Paradoxical Desire in the Poetry of Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Herbert

<p>Inspired by conventional Petrarchism, early modern English poets adopted the concept and rhetoric of paradox in their articulations of desire while revealing significant progression and innovation. Desires expressed by the poet-lovers in the poems of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and George Herbert are the culmination of attempts to coordinate incongruent and contrasting extremes. This thesis examines how desire operates as paradox in Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Philip and Mary Sidney’s Psalms, Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion, Donne’s amorous and religious poems, and Herbert’s poems. Chapter One discusses Astrophil’s desire in Astrophil and Stella as demonstrating the Petrarchan lover enfolded in Neoplatonism. It also explores Donne’s amorous poems, which apply religious vocabularies to communicate sexual love, filling the gap between the distant extremes, establishing a paradoxical unity. In Chapter Two, the thesis compares Spenser’s speakers in Amoretti and Epithalamion and the Sidneys’ Psalmist as Neoplatonic lovers, both of whom search within the physical realms—nature and the body—to express the desire for their divine beloved. In Chapter Three, I compare Donne’s religious poems and selected lyrics from George Herbert’s The Temple. I argue that in Donne’s religious poems, spiritual love is mediated through fleshly desire in a sacramental poetics. The relationship between physical desire and spiritual love is comprehended through sacramental analogy. Comparably, in Herbert’s The Temple, the internal and external components of religious desire reflect the Sacramental theories in which Eucharistic elements communicate their divine referents. The effective way to express love for God, paradoxically, is to establish a spiritual justification for an affirmative embrace of sexuality, making fleshly desire serve as a vehicle of Divine grace. As Donne asserts in his Paradoxes and Problems, “by Discord things increase”. The poet-lovers in the works this thesis explores constantly yearn to imitate and represent their beloved by means of “Discord” and the performance of paradoxical unity. Accordingly, paradoxical desire becomes the inevitable consequence of the poet-lover as a desiring subject who approaches a supposedly insuperable obstacle when he correlates with the beloved obj</p>

Paradoxical Desire in the Poetry of Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Herbert

<p>Inspired by conventional Petrarchism, early modern English poets adopted the concept and rhetoric of paradox in their articulations of desire while revealing significant progression and innovation. Desires expressed by the poet-lovers in the poems of Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and George Herbert are the culmination of attempts to coordinate incongruent and contrasting extremes. This thesis examines how desire operates as paradox in Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, Philip and Mary Sidney’s Psalms, Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion, Donne’s amorous and religious poems, and Herbert’s poems. Chapter One discusses Astrophil’s desire in Astrophil and Stella as demonstrating the Petrarchan lover enfolded in Neoplatonism. It also explores Donne’s amorous poems, which apply religious vocabularies to communicate sexual love, filling the gap between the distant extremes, establishing a paradoxical unity. In Chapter Two, the thesis compares Spenser’s speakers in Amoretti and Epithalamion and the Sidneys’ Psalmist as Neoplatonic lovers, both of whom search within the physical realms—nature and the body—to express the desire for their divine beloved. In Chapter Three, I compare Donne’s religious poems and selected lyrics from George Herbert’s The Temple. I argue that in Donne’s religious poems, spiritual love is mediated through fleshly desire in a sacramental poetics. The relationship between physical desire and spiritual love is comprehended through sacramental analogy. Comparably, in Herbert’s The Temple, the internal and external components of religious desire reflect the Sacramental theories in which Eucharistic elements communicate their divine referents. The effective way to express love for God, paradoxically, is to establish a spiritual justification for an affirmative embrace of sexuality, making fleshly desire serve as a vehicle of Divine grace. As Donne asserts in his Paradoxes and Problems, “by Discord things increase”. The poet-lovers in the works this thesis explores constantly yearn to imitate and represent their beloved by means of “Discord” and the performance of paradoxical unity. Accordingly, paradoxical desire becomes the inevitable consequence of the poet-lover as a desiring subject who approaches a supposedly insuperable obstacle when he correlates with the beloved obj</p>

