He upon whom has descended the “amor intellectualis Dei” must make up his mind to walk much alone. In the world of “intellectuals” he is at present “out of the swim,” and his work must be done against the prevailing current. And among the generality of religious people, he is regarded as rather a disturbing presence in matters of faith, apt to fall short, apparently, of their own standards in the service of God. “The love of the mind for (...) God” has little popular esteem in English-speaking Christianity. The nineteenth century valued feeling as the chief element in religion, and the emphasis of to-day is on the practical service of the will. But in our tradition, from Colet and the Cambridge Platonists to Westcott and von Hiigel, the “amor intellectualis Dei” has produced a line of great men of God, and surely will never be without its witnesses. Their message is a two-fold one. First that every experience of life can be “produced” into an experience of God by an effort of personality in which creative thought and constructive imagination has its part, second that this “love of the mind” is natural in some degree to all men, and an end in itself, giving to each lover an original vision. “It is Origen,” writes Dean Inge, “who in words thrilling alike by their humility and confidence, proclaims that ‘as the eye seeks the light, as our body craves for food, so our mind is impressed with the natural desire of knowing the truth of God and the causes of what we observe.’”. (shrink)

Augustine believes that loving God is the proper end of human life. But what does it mean to love God? Following Anders Nygren’s influential critique, the common interpretation is that the central thrust of Augustine’s account of love for God is Platonic eros. However, I will argue that the main element of human love for God is not eros but philia, the desire for friendship with the beloved. Understanding Platonic eros as one element among others of human (...) love for God allows us to reconcile the erotic aspects of Augustine’s account with the many texts in which he speaks of human love for God in self-forgetful, agapeistic terms. I will argue that we need to understand the erotic and agapeistic elements of Augustine’s position as essential but subservient to the major focus of our love for God, the desire for friendship with God. (shrink)

In two recent articles, Travis Dumsday has formulated a response to the problem of divine hiddenness on the basis of the Christian doctrine—especially Aquinas’s thought. I agree with Dumsday that Christians qua Christians can significantly contribute to the debate in question. However, in both articles the author overlooks a decisive aspect of Aquinas’s doctrine of faith and the Christian teachings that trace back to it. This article dwells on Dumsday’s interpretation of Aquinas’s thought, and from within my argument proposes a (...) different response to the problem of divine hiddenness. (shrink)

Most philosophers do not read Kant’s philosophy of religion as providing a foundation for Christianity, or even as in line with it. Recently, however, a number of so-called “affirmative Kantians” have argued that Kant’s philosophy of religion explicitly aims at recovering the spirit of Christianity. In this article I scrutinize this claim with regard to Kant’s conceptualization of “grace” as a supplement to his moral theory. Contrary to these “affirmative Kantians,” I argue that Kant’s account of grace stems from Kant’s (...) moral pessimism, not from any sense of the shortcomings of human beings in fulfilling their duties or the religious need for supernatural cooperation. Kant’s concept of grace tries to moderate this pessimism by providing what is needed for the possibility of moral progress. But simply by the way in which Kant regards grace as a rational concept needed for his moral theory, it seems to me that his philosophy of religion runs counter to certain central convictions of Christianity. (shrink)

There has been a significant increase in studies devoted to Søren Kierkegaard’s Works of Love in contemporary Kierkegaard research. There are several good reasons why this is so. The single theme that dominates, though, is the relation between preferential love and neighborly love. Are they reconcilable or not? The present paper recasts this discussion by situating Works of Love in the trajectory of deconstructive readings of community from Jean-Luc Nancy and onwards. It is divided into three (...) sections. It is first shown that a deconstructive take on preferential and neighborly love indicates how any community has a place for love as its condition of (im)possibility. The opening of this place is then located in the Christian love-commandment. Finally, the expanse of this place is found in the spreading-out of the promise of love. The paper is conceived as a step towards letting love find its place in the analytics of being-there—as the phenomenon which opens the “there” without losing its “with.” The paper concludes with a postscript that points towards this broader context. (shrink)

