One of the most famous and identifiable of Spinoza’s ideas is his amor Dei intellectualis (the intellectual love of God). It has been argued that this concept is somewhat alien to the main tenets of the Ethics, especially since it is reminiscent of more orthodox religious relations to God, and has a certain mystical (and so, nonrational) quality.In this paper, I will show that it is a consistent development of Spinoza’s interconnected and elaborate theories of knowledge and the (...) affects. Spinoza discusses three kinds of love: passionate love, friendship and the intellectual love of God.The intellectual love of God is nothing but a necessary outcome of Spinoza’s rationalistic project as a whole. Moreover, by culminating his ethical theory with such a concept, Spinoza is placing himself in a rich tradition of thinkers who develop epistemological and ethical systems that put love (either as eros or philia) as the backbone of their philosophy. In order to illustrate the similarities between Spinoza’s philosophical use of love and that of his predecessors, I will address salient features of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought, emphasizing the relationship between love and ethics, as well as the nature of the philosophical impulse. (shrink)

One of the most famous and identifiable of Spinoza’s ideas is his amor Dei intellectualis (the intellectual love of God). It has been argued that this concept is somewhat alien to the main tenets of the Ethics, especially since it is reminiscent of more orthodox religious relations to God, and has a certain mystical (and so, nonrational) quality. In this paper, I will show that it is a consistent development of Spinoza’s interconnected and elaborate theories of knowledge and (...) the affects. Spinoza discusses three kinds of love: passionate love, friendship and the intellectual love of God. The intellectual love of God is nothing but a necessary outcome of Spinoza’s rationalistic project as a whole. Moreover, by culminating his ethical theory with such a concept, Spinoza is placing himself in a rich tradition of thinkers who develop epistemological and ethical systems that put love (either as eros or philia) as the backbone of their philosophy. In order to illustrate the similarities between Spinoza’s philosophical use of love and that of his predecessors, I will address salient features of Plato’s and Aristotle’s thought, emphasizing the relationship between love and ethics, as well as the nature of the philosophical impulse. (shrink)

In the Ethics Spinoza offers a fuller and more philosophical account of the religious ideal, bringing to full maturity a view he had expressed in his earliest works. By the time Spinoza introduces Amor Dei intellectualis in Ethics Part 5, he has already explicated its three components: God, knowledge, and love. God is the eternal, self‐causing, unique substance; God is absolutely infinite, expressing infinite power in infinitely many ways; God is reducible to nothing else, not even the whole universe. (...) Spinoza's definition of love admits a further important distinction: between external and internal objects of love. Spinoza introduces his concept of Amor Dei intellectualis by suggesting that, in the third kind of knowing, acquiescentia in se ipso becomes indistinguishable from love of God. Love has a particularly important place within Spinoza's account of the affects, and also, therefore, within his religion. (shrink)

Descartes maintains that we can love God and that it is pleasant and morally beneficial to do so. In this essay, I examine the necessary conditions for such an intellectual love of God. I argue that the intellectual love of God is incited by a judgment that we are joined to God in reality, which is constitutive of an intellectual joy. I go on to show that the intellectual love of God is, (...) itself, constituted by a stripping of our private interests in favor of God’s divine will. (shrink)

Philosophy Compass, Volume 17, Issue 6, June 2022.

In his Ethics, Spinoza maintains that God’s essence is expressed as both thought and extension. Despite this claim, however, Spinoza’s very definition of truth, understood as adequation, would seem to reduce the aspect of extension to an exclusively intellectual paradigm. I question the extent to which a body remains a body throughout the Ethics in the transition from the first knowledge of the imagination to the highest know ledge of adequate ideas. As a way to think beyond the totality (...) of adequation, I tum to Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between totality and infinity. I reference Levinas in order to highlight certain impasses within Spinoza’s system and to serve as a possible alternative articulation of an extensional love of God. (shrink)

Descartes claims that we can love God sensuously. However, it is prima facie unclear how this is possible, given that he is also committed to the impossibility of sensing or imagining God. In this essay, I show that Descartes has the metaphysical and psychophysical resources necessary to alleviate this tension. First, I discuss Descartes’s account of the intellectual love of God, demonstrating that the intellectual love of God constitutively involves the love of God’s creation. (...) Second, I argue that an image of God’s creation is sufficient for communicating the intellectual love of God to the body, so as to produce a sensuous love of God. And third, I discuss Descartes’s reasons for developing an account of the sensuous love of God. (shrink)

Damaris Cudworth Masham was convinced that the “useful knowledge” has a theoretical, practical and pedagogic content. Man has a social destiny and we cannot offend the divine wisdom assuming that religion precludes this approach and expects the breakdown of society. Reason therefore has a prominent character on the will and free will is the pillar of moral practice. This thought reveals an affinity with the Lockean concept of “person” and “identity” and the central role of individual liberty for love (...) of God and for an ordered and social life. Thanks also to her intellectual relationship with Locke, her “philosophical salon” at Oates become the meeting point for overseas and English scholars, such as Jean Le Clerc, Pierre Des Maizeaux, Pierre Coste, the III Earl of Shaftesbury. Through original sources the paper focus the intellectual legacy of Damaris Masham. (shrink)

For some time now, I have written and talked about Thomas Jay Oord as the most "cutting edge" person on the theological scene today. This may sound like a bold claim, but what Oord has accomplished in bridging the gap between evangelicals and liberals is remarkable both in terms of background and personal commitment. He has a foot in the evangelical camp, yet as a product of Claremont Graduate University, he has another foot solidly in the liberal camp. Intellectually, at (...) least, Oord has had an easygoing relationship with both camps. As a result of his indefatigable efforts, the Open and Relational Theologies Group of the American Academy of Religion has been one of the best attended and most successful groups... (shrink)

‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here’ is, as we all recognize, the inscription over the gate of Dante's hell; but we perhaps forget what precedes that memorable line. Hell, the inscription says, was built by divine power, by the highest wisdom, and by primordial love. Those of us who remember Dante's vivid picture of Farinata in the perpetually burning tombs or Ulysses in the unending and yet unconsuming flames may be able to credit Dante's idea that Hell was (...) constructed by divine power; and if we understand ‘wisdom’ in this context as denoting an intellectual virtue only, then we might agree that only divine wisdom is capable of making something like Dante's hell. (shrink)

A critical edition of the correspondence between Astell and John Norris of Bemerton, which had a profound significance in 18th-century intellectual and religious circles and which represents a crucial step in the development of Norris and Astell's opposition to John Locke.

