vol 2: Synopsis
part V: Applied divinity
page 40: Grace
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Grace
The universe is creative, as is clear from the fact that it has built itself from the initial singularity. This creativity underlies the possibility of grace, that is a gift from God. We see grace in the harvest yielded by effective work. Grace arises from the power of cooperation, and the fortuitous finds of search. It is unearned wealth, physical or spiritual.
We understand grace to be the spiritual equivalent of profit, that is income greater than the cost of production. By the grace of horticulture and agriculture, we plant and harvest a hundredfold. The search for grace is like the search for productivity, that is searching for more goodness for less effort.
In the modern western world, everybody seems to be working harder for less real quality of life. This suggests a lack of grace in the world, a lack of an effective, loving and intelligent approach to the sources of our happiness. Although this applies to natural resources, most of our quality of life stems from our relationships with the people around us. If they are graceful, we profit from our relationships. If our relationships lead to loss, they are lacking in grace.
Traditionally, we pray for grace. We can give the terms prayer and grace practical concrete meaning to serve as a jumping off point for our understanding of spiritual grace. Prayer is meaningful when one asks a favour of one capable of bestowing it (carpenter, doctor, banker). One may pay for the service, but grace flows from prayer when, from a subjective point of view, the goods received are well worth the price paid.
In the spiritual world, our prayers work on our own minds and the minds of others to bring us into a better fit with out world. The root of grace is our ability to theorise. By looking at how things work, we learn how arrange them to work better for our own benefit.
We see that grace and profit are both gifts from God, since they result from the way the universe is structured, that is from the nature of God.
Books
| Casti, John L, Five Golden Rules: Great Theories of 20th-Century Mathematics - and Why They Matter, John Wiley and Sons 1996 Preface: '[this book] is intended to tell the general reader about mathematics by showcasing five of the finest achievements of the mathematician's art in this [20th] century.' p ix. Treats the Minimax theorem (game theory), the Brouwer Fixed-Point theorem (topology), Morse's theorem (singularity theory), the Halting theorem (theory of computation) and the Simplex method (optimisation theory). Amazon back |
| Leigh, G J, The World's Greatest Fix: A History of Nitrogen and Agriculture, Oxford University Press 2004 Preface: 'In the current world, knowledge is rarely valued for itself, and much more often for its commercial potential. Nevertheless, for nearly 30 years my colleagues and I had the immense privilege of studying a challenging problem with a minimum of bureaucratic interference. During this time I became aware that we were all members of a long line of investigators that stretched back for thousands of years. Each of us saw the problem of soil fertility, expressed for us as the conundrum of biological nitrogen fixation, in a different way, and each of us added a small brick to the imposing edifice of modern agricultural science. I have attempted to show in this book how human beings have solved the problems relating to soil fertility, using imagination, ingenuity and understanding of how the world works. ... ' Amazon back |
| Lonergan, Bernard J F, and (edited by Frederick E Crowe and Robert M Doran, Grace and Freedom: Operative Grace in the Thought of St Thomas Aquinas, Jacket: "Grace and Freedom represents Lonergan's entry into subject matter that would occupy him throughout his lifetime. At the same time it is a manifestation of the thinking that has made him one of the world's foremost Thomist scholars. ... Lonergan's thesis is that from the sixteenth century onwards, commentators on Thomas Aquinas lacked historical consciousness, raised questions that Thomas had never considered, and obfuscated the issues. Lonergan's achievement consists in having retrieved the actual postion by adopting a historical approach that has reconstructed [Thomas's] intellectual development on grace. ... What Lonergan also adds is a unique diagnosis of the mistakes made by the modern scholastic authors in their treatment of grace. Throughout this work, Lonergan discovers in Thomas a mind in constant development, displaying radical shifts on fundamental questions. ... ' http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0232511462/tnrp">Amazon back |
| Lovelock, James, Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our Living Earth, W W Norton 1995 'This book describes a set of observations about the life of our planet which may, one day, be recognised as one of the major discontinuities in human thought. If Lovelock turns out to be right in his view of things, as I believe he is, we will be viewing the Earth as a coherent system of life, self regulating and self-changing, a sort of immense living organism.' Lewis Thomas Amazon back |
| Man, John, Alpha Beta: How 26 Letters Shaped the Western World, John Wiley and Sons 2001 Jacket: ' The idea behind the alphabet - that language with all its wealth of meaning can be recorded with a few meaningless signs - is an extraordinary one. So extraordinary, in fact, that it occurrred only once in human history: in Egypt about 4000 years ago, newly discovered origins that this book is the first to detail. Apha Betas then follows the emergence of the western alphabet as it evolved into its present form, contributing vital elelemtns to our sense of identity along the way. The Israelites used it to define their God, the Greeks to capture their myths, the Romans to display their power. And today it seems on the verge of yet further expansion through the internet.' Amazon back |
| Moore, Thomas, Care of he Soul: A Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life, HarperPerennial 1994 Introduction: 'The great malady of the twentieth century, imlicated in all our troubles and afecting us individually and socially, is 'loss of soul." When soul is neglected, it doesn't just go away; it appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or try to eradicate them one by one; but the root problem is that we have lost our wisdom about the soul, even our interest in it. We have today few specialists of the soul to advise us when we succumb to moods and emotional pain, or when as a nation we find ourselves confronting a host of threatening evils. But within our history we do have remarkable sources of insight from people who wrote explicitly about the nature and needs of the soul, and so we can look to the past for guidance in restoring this wisdom. In this book I will draw on that past wisdom, taking into account how we live now, to show tht by caring for the soul we can find relief from our distress and discover deep satisfaction and pleasure. ...' page xi http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060165979/tnrp">Amazon back |
| Noble, David F, The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and the Spirit of Invention, Penguin Books 1999 Introduction: 'It is the aim of this book to demonstrate that the present enchantment with things technological ... is rooted in religious myths and ancient imaginings. Althought today's technologists, in their sober pursuit of utility, power and profit, seem to set society's standard for rationality ... their true inspiration lies elsewhere, in an enduring, other-worldly quest for transcendence and salvation.' Amazon back |
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