No Robots

The war between prophetic Judaism and priestly/pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism is over the nature of the ultimate. Moses used Jahveh, which means Beingness itself. This is not a god, but is the Absolute itself, equivalent to Brahman, the Tao, the Eleatic One, the Stoic Logos. Priestly/pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism makes this into a god. The prophets fought against this superstitious distortion of the pure spiritual priniciple. Christ fights this, too, and uses his word Father to denote the Absolute.

fatpie42

Well put.

bacht

This is a good point, that the God of Jews was not static but evolved over time.

If the first recognizably Hebrew God was the one revealed to Moses we have a fire-and-brimstone tribal totem who later becomes the patron of the Davidic monarchy and ultimately the national deity of all Jews. The god of Deutero-Isaiah becomes universal; the god of Qumran is the coming destroyer of all evil. The god of the rabbis speaks to righteous people and performs minor miracles (and has an ironic sense of humour).

Philo's god seems more Hellenistic, setting the stage for the Christian pseudo-platonic Logos.

fatpie42

Well the answer to all those questions is "no".

I somehow failed to notice the final sentence though:
"Did Christ really think of the symbolic books?! What need of many words, inasmuch as we know indeed that mystics are godless and that here we merely find it confirmed that the greatest of all the mystics, the most godless, virtually abolished God and religion and strikes the last blow against him."

What the hell does that mean?

aa5874

But, it is a fact that up to 100 years after the supposed Christ, the God/man, that the Jews were still expecting a real Messiah.

The evolution process did not affect the Jewish expectation of a real human Messiah who would destroy and kill the enemies of the Jews and deliver them from foreign domination.

The Logos was never regarded as human by Philo or was never regarded as a Messiah who would kill and destroy the enemies of the Jews, but was just a philosophical tool.

No Robots

Moses preached Jahveh, the principle of Absolute Beingness:

Jahveh ehad, cried Moses: "Hear O Israel, Being is our God, Being is One" (Deut. 6:4).

Yet this quotation provides precisely the historically monstrous example of how Israel hears and how the truth is straightway transformed into superstition in Israel's ears. For this magnificent saying is at once a hymn of exultation and a wrathful protest against idol worship of any kind; but despite this protest, it now signifies—in the conception of Israel, the Jewish, Christian and Muslim Israel—the well-enough known, imbecilically wrong translation: "Hear O Israel, the Lord our god is the only God!" (Brunner, Spinoza gegen Kant, page 43). Moses said that thou shalt not make unto thee any image of this Jahveh, no imagination of it, i.e., it is that which cannot be thought as things are thought, as if it had the same sort of being as things—I am that I am (Ex. 3:14)! Jahveh, Being, is the term for the wholly abstract spiritual; it has no relation to the relative world. By Jahveh, the wholly great is meant. It means the same thing as Spinoza does in his great—his absolutely great expression, Ens constans infinitis attributis (Absolute Being with infinite attributes.) And Jahveh Tsebaot, Jahveh of infinite powers, is nothing but the mystical expression of the same thing as is expressed philosophically by Ens constans infinitis attributis. The whole tremendous concern of Judaism lies in this phrase Jahveh ehad [Ehad=one and only. Pronunciation; with a gutteral 'kh', accent on the second syllable], in that single word Jahveh, which was ultimately forbidden even to be pronounced, and to pronounce which was a deadly sin. The mystical primordial character of Judaism—so naturally mystical that the Jews, in spite of their having made Jahvism into religion, never established a mythology, even while their Jahveh always remained exalted as God over every god of other religions, so that other ancient civilizations did not recognize him as a god, and said the Jews were without religion and atheistic—the mystical primordial character of Judaism expressed itself in this, its ineffable holy word.—Constantin Brunner / Our Christ, p. 157-8.

No Robots

What does it mean to say that a mystic is godless? It means that he sees himself as in union with the ultimate, which is not a god. Here is the great mystic Meister Eckhart:

I am more than God and I am my own creator. When I came into being, all things came into being; I was the cause of myself and of all things, and if I so willed, I would not be and all things would not be. If I were not, God also would not be.—Meister Eckhart as quoted in Constantin Brunner’s Our Christ, p.3, which provides the following citation: F. Pfeiffer, Deutsche Mystiker des 14. Jahrhunderts, vol. 2 (Leipzig, 1857). p. 283, line 37.

aa5874

Do you by any chance think Brunner is God?

fatpie42

1) He doesn't say a mystic is godless. He says mystics (i.e. lots of them) are godless.

2) Jesus is not Meister Eckhart. They are different people. Quoting Meister Eckhart saying that we must "take leave of God" does not say anything about the beliefs of Jesus (whether he be fictional or not).

No Robots

Nah, I'm an atheist. But I do think that he is one of the greatest thinkers of all time.