This paper explores Spinoza’s therapy of passions and method of salvation through knowledge and love of God. His optimism about this method is perplexing: it is not even clear how his God, who is unlike any traditional notion of divinity, can be loved. Sorting out Spinoza’s view involves distinguishing an ethics of bondage from another of freedom, and two corresponding notions of love of God. The paper argues that the highest kind of love—‘pure intellectual love (...) of God’—should not be understood as an affect at all, but instead as unimpeded intellectual activity. This suggestion requires reconsidering Spinoza’s account of cognition, particularly his use of the Cartesian notions of objective and formal reality which are not only central to his theory of ideas but constitute the foundations of his salvation project. (shrink)

Spinoza unequivocally states in the Ethics that intuitive knowledge is more powerful than reason. Nonetheless, it is not clear what exactly this greater power promises in the face of the passions. Does this mean that intuitive knowledge is not liable to akrasia? Ronald Sandler offers what, to my knowledge, is the only explicit answer to this question in recent Spinoza scholarship. According to Sandler, intuitive knowledge, unlike reason, is not susceptible to akrasia. This is because, intuitive knowledge enables the knower (...) to greater power over the passions due to its immediacy, its foundation and because it engenders the boundlessly powerful intellectual love of God. In this paper, I consider to what extent intuitive knowledge is liable to akrasia by exploring whether Sandler's claim can justifiably be attributed to Spinoza. I argue that, given our modal status, it is not plausible to claim that akrasia would never apply to intuitive knowledge. Since intuitive ideas are the ideas of a finite .. (shrink)

He upon whom has descended the “amor intellectualis Dei” must make up his mind to walk much alone. In the world of “intellectuals” he is at present “out of the swim,” and his work must be done against the prevailing current. And among the generality of religious people, he is regarded as rather a disturbing presence in matters of faith, apt to fall short, apparently, of their own standards in the service of God. “The love of the mind for (...) God” has little popular esteem in English-speaking Christianity. The nineteenth century valued feeling as the chief element in religion, and the emphasis of to-day is on the practical service of the will. But in our tradition, from Colet and the Cambridge Platonists to Westcott and von Hiigel, the “amor intellectualis Dei” has produced a line of great men of God, and surely will never be without its witnesses. Their message is a two-fold one. First that every experience of life can be “produced” into an experience of God by an effort of personality in which creative thought and constructive imagination has its part, second that this “love of the mind” is natural in some degree to all men, and an end in itself, giving to each lover an original vision. “It is Origen,” writes Dean Inge, “who in words thrilling alike by their humility and confidence, proclaims that ‘as the eye seeks the light, as our body craves for food, so our mind is impressed with the natural desire of knowing the truth of God and the causes of what we observe.’”. (shrink)