In the Groundwork Kant dismisses theistic principles, along with all other competitors to his Categorical Imperative, claiming that they are heteronomous. By contrast, he asserts, the fundamental moral principle must be a principle of autonomy. I argue that the best case for this Kantian conclusion conflates our access to the reasons for our commitments with an ability to state these reasons such that they could figure in an argument. This conflation, in turn, results from a certain Kantian conception of inclination, (...) and its role in our moral psychology. These are views that we ought to reject. Having done so we will see that a theistic ethics based on desire or love for God would not face a distinctive problem of heteronomy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Love of God above SelfJordan OlverIS THERE ANY LOVE that is not ultimately a form of self-love? Anders Nygren famously maintained that for Thomas Aquinas there is not. Nygren was led to this conclusion in large part by Aquinas’s claims that love is an act of the will and that the ultimate end of the will is happiness: if every act of love is (...) on account of happiness as an ultimate end, it seems to follow that all love of others is motivated by, and reducible to, love of self.1 Others have drawn this conclusion for similar reasons. Scott MacDonald, for example, interprets Aquinas as proposing “egoistic rationalism”; he believes that this ethical position follows from Aquinas’s claim that human beings, like all creatures, seek their perfection.2Texts, however, can be produced to show that Aquinas himself believes that nonegoistic love is possible.3 If he is an [End Page 97] egoist, he is not so intentionally; he can only be so in the sense that his principles, despite his wishes, necessitate such a position. While Nygren interpreted Aquinas as an unwilling egoist of this sort,4 most modern scholars of Aquinas’s thought on love have held that his principles do not necessitate egoism, and they have endeavored to explain how nonegoistic love is possible on Thomistic grounds. Modern attempts to solve the “problem of love in Thomas Aquinas” normally look back to Pierre Rousselot’s 1908 work Pour l’histoire du problème de l’amour au moyen âge.5 Rousselot identified the “problem of love” as whether a love that is not egoistic is possible and, if it is, what the relation might be between this love and the love of self which appears to be the foundation of natural tendencies.6 Rousselot believed that in the Middle Ages this problem was primarily dealt with through the consideration of the more particular problem of whether it is possible to love God above self apart from grace. This approach, he thought, offered significant advantages: it was simultaneously concrete and profound, and the object of love was both the last end and the author of all natural appetites.7 If genuine love for another is possible, that possibility would be discoverable in this case and through analysis of love of God above self it would seem that one could [End Page 98] arrive at the principles needed to make sense of other nonegoistic loves.8 Accordingly, when Rousselot presented Aquinas’s solution to the problem of love, he did so exclusively through an explanation of Aquinas’s teaching on love of God above self.9 The most notable feature of this account was its appeal to the part-whole relation: Rousselot proposed that for Aquinas our love for God above self is due to the fact that we relate to God as a part to a whole.Rousselot’s work inspired a scholarly discussion that has persisted now for over a century. This discussion may be roughly divided into three stages: the early twentieth century, the mid-twentieth century, and the late-twentieth century to the present. General agreement with Rousselot characterizes early twentieth-century scholarship. Scholars of this period, such as Charles-Vincent Héris, Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, and H.-D. Simonin, may claim that Rousselot neglects or overemphasizes something, but they do not assert that he is substantially wrong.10 By contrast, rejection or neglect of the “part-whole” approach to love of God above self characterizes the scholarship of the mid-twentieth century. Étienne Gilson, in his 1932 work L’esprit de la philosophie médiévale, vigorously objects to Rousselot’s account, arguing that the part-whole relationship, as it functions in Aquinas’s arguments for love of God above self, should not be understood in “a distressingly literal way,” but simply as “a metaphor, the first moment in a manuductio.”11 [End Page 99] Louis-Bertrand Geiger also emphatically rejects Rousselot’s account, arguing that the real explanation of disinterested love is to be found in the will’s special, “objective” inclination to the “good in itself” as opposed to the “good for me”; we love God... (shrink)

In the late seventies of the 20th century, Jacob Taubes, a philosopher of religion and a scholar in Jewish thought, visited Carl Schmitt in his home. Schmitt was a scholar in constitutional and international law who joined the Hitler regime in 1933. Both were fascinated by the apocalyptic tradition, albeit it in opposite ways. They had a conversation about the apostle Paul, especially about his ‘Letter to the Romans’. Their discussion focused on the passage in which Paul speaks of the (...) Jews as 'enemies of God'. Against the background of history’s violent anti-Semitism, this exceptional conversation deconstructs Paul’s texts, traditionally conceived as constitutive of orthodox Christianity, and opens them up for a more subversive, heterodox reading. By Taubes, Paul is portrayed as an heretic Jew who joined the ‘Jesus movement’. He remained loyal to his tradition, while at the same time searching for new forms of spiritual community, avoiding direct political actions, as well as Gnostic interiorization, and establishing a new Law. (shrink)

