Finding high-level mathematical thinkers at home in metaphysical surrounds and metaphysicians diligently practicing mathematics are certainly not new. Some instructive examples include, famously, the Pythagoreans, the 15" Century Catholic Cardinal Nicholas Von Cusa, who used geometric symbols to record his spiritual philosophy, and the Talmudic-Cartesian style of argumentation of Nicholas de Spinoza. This approach to an examination of metaphysical systems, sometimes called mathematicism, exploits the machinery of the mathematical mind to evaluate the consistency and completeness of thoughts, to create representative axiomatic structures and to operate within them using syntactic calculus. The practice of the rational dialectic of mathematicism, working for moral purity of heart, develops a brain-somatic discipline much like the exercises of Yoga.
This approach flies in the face of the major premise of these essays, my belief in the necessity of what William James and others have called the primary religious experience in order to know God. Recall that my father’s favorite Jewish mystic, Abraham Abulafia, said this experience gives birth to an activated mind that can then immediately and completely inform the Spirit. Among the religious English mathematicians, | learned that it doesn’t have to happen this way. One can apparently think oneself to It. A well known example of a modern theistic Oxford type, the Magdalene College English tutor and Don, C.S. Lewis, in his introduction
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to St. Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word of God, wrote, “...| believe that many who find that nothing happens when they sit down or kneel down with a book of devotion, might find that their heart would sing unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand...” In contrast, without my personal experiences with joyful transcendence, the direct feeling of His presence, | would not have known about the goals of his more analytic efforts. It was a struggle for me to use a rational mind to share the meanings of the poetic ruminations in his BBC lectures, Mere Christianity. This Reader from Oxford with two firsts in Latin and Greek followed by another first
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in English Literature, described the world as “...enemy occupied territory...” the
omnipresence of the Good Power turned Dark Power of the Prince of Darkness and
the Christian as “...a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up...”
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