St. Augustine, pictured by Western painters holding in his hand his heart blazing with passionate love, consistently and repeatedly insisted―from his earliest writings until close to his death―that the essential characteristic of God is “God is love” (1 John 4:16). Yet he also insisted on the doctrines of original sin and everlasting punishment for the massa damnata. This article will not explore the rationale or semantics of his arguments, nor the detail and nuance of the doctrines of predestination (...) and perseverance. Rather, I seek to understand, from Augustine’s last writings, how he reconciled his strong conviction that God is love with doctrines requiring belief in a God who determined the fate of individuals to eternal reward or punishment “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), a God indifferent to individuals’ actions, struggles, or longings. My primary interest is not on Augustine’s ability to render these two apparently opposing ideas of God intellectually compatible, but rather on his feeling, gathered from his last sermons, as he approached death. In brief, how could Augustine love the God in whom he believed? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:For the Love of Nothing:Auden, Keats, and DeconstructionJo-Anne Cappeluti"Authors can be stupid enough, God knows, but they are not quite so stupid as a certain kind of critic seems to think. The kind of critic, I mean, to whom, when he condemns a work or a passage, the possibility never occurs that its author may have foreseen exactly what he is going to say"—W. H. AudenIDeconstruction by definition (...) is an exercise of the intellect's predilection to disprove and deny aesthetic experience. Deconstruction is in love with denying this "nothing," but is seemingly unaware of how attempting demystification entangles the intellect all the more with the imagination. And it is the imagination that creates aesthetic experience, the very entity critics deny even exists. This dynamic is especially true of deconstruction looking at the Romantic mode of poetry: the poetry of poets who serve as their own subject. Analyzing the internalized quests of these poets, deconstruction offers a drama of itself too much in love with demystifying aesthetic experience, attempting and always failing, intellectually, to reduce it to nothing.Poets who write in the Romantic mode of poetry are in love with this "nothing"; they present internalized quests filled with their acute awareness of the aesthetic—and highly indeterminate—nature of being human. At the core of this indeterminacy is the ongoing debate between imagination and intellect, the first interested in exploring what is there, in human consciousness, the second prone to demystifying it. Poets who write in this mode learn that such improvable yet actual aesthetic experience or "nothing" is germane to being human. Any attempt [End Page 345] to escape it intellectually will only lead back to the imagination that presents it.Poets who write in the Romantic mode of poetry are so familiar with the way in which this aesthetic nature of human existence involves the unresolved conflict between imagination and intellect that these poets present in their poetry a response to the criticism that denies it. John Keats and W. H. Auden are two poets who show this dynamic and who, not by coincidence, have a lot in common. Deconstruction, however, sees Auden and Keats—however separately—as poets who wake up at mid-career to the fallaciousness of the imagination and subsequently turn their talent to making nothing happen in their poetry: undermining its aesthetic nature. Keats's Endymion and Auden's "Caliban to the Audience" are frequently cited as prime examples of this demystification process. As I will argue, however, both of these poems deliberately dramatize the self-thwarting attempts of the intellect to dissect and dismiss what it claims is nothing.1Keats dramatizes this dynamic in Endymion, drawing attention to the way in which this "Brain-sick shepherd prince" claims—actually over-protests—to have loved "nothing" after his miraculous experience beneath the ocean with the strangely indeterminate creature, Glaucus (pp. 134, 206).2 Auden offers as well a detailed description of this dynamic in "Caliban to the Audience," the last section of The Sea and The Mirror, A Commentary on Shakespeare's The Tempest. In this poem, the strangely indeterminate, begged question of existence, Caliban, reveals in great detail his audience's futile attempt to demystify what upsets them.My argument concludes with a discussion of the way in which these poems dramatize deconstruction's unintentional witness to the "real Word" of the imagination (CP, p. 444).3As poets who write in the Romantic mode, exploring what is there in their consciousness, Keats and Auden find a great indeterminacy inherent in their human nature: an unresolved problem that they explore—rather than try to solve. Auden, in fact, links himself to Keats, finding in Keats's idea of the chameleon poet his (Auden's) central idea of the poet as actor for the imagination. Like Keats, Auden takes the imagination quite seriously and fuses Keats's sense of the imagination with Coleridge's: observing that poetry records the poet's experiences in which the (Primary) imagination is drawn to certain "sacred" beings and events. In "Making, Knowing and Judging," Auden declares that the "impression made upon the imagination by any sacred being is of... (shrink)

Once it is appreciated that it is not possible for an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-loving God to exist, the important question arises: What does exist that is closest to, and captures the best of what is in, the traditional conception of God? In this paper I set out to answer that question. The first step that needs to be taken is to sever the God-of-cosmic-power from the God-of-cosmic-value. The first is Einstein’s God, the underlying dynamic unity in the physical universe which (...) physics seeks to depict by means of a true, unified, physical “theory of everything”. Science has already achieved some theoretical knowledge of this God-of-cosmic-power. The second is what is of most value in our human world, and in the world of sentient life more generally. Having cut God in half in this way, our fundamental problem, intellectual and practical, becomes: How can the God-of-cosmic-value (as it is represented on earth at least) exist and best flourish within the God-of-cosmic-power? Or, in other words: How can what is of value associated with human life – and sentient life more generally – exist and best flourish within the physical universe? Clearly acknowledging that this is our fundamental problem, in academic inquiry, and in all that we do, might help what is of value in life to flourish rather better than it does at present. (shrink)

The nine essays in The Appearing of God are situated on the fluid border of philosophy and theology, and follow a path leading from classic modern philosophical discussions of experience to some leading themes in contemporary phenomenology. After an introductory exploration of Kierkegaard's classic text that straddles the border between philosophy and theology, the reader is introduced to Husserl's account of perception, with its demonstration that the field of phenomena is wider than that of perceptible entities, allowing phenomena that give (...) themselves primarily to feeling. Husserl's theory of reduction is then subjected to a critique, which identifies phenomena wholly resistant to reduction. John Paul II's encyclical on Faith and Reason elicits a critical rejection of its attempt to reify the boundary between natural and supernatural, the author asserting in its place that love is the distinguishing mark of the knowledge of God. This theme is continued in a discussion of Heidegger's Being and Time, where a passing reference to Pascal invites interrogation of the work's 'methodological atheism', which is found to leave more room than appears for love of the divine. The next three chapters deal with the themes of Anticipation, Gift and Self-Identity, all exploring aspects of a single theme, the relation of present experience to the passage of time, and especially to the future. The final chapter puts that theme, together with the theme of love and knowledge, to the service of an enquiry into how theology as an intellectual enterprise relates to the practice of worship. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I. The Concept of Beatific EnjoymentThe locus classicus for the medieval scholastic discussion of beatific enjoyment is the first distinction of Book I of Peter Lombard's Sentences. Lombard extracts three distinct formulations of the term "enjoyment" from Augustine's writings. The first formulation is borrowed from the first book of Augustine's treatise On Christian Learning . The formulation states that "to enjoy is to inhere with love in something (...) for its own sake." The other two formulations are taken from Book X of Augustine's work On the Trinity . The first reads as follows: "we enjoy the things that we know, when the will rests, by delighting in them for their own sake." The second says that "to enjoy is to use with gladness , not merely through hope, but already in reality." These truncated statements served as technical definitions of the concept of enjoyment in scholastic Sentences commentaries. It was thought that the definitions call attention to the various psychological factors required for enjoyment to occur. For instance, the theologian Alexander of Hales explains that the definitions reveal distinct aspects of enjoyment with respect to the subject experiencing it and with respect to the object motivating the enjoyment. The expression "to inhere with love" refers to the soul on the part of the subject and to God on the part of the object. The saying "to use with gladness" relates to the power of the soul on the side of the subject and to created beatitude on the side of the object. Finally, the phrase "we enjoy the things that we know" corresponds to the faculty of the will as well as to the uncreated divine persons. Alexander would thus say that an adequate treatment of Augustine's concept of enjoyment must take into account the subject involved in the activity of enjoyment – e.g., the human soul, the faculty of the will, the faculty of cognition, etc. – and the object or objects of an act of enjoyment – created beatitude, the persons of the Trinity, or simply God.A slightly different reading of Augustine's definitions of enjoyment is found in Thomas Aquinas's Sentences commentary. In his literal exposition of the first distinction of Lombard's Sentences, Thomas notes that a perfect definition of a thing must disclose all of its proper causes. He then offers an explanation of the way in which Augustine's three definitions aim to clarify the concept of enjoyment. According to Thomas, the statement "to inhere in something with love for its own sake" portrays the act of enjoyment in relation to the object as a thing worthy for its own sake and the habit of love causing the enjoyment. The second formulation – "we enjoy the things that we know, etc." – links the act of enjoyment with the faculty of cognition required for the activation of the will. The third formulation – "to enjoy is to use with gladness" – refers primarily to the property of delight , which accompanies the obtainment of the desired object and perfects the act of enjoyment. Thomas, thus, identifies three factors contributing to the occurrence of an act of enjoyment – habit, cognition, and delight . In the first article of the first question of his commentary on Book I of the Sentences, Thomas states that enjoyment is the ultimate happiness of a human being. Enjoyment requires the clear intellectual vision of God, it involves an union as well as a sort of a mutual penetration through love between the one who sees and the thing that is seen, and it culminates in supreme delight . Thomas also says that enjoyment is an act of the will manifesting the habit of charity. In his Summa theologiae Ia IIae, Thomas defines enjoyment as an act of the appetitive faculty , and.. (shrink)