Although Anders Nygren deserves a lot of the credit for launching the debate about the Christian understanding of love, his insistence on the distinctiveness of agape has been severely challenged by advocates for the sensuousness of eros and the mutuality of philia. The most serious challenge, however, may come from defenses of agape where the altruistic distinctiveness of the theological thrust is qualified by the claims of an ethical horizon. In spite of his disservice to eros and his neglect (...) of philia, Nygren deserves to be heard in his insistence that agape is a unique concept, and that this uniqueness is due particularly to its theological source and reference. (shrink)

Most philosophers do not read Kant’s philosophy of religion as providing a foundation for Christianity, or even as in line with it. Recently, however, a number of so-called “affirmative Kantians” have argued that Kant’s philosophy of religion explicitly aims at recovering the spirit of Christianity. In this article I scrutinize this claim with regard to Kant’s conceptualization of “grace” as a supplement to his moral theory. Contrary to these “affirmative Kantians,” I argue that Kant’s account of grace stems from Kant’s (...) moral pessimism, not from any sense of the shortcomings of human beings in fulfilling their duties or the religious need for supernatural cooperation. Kant’s concept of grace tries to moderate this pessimism by providing what is needed for the possibility of moral progress. But simply by the way in which Kant regards grace as a rational concept needed for his moral theory, it seems to me that his philosophy of religion runs counter to certain central convictions of Christianity. (shrink)

Emerging from thought-provoking discussions and correspondence Simone Weil had with the Reverend Father Perrin, this classic collection of essays contains her most profound meditations on the relationship of human life to the realm of the transcendant.An enlightening introduction by Leslie Fiedler examines Weil's extraordinary roles as a philosophy teacher turned mystic. "One of the most neglected resources of our century ", Waiting for God will continue to influence spiritual and political thought for centuries to come.

An exploration of the crucial role of the intellect in Christian belief and the life of faith.

Bringing the topic down to earth -- The body of Jewish law : how Jewish law resembles other legal systems -- The covenantal soul of Jewish law : how Jewish law is unique -- Motivations to live by Jewish law -- Continuity and change in Jewish law -- The relationship of Jewish law to morality and theology -- Jewish law and custom -- Comparisons to the right and the left -- Applications of my theory of Jewish law to specific cases.

In his Ethics, Spinoza maintains that God’s essence is expressed as both thought and extension. Despite this claim, however, Spinoza’s very definition of truth, understood as adequation, would seem to reduce the aspect of extension to an exclusively intellectual paradigm. I question the extent to which a body remains a body throughout the Ethics in the transition from the first knowledge of the imagination to the highest know ledge of adequate ideas. As a way to think beyond the totality of (...) adequation, I tum to Emmanuel Levinas’s distinction between totality and infinity. I reference Levinas in order to highlight certain impasses within Spinoza’s system and to serve as a possible alternative articulation of an extensional love of God. (shrink)

To set the stage for the symposium on my monograph, Love Divine: A Systematic Account of God’s Love for Humanity, I present the purpose of this manuscript and summarize its main themes and chapters. Additionally, to orient readers to the wider literature in which Love Divine is situated, I respond to recent reviews of Love Divine and mention some of the most significant challenges to the book raised so far by those not represented within the symposium.