Augustine

Augustine of Hippo (Thagaste, b. 354–Hippo, d. 430 ce) brings the very person of the thinker onto the philosophical scene for the first time in the history of philosophy, with his existential vicissitudes, his spiritual travails, and his incessant search for truth. Augustine is the ancient figure we know better than anyone else, thanks to the fact that he himself has narrated in the Confessions the external and internal events of his life, from his childhood spent in Roman Africa to his conversion to a radical and demanding form of Christian existence in 386. His conversion also marks the moment in which faith is consciously and programmatically assumed as the starting point of a rational itinerary that aims at understanding the most important truths about God and the human being. Augustine’s contribution to philosophical and theological thought is broad and manifold, from the theory of knowledge and language to the conception of evil and freedom, from the doctrine of creation and time to the analysis of the mind and its acts, from the most difficult questions concerning divine grace and the Trinity to the reading of human history as the interweaving of two mystical ‘cities’. Fundamental terms of the intellectual language of the West—such as ‘sign’, ‘free will’, ‘original sin’, ‘predestination’, ‘relation’—bear the indelible imprint of Augustine’s reflection. Especially sensitive to the influence of Plotinian and Porphyrian Neoplatonism, the gigantic work of this Father of the Church—an essential link between Antiquity and the Middle Ages—has in turn influenced Western Christianity like few others, and through it European culture, right up to modern and contemporary times. Although in Augustine’s thought one cannot clearly distinguish between philosophy and theology, in this article only his works and themes that have greater philosophical prominence today are considered. Therefore, purely theological topics such as the doctrine of divine grace are excluded. Only books published or republished after 1970 are cited, with a few rare exceptions. The remaining bibliography (earlier books, essays contained in collective volumes, and journal articles) can be found by consulting the section Bibliographies.

Compassionate Exclusivism: Relational Atonement and Post-Mortem Salvation

Faithful persons tend to relate to their religious beliefs as truth claims, particularly inasmuch as their beliefs have soteriological implications for those of different religions. For Christians the particular claims which matter most in this regard are those made by Jesus of Nazareth and his claims are primarily relational in nature. I propose a model in which we understand divine grace from Jesus as being mediated through relational knowledge of him on a compassionately exclusivist basis, including post-mortem. Supporting this model, I draw from Eleonore Stump’s hypothesis in her 2018 Atonement that the crucifixion of Jesus opens the divine psyche to all human psyches sufficiently for salvific mutual indwelling to occur, and from Gavin D’Costa’s conception of the descensus Christi ad inferos as the mechanism for grace’s accessibility post-mortem presented in his 2009 Christianity and World Religions. This model seeks to address ongoing, justified pastoral concern for the soteriological status of non-Christians while still treating Christianity as objectively true.

Authority and Innovation in Bernard of Clairvaux ’s De gratia et libero arbitrio

Twelfth-century scholastics are renowned for their willingness to reassess and to criticize patristic authorities, with monastic authors typically understood as far more conservative in this regard. Bernard’s treatise revises that view. It reflects Bernard’s willingness to depart sharply from the late Augustine on grace and free will and to invoke a patristic-age monastic authority, John Cassian, in so doing. Bernard’s own position, accenting the liberty of our postlapsarian free will and its full collaboration with divine grace, displays both his uses of, and departures from, these two authorities.

Karl Barth’s Theological Ethics

Barth’s theological ethics is a version of divine command ethics. However, it is a highly unusual version. Its premise is that the Word of God—the revelation and work of God’s grace to human beings in Jesus Christ—is also the command of God, that gospel is also law. What God commands, therefore, is that human beings confirm in their conduct what they already are by virtue of God’s grace to them. Human beings confirm grace in their conduct by performing actions that correspond to grace, so that the moral life is lived as a human analogy to divine grace. The problem with Barth’s divine command ethics is that the claim that grace is the norm of human action fails to do justice to human beings as creatures. For Barth, God’s resolution from eternity to be gracious to human beings and God’s realization of this eternal resolution in time determines human beings as creatures, not just as those who have fallen into sin. It follows that the human creature exists for the actualization of grace, not grace for the perfection of the creature.

