Является ли человек венцом творения?

[shkrobius]

Who teacheth us more than the beasts of the earth, and maketh us wiser than the fowls of heaven? http://bible.cc/job/35-11.htm

If the Torah had not been given, we could have learned modesty from the cat, honesty from the ant, chastity from the dove, and good manners from the rooster. Read more... )

Comments

[poltorazhyda]

I was just axin', Professor.

I did go through the Guide since this discussion, and from what I remember, the Rambam says that it is improper to think that G-d's purpose in creating any given thing is not to provide something (material or spiritual) to man, since such an assertion raises the question of whether G-d could not have otherwise provided whatever his notional purpose is. If the answer is "yes," then G-d's work is redundant, which is heresy. If the answer is "no," it is obviously heresy. The Rambam says that this matter is basically an insoluble mystery and leaves it at that. In other words, as I understand it, earthly creation can't be reduced to its value to humans.

[shkrobius]

Sure, it is here

[shkrobius]

Ah, I see what your problem is - I can't help it; there are confessional differences...

[poltorazhyda]

?

[shkrobius]

A Christian would not accept Rambam's answer.

[vvz]

Почему бы и нет. Просто надо не забывать, что человек в христианской (или только православной?) антропологии - трехсоставное существо.

[shkrobius]

I have not seen it bluntly stated. I suppose it has to do with the Christian prophecy that the lordship of the world would pass from Satan to New Man after the resurrection of the dead. I have difficulty understanding the Greeks because it is never quite clear when they talk about the man before the fall, before the reincarnation, before the end of time, or past that point. Perhaps it is this (admirable) intent of thinking about man in the entire progression of time that causes so much confusion in people that are uninterested and uninformed about the context.

BTW, the three components (if you mean the animal spirit, the soul, and the spirit) is a Judaic concept.

[vvz]

In Orthodox theology it is the body, the soul and the spirit so very similar to the Judaic concept.

Yes, Greek authors very often don't discern different "species" of humankind and, what worse for me, sometimes they talk about "the spirit" or "the soul" in the same terms as "the body" which totally confuses me. It might be lost in translation both in English and in Russian or it might be just the property of Greek writing of patristic age.

[poltorazhyda]

Who's a Christian here?

I'm a big fan of a lot of the stuff I've read in the Moreh Nevuhim. Something particularly cool that jumped out at me was that he points out that in reality, there are no species, just individual animals with more or less commonality...

One thing I have trouble with is the concept of "spheres" as he uses it. Could you explain what he meant? It seems like he thinks that the geocentric universe consists of layers, like an onion, and the planets and stars are embedded, each in their own layer, but I really can't make heads or tails...

[shkrobius]

You can think of them not as the actual layers of the physical universe but as layers of causual connections emanating from G-d. In Mishne Torah Rambam speculates that tracing the spheres back to the origin is how Abraham arrived at monotheism,
http://www.mesora.org/AbrahamIdolatry.htm

[poltorazhyda]

Oh, that's pretty clever. But then what about the planets and their relationships with the spheres? Is that some kind of artifact of astrology?

I am unsure of Rambam's model of G-d's interaction with the world. He says that it's a mystery, I believe, since it's impossible for the world to affect G-d, yet there is interaction. I am not sure that there can be a series of causal connections like there is when we interact with the world. We are within it, and limited, unlike G-d...