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Getting What You Wish For: A Reading of the Fall

David Quint

in Inside Paradise Lost: Reading the Designs of Milton's Epic

This chapter relates the separate falls of Eve and Adam in book 9, respectively, to deeply held wishes that Milton reveals in other writings throughout his career. The fall of Eve grows out of the ... More

This chapter relates the separate falls of Eve and Adam in book 9, respectively, to deeply held wishes that Milton reveals in other writings throughout his career. The fall of Eve grows out of the desire to make trial of an otherwise cloistered virtue and to stand approved in the eyes of God: individual recognition, which Milton uneasily assimilates with the wish for fame. Adam, on the other hand, falls in the name of marital love. Both Eve and Adam have good reasons that go wrong when they disobey God, and their respective wishes—the proof, in Eve's case, of one's solitary spiritual worth and sufficiency, the remedying, in Adam's, of one's social deficiency through human love and companionship—survive and are ratified after the Fall when the couple appear to have switched positions. Adam at the poem's end asserts his vertical dependence on the only God, while Eve declares her love for and inseparability from Adam.Less

The Power of Love

Bernard Cooke

in Power and the Spirit of God: Toward an Experience-Based Pneumatology

Both scripture and Christian tradition identify the Spirit of God with divine love. While seldom linking love and friendship with power, humans have long thought of authentic love as a supreme good ... More

Both scripture and Christian tradition identify the Spirit of God with divine love. While seldom linking love and friendship with power, humans have long thought of authentic love as a supreme good in human experience. However, ‘love’ has had quite different resonance in various contexts. Agapic love often joined to erotic attraction and revelatory of divine love and kenotic aspect of creation. Biblical link of Spirit/love/power with power of the divine word. Christian stress on fundamental role of love, on knowledge of the heart, in morality and spirituality. Love, human and divine, as ultimate power.Less

Gower

Hugh White

in Nature, Sex, and Goodness in a Medieval Literary Tradition

The significance of nature for Gower is apparent simply in the frequency with which he uses nature terms. This chapter deals mainly with Confessio Amantis, Gower's great English work. Most of this ... More

The significance of nature for Gower is apparent simply in the frequency with which he uses nature terms. This chapter deals mainly with Confessio Amantis, Gower's great English work. Most of this work consists of speech by characters and this raises the question of whether what is said here about Nature is wholly reliable, or whether it should be subjected to a scrutiny informed by an apprehension of shortcomings in the speaker. The final directions of the poem suggest that one might do well not to put too much trust in the fact that love and nature are permitted their power over humankind by God. The same is true of the devil himself, but to succumb to his power means damnation. In the background here are alarmed questions about the purposes of God which would have to be met by sheer faith in God's mercy.Less

The Value Account of God’s Love

Jordan Wessling

in Love Divine

A model of God’s love, called the ‘value account’, is defended in Chapter 2. According to this value account, God’s love is an appreciative response to intrinsic worth (dignity in the case of a ... More

A model of God’s love, called the ‘value account’, is defended in Chapter 2. According to this value account, God’s love is an appreciative response to intrinsic worth (dignity in the case of a human), wherein God values the existence and flourishing of the one loved as well as union with the loved individual. After this model of love is expounded, it is argued that conceiving of God’s love in this manner is independently plausible, compatible with important kinds of biblical data, and nourished by a traditional Christian stream of thinking about God’s love.Less

Emotional Detachment: How to Square it with Love of Family and all Humans in the Stoics and Gandhi 1

Richard Sorabji

in Gandhi and the Stoics: Modern Experiments on Ancient Values

The Stoics invented cognitive therapy of the emotions, through treating most natural objectives as in a qualified sense ‘indifferent’. How did they square this with advocating the extension of family ... More

The Stoics invented cognitive therapy of the emotions, through treating most natural objectives as in a qualified sense ‘indifferent’. How did they square this with advocating the extension of family love to all humans? Because the love became unemotional, and, they claimed, a truer love, when detached from concern with indifferents. Gandhi's love for all humans was learnt from Tolstoy's views on Christ, his belief in detachment from the Bhagavadgita. Both were needed for non-violent resistance, and had to be squared with each other by making the love detached, but in a way closer to Christian asceticism than to the Stoics. Gandhi's exemplary love towards his opponents was felt as cold by his family and as warm by his co-workers. Detachment in family love, though unacceptable as a norm, might be seen as an inevitable price in reformers campaigning in the manner of Gandhi or Christ.Less

Neoplatonism and the Renaissance

Irving Singer

in The Nature of Love: Courtly and Romantic

This chapter discusses the model of thinking put forth by Dante in his effort to establish harmony between human love and religious love. This model has been put to good use by philosophers in the ... More

This chapter discusses the model of thinking put forth by Dante in his effort to establish harmony between human love and religious love. This model has been put to good use by philosophers in the Italian Renaissance, most importantly by Marsilio Ficino, whose goal was simple; he endeavored to combine Plato’s philosophy with the orthodox dogmas of the Christian faith. Ficino, who dedicated himself to Platonism and became a parish priest, aiming to be wholly Platonic and wholly Christian, searched for complementary truths in each tradition so that he could strengthen both. It can be argued that his mission had already been accomplished, since medieval Christianity cannot be understood without its Platonic element. Ficino himself did not feel that his attempts to merge Platonism and Christianity were in any way revolutionary.Less