Augustine’s accounts of his so-called mystical experiences in conf. 7.10.16, 17.23, and 9.10.24 are puzzling. The primary problem is that, although in all three accounts he claims to have seen “that which is,” we have no satisfactory account of what “that which is” is supposed to be. I shall be arguing that, contrary to a common interpretation, Augustine’s intellectual “seeing” of “being” in Books 7 and 9 was not a vision of the Christian God as a whole, nor of (...) one of the divine persons, each of whom is equally God, according to Augustine. This becomes clear when we attend to the fact that Augustine is appropriating a specific meaning of “that which is” or “being” used by Plotinus in his account of the lover of Beauty. This resolution, however, leads to a second question. Is there anything distinctively Christian about any, or all, of Augustine’s ascents? On the one hand, it would be odd if there were not, given that the Confessions are addressed to the Christian God. On the other hand, upon close inspection we find that the allegedly specific “Christian” characteristics that modern commentators have identified in the ascents of conf. 7 and 9 also occur in the Neoplatonists. I will argue that there is in fact one important difference between Augustine and the Neoplatonists here that has not been pointed out in these prior interpretations. (shrink)

Spinoza is widely regarded as either a God-forsaking atheist or a God-intoxicated pantheist, but Clare Carlisle says that he was neither. In Spinoza's Religion, she sets out a bold interpretation of Spinoza through a lucid new reading of his masterpiece, the Ethics. Putting the question of religion centre-stage but refusing to convert Spinozism to Christianity, Carlisle reveals that "being in God" unites Spinoza's metaphysics and ethics. Spinoza's Religion unfolds a powerful, inclusive philosophical vision for the modern age--one that is grounded (...) in a profound questioning of how to live a joyful, fully human life. Like Spinoza himself, the Ethics doesn't fit into any ready-made religious category. But Carlisle shows how it wrestles with the question of religion in strikingly original ways, responding both critically and constructively to the diverse, broadly Christian context in which Spinoza lived and worked. Philosophy itself, as Spinoza practiced it, became a spiritual endeavor that expressed his devotion to a truthful, virtuous way of life. Offering startling new insights into Spinoza's famously enigmatic ideas about eternal life and the intellectual love of God, Carlisle uncovers a Spinozist religion that integrates self-knowledge, desire, practice, and embodied ethical life to reach toward our 'highest happiness'--to rest in God. Seen through Carlisle's eyes, the Ethics prompts us to rethink not only Spinoza but also religion itself. (shrink)

The four talks collected here transcribe lectures delivered to an audience of children between the ages of ten and fourteen, under the auspices of the little dialogues series at the Montreuil's center for the dramatic arts. Modeled on Walter Benjamin's Aufklrung for Kinderradio talks, this series aims to awaken its young audience to pressing philosophical concerns. Each talk in God, Justice, Love, Beauty explores what is at stake in these topics as essential moments in human experience. (Indeed, the book (...) argues that they are constitutive of human experience.) Following each, Nancy's audience is given a chance to engage with him in a process of philosophical questioning; the texts of these touching and probing exchanges are included in the volume. Despite the fact that these lectures were delivered to an audience of children, the intellectual level they achieve-while remaining easily comprehensible-is astounding. No attempt is made to simplify Nancy's positions or to resolve the complexities that arise in the course of the talks or the question periods that follow. The work of opening performed here is fully in keeping with the strategy of Nancy's philosophy as a whole. Thus, for readers unfamiliar with his work, God, Justice, Love, Beauty will function as an excellent introduction to Nancy's larger corpus. As varied as the individual talks are, they share the motif of incalculability or the immeasurable. Broadly speaking, one could say that the various ways in which Nancy approaches this motif exemplify his deconstructive approach to think of human existence. As well, those treatments exemplify his conviction that the task of thinking is to develop original ways of communicating the incalculable.God, Justice, Love, Beauty is thus a skillful reminder that philosophy is important to all of us. The book is also a model of intellectual generosity and openness. Seamlessly moving from Schwarzenegger to Plato, from Kant, Roland Barthes, and Caravaggio to Caillou, Harry Potter, and the pages of Gala magazine, Nancy's wide-ranging references bear witness to his commitment to think of culturein its broadest sense. (shrink)

