Love, Beauty, and the Demonic as Saturated Phenomena

Macrina Magazine, earlier this week, published an essay of mine on the relationship between the notion of the Saturated Phenomena, the mechanistic worldview, love, beauty and the demonic. Take a read:

Love, Beauty, and the Demonic as Saturated Phenomena

The Phenomenological world and the Noumenalogical world

I recently finished the book Deliver us From Evil: Interpreting the Redemption from the Power of Satan in New Testament Theology by Richard H. Bell, and would like to share something I learned from it. One main insight, which I already kind knew but didn’t ever apply it this way, is that the world of science, the world of empiricism, is the phenomenological world which is not necessarily the world in it self: the noumenalogical world. What this means is that when we think of spirit/human interaction (such as demon posesssion), we are speaking of something happening on the level of the noumenalogical, meaning the world in itself independent of the how it appears to us through our senses and our necessary interpretive frameworks of perception (space, time, causality, etc etc). Richard Bell then goes on to apply the Sophenhauer’s own philosophy to claim that mythology can, in part, uncover the noumenalogical, the world as it is. Richard Bell then reads much of the biblical theological discourse (redemption, salvation, the fall, Satan, Christ) mythologically and claims that it is through this mythological reading that one can approach the theological reality.

Healing

In dealing with theodicy, a scriptural data set that needs to be taken into account is Jesus’s healings. The reason for this is that with these healings, we get Jesus’s own reaction to human suffering. Some accounts portray the motivation as ‘pity’ (e.g. Luke 7:13 with Jesus rising the only son of a woman from the dead,  Matthew 14:14 with the healing of sick people in the crowd, Matthew 20:34 with his healing of the blind man). The word used for being moved pity is σπλαγχνίζομαι bascially means being moved as to one’s inward parts, kind of like how one might say “that hit me in gut”.

So what are we to make of these accounts? I think there are a few things we can say: