John Dunn

Human beings: the odd ones

Monday, 14 October 2024 at 22:13

Human beings: the odd ones

The theme of wilful disobedience is examined in Beatrice’s Paradise I exposition of the Cosmos. ‘All things observe a mutual order among themselves,’ said Beatrice, ‘and this is the structure that makes the universe resemble God’. This too is the premise of Dante's cosmos, in which all natures have their bent, their given instincts. Just as a flame always rises when lit, a stone always falls when dropped. This is the natural order. The question should already be rising in the reader’s mind - are we like that? Think of that child, who turns spontaneously without necessity to what delights it. The answer to the question is, most emphatically, no. Beatrice explains by expanding upon the theme of creativity with a metaphor from art. ‘Just as form is sometimes inadequate to the artist’s intention, because the material fails to answer, so the creature, that has power, so impelled, to swerve towards some other place, sometimes deserts the track.’ In other words, within the description of the order of the cosmos, Beatrice emphasises that human beings are the odd ones out, with the power to deviate from the cosmic order.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

redland2

Sunday, 13 October 2024 at 22:02

Dante

Crowned and mitred

Virgil urges Dante to explore the Earthly Paradise until he meets Beatrice. Before sending him off, Virgil blesses him with these words: ‘there I crown and mitre you over yourself.’ This is an expression of explosive political significance. Dante had attained the power of mind over which no secular or clerical authority can rule. He takes both crown and mitre upon himself. Dante’s decision to go beyond the garden shows it is not just a point of arrival, but the necessary pre-condition for moral life.Under his own self-mastery, his choice becomes a positive act of defiance that resonates with felix culpa, the happy fall. Dante was determined to explore beyond that which we see. Political, religious and psychological freedom coalesced and it was all down to a passing encounter.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Life-changing encounter

Saturday, 12 October 2024 at 22:01

Dante meets Beatrice by Henry Holiday

Life-changing encounter

The love of Dante for Beatrice is the exemplar of all life-changing encounters. He met her briefly, she greeted him and walked on, and yet through the encounter his life was changed forever. Why? This was the metaphysical question and the answer was to be found inside of him. Without that chance encounter he would never have left the Hell of unknowing. Eros led him. Lust encouraged him. Loss destroyed him. Rejection and humiliation led him to the wall of fire. It was only Virgil’s promise that he would be reunited with Beatrice that led him through.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Coleridge and Asra

Friday, 11 October 2024 at 22:16

Asra

Coleridge and Asra

The encounter which swept away the last vestiges of Spinozism from Coleridge’s worldview was his extramarital encounter with Sara Hutchinson, or Asra as he refashioned her name. Coleridge’s encounters with German idealism and Sara Hutchinson came in quick succession, the first in 1798, the second in 1799. It was the combination of philosophical idealism and extra-marital love that was incendiary, not the former in isolation, which Coleridge ultimately deemed to be inadequate because of its Spinozist polarity. Fichte came close, with his invitation to imagine the first encounter of two human beings, the summoning to a mutuality of experience, a ‘reciprocal interaction’. However, the result of encounter for Fichte was synthesis, a reduction of two to one, rather than the feminine principle of reflection, resulting in not one, or even two, but the three of fecund creativity.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

...fire meets with FIRE

Thursday, 10 October 2024 at 21:46

...fire meets with FIRE

In contrast the seeker of truth in love is given new life, as anyone who has been in love knows. All the old certainties are shattered. There is turmoil and pain to be sure, but there is expanded vision too. Nothing is seen in the same way ever again by anyone who has stepped into the wall of fire. Tomberg knew this. Union with the Divine is not the absorption of being by Divine Being, far from it:

...fire meets with FIRE, Then nothing is extinguished in the human personality but, on the contrary, everything is set ablaze. This is the experience of ‘legitimate twofoldness’ or the union of two separate substances in one sole essence.

Two separate substances and one sole essence = three. Know this and know why the God of love is revealed to human consciousness as the eternal Trinity - the Loving One who loves, the Loved One who loves, and their Love who loves them: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Consciousness is not lost. To be conscious is to be human. Encounter awakens consciousness and humanises. This is where the magic resides. Human consciousness is magic. Mind is magic in the sense that our consciousness as fully human beings cannot be subject to rational explanation.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Magician without a conscience

Wednesday, 9 October 2024 at 22:04

Spinoza

Magician without a conscience

If God were only One, be that an infinitely distant Jehovah, or the solipsistic ‘I am I’ of the idealist philosophers, or Spinoza’s Substance, he would not be the God of whom John says:

God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (I John 4:16)

He would not be this, because he would love no one other than himself, but more than this, he would be the Magician without consciousness, or conscience. He would have, however, the status of being, which is, after all, the Spinozist claim, i.e. that God is not love, he is being, universal being. This claim is applicable to the mineral realm, sufficing to arrive at the morally neutral idea of being. For the mineral is. In contrast to being, love is not neutral from the point of view of moral life, but rather at the heart of it, which is critical to the understanding of ourselves as human beings. The seeker of truth in being will lose himself in a state of depersonalisation. Coleridge and Buber, amongst others, have made this their central criticism of Spinoza. Tomberg argued that the same criticism could be made of the Bhagavan, the Buddha, the masters of yoga and the ancient philosophers who really lived out their philosophy, above all the Stoics. It is this depersonalisation which is the goal of Tikkun in the Lurianic Kabbalah, the reabsorption into the One, Ein Sof. It is the death of the self in Spinoza’s secularised Judaism, the dehumanising result of Spinozism rejected by Buber. It is epitomised by the amoral realm of money which is the basis of the Spinozist ‘Republick of Merchants’.

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.

Two... is the number of love

Tuesday, 8 October 2024 at 22:01

Valentin Tomberg

Two... is the number of love

Like Spinoza, Fichte and Gentile, we can choose monism and argue that there is only one sole being. Or we can choose dualism and see that there are two principles in the world: good and evil, spirit and matter. After all, did not Zarathustra, Prometheus and Jesus of Nazareth epitomise the good confronted by evil? And in the same way that Buber called this dualistic mode the ‘encounter’, (the mode of I–Thou), insisting that it is best described as love, Tomberg also argued that:

Two...is the number of love or the fundamental condition of love which it necessarily presupposes and postulates... because love is inconceivable without the Lover and the Loved, without ME and YOU, without One and the Other.

If God were only One, be that an infinitely distant Jehovah, or the solipsistic ‘I am I’ of the idealist philosophers, or Spinoza’s Substance, he would not be the God of whom John says:

God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him. (I John 4:16)

From Child of Encounter

© John Dunn.