I locate the starting point for this essay on the common ground between the traditionally conceived attribute of divine love and the moral theory known as divine command ethics. The latter assumes that something is good because God commands it; with the former, the gift of divine love requires love in return. In this light, God’s command to love is recognized as goodness itself by those ‘he’ loves. In other words, those persons loved by God are (...) morally motivated to love. However, this theistic account of divine command theory simply assumes that love is knowable, do-able and so required. The obstacles to knowing love and loving are rarely made explicit. To tackle some of these, this essay is loosely structured around a dialogue with Kantian morality. Analysis of the gendered nature of love will take place indirectly in the course of my account of duty, pure goodness and moral motivation. (shrink)

How should we interpret the declaration in I John 4:8 and 16 that God not only loves, but is love? Many philosophically trained Christians will no doubt interpret this, as I do, to mean that love is part of God's very essence; that loving kindness is an essential, not merely an accidental, property of God. Of course the author of I John was not a philosopher and did not, fortunately, employ philosophical jargon in his writings; nor was he (...) likely even familiar with the philosophical distinction between essential and accidental properties. He nonetheless seems clearly to employ "God" as a proper name (as opposed to a title), the name of a distinct person whom we ought to adore and worship, and he says concerning this person that he is love. The point, then, hardly seems to be that the person who is God just happens to love us, as if it were a happy accident that he does; the point seems to be that it is his very nature to love us. In a broadly logical (or metaphysical) sense, it couldn't have been otherwise.1 That this is, at the very least, a natural interpretation seems indisputable. Commenting upon I John 4:8, the conservative New Testament scholar, Leon Morris, thus writes: God is love. This means more than `God is loving'. It means that God's essential nature is love. He loves, so to speak, not because he finds objects worthy of His love, but because it is His nature to love. His love for us depends not on what we are, but on what He is. He loves us because He is that kind of God. (shrink)

This dissertation uses the context of the thirteenth-century debate about the natural love of God over self to clarify the difference between the ethical system of Thomas Aquinas and that of John Duns Scotus. Although Thomas and Scotus both believe that such love is possible, they disagree about the reasons for this position. ;Early thirteenth-century thinkers, such as William of Auxerre and Philip the Chancellor, were the first to distinguish between a natural love of God and charity, (...) which is a love assisted by grace. Thomas Aquinas' approach to the issue is original. According to Thomas, since human beings are part of a political whole and also part of a whole whose good is God, it follows that they have a natural inclination to love the common good and God more than themselves. Although Thomas' position and his corresponding interpretation of Aristotle were upheld by Godfrey of Fontaines and Giles of Rome, it was severely criticized by James of Viterbo, who argued that the part always seeks its own good. ;John Duns Scotus makes the same criticism of the part/whole argument, although Scotus emphasizes that the human will is free to act against the natural inclination for self-perfection. Scotus clearly distinguishes between the will and nature. ;The conclusion of the dissertation argues that the debate prefigures the modern shift sway from an ethics based upon natural inclination along with the modern tendency to understand morality as a limitation of self-interest. Moreover, it is argued that modern Thomists need to take into account Thomas' original emphasis on natural inclination and the priority of the common good. (shrink)

