Perspectives Vocab

“Knowledge makes a bloody entrance.”

Bernard Lonergan (Jesuit)

What is the good life and how should I live it?

The question of Perspectives

Doxa

Greek for “opinion”. Refers to ideas we assume are true without testing them or even realizing we hold them.

An education is a self-inflicted wound.

N/A

“You’ll never persuade me to give up the truth.”

Oedipus

“Pollution of bloodguilt”

The notion that murder and/or murderers defile the land and community where they resided, requiring exile or purgation of bloodguilt by killer’s death

Scapegoat

The figure who’s expulsion/persecution/death relieves the community’s (internal and environmental) strife

The output of perspectives

You, whatever transformation occurs in your self

ontology

the fundamental nature or principles of being or reality: what life is most fundamentally like

“cosmos”

greek word for “order”, which comes to mean “beauty” and “world/universe”

Cosmogony

literally “birth of the universe”: a narrative that explains how the cosmos came to be

theogeny

literally “birth of the gods”: a narrative that explains how the gods came to be

myth

a narrative account meant to explain fundamental realities of the world; involves god or gods; recited to keep a community together in its fundamental vision and practices

The “Fall”

the biblical story of humanity’s sin and subsequent exile from paradise into death

Sin

to act from disordered desire

“And the eyes of the two were opened, and they knew they were naked”

Genesis 3:7; Adam and Eve upon eating the forbidden fruit

“Am I my brother’s keeper?”

Cain to God, after killing Abel

“Your brother’s blood cries out to me from the soil.”

God to Cain (Genesis 4:11)

Mimicry

imitation of another’s actions

Mimetic desire

imitation of another’s desire (by “catching” their desire from them)

Model/Mediator

one who mediates a desire

Acquisitive mimesis

desire for a model’s object

Metaphysical mimesis

desire for a model’s status

Restricted object/status

an object of desire that cannot be shared

“You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good”

Joseph to his brothers, referring to their crimes

Dual causality

the idea that both divine figures and human beings cause the same events on earth

Divine Providence

Latin for ‘foresight.’ The doctrine that God directs all earthly events, including moral evil, towards the greater good of all