Scott,

Pope John Paul 2 described God as, “the all-knowing absolute.”

The problem with that is a spiritual absolute, as in source and undifferentiated sentience and consciousness, would be that essence of sentience, bubbling up through life, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which it fell.

More the new born, than the wise old man. Consciousness seeking knowledge, than any form or brand of it. Desire, more so than the objects of desire. The light shining through the film, than the images on it.

A good read in the foundations of Western culture and Christianity is Gilbert Murray’s; The Five Stages of Greek Religion.

It was from the Greeks that Christianity got the Trinity. It came from their year god tradition and symbolized the cycle of life, the old dying and the new being born. As Jesus was trying to push the reset button on Judaism, was killed and risen, it created the ideal analogy, given some of the prior methods used to celebrate this dynamic.

Though the Catholic Church viewed itself as the eternal institution and did its best to obscure the nature of this symbolism, requiring Martin Luther to try pushing the reset button on Christianity.

The Ancients didn’t distinguish between politics and religion, culture and civics, so more monotheistic traditions tended to be equated with more monolithic, monarchial politics.

Remember that democracy and republicanism originated in pantheistic societies, which were the Ancient’s interpretation of multiculturalism, as diverse cultures mixed and brought their various gods and traditions into the network.

So when the West went with its version of monotheism, the default political model for the next 1500+ years was monarchy. “The divine right of kings.”

It was when we went back to more pluralistic political models, that separation of church and state, culture and civics, became necessary.

Given that the last several centuries of philosophy haven’t commented on and tried peeling open this problem of conflating the ideal with the absolute and the consequences of doing so, such as instilling the assumption that people can assume their beliefs are absolute/universal, rather than unique, only goes to show how shallow and convoluted our navel gazing really has been.

The dichotomy of left and right, liberal and conservative, also goes to this dynamical cycle between upward growth and desire, versus civil, cultural consolidation and judgement. Youth and age. The heart and the head.

That we have a cultural paradigm of monist idealism, both side of this process see themselves on the road to nirvana, while the other side of the cycle are misbegotten fools.

We are not so much at the dawn of a new age, as the terminal stages of the old.