We have sought to expound how Jan van Ruusbroec goes about representing the relationship of love between God and human beings by proceeding from God’s inner life of love. Therefore, in the first part of our paper we elucidated Ruusbroec’s view of the inner love reality of the Triune God. In the second part we explained how genuine Christian mystical life is founded within the intra-trinitarian life of love. Prior to discussing the characteristics of Ruusbroec’s trinitarian (...) position, we dwelled upon the author’s development of his idea of the Trinity from a personal perception of his relation with God, the embedding of Ruusbroec’s love-mysticism in traditional Christian faith and his repeated clarification of the Triune God from two perspectives: God’s nature and God’s essence. We found that, in his explanation of God’s nature, Ruusbroec underlines its fruitfulness as a way of demonstrating that God is one dynamic of love, without beginning or end, which ceaselessly and simultaneously consists in “flowing out” and “being flowed back”. This phenomenon, we stated, he associates with the concept, “oneness in threeness” and “threeness in oneness”. Through an exposition on the differing features of unity and the Persons of the Trinity, we came to the conclusion that the author in all of his works combines both the origin of “flowing out” and “flowing-back” with the Holy Spirit as the bond or unity of love of Father and Son. From this we concluded that none of the Persons is the principle or source of regiratio, i.e. return, to the unity. The view that God’s unity of Persons is the principle of exitus-reditus – and not only the third Person as recent scientific research has sought to demonstrate – is what we consider to be the heart of Ruusbroec’s trinitarian way of thinking. We ascertained, further, that the author not only links the unity of the Persons with fruitfulness; he believes that the same “fruitful” unity, drawing in the divine Persons on the level of God’s nature, is the “enjoying” unity on the level of God’s essence. By means of the distinction between God’s enjoying unity and the unity of God’s fruitful nature, Ruusbroec explicates the true facts of the intra-trinitarian life of love. The perception leads him to conclude that God, as a unity of Persons, is ceaselessly and simultaneously working and enjoying. In the second part, we illustrated how Ruusbroec’s trinitarian thought mirrors the basis of his mystical doctrine: the conviction that mystics are unified with the divine Persons both in working and enjoying, and that they are one reality of love with God. We explained how the author, first of all, maintains that mystics, who bear a full likeness to God’s fruitful nature, ceaselessly turn to good works and virtues, just as God, ceaselessly, through the divine Persons, flows out in love. We then avered that the likeness to God’s nature is not the result of human effort and that it arises from God’s touch within the human mind. Moreover, we showed that Ruusbroec, in accordance with his intuition that God’s fruitful unity is both out-flowing and inwarddrawing, believes that God is both impelling humans outward toward virtues and drawing them into God’s unity of love. In analogy with the first part of our argument – as far as the “return” of humans is concerned – we ascertained that our author is stressing the initiative of God’s unity of the Holy Spirit, i.e. the mutual love between the Father and the Son. We found the emphasis on God’s inward-drawing unity to be of great significance, because God’s unity of love also plays a crucial role with respect to the transition to “enjoyment” of human beings in God’s essence. We clarified how human beings, according to Ruusbroec, through the likeness to God’s nature, participate in the enjoyment of God’s essence with the divine Persons. We pointed out that the union in God’s essence is the most intimate experience, but not the end-point of the mystical life as, according to our author, contemplatives are directed, again and again, to good works. Lastly, we arrived at the conclusion that Ruusbroec considers the mystical life, like the life of God, to be ceaselessly consisting of action and enjoyment. However, it is not primarily the analogy with God’s trinitarian reality of love that Ruusbroecs stresses. Basically, he accentuates the fact that mystics ceaselessly experience unification with the divine Persons, both in working and enjoying. This means that mystics, united with the divine Persons in one enjoyment on the level of God’s essence, concurrently experience that, with the divine Persons, they also “share” in God’s “flowing” and “ebbing” on the level of God’s nature. On the basis of this we have affirmed that, according to Ruusbroec, God’s activity and enjoyment in the “Divinity Itself” is God’s activity and enjoyment in the human being, and the inverse. Moreover, we have shown how the author considers both moments to occur simultaneously, both in God and in human beings, meaning that the mystical life is continuously one reality of love with God. (shrink)

Descartes claims that we can love God sensuously. However, it is prima facie unclear how this is possible, given that he is also committed to the impossibility of sensing or imagining God. In this essay, I show that Descartes has the metaphysical and psychophysical resources necessary to alleviate this tension. First, I discuss Descartes’s account of the intellectual love of God, demonstrating that the intellectual love of God constitutively involves the love of God’s creation. Second, I (...) argue that an image of God’s creation is sufficient for communicating the intellectual love of God to the body, so as to produce a sensuous love of God. And third, I discuss Descartes’s reasons for developing an account of the sensuous love of God. (shrink)

Descartes maintains that we can love God and that it is pleasant and morally beneficial to do so. In this essay, I examine the necessary conditions for such an intellectual love of God. I argue that the intellectual love of God is incited by a judgment that we are joined to God in reality, which is constitutive of an intellectual joy. I go on to show that the intellectual love of God is, itself, constituted by a (...) stripping of our private interests in favor of God’s divine will. (shrink)

In his later years, Puritan pastor Richard Baxter developed a perspective on spiritual formation that highlighted the centrality of the love of God. Interestingly, Baxter emphasized the ways in which a delight in earthly pleasures—such as nature, relationships, and food—could help Christians cultivate the love of God. He viewed these pleasures as “love-tokens” from God, sent in order to help human beings see his goodness and expand their love for the giver of these gifts. While he (...) recognized the potential of such earthly delights to lure hearts away from God, he also recognized that they could serve as powerful “glasses” through which earth-bound creatures could see God’s beauty and goodness and thus grow in godly delight. In the end, Baxter was able to forge a pathway between asceticism and materialism, encouraging Christians to grow their love for God by tracing earthly mercies back to their divine source. (shrink)

