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Updated: May 11, 2025
The unwillingness of Burke to examine into their foundation reveals his lack of moral insight into the problem he confronted. That lack of insight must, of course, be given some explanation; and its cause seems rooted in Burke's metaphysic outlook. He was profoundly religious; and he did not doubt that the order of the universe was the command of God.
Aristotle was held in high estimation by the monophysite leaders, particularly in the sixth and seventh centuries. His works were translated into Syriac in the Jacobite schools. The West owes much to these translations. For it was largely by this agency that his metaphysic reached the Arabs, who transmitted it to the West in the Middle Ages.
But in the third place, since a metaphysic of morals, in spite of the discouraging title, is yet capable of being presented in popular form, and one adapted to the common understanding, I find it useful to separate from it this preliminary treatise on its fundamental principles, in order that I may not hereafter have need to introduce these necessarily subtle discussions into a book of a more simple character.
An intelligent grasp of this basic principle is necessary to an appreciation of the whole system. Accordingly, our first concern is to ascertain and exhibit this metaphysical basis. In subsequent chapters we shall analyse in detail the doctrines specifically monophysite and trace the Christological errors back to their source in metaphysic.
If it be correct to express human thought by writing whole pages of vague and bald abstract metaphysic, and then trying to explain them by concrete concetti, which bear an entirely accidental and mystical likeness to the notion which they are to illustrate, then let the metaphysic be as abstract as possible, the concetti as fanciful and far-fetched as possible.
The opening is unnecessarily complicated by the exposition of a metaphysic that is quite uncharacteristic and has little to do with the personal exposition that follows; and, indeed, I feel with regard to the whole work that it attempts to define the indefinable. I deprecate the note of finality implied in the title.
That work was left for the Christian schools; and up to a certain point they performed it. They made men good. This was the test, which of the schools was in the right: this was the test, which of the two had hold of the eternal roots of metaphysic.
Wycliffe was but one of a great number of men who were theorizing up and down Europe upon the nature of society and morals, each with his special metaphysic of the Sacrament; each with his "system." Such men have always abounded; they abound today. And so it is with the whole lot: and there were hundreds of them.
But the true reader of him experiences all these things: he finds in his pages, if he knows how to look for it, a profound metaphysic, a profound ethic, a profound æsthetic; a theory of art and poetry which is never stated, but only hinted or suggested, and which is much more robust and vital than what we are used to; a theory of good and evil; a view of character and conduct; a theory of the state and of politics, of the relation of the sexes, etc., to give ample food for thought and speculation.
It has become so, and thence a metaphysic that aims at an abstract unity must resign itself either to comprehend in its synthesis only one half of the real, or to take advantage of the absolute heterogeneity of the two halves in order to consider one as a translation of the other.
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