Quaestio Disputata: Divine Virtues and Divine Ideas of Virtues

2020 ◽  
Vol 81 (2) ◽  
pp. 467-477
Author(s):  
Paul DeHart
Keyword(s):  
Divine Essence ◽  
Multiple Exemplars ◽  
Eternal Law

Benjamin DeSpain has taken issue with my claim that the divine ideas according to Aquinas’s conception cannot be the objects of our moral striving, nor can they be approximated by us. I argue that he has not attended to a necessary distinction between the divine essence as single exemplar and the ideas as multiple exemplars of the varied imitability of that essence. The result is that Macrobius’s “exemplar virtues” are the divine essence; they are not divine ideas, nor are they eternal law. Approximation to these virtues is possible, but not to the ideas. I conclude with some reflections on Aquinas’s use of tradition, and on the question of his “Platonism.”

scholarly journals Stylizing face images via multiple exemplars

2017 ◽  
Vol 162 ◽  
pp. 135-145 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yibing Song ◽  
Linchao Bao ◽  
Shengfeng He ◽  
Qingxiong Yang ◽  
Ming-Hsuan Yang
Keyword(s):  
Multiple Exemplars ◽  
Face Images

Mullā Ṣadrā’s Arrivers in the Heart (al-Wāridāt al-Qalbiyya)

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 53-107
Author(s):  
William C. Chittick
Keyword(s):  
Spiritual Psychology ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
Mulla Sadra ◽  
Human Love

Abstract It is increasingly difficult after Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240) to differentiate the aims of the Sufis from those of the philosophers. Mullā Ṣadrā (d. 1050/1640) offers a fine example of a thinker who synthesized the Sufi and philosophical methodologies in his voluminous writings. In Arrivers in the Heart he combines the precision of philosophical reasoning with the recognition (maʿrifa) of God and self that was central to the concerns of the Sufi teachers. In forty “effusions” (fayḍ) of mostly rhymed prose, he provides epitomes of many of the themes that he addresses in his long books. These include the concept and reality of existence, the Divine Essence and Attributes, God’s omniscience, theodicy, eschatology, the worlds of the cosmos, spiritual psychology, divine and human love, disciplining the soul, and the nature of human perfection.

scholarly journals Spatial-temporal principles of the symbols of Ukrainian sacred art

1999 ◽  
pp. 93-100
Author(s):  
O. Ishchenko
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Art ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
Space And Time

Understanding Ukrainian sacred art is impossible without understanding how ancient Ukrainians felt space and time, transformed and materialized this understanding in signs, the most ancient among which is the circle, square and cross. These symbols are universal spatial and temporal signs that play the role of archetypes and have deep pre-Christian roots and origins. Their original, cosmological essence of the understanding of nature, the desire to convey the divine essence through comprehension of space and time converges the sacred art of the Christian, Hindu and Islamic worlds.

Walter Burley on divine Ideas

2021 ◽  
pp. 50-75
Author(s):  
Chiara Paladini
Keyword(s):  
Ontological Status ◽  
Open Problems ◽  
14Th Century ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
The World ◽  
Divine Freedom ◽  
Mode Of Being ◽  
Walter Burley ◽  
The Way

This paper focuses on the theory of divine ideas of Walter Burley (1275-1347). The medieval common theory of divine ideas, developed by Augustine, was intended to provide an answer to the question of the order and intelligibility of the world. The world is rationally organized since God created it according to the models existing eternally in his mind. Augustine's theory, however, left open problems such as reconciling the principle of God's unity with the plurality of ideas, the way in which ideas can or cannot be said to be eternal, their ontological status. Medieval authors discussed such questions until at least the late 14th century. By resorting to the semantic tool of connotation, Burley explains both in what way ‘idea' can signify the divine essence as much as the creatures (thereby reconciling the principle of God's unity with the multiplicity of ideas), and in what sense we can say that God has thought them from eternity, without slipping into a necessitarian view that undermines the principle of divine freedom. Moreover, by envisaging the objective mode of being as the only mode of being of ideas, he explains in what way they truly differ from one another on the basis of their different conceptual contents

Divine Revelation in Islam

2021 ◽  
pp. 390-403
Author(s):  
Nader El-Bizri
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Divine Revelation ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
Public Expression ◽  
State Of Affairs

The paramount form of divine revelation (waḥy) in Islam is the Qur’ān. Appropriate investigations show that revelation in Islam is onto-theological, and it is closely tied to the manifold modes of addressing the connection and distinction between the divine essence and its attributes (al-dhāt wa’l-ṣifāt). Such onto-theology is mediated via variegated methods of literal exegesis (tafsīr) and allegorical hermeneutics (ta’wīl) of Scripture, as impacted by the reception and assimilation of inherited narrations about the Prophetic sayings (ḥadīth) and biography (sīra) in relegated traditions, and as these were oriented by various theories and manners of praxis in jurisprudence, theology, mysticism, and philosophy. The approach to the question of revelation is, moreover, set within experiential and situated realms of concrete everydayness, which evoke various emotive dispositions in mood and affective comportments on the part of a Muslim believer (mu’min) in the confessional public expression of faith. This state of affairs is underpinned by a sense in which Islam is pictured as being a unified corpus by its majoritarian orthodoxy, with what this entails in terms of doctrinal leanings, and modes of quotidian social interactions, as guided or dictated by legal and jurisprudential frameworks, which are themselves grounded on differential modes of interpreting Scripture. Revelation is as such a phenomenon that can be grasped through the prism and perspective from within which Scripture is disclosed in terms of accrued doctrinal leanings and sectarian traditions, which historically constituted the diverse aspects of the credal understanding of the Islamic pluralist corpus.

A Multi-Perspective Approach to “Spiritual India”

2021 ◽  
pp. 154-170
Author(s):  
Sribas Goswami
Keyword(s):  
Indian Philosophy ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Fundamental Idea ◽  
Divine Essence ◽  
Human Thinking

The fundamental idea of all Indian philosophy is one common to the highest human thinking everywhere. The supreme truth of all that is a being or an existence beyond the mental and physical appearances we contact here. Beyond mind, life, and body there is a spirit and self containing all that is finite and infinite, surpassing all that is relative, a supreme absolute originating and supporting all that is transient, a one eternal. A one transcendent, universal, original, and sempiternal divinity or divine essence, consciousness, force, and bliss is the fount and continent and inhabitant of things. Soul, nature, life are only a manifestation or partial phenomenon of this self-aware eternity and this conscious eternal. But this truth of being was not seized by the Indian mind only as a philosophical speculation, a theological dogma, an abstraction contemplated by the intelligence. This chapter indicates the central characteristics of Indian culture as it has grown from its beginning to its present positions.

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