Why are ancient and medieval philosophers always gushing about how beautiful the world is and how wonderfully ordered it is?Wasn't everything shit back then and they had no food or heat and died if plague non-stop? How come their so sunny, literally even the ones getting tortured to death like Origen and Maximos? Dante is all on about beauty and love in the world and he wrote impoverished in exile in a war torn plague ridden shit hole under threat of being burnt alive.It's not even a Christian thing because the Pagans are like this too. Meanwhile, modern thinkers are all depressed and on about how the world is shit. What gives?
>>18226118Life was meaningful for them, modern philosophies removed all meaning making the life pointless
>>18226118The world is beautifully ordered, dumbass. Check these numbers.
>>18226138Why tho?
>>18226118Because sight is from the soul, not from the eyes. Everything is beautiful if you can see it.
>>18226118>The glory of the One who moves all things>permeates the universe and glows>in one part more and in another less
complaining wasn’t really a thing back then you especially wouldn’t be trying to find ways to undermine authority like in this day and age
>>18226118I don't know... but all the depressed thinkers started during the industrial age and onward. Something to do with that I assume.
Virtuous souls see virtue. Vice-addled degenerates see only their own privations reflected back at them. Modern thinkers tend to be degenerates. The philosopher before modernity was expected to be a saint or sage.>And the true order of going, or being led by another, to the things of love, is to begin from the beauties of earth and mount upwards for the sake of that other beauty, using these as steps only, and from one going on to two, and from two to all fair forms, and from fair forms to fair practices, and from fair practices to fair notions, until from fair notions he arrives at the notion of absolute beauty, and at last knows what the essence of beauty is.>This, my dear Socrates,’ said the stranger of Mantineia, ‘is that life above all others which man should live, in the contemplation of beauty absolute; a beauty which if you once beheld, you would see not to be after the measure of gold, and garments, and fair boys and youths, whose presence now entrances you; and you and many a one would be content to live seeing them only and conversing with them without meat or drink, if that were possible–you only want to look at them and to be with them.>But what if man had eyes to see the true beauty–the divine beauty, I mean, pure and clear and unalloyed, not clogged with the pollutions of mortality and all the colours and vanities of human life–thither looking, and holding converse with the true beauty simple and divine? Remember how in that communion only, beholding beauty with the eye of the mind, he will be enabled to bring forth, not images of beauty, but realities (for he has hold not of an image but of a reality), and bringing forth and nourishing true virtue to become the friend of God and be immortal, if mortal man may. Would that be an ignoble life?’”
>>18226799And I am persuaded that none of these things has been ordered in vain, none without a reason, none in a grovelling manner or unworthy of the legislation of God... and though these are only to be understood by those who rank with Moses in virtue, or have made the nearest approach to his learning. For in that Mount itself God is seen by men; on the one hand through His own descent from His lofty abode, on the other through His drawing us up from our abasement on earth, that the Incomprehensible may be in some degree, and as far as is safe, comprehended by a mortal nature. For in no other way is it possible for the denseness of a material body and an imprisoned mind to come into consciousness of God, except by His assistance. Then therefore all men do not seem to have been deemed worthy of the same rank and position; but one of one place and one of another, each, I think, according to the measure of his own purification. Some have even been altogether driven away, and only permitted to hear the Voice from on high, namely those whose dispositions are altogether like wild beasts, and who are unworthy of divine mysteries.Saint Gregory the Theologian, Oration 45See also, Saint John Cassian, Conferences 14, 14-16, "How an unclean soul can neither give nor receive spiritual knowledge."
>>18226118I suppose there exists a beauty that isn't dependent on comfort, food or health. And I suspect those things prevent us from seeing it.>>18226639In our search for precision and accuracy we forget that meaning is neither. So we chuck it out.
>>18226118"Jesus said, "Whoever has become acquainted with the world has found a corpse, and the world is not worthy of the one who has found the corpse.""
Nominalism, voluntarism, the Baconian mastery of nature, empiricism, naturalism, humanism, etc. are all demonic heresies that have made man miserable.