J. L. Schellenberg has recently argued that there is a logical incompatibility between God’s being perfectly loving and there being non-resistant nonbelievers in the proposition that God exists. In this paper I highlight the parallel between this claim and the claim made by the logical problem of evil. Following Plantinga’s strategy in undermining the logical problem of evil, I argue that all that is needed to undermine the alleged incompatibility of divine love with non-resistant non-belief is a counterexample showing (...) how the two might possibly co-exist. But whereas most attempts to show this have been grounded anthropologically, by drawing on forms of love-relationship that God and humans have in common, I offer a defense of the compatibility of perfect divine love with human non-resistant non-belief in God’s existence grounded theologically, in the unique sort of love relationship that God wants with us, which is the relationship of “imaging.”. (shrink)

The greater good -- The intellectual and the existential -- The problem of evil and the problem of the slightest toothache -- The God of love -- Is God an agent? -- The real God.

On his website, Robert Cummings Neville makes an interesting remark: My serious intellectual life began in 1944 at the age of five when a kindergarten classmate told me that God is a person. I checked with my father about this, and he said, “No, Jesus was a person but God is more like electricity or light.” This seemed reasonable and triggered in me a decisive love of God. Electricity makes things go, like my electric train, and my father (...) explained that God makes everything go, which remains my theology to the present day.1 The question I want to discuss in this paper goes back to the very early beginnings of Neville’s outstanding academic career. Over.. (shrink)

This book treats the thirteenth-century debate concerning the natural love of God over self with an eye to how the thinkers of this period saw the connection between one's own good and the aims of virtuous action. It shows that the main difference in this debate reflects a fundamental contrast between Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus over the importance of natural inclination in Ethics and the priority of the common good. It indicates how medieval thinkers attempted to reconcile (...) eudaimonism with the claim that everyone must love the common good more than themselves. It considers perhaps the most crucial issue in the thirteenth-century reception of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It also indicates how later theories that separate morality from self-interest have their origins in concepts that were created in earlier debates, such as this one. (shrink)

The philosophy of loveFor centuries, popular writers and respected scholars have written about and analyzed the phenomenon of love without exhausting its potential for contemporary debate. By representing the three major traditions in the philosophy of love--Platonic eros, Christian agape, and Aristotelian philia--editor Alan Soble has not only examined the intellectual problem of what "love" is, but has designed a dialogue among the three traditions in genuine philosophical style. "Eros is acquisitive, egocentric or even selfish; agape (...) is a giving love. Eros is an unconstant, unfaithful love, while agape is unwavering and continues to give despite ingratitude. Eros is a love that responds to the merit or value of its object; while agape creates value in its object as a result of loving it... Finally, eros is an ascending love, the human's route to God; agape is a descending love, GodÆs route to humans... Philia is caught between eros and agape."--From the Introduction to Eros, Agape and Philia ISSUES EXPLORED: --What is the state of love today as seen through the eyes of Plato, Aristotle, and Paul? --How do relations between the sexes illustrate the difficulties of love? --What are the nature and effects of exclusivity, reciprocity, and constancy? --What are the conceptual and psychological ties between sex and love? --Does it make any sense to think of love in moral terms? (shrink)

The Spinozistic essence is the factor of individuation of a particular or individual thing. Affects or emotions are properties of an essence, which, under the attribute of thought, is an idea, i.e., cognition. Such essence is the human mind, which is the idea of a particular actual body. Since our emotions are properties of our cognitions, whether adequate or not, concerning the state of our body, which reflects nature as a whole in a particular way, I entitle Spinoza’s theory of (...) emotions "cognitivism." In light of Spinoza’s cognitivism, I attempt to explain what is precisely the significance of the intellectual love of God and how cognitive means serves Spinoza’s philosophical psychotherapy or theory of salvation. (edited). (shrink)