“Where has Your Beloved Gone?”: The Song of Songs in Contemporary Israeli Poetry

Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg

in Scrolls of Love: Ruth and the Song of Songs

In an essay in this book, Ellen Davis contests the predominant scholarly understanding that the Song of Songs gained its place within the canon entirely because the rabbis misread the ... More

In an essay in this book, Ellen Davis contests the predominant scholarly understanding that the Song of Songs gained its place within the canon entirely because the rabbis misread the book, taking it not as a poem about human love, but as pertaining rather to the love of God and Israel. She contends that this scholarly view represents a misunderstanding, that in fact the Song was correctly understood by those who accorded it a place among Israel's Scriptures. Thus, in Davis's view, the Song really is, in large part, about the love that obtains between God and Israel—or, more broadly, between God and humanity. To read it only as a poem about human desire is therefore to misread it.Less

The Goodness of Home: Attachment as Anthropological and Pneumatological Middle Space

Natalia Marandiuc

in The Goodness of Home: Human and Divine Love and the Making of the Self

Bringing together the strands of the book’s argument, the chapter proposes that a relational home is both anthropological and pneumatological, enabling human freedom. Kierkegaard’s divine middle term ... More

Bringing together the strands of the book’s argument, the chapter proposes that a relational home is both anthropological and pneumatological, enabling human freedom. Kierkegaard’s divine middle term understood here as the Holy Spirit, who inhabits the attachment space between human beings, holds the relational space in place, preventing its implosion or dissolution and making it a space of belonging, which befits the concept of home. It is suggested that Jesus’s embodied life provides the pattern for meeting human need and desire, as Jesus is both needful of and a generous giver of human love while simultaneously the most perfect union of human and divine loves working in tandem. The chapter proposes that the self is cocreated and sustained by relational homes that mediate and participate in the streams of divine love that originate in God, reach human lives, and empower human beings to become channels of such love toward other people.Less

Donne’s “Valediction: Forbidding Mourning”

John Freccero

Danielle Callegari and Melissa Swain (eds)

in In Dante's Wake: Reading from Medieval to Modern in the Augustinian Tradition

This chapter examines the poetry of John Donne. Among English poets who underwent the influence of Italian love poetry of the Renaissance, Donne stands out as one who sought to reconcile the errant ... More

This chapter examines the poetry of John Donne. Among English poets who underwent the influence of Italian love poetry of the Renaissance, Donne stands out as one who sought to reconcile the errant soul to its body once more. This meant rescuing human love from both the angelic mysticism and the erotic formalism of the Italian tradition and restoring it to its proper domain: humanity. Donne was primarily concerned neither with the angel nor with the beast, but rather with the battlefield separating them, long since vacated by the Italians. Insofar as he defended that middle ground in the question of human love, his poetry marked a return to a more “medieval” sensibility. The chapter argues that his most famous image, that of the compass in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” protests, precisely in the name of incarnation, against the neo-Petrarchan and Neoplatonic dehumanization of love.Less

Good Daughter, Good Wife

Kristi Brown-Montesano

in Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas

Human love in its many forms is one of the primary themes of Die Zauberflöte. All of the characters invoke love, but it is Pamina who is most motivated by and vulnerable to its claims. Committing ... More

Human love in its many forms is one of the primary themes of Die Zauberflöte. All of the characters invoke love, but it is Pamina who is most motivated by and vulnerable to its claims. Committing herself to Prince Tamino with ingenuous fervor, the daughter of the Queen of the Night goes mad because of conflicting loves. Pamina loves easily and generously, but the opera's social mandate requires that she make a terrible choice: relinquish her ties with her mother or else lose Tamino and paternal favor. In tacitly forsaking the Queen of the Night, Pamina fully satisfies the requirements of a Brotherhood-friendly femininity, renouncing entirely her maternal origins.Less

Troubadour Fin’ Amors

Irving Singer

in The Nature of Love: Courtly and Romantic

This chapter discusses the antagonism between courtly love and mystical love; the former is limited to human beings and fosters sexual desire, while the latter is a love directed toward God that aims ... More

This chapter discusses the antagonism between courtly love and mystical love; the former is limited to human beings and fosters sexual desire, while the latter is a love directed toward God that aims to eliminate all but the spiritual. In this respect, mystical love renounces courtly love as it symbolizes worldly attitudes that are deemed heretical. At the same time, these two concepts reveal their Platonic parenthood through their similarities. It is the same case with the troubadour concept of “fin’ amors,” which fuses the Neoplatonism of the Middle East with elements of Christian mysticism, resulting in an idealization of human love. The seeds of courtly love may be found in Plato’s Symposium, as most aspects of the eros tradition, upon which courtly love is dependent, are rooted in that work.Less

Love and Sin: Sense and Sentimentalism in Christian Globalism

Hillary Kaell

in Christian Globalism at Home: Child Sponsorship in the United States

This chapter discusses informal evangelical theologies that fused the circulation of human love and Divine Love into a basis for U.S. Christian globalism. It begins by clarifying how ... More

This chapter discusses informal evangelical theologies that fused the circulation of human love and Divine Love into a basis for U.S. Christian globalism. It begins by clarifying how nineteenth-century Christians came to understand childhood innocence as a shared attribute of humankind. Without this revolutionary shift, sponsorship would likely never have come about. The chapter then looks at how the rising middle classes grappled with vexed questions about adult sin among heathens and in their own communities. Ultimately, a productive tension between a growing theology of love and earlier ideas about sin became the engine driving thousands of nineteenth-century Americans to band together, announce their sins, make objects, save pennies, and adopt a child abroad.Less