Language, form, and imagery in John’s poetry

2020 ◽  
pp. 105-131
Author(s):  
Sam Hole
Keyword(s):  
Inner Life ◽  
Language Form ◽  
Union With God ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Father And Son ◽  
Erotic Desire ◽  
The Erotic

Chapter 3 turns to John’s poetry, the first genre in which he wrote and the foundational form of his thought. In their imaginative, narratival depiction of the inner life of the Trinity, John’s Romances explore the communicative nature of language, examining how the loving desire that constitutes the pneumatological bond of Father and Son is also is to be found in the creativity of language itself. John is certainly intrigued by the limits of language that are encountered in the spiritual ascent, which he explores in his glosa and copla poems by playing in various fashions on the theme of the paradoxes involved in human union with the divine. Yet his lira poems, which serve as the basis for his prose commentaries, show him to be chiefly animated by the value of the language and imagery of erotic desire for the depiction of the spiritual ascent. The form and imagery of these poems present a heightened sense of the erotic potential of language itself, which in its very superabundance and excess supports the poem’s accounts of the lovers’ yearning and consummation. Through his poetry, therefore, John presents erotic desire as a force that propels the soul towards its goal, and whose eventual realization in union with God may be meaningfully depicted through the superabundant deployment of images and language drawn from human sexual love.

Phenomenology of Interior Life and the Trinity

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-88
Author(s):  
Robert Farrugia
Keyword(s):  
Conscious Experience ◽  
A Priori ◽  
The Self ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
The World ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
Michel Henry ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Static Nature

Michel Henry radicalises phenomenology by putting forward the idea of a double manifestation: the “Truth of Life” and “truth of the world.” For Henry, the world turns out to be empty of Life. To find its essence, the self must dive completely inward, away from the exterior movements of intentionality. Hence, Life, or God, for Henry, lies in non‑intentional, immanent self-experience, which is felt and yet remains invisible, in an absolutist sense, as an a priori condition of all conscious experience. In Christian theology, the doctrine of the Trinity illuminates the distinction between the immanent Trinity (God’s self‑relation) and the economic workings of the Trinity (God‑world relation). However, the mystery of God’s inmost being and the economy of salvation are here understood as inseparable. In light of this, the paper aims to: 1) elucidate the significance of Henry’s engagement with the phenomenological tradition and his proposal of a phenomenology of Life which advocates an immanent auto‑affection, radically separate from the ek‑static nature of intentionality, and 2) confront the division between Life and world in Henry’s Christian phenomenology and its discordancy with the doctrine of the Trinity, as the latter attests to the harmonious unity that subsists between inner life and the world.

Re-conceiving the Trinity as the Mystery of Salvation

1985 ◽  
Vol 38 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. M. LaCugna
Keyword(s):  
Second Step ◽  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Inner Life ◽  
Doctrine Of The Trinity ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Trinity

We began by wondering what it might mean to speak of the immanent and economic threefoldness of God. Rahner's axiom provided leverage on the problem by showing that trinitarian theology is meant above all to be a truth about the mystery of salvation. That is, it is a way of both narrating and conceiving the God who saves and the God who saves.The correspondence between these two emphases presented a hermeneutical problem at two methodological levels, and so the second step was to examine the meaning of the copula in Rahner's axiom in order to decide how we might (a) link up our narrative of God's history with us with God's inner history, and, having answered that, how we might (b) link up our speculation about God's ‘inner’ life with the divine reality. We replied in the case of (a) that the axiom legislates speaking of God by drafting an equivalence between the temporal history of God-with-us and the eternal history of God, and vice versa: the economic trinity is the immanent trinity, and vice versa. In the case of (b) and building on the answer to (a), we proposed an understanding of the trinity as a theological model. The model (trinity of relations) is related to the ‘modeled’ (God-in-relation) both heuristically and ontologically. The theological model of trinity therefore must incorporate imagistic as well as discursive, indirect as well as direct modes of discourse.Finally, we indicated some of the theological and methodological consequences of understanding God as being the ‘God for us’, and of re-conceiving the doctrine of the trinity to be a theological model of salvation.