The doctrine of God is central to theology for it determines the way in which other regions of Christian doctrine are articulated, yet work on this topic in its own right has been occluded recently by treatments of the Trinity or divine passibility. This collection of specially commissioned essays presents major treatments of key themes in the doctrine of God, motivated by but not restricted to the work of Professor Paul S. Fiddes to whom it is offered as a Festschrift. (...) It includes invigorating discussions of the biblical and non-biblical sources for the doctrine of God, and the section on 'Metaphysics and the Doctrine of God' examines some of the most important conceptual questions arising in contemporary theological debate about the being and nature of God, and God's relations to the world. The final section of the book on 'God and Humanity' will be highly relevant to scholars working in the fields of theological anthropology, moral and political theology, on inter-faith relations, on theology and literature, or who are interested in the impact of contemporary science on the doctrine of God. The introduction relates the essays in the book to the work of Professor Fiddes and to wider debates in Christian doctrine. This volume brings together a team of internationally distinguished scholars from a wide range of theological, philosophical, and religious perspectives, and it will stimulate fresh thinking and new debate about this most central of topics in Christian theology.--Publisher. (shrink)

Damaris Cudworth Masham was convinced that the “useful knowledge” has a theoretical, practical and pedagogic content. Man has a social destiny and we cannot offend the divine wisdom assuming that religion precludes this approach and expects the breakdown of society. Reason therefore has a prominent character on the will and free will is the pillar of moral practice. This thought reveals an affinity with the Lockean concept of “person” and “identity” and the central role of individual liberty for love (...) of God and for an ordered and social life. Thanks also to her intellectual relationship with Locke, her “philosophical salon” at Oates become the meeting point for overseas and English scholars, such as Jean Le Clerc, Pierre Des Maizeaux, Pierre Coste, the III Earl of Shaftesbury. Through original sources the paper focus the intellectual legacy of Damaris Masham. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Love of Country and Love of God: The Political Uses of Religion in MachiavelliBenedetto Fontana*This paper will discuss the place of religion in Machiavelli’s thought. 1 The traditional and generally accepted interpretation presents Machiavelli’s religion as a belief system whose value is determined by its functional utility to the state. In this he is said to resemble Cicero, 2 Montesquieu, 3 and Tocqueville, 4 among others. This (...) view is based on the proposition—one that is now fundamental to a modern understanding of Machiavelli—that his political theory develops a politics without moral, theological, and religious foundations (what Benedetto Croce 5 calls the “autonomy of politics” and Sheldon Wolin 6 the “autonomy of political theory”). Students of Machiavelli who ascribe to him an instrumentalist theory of religion rest their interpretation on this conception of politics: a distinction is established between religion viewed as religio, and religion conceived as fides, where the former is used to develop and cement social bonds and the latter is a faith based on a transcendent “truth.”A reading of the texts shows that Machiavelli discusses various kinds of religion. He refers, for example, to multiple forms of Christianity, such as “primitive” [End Page 639] or original Christianity, 7 official, medieval Christianity, the ecclesiastical principality of the papacy, as well as to ancient Judaism, 8 paganism, and to Islam. 9 However, it is possible to discern in Machiavelli two principal or distinctive types. One is based on the opposition Machiavelli sees between the religion of the Romans (which instills virtù) and the religion of the post-classical and post-Roman Christian world (which teaches humility and passivity). The other is prophetic religion, in which Machiavelli contrasts the prophet armed to the prophet unarmed. Thus, we have prophetic religion and non-prophetic religion; the former is either armed or unarmed, and the latter is either immanent (natural) or transcendent. 10Machiavelli’s stress on the importance of virtù (whether of the prince or of the people) suggests that religion is not simply religio—that is, a political technique to rule and to control the masses. Rather, it presupposes a concern for a moral fides which, though certainly not transcendent, is nevertheless necessary to the construction of a political order based on virtù. His concern with civil and military virtue links the armed prophetic religion with that of the ancient Romans, such that ancient Judaism, Islam, and a reformed Christianity (a kind of Lutheranism ante litteram) all stand opposed to primitive and post-classical Christianity.Machiavelli anticipates in theory the national, anti-papal, and anti-imperial movements that were later realized in history by the Lutheran and Calvinist Reformations. He attempts to infuse the corrupt and decadent Christian conception of the world with a new, innovating spirit, one opposed to the prevailing medieval and scholastic conception of the world. In the past Christian philosophers and thinkers revised the classical notions of virtus and arete, transforming them into Christian concepts of value. Machiavelli attempts a similar “transvaluation of values” (Nietzsche), but for different ends and in a different direction: he reinterprets the Christian religion in order to assimilate it into his conception of virtù and his vision of a vivere civile.In the first part of this paper the relation Machiavelli establishes between “speaking with God” and the founding and/or reforming of states is explored. Parallels between Christian and pre-Christian (pagan and biblical) rulers reveal a basic ambiguity in Machiavelli’s belief that religion—that is, the claim of having spoken with God—is necessary to effective rule. In the second part [End Page 640] Machiavelli’s teaching (“new ways and methods”) is compared to Christ’s message of the “good news.” The contrast between the two is presented in terms of an opposition between different “ways of living,” each with its specific moral claims and political consequences. The opposition is not, the section argues, between logos and kratos, ethos and kratos, but rather between diverse ways of understanding logos and ethos. The final section argues that Machiavelli uses biblical, pagan, and Christian forms of religious symbols and metaphors in order to reevaluate the concepts of patria and amore. In so doing... (shrink)

