Thursday 5 November 2015

Questions

Queen Gunnhild questions the priest Brihtnoth about theology:

"Trying to answer her further questions, he found he knew less than he had thought. She didn't pursue him about it as a pagan Roman philosopher might have."
-Poul Anderson, Mother Of Kings (New York, 2003), Book Four, Chapter XXI, p. 360.

No, because her aim is not to find the truth but to gain his confidence and manipulate him. Gunnhild has an innocent-sounding way to break off the questioning:

"'Why should we, small and death-doomed, be able to understand everything?...God is one with us and the world, which lies mostly beyond our ken.'
"'No, Queen, again you are wrong. God and his creation are not the same.'" (pp. 360-361)

I thought that her remark was orthodox because I had not taken her "...one with..." to mean "the same as." The Cloud Of Unknowing says that we are "...full far beneath Him in nature but oned with Him in grace." But, if we do not accept Christian faith in the first place, then we do not have to theologize about it.

I am "...a pagan Roman philosopher..." or, in St Paul's terminology, a Greek. Some philosophical questioning is merely negative, analyzing every positive proposition out of sight, but some of us try to understand the world although not on the basis of accepting inherited doctrines.

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