“In the Power of God Christ”: Greek inscriptional evidence for the anti-Arian theology of Ethiopia's first Christian king

2008 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 93-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie L Black
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Fourth Century ◽  
Documentary Evidence ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Father And Son ◽  
Power Of God

AbstractFour fourth-century ad inscriptions of Ezana, first Christian king of Aksum (Ethiopia), are surveyed, with special attention to Ezana's only known post-conversion inscription, written in Greek. Greek syntax and terminology in Ezana's inscription point to an anti-Arian Christology which may be associated with Frumentius, first bishop of Aksum, and his connection with Athanasius of Alexandria. The inscription's trinitarian formula “the power of the Father and Son and Holy Spirit” is structured in such a way as to assert the identity of the three members of the Trinity. The phrase “in the power of God Christ” further equates Christ with God. This christological language stands in contrast to the Arian imperial policy of the time, and is historically significant in light of Constantius's attempt to force Frumentius's recall to Alexandria. This inscription serves as the first internal documentary evidence for an anti-Arian Christology in the earliest developments of Ethiopian Christianity.

‘Love’s Use’ in Campaspe

2020 ◽  
pp. 183-218
Author(s):  
Gillian Knoll
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Conceptual System ◽  
Dynamic Relation ◽  
Two Bodies ◽  
Erotic Desire ◽  
The Erotic

Lyly’s Campaspe explores the roles of creative instruments—easel and canvas, pigments and words—in the erotic relationship between the painter Apelles and his model Campaspe. Like any object placed between two bodies in some kind of dynamic relation, these erotic instruments invariably generate friction and heat between Lyly’s lovers. Chapter 5 traces the medium and metaphor of painting, which shapes Apelles and Campaspe’s interactions according to particular artistic features. This chapter considers the erotic qualities of Campaspe’s portrait via classical and early modern psychological accounts of the “phantasm,” a pneumatic image of a beloved that can take on a life of its own. Lyly’s euphuistic language is an erotic instrument in its own right. Providing the lovers with more than a vocabulary, it affords them a structure, a conceptual system, which gives their experience of erotic desire its shape, its medium, and its meaning.

C. S. Lewis, Augustine, and the Rhythm of the Trinity

2012 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-22
Author(s):  
Charles Stanley Ross
Keyword(s):  
Holy Spirit ◽  
Direct Reading ◽  
Lewis Bases ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Holy Spirit ◽  
Third Person ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Third Person ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Father And Son

Although C. S. Lewis was reticent about holding himself up as an expert in theology, in Mere Christianity he explains the relationship between the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit in a characteristically metaphorical and lucid way. Lewis bases his theology on a direct reading of a passage in Augustine’s De civitate Dei to which he added the explanatory metaphor of the ‘dance’—an image scholars have begun to notice in his fiction—to bring alive to his readers the ‘spirit’ of love between the Father and Son that, as Augustine said, became the third person of the Trinity

Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory

2004 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 777-778
Author(s):  
Lorraine Smith Pangle
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
Private Realm ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The City ◽  
Erotic Desire ◽  
The Erotic

Eros and Polis: Desire and Community in Greek Political Theory, Paul W. Ludwig, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. xiii, 398In Eros and Polis, Paul Ludwig explores a rich array of issues relating to eros, homosexuality, and pederasty and their implications for republican political life. He examines ancient accounts of eros and its relation to other forms of desire, to tyranny and aggression, to spiritedness and the love of one's own, and to bonds of affection between citizens. He discusses ancient attempts to overcome the divisiveness of the private realm by controlling erotic relations between citizens, both in practice (such as at Sparta) and in theory (Plato's Republic). He concludes with a critique of the attempt of Thucydides' Pericles to stir up erotic desire and harness it in the service of the city, and of the erotic passion implicit in the attraction to foreign customs and sights. Ludwig draws upon a wide range of ancient sources including Homer, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Herodotus, Xenophon, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Lucretius, and many others. But he does not limit himself to textual analysis; much of the book is devoted to putting these texts in historical context, and much is also devoted to drawing connections between ancient thoughts and practices and the concerns of contemporary political theory.