Eighteenth-Century Evangelical Calvinists

Eighteenth-century evangelical Calvinists were a diverse group of people, but the majority of them adhered to Reformed theology. They debated how best to practise their faith, including the proper mode of baptism. Whereas the English Particular Baptists and others insisted that believers be immersed upon a profession of faith as an adult, others, including the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, practised infant baptism. Evangelical Calvinists furthermore sometimes clashed on ecclesiastical policies. The Baptists and Congregationalists, for instance, established independent churches, contrasting the hierarchical structures of the Church of England and Presbyterianism. Despite their diversity on doctrinal and ecclesiastical matters, eighteenth-century evangelical Calvinists were unified in proclaiming that salvation came exclusively by divine grace mediated through Christ’s death on the cross, and that conversion was the means by which God redeemed the elect.

Os ex-votos como mídias na transmissão e na preservação da memória social

Este artigo, de caráter teórico, baseado em pesquisa bibliográfica, assentada nos estudos em Folkcomunicação, com as teorias de Luiz Beltrão, e na noção de memória cultural religiosa, com as ênfases defendidas por Jan Assmann, atenta para o caráter comunicativo da memória religiosa que abrange a articulação de experiências vividas e aprendizagens transmitidas. Destaque é dado ao lugar dos ex-votos, uma prática comum a vários grupos religiosos, de agradecimento por uma graça divina alcançada, interpretados aqui como veículos de transmissão e preservação da memória de uma localidade e de uma época. No trajeto metodológico é elaborada uma aplicação, por meio da apresentação da ampliação das tipologias utilizadas nos estudos de Folkcomunicação, proposta em tese de doutorado defendida por um dos autores deste estudo, como a indicação das possíveis formas de transmissão e preservação da memória social em cada tipo de ex-votos. Memória cultural religiosa; Folkcomunicação; Ex-votos. This article, of a theoretical nature, based on a bibliographical research, grounded on the studies in Folkcommunication, with the theories of Luiz Beltrão, and on the notion of religious cultural memory, with the emphasis defended by Jan Assmann, puts attention to the communicative character of the religious memory that encompasses the articulation of lived experiences and transmitted learning. The ex-votos are highlighted in the study, a common practice of various religious groups, of thanks for a divine grace achieved, interpreted here as vehicles of transmission and preservation of the memory of a locality and an time. In the methodological course, an application is elaborated, through the presentation of the extension of the typologies used in the studies of Folkcommunication, proposed in a doctoral dissertation defended by one of the authors of this study, as the indication of possible forms of transmission and preservation of social memory in each type of ex-votos. Religious cultural memory; Folkcommunication; Ex-votos. Este artigo teórico, basado en la investigación bibliográfica, referenciado en los estudios en Comunicación Popular, con las teorías de Luiz Beltrão, y en la noción de memoria cultural religiosa, con los énfasis defendidos por Jan Assmann, es atento al carácter comunicativo de la memoria. que engloba la articulación de experiencias vividas y aprendizajes transmitidos. Se destaca en el lugar de los exvotos, práctica común a diversos grupos religiosos, en agradecimiento por una gracia divina lograda, interpretada aquí como vehículos para transmitir y conservar la memoria de un lugar y un tiempo. En el camino metodológico, se elabora una aplicación, mediante la presentación de la ampliación de las tipologías utilizadas en los estudios de Comunicación Popular, propuesta en una tesis doctoral defendida por uno de los autores de este estudio, como indicación de las posibles vías de transmisión y preservación de la memoria social en cada tipo de exvotos. Memoria cultural religiosa; Comunicación popular; Exvotos.