Lucifer & Nirvana

[Thomas]

Hi Francis —

Hermeneutics is the study or science of the interpretation of texts.

It is a given among scholars that a given text, the Bible, the Upanishads, the Koran, etc., contains within it everything necessary for its interpretation. It is not necessary to be a Buddhist to be a Christian, nor a Jain to be a Jew, that kind of thing. Everything necessary for the practice of a religion is contained within the data of revelation.

So if there's a question about how to interpret a passage of Scripture, the answer lies in Scripture as a whole, it's no use looking in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, any more than a quote from the Book of Proverbs is the answer to a Zen koan.

There might well be similarities, but they are largely because people are people ... Revelation differs, but the audience is essentially the same ...

People make the huge assumption that because people are the same, the revelations are necessarily the same also, which of course is not the case, and that all revelations are equal ... another metaphysical error, but one beloved of the current fashion for egalitarian and anti-authoritarian modernism ... if such was the case then we'd still be throwing children on the fire, the 'traditional' European test to see if the child was in fact a faerie ... in fact we'd be acknowledging that man has learnt nothing since he learnt to stand upright...

Likewise there might be elements in common ... fashionably 'love' being the heart of all religions, which I can agree with, but the Way of the Heart in Christianity is different than the Way of the Heart for the Sufi. As discussed elsewhere, Compassion in Buddhism is utterly different to Compassion in Christianity, because of the background against which compassion as a human activity is understood ... in the same way that an athiest can be compassionate, without believing in God or Buddha ... but Buddhist and Christian compassion opens onto different horizons...

My argument then with this modern idea of 'one size fits all' is that it takes certain data out of context, matches it with other, similar data that has been removed from its context, and say, "Hey! They both say the same thing!" which appears to be the case superficially, but if you ask an expert in either case s/he'd say, 'actually, no, that's not what it means... '

... then, when a difference is encoutered, either one is wrong, or its 're-interpreted' to make it fit ... this is not hermeneutics, it's making a text fit our preconceptions...

The other thing is that 'esoteric' is and always was an adjective, but now it has become a noun, 'the esoteric' has that certain whoo-hoo factor, whereas, the workings of an electric kettle are esoteric to me, because I don't understand enough about electricity ... in fact DIY in general is esoteric to me, as an attempt to change a £1.37 ceiling rose now requires the house to be rewired, amply demonstrates ...

So, yes, light ... you're asking me about the Angel of Light, when I nearly burnt the house down changing a bulb?

Thomas

[Thomas]

Allow me to quote from NewAdvent — a Catholic online resource, albeit somewhat conservative and old-fashioned ...

Lucifer
(Hebrew helel; Septuagint heosphoros, Vulgate lucifer)

The name Lucifer originally denotes the planet Venus, emphasizing its brilliance. The Vulgate employs the word also for "the light of the morning" (Job 11:17), "the signs of the zodiac" (Job 38:32), and "the aurora" (Psalm 109:3). Metaphorically, the word is applied to the King of Babylon (Isaiah 14:12) as preeminent among the princes of his time; to the high priest Simon son of Onias (Ecclesiasticus 50:6), for his surpassing virtue, to the glory of heaven (Apocalypse 2:28), by reason of its excellency; finally to Jesus Christ himself (2 Peter 1:19; Apocalypse 22:16; the "Exultet" of Holy Saturday) the true light of our spiritual life.

The Syriac version and the version of Aquila derive the Hebrew noun helel from the verb yalal, "to lament"; St. Jerome agrees with them (In Isaiah 1:14), and makes Lucifer the name of the principal fallen angel who must lament the loss of his original glory bright as the morning star. In Christian tradition this meaning of Lucifer has prevailed; the Fathers maintain that Lucifer is not the proper name of the devil, but denotes only the state from which he has fallen (Petavius, De Angelis, III, iii, 4).

So, in fact then, Lucifer can apply in a number of ways in Scripture, and one has to read it in context ... but to suppose that because it is used here and means a bad man, that when it's used there, thatr man is bad too, is an oversimplification ...

"Red sky at night, shepher'd delight ..." unless of course, that's his house burning down (another DIY disaster, no doubt), it's all about context, and these 'one size fits all' views have no anchoring context in the real, but inb abstraction, so they're in freefall.

In Hebrew texts the King of Babylon who shone like the brightest star, and then crashed ... so really there's a dozen proverbs that fit the bill ... the Church fathers then just took the analogy and applied it again in a different way to bring out another aspect of the teaching.

But the idea that Lucifer is the secret agent of God, bringing to fruition all God's plans, is erroneous, and falls flat when examined in the light of a proper Christian metaphysic, and I'm more interested in Christian metaphysics than analogy.

In my Hermetic days I used to lecture on matters esoteric to circles of between twenty-fifty people (one one occasion over three hundred) ... I lectured about five or six nights a week, for three hours a night, whilst holding down a day job (just) ... and was never at a loss for something to say ... that's what it's like, once you step outside the context, there are no rules, you just go with the flow ... it's like a kaleidescope ... all of it fantastic, most of it speculative nonsense ... but your audience has no context either, so they've no means of forming any reasonable judgement, there's the trick, you just keep piling it on, and the sheer weight of 'evidence' becomes staggering ... just don't stop, and don't look too closely ...

Thomas