Kierkegaard and the limit of analogy -- Distinctions : marks of the paradox -- The paradox is not one: transfiguring transcendence -- Monstrance : articulating the paradox -- Silhouettes : figuring the immanent paradox -- Satan's angel : the interruption of the demonic -- Kierkegaard, Spinoza and the intellectual love of God -- Conclusion : theology for creatures.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Love of God above SelfJordan OlverIS THERE ANY LOVE that is not ultimately a form of self-love? Anders Nygren famously maintained that for Thomas Aquinas there is not. Nygren was led to this conclusion in large part by Aquinas’s claims that love is an act of the will and that the ultimate end of the will is happiness: if every act of love is (...) on account of happiness as an ultimate end, it seems to follow that all love of others is motivated by, and reducible to, love of self.1 Others have drawn this conclusion for similar reasons. Scott MacDonald, for example, interprets Aquinas as proposing “egoistic rationalism”; he believes that this ethical position follows from Aquinas’s claim that human beings, like all creatures, seek their perfection.2Texts, however, can be produced to show that Aquinas himself believes that nonegoistic love is possible.3 If he is an [End Page 97] egoist, he is not so intentionally; he can only be so in the sense that his principles, despite his wishes, necessitate such a position. While Nygren interpreted Aquinas as an unwilling egoist of this sort,4 most modern scholars of Aquinas’s thought on love have held that his principles do not necessitate egoism, and they have endeavored to explain how nonegoistic love is possible on Thomistic grounds. Modern attempts to solve the “problem of love in Thomas Aquinas” normally look back to Pierre Rousselot’s 1908 work Pour l’histoire du problème de l’amour au moyen âge.5 Rousselot identified the “problem of love” as whether a love that is not egoistic is possible and, if it is, what the relation might be between this love and the love of self which appears to be the foundation of natural tendencies.6 Rousselot believed that in the Middle Ages this problem was primarily dealt with through the consideration of the more particular problem of whether it is possible to love God above self apart from grace. This approach, he thought, offered significant advantages: it was simultaneously concrete and profound, and the object of love was both the last end and the author of all natural appetites.7 If genuine love for another is possible, that possibility would be discoverable in this case and through analysis of love of God above self it would seem that one could [End Page 98] arrive at the principles needed to make sense of other nonegoistic loves.8 Accordingly, when Rousselot presented Aquinas’s solution to the problem of love, he did so exclusively through an explanation of Aquinas’s teaching on love of God above self.9 The most notable feature of this account was its appeal to the part-whole relation: Rousselot proposed that for Aquinas our love for God above self is due to the fact that we relate to God as a part to a whole.Rousselot’s work inspired a scholarly discussion that has persisted now for over a century. This discussion may be roughly divided into three stages: the early twentieth century, the mid-twentieth century, and the late-twentieth century to the present. General agreement with Rousselot characterizes early twentieth-century scholarship. Scholars of this period, such as Charles-Vincent Héris, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and H.-D. Simonin, may claim that Rousselot neglects or overemphasizes something, but they do not assert that he is substantially wrong.10 By contrast, rejection or neglect of the “part-whole” approach to love of God above self characterizes the scholarship of the mid-twentieth century. Étienne Gilson, in his 1932 work L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, vigorously objects to Rousselot’s account, arguing that the part-whole relationship, as it functions in Aquinas’s arguments for love of God above self, should not be understood in “a distressingly literal way,” but simply as “a metaphor, the first moment in a manuductio.”11 [End Page 99] Louis-Bertrand Geiger also emphatically rejects Rousselot’s account, arguing that the real explanation of disinterested love is to be found in the will’s special, “objective” inclination to the “good in itself” as opposed to the “good for me”; we love God... (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s professional philosophical reputation rests mainly on his mathematical logic and theory of knowledge. In this study, first published in 1985, however, Kenneth Blackwell considers Russell’s writings on ethics and metaethics and uncovers the conceptual unity in Russell’s normative ethic. He traces that unity to the influence of Spinoza’s central ethical concept, the ‘intellectual love of God’, and then evaluates the ethic which he terms ‘impersonal self-enlargement’. The introduction discusses the metaethical background to Russell’s ethic and the (...) difficulties inherent in Russell’s view that ethical knowledge is not possible. The first section then examines Russell’s writings on Spinoza from 1894 to 1964, dividing them into three periods, the second part analyzes Russell’s two interpretations of the main concept, traces 'impersonal self-enlargement' in Russell’s own ethical writings, and evaluates the ethic in relation to other ethical theories and on its own merits as a ‘way of living’. This book provides a foundation for a positive re-evaluation of Russell’s status in the major philosophical field of ethics and will be welcomed by students of moral philosophy as well as those interested in Bertrand Russell’s works. (shrink)

Bertrand Russell’s professional philosophical reputation rests mainly on his mathematical logic and theory of knowledge. In this study, first published in 1985, however, Kenneth Blackwell considers Russell’s writings on ethics and metaethics and uncovers the conceptual unity in Russell’s normative ethic. He traces that unity to the influence of Spinoza’s central ethical concept, the ‘intellectual love of God’, and then evaluates the ethic which he terms ‘impersonal self-enlargement’. The introduction discusses the metaethical background to Russell’s ethic and the (...) difficulties inherent in Russell’s view that ethical knowledge is not possible. The first section then examines Russell’s writings on Spinoza from 1894 to 1964, dividing them into three periods, the second part analyzes Russell’s two interpretations of the main concept, traces 'impersonal self-enlargement' in Russell’s own ethical writings, and evaluates the ethic in relation to other ethical theories and on its own merits as a ‘way of living’. This book provides a foundation for a positive re-evaluation of Russell’s status in the major philosophical field of ethics and will be welcomed by students of moral philosophy as well as those interested in Bertrand Russell’s works. (shrink)

Simone Weil recognized that there is a problem reconciling the Iove of God/Good with the Iove of neighbor, and she probabIy believed that she never successfully resoIved it. A quotation from her ‘New York Notebook’ sets the probIem niceIy:OnIy God is the good, therefore, onIy He is a worthy object of care, solicitude, anxiety, longing, and efforts of thought. OnIy He is a worthy object of all those movements of the souI which are reIated to some vaIue.From this and other (...) quotes, I construct various arguments showing that one cannot consistently both Iove God and one’s neighbor. The buIk of the paper is taken up with a critical consideration of these arguments. The upshot of this is that there is no pIausibIe way to reject all of these arguments; hence one must tentativeIy conclude that the Iove of God/Good is irreconciIabIe with the Iove of neighbor in Weil’s philosophy. (shrink)

The essay argues that Mary Astell’s support of the theocentric philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche embroiled her in the fray of anti-Spinozism in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Because of her dawning awareness of contemporaries’ associations of Malebranche’s occasionalism with the Spinozist doctrine of one substance, Astell retracted her previous endorsement of this theory in 1694. When contemporaries briefly turned the accusation of Spinozism against Locke and his followers in the early 1700s, however, Astell felt free to return to (...) a support of Malebranche. (shrink)