McIntyre speaks for the relevance of the ancient Christian conception of God's love to our modern, fragmented, and destructive society. Christ furnishes the ideal principle of human relations.--J. W.

There is some important data which has not as yet found its way into philosophic discussions on the problem of evil. Some religious people report that suffering, instead of being contrary to the love of God, is actually a medium in and through which his love can be experienced. This looks highly paradoxical, but it will be our purpose to show that it is intelligible and that it has important consequences for philosophical discussions of the problem of evil.

St. Augustine, pictured by Western painters holding in his hand his heart blazing with passionate love, consistently and repeatedly insisted―from his earliest writings until close to his death―that the essential characteristic of God is “God is love” (1 John 4:16). Yet he also insisted on the doctrines of original sin and everlasting punishment for the massa damnata. This article will not explore the rationale or semantics of his arguments, nor the detail and nuance of the doctrines of predestination (...) and perseverance. Rather, I seek to understand, from Augustine’s last writings, how he reconciled his strong conviction that God is love with doctrines requiring belief in a God who determined the fate of individuals to eternal reward or punishment “before the foundation of the world” (Eph. 1:4), a God indifferent to individuals’ actions, struggles, or longings. My primary interest is not on Augustine’s ability to render these two apparently opposing ideas of God intellectually compatible, but rather on his feeling, gathered from his last sermons, as he approached death. In brief, how could Augustine love the God in whom he believed? (shrink)

Evolutionary theodicies are attempts to explain how the enormous amounts of suffering, premature death and extinction inherent in the evolutionary process can be reconciled with belief in a loving and almighty God. A common strategy in this area is to argue that certain very valuable creaturely attributes could only be exemplified by creatures that are produced by a partly random and uncontrolled process of evolution. Evolution, in other words, was the only possible way for God to create these kinds of (...) creatures. This article presents and examines two versions of the “only way”-argument. The anthropocentric version tries to justify God’s use of evolution by reference to the value of human freedom, and argues that freedom presupposes that God lets go of full control over the process of creation . The non-anthropocentric version presents a similar argument with respect to more inclusive creaturely properties, such as that of being “truly other” than God, or of being a “creaturely self” with a certain degree of autonomy in relation to God . With the help of a number of thought-experiments of the “Twin-Earth”-type, the author argues that both the anthropocentric and the non-anthropocentric only way-arguments fail. (shrink)

This paper addresses the connections between love of self and love of God in terms of their impact on personal subjectivity according to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. I argue that Aquinas’s understanding of self-love illuminates the experience of oneself as a person. Part of this argument relies on Aquinas’s notion that love of self is more basic than love of others. Aquinas further affirms that one ought to love God more than oneself. I (...) explore the implications of this claim for my interpretation concerning personal self-experience. I maintain that our participation in God causes a pull toward goodness and God within one’s experience of self. Also, friendship with God through charity offers the highest fulfillment of self-experience. (shrink)

