The Idealist View of Divine Action in Nature

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From Laws to Liturgy: An Idealist Interpretation of the Doctrine of Creation

Christian idealism is an interpretative framework for developing the doctrine of creation in the parallel contexts of theology and philosophy. It recommends itself by its explanatory fecundity and consilience. Against physical realism’s claim that the physical world is ontologically fundamental and mind-independent, idealism holds that it is constituted by facts about the organization of human sense experience. The sensory regularities in turn may be explained by a prephysical temporal reality of angelic minds who causally constrain human experience within a divinely decreed nomological system. Idealism is here re-attached to a tradition of Christian Platonism, recovering and updating the traditional notions of the aeon, angelic government, and the divine ideas, so as to be capable of explanatory work in regard to the philosophical problems of perception and induction. In so doing, Christian idealism enables theologians coherently to articulate the thesis that the ontological objectivity and empirical immanence of the world, as grounded in the phenomenological laws of nature, is explained by the liturgical function of the cosmic Church hierarchy. An idealist theology thus develops the doctrine of the cosmic liturgy, that the various works of God in heaven and earth are analogously unified in a single sacramental economy of the Eucharist.

Charity and the Two Economies

A Christian will recognize that along with this usage of the term ‘charity’ there is a specifically Christian one of wider scope that refers to the supreme virtue that is synonymous with love, pity, or compassion in English, agape in Koine Greek, caritas in Latin, pieta in Italian. Though wider in scope, this sense of the term does not seem to be any more closely connected with economy; probably, the point of contact between charity in this sense and economy will be thought to pass through the narrower sense of charity as almsgiving. This is a mistake. And it is here my purpose to highlight and correct it in a way that I hope will make a special appeal to Orthodox Christians

Perceptual consciousness

This dissertation is about the nature of perceptual consciousness. It is concerned with the question of how we become conscious of physical objects through the psychological act of perception. I seek to establish three theses: (i) that something closely akin to naïve realism is the correct theory of perception, i.e. that perceptual consciousness of a physical item is an unmediated or fundamental psychological relation; (ii) that the identity of a perceptual episode is wholly determined by the physical items perceived and the sensible qualities they presents to consciousness, which characterize the manner of perceiving; (iii) that the traditional arguments against this theory can be blocked by adopting a selective interpretation of the transmissive and neurophysiological conditions of perception, together with a causal account of objecthood

Perceptual consciousness

This dissertation is about the nature of perceptual consciousness. It is concerned with the question of how we become conscious of physical objects through the psychological act of perception. I seek to establish three theses: (i) that something closely akin to naïve realism is the correct theory of perception, i.e. that perceptual consciousness of a physical item is an unmediated or fundamental psychological relation; (ii) that the identity of a perceptual episode is wholly determined by the physical items perceived and the sensible qualities they presents to consciousness, which characterize the manner of perceiving; (iii) that the traditional arguments against this theory can be blocked by adopting a selective interpretation of the transmissive and neurophysiological conditions of perception, together with a causal account of objecthood