Mystic and Scientist: the Incompatible Components of Spinoza's Meta physics -- The Ethics of the Free Man as a Critique of the Calvinist Ethics -- The Mystic Rejection of Libertine Hedonism -- The Therapy of Self-understanding: Precursor to Freud -- Intellectual Love of God and Intellectual Hatred -- The Eternity of the Human Mind: Spinoza's Leap Beyond the Geometrical Method -- Ultimate Uncertainty: the Failure of the Geometrical Method -- Spinoza as a Left Cartesian The Infinity of (...) God: a Masochist Projection -- The Infinity of God: the Discovery of the Plurality of Attributes -- The Final Disunity of Spinoza's Thought: Linguistic Nonsense or Linguistic Transfiguration? -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index. (shrink)

In the second installment of this contribution to the Common Knowledge symposium “Contextualism—the Next Generation,” Donne's religious poetry is set in dialogue not only with the “Great Controversy” of the 1560s over the nature of the eucharistic sign but also with pre-Christian semiotic discourses. From the perspective of contextualist scholarship, which recognizes in any temporal context a limited number of discourses available, Donne's religious poems of the period from about 1607 to 1620 register many contradictory conceptions, but contradictory only in (...) the sense that no contextualist map of religious identities allows for their miscibility or even collocation. Notoriously resistant to psychological and phenomenological interests, contextualism has no place for an early seventeenth-century Christian writer whose concern is less to join a school of thought on the Real Presence in the Eucharist than to dismiss the issue as vexingly trivial in comparison with the question of whether God thinks that each or any of us adequately loves him. For the questions that concern Donne, there are no determinate answers available, and no standard vocabulary. But the poet's alternating acquiescence in and fretfulness about indeterminacy and incomprehensibility constitute an intellectual and affective identity as much as does the attachment to any one or other more recognizable set of arguments and ways of framing them. (shrink)

How should we interpret the declaration in I John 4:8 and 16 that God not only loves, but is love? Many philosophically trained Christians will no doubt interpret this, as I do, to mean that love is part of God's very essence; that loving kindness is an essential, not merely an accidental, property of God. Of course the author of I John was not a philosopher and did not, fortunately, employ philosophical jargon in his writings; nor was he (...) likely even familiar with the philosophical distinction between essential and accidental properties. He nonetheless seems clearly to employ "God" as a proper name (as opposed to a title), the name of a distinct person whom we ought to adore and worship, and he says concerning this person that he is love. The point, then, hardly seems to be that the person who is God just happens to love us, as if it were a happy accident that he does; the point seems to be that it is his very nature to love us. In a broadly logical (or metaphysical) sense, it couldn't have been otherwise.1 That this is, at the very least, a natural interpretation seems indisputable. Commenting upon I John 4:8, the conservative New Testament scholar, Leon Morris, thus writes: God is love. This means more than `God is loving'. It means that God's essential nature is love. He loves, so to speak, not because he finds objects worthy of His love, but because it is His nature to love. His love for us depends not on what we are, but on what He is. He loves us because He is that kind of God. (shrink)

In the Groundwork Kant dismisses theistic principles, along with all other competitors to his Categorical Imperative, claiming that they are heteronomous. By contrast, he asserts, the fundamental moral principle must be a principle of autonomy. I argue that the best case for this Kantian conclusion conflates our access to the reasons for our commitments with an ability to state these reasons such that they could figure in an argument. This conflation, in turn, results from a certain Kantian conception of inclination, (...) and its role in our moral psychology. These are views that we ought to reject. Having done so we will see that a theistic ethics based on desire or love for God would not face a distinctive problem of heteronomy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Living Zen, Loving GodRobert P. KennedyLiving Zen, Loving God. By Ruben L. F. Habito. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004. 136 + xxvi pp.In his treatise On Christian Doctrine, Augustine states that non-Christian "seekers of wisdom" may have "said things which are indeed true and are well accommodated to our faith," and even goes on to assert that "some truths concerning the one God are discovered among them." Augustine urges (...) that taking the "gold and silver" of genuine moral and spiritual wisdom from non-Christian sources "should not be feared... but rather [that these treasures ought to be] taken... and converted to our use" (II, xl, 60). As the title of his book implies, Habito believes that "living Zen," and particularly practicing the discipline of zazen, or contemplative sitting, is, for Christians at least, equivalent to the practice of loving God. He addresses himself to Christians—specifically, Roman Catholics—who are seeking to deepen their spirituality, and the book's over-arching purpose is to show that the practice of Zen meditation is both helpful in this quest and conformable with Christian faith. At various points throughout his book, Habito emphasizes that following the path of Zen, if done properly, will in fact strengthen Christians' commitment to their beliefs and, especially, the Gospel's call of loving one's neighbor.Living Zen, Loving God is divided into ten short chapters. In the first chapter, Habito gives a personal account of his experience with Zen. This opening allows him to demonstrate his authority to speak about Zen Buddhism, to introduce the fundamental experience that he is inviting his readers to share, and to illustrate how, in his own case, the practice of zazen shed new light on his Christian faith. As a former Jesuit priest and practicing Catholic, Habito may dispense with any discussion of his qualifications to speak as a Christian. His claim to speak for the Zen experience is less obvious, and so he relates the validation of his kensho (initial enlightenment) by two Japanese Buddhist masters. This, along with the testimonials in the forewords by John Keenan and Fr. Hugo Enomiya Lassalle, SJ, is an assurance that his presentation of Zen is reliable, despite the cultural gulf between his background and that of his Zen teachers.What Habito discovered in his initial enlightenment was nothing less than a transformative encounter with reality, an awareness that is irreducible to conceptual knowledge. Kensho is the experience of nothingness that cannot be expressed but only patiently awaited in silence (p. 5). This experience carried with it a new awareness of the Christian doctrine of creation and a renewed commitment to social involvement on behalf of those who suffer.The nature of Zen is explored more fully in the second chapter, "Emptiness and Fullness." The experience of nothingness involves a self-emptying, a "peeling off " of layers of the false self to find the "depths" in oneself (pp. 13–14). This work of self-realization proceeds by the use of a koan, an enigmatic statement [End Page 193] or story that brings the disciple to an intellectual impasse. The goal of zazen may be indicated inchoately by understanding that the purpose of the koan is precisely to stop thinking and thus to experience oneself as one is and not according to the labels or concepts one habitually uses. Self-realization, the kensho experience, then opens the capacity to relate to others and the world directly, without the falsification of translating experience into thought: "One who is fully emptied in Zen finds himself or herself in everything, literally, and is able to identify fully with everything, to be all things, and thus to act in total freedom, according to what the particular situation demands. Such a one is no longer separated by the illusory barrier between himself and the 'other.' One sees one's True Self in the 'other,' and the 'other' in one's True Self" (p. 22).The next three chapters develop the themes in this summary through readings of classic Buddhist texts. In chapter 3, on the Heart Sutra, Habito stresses that Buddhist meditation, when practiced genuinely, is not solipsistic, an escape into oneself from concern for... (shrink)

