The search for mystical influences on Dooyeweerd continues apace

Dr. J. Glenn Friesen, Studies relating to Frederik van Eeden

Dooyeweerd had an interest in Van Eeden and his work, as well as in the International School for Philosophy. In 1915, Dooyeweerd published an article in the Free University Student Society Almanac, entitled “Frederik van Eeden and Neo-Mysticism.” The article is dated November 27, 1914. My translation of this article is available here. http://members.shaw.ca/jgfriesen/Mainheadings/Neo-mystiek.html

This article is discussed by Henderson in his Illuminating law. It is also discussed by Verburg. Verburg says that in this article, Dooyeweerd studies the development of the idea of intuition. The second half of the article is devoted to van Eeden. Dooyeweerd is attracted to him because unlike Bergson, van Eeden did not depreciate the value of science. Science also has value, as long as it does not pretend to be able to split apart [uiteen to kunnen doen vallen] the mysterious universe into numbers and mathematical formulas.

In the article, Dooyeweerd compares intuition to the dream state. He says van Eeden is both a thinker and a poet-seer [ziener-dichter]. Science must have regard to these poet-seers, and come to the conclusion that these seers long ago concluded, that our categories bound to space are only relative. (p. 150, referred to in Verburg 20)

Dooyeweerd refers in this article to van Eeden as holding to the viewpoint of "scientific mysticism." The same term might perhaps describe Dooyeweerd's own work.

---------

Almost two years later, Dooyeweerd was still interested in Van Eeden. He gave a review of the first publication of the Mededelingen van de Internationale School voor Wijsbegeerte te Amersfoort. (Review Oct 15, 1916 in the student paper Fraternitas, cited Verburg 24). Dooyeweerd criticized the school's goal of making one conscious of divinity in man. They seek a unity above religion in the philosophy of the ages. We can't do this because above the absoluteness of philosophy is the absoluteness of the word of Christ. "No one comes to the Father but through me." In other words, Dooyeweerd seems to be opposing an idea of a perennial philosophy.

It is interesting that the Dutch mathematician Brouwer took part in van Eeden’s community. Vollenhoven’s thesis was about Brouwer’s intuitionism in mathematics.

Although I believe that we must look to Baader for the source of Dooyeweerd's key ideas, it seems to me that some of Dooyeweerd's ideas can also be traced to Van Eeden. This is not inconsistent, for Van Eeden had an interest in Boehme and theosophy. So it is not surprising that we can find some interesting parallels between van Eeden and Dooyeweerd..

It is also important to note that Vollenhoven was also interested in van Eeden...

Tesseract Morbey


DEATH BECOME LIFE: BAPTISM / THEOSIS

On the participation in Christ's death as a being taken up in His Life, II Corinthians 5 is very instructive. At first we might think that being "absent from the body, present with the Lord" refers merely to "dying". Yet St. Paul seems to speak of this alternately being "at home" or "away" in II Corinthians 5:9 as part of his daily / nightly spiritual experience. And he as much as says so in II Corinthians 5:13 which sounds very much like a parallel to II Corinthians 12:3. So, if being "absent from the body, present with the Lord" and "being clothed upon from above" is about dying, it is equally about living --about "mortality being swallowed up by life" (II Corinthians 5:4). Whatever dying is or we thought it was, it has been so transformed in Christ that even our old view of death has passed away (II Corinthians 5:17). To experience "death before death" and "resurrection before the resurrection", this is the aim of the Orthodox Christian here below. Daily dying 

becomes a more and more perfect living union with the Lord, casting out fear of death and the bondage it entails (Hebrews 2:14-15). To experience this is to experience Life Eternal here and now, and to participate already in the Age to Come: "But it seemed to me that with this body of mine, I was such as we shall be after the resurrection, or rather, that with this very body I had secretly slipped in among those there" (St. Andrew the Fool of Constantinople, quoted in Rev. Lev Puhalo, _The Soul, the Body, and Death_, Saints Cyril and Methody Society Educational Series, 1981, p.31). Although II Corinthians 5 can be validly read as a commentary on what we commonly call "death" here below, we see that its multiple levels of meaning also relativize death in Christ as lived experience to this higher, deeper, and more mature level of personal experience which the Orthodox Church calls "theosis" (II Corinthians 3:17-18). It is no longer just "I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day" (John 11:24), but now Jesus says, "I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?" (John 11: 25). Resurrection may resuscitate, but even more, the Resurrection is a Person, Who is also the Way, the Truth, the Life, the Bread, the Vine, and the True Sabbath (, and also the Bethesda Pool, as I heard Fr. Thomas Hopko say). Our old categories of thought and perception must pass away. "Behold, the new has come!" (II Corinthians 5:17).

ON THE OVERCOMING OF DEATH BY DEATH:

"Jesus' death *is* the in-breaking of the messianic age; the dead Jesus *is* the Christ who through his being-with-the-dead leads the dead to life"(Wilhelm Mass, "He descended into hell", Theology Digest 30(1):43-46 (Spring, 1982). "It [becomes] apparent that this humiliating defeat [is] not to be followed by a miraculous reversal, a victory despite the cross, but quite the contrary; this defeat [is] itself actually and already the *triumph*. This death [is] revealed to us as a "life-creating death"...

Today, hell cries out groaning: 

  

"I should not have accepted the man born of Mary! 

He came and destroyed my power... 

And now as God he frees all those whom I had held captive!" 

  

Glory to thy cross and to thy resurrection, O Lord! 

  

Today hell cries out groaning: 

"My power has been trampled on! 

I received a dead man as one of the dead 

But against this One I could not prevail 

The Son of Mary has cleared the tombs..." 

  

Glory to thy cross and to thy resurrection, O Lord! 

  

The great Moses mystically foreshadowed this day when he said 

God blessed the seventh day 

This is that blessed sabbath, the day of rest 

On which the only begotten Son of God rested from all his work..." 

  

"The necessity for Christ's death is not presented here as a juridical atonement for the crimes of the human being, Jesus the innocent victim suffering in place of sinners who actually deserve punishment. The emphasis is not on his pain or physical tortures at all...It is not his suffering but his death that liberates and transforms" (Michael Oleksa, _Overwhelmed by Joy_, International Review of Mission 72(287):415-420 (July, 1983). Quotation from an Orthodox hymn on the morning of Holy Saturday).

March, 1998

2011-09-26

mmm