Mysterious Myths or Legendary Legends?

I am posting this paper, in part to prove that this is still somewhat a Chestertonian blog, and also because I believe it brings up many important questions about Christian Mythology. I originally wrote this paper for a seminar course on the "Anglo-Catholic" movement of "Radical Orthodoxy."

In the modern world, the word myth is synonymous with the word false. But should it be? G.K. Chesterton wrote:

What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the day-dreams. To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can come true. To compare them to travellers' [sic] tales is not to deny that they may be true tales, or at least truthful tales. In truth they are the sort of tales the traveller [sic] tells to himself. All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it. It needs a poet to criticise it. There are more poets than non-poets in the world, as is proved by the popular origin of such legends. But for some reason I have never heard explained, it is only the minority of unpoetical people who are allowed to write critical studies of these popular poems.
(The Everlasting Man, 70)

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Yours in Christ,
Thursday

Spinozistic Infinity and its Relationship to Mathematical Infinity

I have decided to post some of my essays and papers that I have to write for my philosophy classes. I am not going to post the entire paper on the front page, only the first paragraph. To read the rest of the paper, click on the link called "click here to read more" immediately following the paragraph. This will be linked to a PDF of the entire paper.

The first paper is my final paper for a seminar course I took last year on Spinoza's Ethics. In it, I look at Spinoza's understanding of infinity, and compare it to the modern mathematical view of infinite sets.

Spinozistic Infinity and its Relationship to Mathematical Infinity

It might seem, at first glance that Spinoza lived in a “dark age” for the study of the infinite. A time when mathematicians doubted the actual existence of the infinite, and the only book to mention it was on the index of forbidden books. However, Spinoza seems to have risen above these difficulties, and developed a theory of the infinite, though lacking in many ways, was surprisingly close to the modern view. This paper is divided into two parts. The first part is a line-by-line analysis of the most valuable explanations of the infinite taken from the thirty-two works and letters that deal with this subject. And the second part, in which Spinoza’s theory is put in the context of the developing understanding of the infinite.

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Click here for the Appendix

Yours in Christ,
Thursday