Idols

What lies at the heart of idolatory? The desire to kill all that is alive and to assume life where there is none....

The concept of life in the West results from a perversion of the Christian belief according to which God, who is Life, became man. From this promise, this offer of a gift, this mysterious opening to what lies beyond, a this-worldly entity was derived. Life became an immanent idol, an all-purpose polemical label, a conceptual justification for boundless acquisition in this world. Indeed, life permits the formation of a foundational category, separate from the cosmos, for possessive individualism. From there it is easy to see the leaps to the struggle for life against nature, other individuals and society. In this construction, life cannot be understood apart from the"death of nature." In a continuous thread that runs back to Anaxagoras(500 - 480 BC) and up through the sixteenth century, an organic, whole conception of nature was a constant theme in the West. With varying nuances and emphases, nature was seen as alive, sensitive, at times animistic, correlated with human action. With the Scientific Revolution, a mechanistic model came to dominate thinking - nature was then seen as dead. This death of nature, I would argue, was the most far-reaching effect of the radical change in man's vision of the universe. But an insistent question then presented itself: How do we explain the notion of living forms in a dead cosmos?The modern substantive concept of life thus appears as a kind of mindless movement to fill the void.

----Ivan Illich

To kill all that lives is to set oneself up at the centre of the universe, the only point at which there is life and intelligence; it is to say that Man is the measure of all things..in short, it is the desire to see with the eye of God, to assume that one has power over nature (which is recognized as nothing but "extension", a lesser power or "force" ).

Idolatory is a form of substitution; it is to substitute the relative for the absolute, the temporary for the permanent; Man, the "image" of God, becomes the sole intelligence, alone in a cold universe. To do so, he must first "kill" God.

Idolatory mirrors the fall; it is the desire to see things contingently, to see them in isolation from the divine; it is to draw a circle around a centre that we make and thereby place ourselves at the centre of the dance of time.

The cogito: to say "i think" is already to assume too much; it is to place oneself as the originator of thought, as if one were totally self-subsisting. The medievals would have said that we can think points to an existence and essence that is given to us.

Idolatory is to see only onself in a circle of reason that starts with the turn to subjectivity and ends up with oneself; but there are other circles that start with love and end with love...for isn't love the acceptance of the 'other'?

A concept of God becomes an idol.

-----Gregory of Nyssa

God is a percept, the world is a concept.

-----Ibn Arabi

Zeus wants to and does not want to be named.

Idolatory is to hold on to immanence without the sense of transcendence.

Wonder,
a garden among the flames!

My heart can take on
any form:
a meadow for gazelles,
a cloister for monks.

For the idols, sacred ground,
Ka'ba for the circling pilgrims,
the tables of the Torah,
the scrolls of the Qur'an

My creed is love;
wherever the caravan turns along the way
that is my belief,
my faith.

-----Ibn Arabi