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John Dunn
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John Dunn home page
How happy ye mortals are,
if the Eros which governs the heaven
does also reign in your heart.
In this passsage from the Consolations of Philosophy, Boethius maps the individual experience of Eros onto the cosmic experience.
Very much the same concept is to be found in the contemporary of Boethius, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, in On the Divine Names.
On this basis the Pseudo-Dionysius can describe Eros as a mighty stream, coming from God and ruling the Cosmos: this is condescending love of the higher for the lower.
Down here on earth Eros also works as a uniting and commingling power in men by urging them to create community, “moves co-equals to a communion,” be it in society or marriage. And finally this life force can be sublimated into a desire for God: it “moves the inferiors to turn towards their superiors in virtue and position.”
So the cosmogonic Eros forms a cycle, originating in God, penetrating the Cosmos, transformed in man into public spirit and sexual desire and returning to its source as love of God.
In the cycle, Love (Eros) comes from God and returns to God.
© John Dunn.
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From the archive:
Cosmic mediator
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Authentic personalism
This matrix not chosen need not be utterly binding or deterministic, which leaves an alienation against which human beings can struggle and find an opening for freedom.
Such a view needs the ‘other’ against which to struggle. The ‘other’ are the formulators of the matrix into which we are thrown. To struggle successfully against the ‘other’ is to open a clearing, a chink in the matrix, through which we will see.
John Dunn
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Just a thought:
I felt an affinity with the Romantics who kicked against the Spinozist proposition that man, along with all multiplicity, must be dissolved into the Substance.
John Dunn from 'Child of Encounter'
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Heidegger under the carpet
Death for Heidegger sets the limit to separateness as a human being. In the end all is subsumed into the Oneness. In this context therefore, human life is a temporary aberration, something with which Heidegger reluctantly had to deal. Ironically, Heidegger had to deal with this because of the uniquely human ability to stand back and think about this aberration.
John Dunn
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