The Danish author Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813-1855) is one the best-known theologians in the intellectual history of modernity since the nineteenth century. His influence is comprehensive: it is to be detected, amongst others, in theological, philosophical, literary, psychological and aesthetic discourses across the globe in many contexts. As such this publication will provide welcome input in further reflection on Kierkegaard's role in the interpretation of Scripture in modernity. Huls's book is a refreshing addition to Kierkegaardian studies, which will pave (...) the way for further research on one of the great thinkers of our time. It is also a useful contribution to the debate in contemporary hermeneutics about the legacy of the Enlightenment and the nature of biblical interpretation as a hermeneutical enterprise. Scripture aims to bring us back to our being-seen-in-God. By being alone with it, we realize that in it we are looking in the mirror of Him who loves us from our origin. In reading Scripture, we can, consequently, not be allowed to flee in all sorts of human fabrications about Scripture, as if only the knowledge of theologians could expose the true meaning of Scripture. Every person, whether well-schooled or not, whether he has much or little knowledge, knows Scripture, because before all else Scripture lives in us. Scripture merely reminds us of the Word that is spoken in us immediately and that constitutes our subjectivity. As long as the Word has not truly made us fall silent and we ourselves still think we have a say, the Word does not yet have us in its grasp. Only when we truly fall silent, in the realization that our human logic shrinks into insignificance compared to the wisdom of Him who loves us from our origin, can this Word become directive in our existence. Because there is truly only one eternal object of wonder -- that is God -- and only one possible hindrance to wonder -- and that is a person when he himself wants to be something. (shrink)

Simone Weil recognized that there is a problem reconciling the Iove of God/Good with the Iove of neighbor, and she probabIy believed that she never successfully resoIved it. A quotation from her ‘New York Notebook’ sets the probIem niceIy:OnIy God is the good, therefore, onIy He is a worthy object of care, solicitude, anxiety, longing, and efforts of thought. OnIy He is a worthy object of all those movements of the souI which are reIated to some vaIue.From this and other (...) quotes, I construct various arguments showing that one cannot consistently both Iove God and one’s neighbor. The buIk of the paper is taken up with a critical consideration of these arguments. The upshot of this is that there is no pIausibIe way to reject all of these arguments; hence one must tentativeIy conclude that the Iove of God/Good is irreconciIabIe with the Iove of neighbor in Weil’s philosophy. (shrink)

Genevieve Lloyd’s Spinoza is quite a different thinker from the arch rationalist caricature of some undergraduate philosophy courses devoted to “The Continental Rationalists”. Lloyd’s Spinoza does not see reason as a complete source of knowledge, nor is deductive rational thought productive of the highest grade of knowledge. Instead, that honour goes to a third kind of knowledge—intuitive knowledge (scientia intuitiva), which provides an immediate, non-discursive knowledge of its singular object. To the embarrassment of some hard-nosed philosophers, intellectual intuition has (...) an affective component; it is a form of love, and ultimately given that human beings are finite modes of God/Nature (Deus sive Natura), it is a form of the intellectual love of God (amor Dei intellectualis). Some philosophers do not know what to make of this mysterious aspect of Spinoza’s philosophy, which is nonetheless firmly anchored in a reading of Part V of the Ethics. Nonetheless, this note will insist with Lloyd’s “Reconsidering Spinoza’s Rationalism” that such doctrine is an integral part of Spinoza’s philosophy. Moreover, it will be shown that Spinoza is well aware of the limitations of reason (ratio) in gaining scientific knowledge of the world and requires intuition precisely because of the inability of reason to represent individuals in their full particularity. Imagination too has a role to play in shaping scientific knowledge, although reason performs a vital critical role in disciplining and liberating the human mind from inadequate imaginary ideas. The result is an interpretation of Spinoza’s epistemology as both rationalist and intuitionist. DOI: 10.1080/24740500.2021.1962652. (shrink)

Spinoza’s Ethics has a robust and underappreciated theory of love. In this paper, I show that Spinoza’s discussion of love, which stands at a crossroads between his ethics and his epistemology, details the metamorphosis of love in the philosopher’s mind – from passionate love to intellectual love of God, and from imagination or opinion to scientia intuitiva. This metamorphosis is responsible for the closely interrelated philosopher’s morality and the perfection of their understanding, which are (...) closely linked. Reading Spinoza’s guide to ethical and philosophical progress through the prism of his theory of love holds the key to understanding some of the most perplexing issues presented in the second half of Part 5, namely, the nature of the intellectual love of God and the object of the third kind of knowledge. (shrink)