s due to a fundamental reciprocity grounded in God, not because of a subjective sense of aesthetics.
Thanks so much. I have your first edition on Kindle and it's been liberating to see how our typical translations have been rendered more with theological presuppositions and tradition instead of unapologetic honesty and careful research.
I grew up as a rigid calvinist protestant. When Michael Heiser (RIP) argued that election is not synonymous with salvation I eventually ended up at your writings. Really loved your point in Doors of the Sea that if we cannot imagine uttering the calvinist dogma directly to those who are suffering, then surely we must never speak it at all.
Re 1, might you at any point offer some kind of summary of what the main changes in this updated edition are?
No. There’s no way of summarizing them; I could only list them.
Ah, well, fair enough then.
It's kinda like the equivalent of "showing your work" in grade school. When after doing your long division problem you must then show the teacher how you did the equation.
Also known as: The most boring part of school.
Say David, you mind showing us the 1,000 changes you made in detail? You could just put them all in another book companion work titled "how I made the first edition better." It won't sell as well, but it'll certainly put our minds at rest.
Thanks.
Thank you David. Very kind of you. I sometimes think that if we just keep saying it, tweaking here and there, folks (like Rooney) who don't see it will see it. The coin will drop in the slot. But being a moral argument, I suppose it is also aesthetic at bottom. And just as there is no syllogism (which is what Rooney wants) that will communicate the beauty of a Turner, a Sorolla, or a Monet canvas, perhaps there's no syllogism that will move one into seeing why divine beauty exposes eternal hell as the worst kind of art. Not familiar terrain for Thomists I take it?
Well, Rooney fails to understand the basic dialectical point as well. Yes, he’s a moral philistine; all manualists are. But the simple logic—that even scripture identifies the loss of a soul as a natural evil, that the direct willing of a natural evil is a moral evil, that the classical metaphysics of creation leads to an eschatological collapse of any distinction between will and permission, etc.—his failure to grasp that part of the argument is the result simply of very poor philosophical gifts.
The arguments in that thread are long and complicated, but did you all get Rooney to move from the clear atrocity of infinite torment to the mere absurdity of “infinite purgation?” I’m not sure this counts as a victory, but perhaps it’s something?
Your curt nod of the head causes me to imagine you in persona Iovis on an Olympian crag, slowly nodding your assent as Thetis (or in this case Tom Belt) begs you to honor Achilles and bring ruin on the Achaean Thomists.
Not sure how I should feel about being compared to a sea nymph, but OK.
Hey, I mean, I at least intend it as a compliment. Also, hi, Tom! Long time.
Hi David!
I took it as a compliment as well. She had her parts to play too! ;o)
Does this make Fr. Rooney Agamemnon?
Elpenor.
I ordered mine off eBay. I didn't realize until recently that they sold brand new copies of books but I'm glad I discovered it. It will be fun having the first and second editions side by side and studying the differences between them since your revisions. I hope the proceeds from the sale of your book through eBay get to you somehow. If not, I'll make sure whatever book I buy of yours in the future does. For now, I've got some good reading coming up soon!
I was intrigued by your note about "epibalon" and Peter in the Gospel of Mark, 14:72 and wondered if you had any thoughts about the possible relation with the "neaniskos" and the nakedness after leaving the "sindon". Given the proximity, Mark seems like he might be making a point about Jesus' disciples and the shame of fleeing naked, compared with the shame of Peter's denial and covering/encowling.
I was reading in the introduction of The New Testament your concern about translation by committee and that had me wondering about what, if anything, distinguishes the Septuagint, or is it susceptible to the same pitfalls, and if not, in your estimation, why not? I recognize , of course, that it is a translation in very different circumstances, but it seems likely that many of same impulses that you reasonably decry would still obtain.
Alas, we in the UK must wait until 6th May for the 2nd Ed. to be released. Speaking of scripture, would you recommend The Orthodox Study Bible as an entry into EO approaches to scriptural interpretation?
I would recommend it as an object for propping up an uneven table, and for no other purpose.
I think you’re being unfair David: I’m sure another purpose could be kindling for cold winter evening fires.
Incidentally, Dr. Hart, do you know of any translations of the Deuterocanonical books in the line of, say, Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible or your translation of the New Testament? All I have to go on is my NRSV.
I’ve thought of doing my own. But that’s just a slippery slope to doing the whole Septuagint.
It’s a shame there aren’t any good ones on the market; after being spoiled with the aforementioned translations (and training in Attic), I’ve little patience for impoverished KJVs.
Considering the current options for the Septuagint, I certainly wouldn’t complain if you did translate it (Brenton is outdated, the NETS is a modified NRSV, and the LES was apparently forged by a computer rearranging an interlinear, which feels like a minor blasphemy). Still, that would be a Herculean labor - I’m sure your family wants to keep you reasonably sane!
Not really.
Ooh, are there lots of new footnotes? I bought the first edition mainly for the footnotes and the post-script.
What would “lots” be? The footnotes have been revised.
question: david, tom quotes you as saying creation is not theogony but rather theophany. however, in “you are gods”, you write “creation is already deification—is, in fact, theogony”. would appreciate clarification. btw — your writing has been profoundly transformative to my faith & understanding — i give thanks to God for you.
Two different contexts. Creation is not theogony for God. It is however theogony for creatures-becoming-God.
makes perfect sense. thank you!
I look forward to my updated copy. Had your previous one next to me whenever I did a paper while getting my MTh. BTW, was there anything that jumped out at you in your second go-around. Something that changed you a bit?
<3