‘The More we Wonder’: Union with God, Distance from God, and the Vexing Question of ‘Necessary Reasons’ in Aquinas’s Trinitarian Theology

2021 ◽  
pp. 002114002199590
Author(s):  
Michael Joseph Higgins
Keyword(s):  
Trinitarian Theology ◽  
Beatific Vision ◽  
Union With God ◽  
The Trinity ◽  
Vexing Question

Scholars have long noted that there is a tension between the strength of Thomas’s arguments for the Trinity and the limits he places on natural reason. Very few, however, have noted a curious pattern: it is often within the same passage that Thomas both seems to prove the Trinity and rules out the possibility of any such proof. This paper begins by drawing out this pattern. It then proposes that this tension in Thomas’s thought might be a reflection of, and an education into, a deeper tension: the tension between union with God and distance from God that structures the beatific vision into which Thomas’s Trinitarian theology hopes to initiate us.

scholarly journals A Neo-Platonic Dialogue on the Ethics of Love*

2021 ◽  
pp. 81-99
Author(s):  
Dimitrios A. Vasilakis
Keyword(s):  
Critical Engagement ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
Human Individual ◽  
Platonic Love ◽  
Platonic Dialogue ◽  
Ontological Entity ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Classic Paper ◽  
Erotic Desire ◽  
The Erotic

In his classic paper on “The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato” Gregory Vlastos denied that according to Plato’s Diotima in the Symposium a human individual can ever be the proper object of one’s erotic desire, because what one (should) be enamoured with is the Form of Beauty. For the true Platonic lover, the beauty of an individual is only the starting-point for one to understand that beauty can reside also in more abstract levels. Hence, Vlastos argues that the beloved individual is for his lover only a means to an end, so that the lover recollects and attains to true Beauty, and that this is morally objectionable. The systematic Neoplatonic philosopher Proclus (412–485 AD) had already given an answer to this accusation. I will first present the altruistic side of Eros as an ontological entity in Proclus’s metaphysical system. My guide in this will be Socrates, as well as the Platonic Demiurge from the Timaeus and Republic’s philosopher-king. It will be shown that, according to Proclus’s interpretation of various Platonic texts, Vlastos was wrong to accuse Plato of the abovementioned “instrumentality” on the erotic field. However, my paper will close with a critical engagement with Proclus too, since I discern that in his view of Platonic love another sort of instrumentality, one which is akin to Stoic ethics, arises. Vlastos was wrong, but we do not need to be wholeheartedly sympathetic to Proclus.

scholarly journals Wiara w życiu człowieka w ujęciu św. Hilarego z Poitiers

Vox Patrum ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 61 ◽  
pp. 343-357
Author(s):  
Helena Karczewska
Keyword(s):  
Daily Life ◽  
Spiritual Education ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
The People ◽  
Union With God ◽  
Self Discovery ◽  
The Trinity

According to Hilary, faith is a recognition of the divinity of Jesus and a proper understanding of the Trinity. As understood by him, faith is important above all in the fight against heresy and in the daily life of the people. He teaches that faith is not opposed to knowledge, although they differ from each other. Rational faith and spiritual education repel the attacks of heretics and pagans. Faith is a remedy against impious doctrine and it heals the inner darkness of the believer. For faith to lead to union with God it must be tempted, because temptation leads to self-discovery. Faith can be strengthened only in danger and suffering, and acts of faith lead the believer to salvation.

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