. A psychological theory of religious experiences, sensitivity theory, is proposed. Whereas other theories maintain that religious motivation is about a few overarching desires, sensitivity theory provides a multifaceted analysis consistent with the diversity, richness, and individuality of religious experiences. Sixteen basic desires show the psychological foundations of meaningful experience. Each basic desire is embraced by every person, but to different extents. How we prioritize the basic desires expresses our individuality and influences our attraction to various religious images and activities. (...) Each basic desire is associated with a basic goal and a unique joy, such as love, self-worth, relaxation, or strength. We do not seek to experience joys infinitely; we regulate joys, in accordance with our core values, to sixteen balance points (sensitivities) that vary based on individuality. Religions help persons of faith regulate the sixteen basic joys by providing some images that strengthen joyful experiences and others that weaken them. We can strengthen our experience of self- worth, for example, by contemplating God in the image of savior; we can weaken our experience of self-worth by contemplating original sin. The theory of sixteen basic desires is testable scientifically and suggests such philosophical concepts as value-based happiness. (shrink)

This book explores the mystical thought of Gregory Barhebraeus (1226-1286CE) and its contemporary relevance, to offer a reading of Barhebraeus' mystical texts by bringing them into conversation with critical religious studies and the hermeneutical tradition of philosophy. Griggs emphasises the problem of conceptual categories for the academic study of mysticism, seeking to avoid traditional assumptions concerning 'mysticism' and attend to the particularity of 'mystic' traditions. Through this approach, she examines the mystical hermeneutics of the love of God developed by (...) Barhebraeus, as a response to the elaboration of this theme by the Islamic theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazālī (1058-1111CE), and as a resolution of the tensions between scholastics and ascetics within his own Syriac tradition. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to provide a comment on Simone Weil’s brief but seminal essay ‘Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God.’ It complements an earlier one on Weil’s Lectures on Philosophy. The essay was sent via a letter to her friend and mentor, the Catholic priest, and Dominican friar, Father Joseph-Marie Perrin O.P. It set out her belief that school studies should provide the individual pupil or student (...) with an education in the value and acquisition of attention. This, Weil believed, would be of fundamental value when reaching out to God through prayer. Such a capacity for attention would also enhance the student’s general academic and social learning providing a basis for authentic dialogue with others, and not only teachers and schoolfellows. The article introduces her as a religious philosopher, explains the origins of the essay, and Weil’s friendship with Father Perrin, who was her Christian religious mentor, examines the text itself, considers some critical commentaries, and assesses its relevance to the philosophy and practice of education today. (shrink)

1. Constructing a defence in the case of God is doing something not only for his glory but also for our advantage, in that it may move us to •honour his greatness, i.e. his power and wisdom, as well as to •love his goodness and the justice and holiness that stem from it, and to •imitate these as best we can. This defence will have two parts—a preparatory one and then the principal one. The first part studies the •greatness (...) and the •goodness of God separately. The second part concerns these two perfections taken together, including the providence that God extends to all created things and the control that he exercises over creatures endowed with intelligence, particularly in all matters concerning piety and salvation. ·The first part will occupy sections 2–39, the second part sections 40–144·. (shrink)

1. Constructing a defence in the case of God is doing something not only for his glory but also for our advantage, in that it may move us to •honour his greatness, i.e. his power and wisdom, as well as to •love his goodness and the justice and holiness that stem from it, and to •imitate these as best we can. This defence will have two parts—a preparatory one and then the principal one. The first part studies the •greatness (...) and the •goodness of God separately. The second part concerns these two perfections taken together, including the providence that God extends to all created things and the control that he exercises over creatures endowed with intelligence, particularly in all matters concerning piety and salvation. ·The first part will occupy sections 2–39, the second part sections 40–144·. (shrink)

For some time now, I have written and talked about Thomas Jay Oord as the most "cutting edge" person on the theological scene today. This may sound like a bold claim, but what Oord has accomplished in bridging the gap between evangelicals and liberals is remarkable both in terms of background and personal commitment. He has a foot in the evangelical camp, yet as a product of Claremont Graduate University, he has another foot solidly in the liberal camp. Intellectually, at (...) least, Oord has had an easygoing relationship with both camps. As a result of his indefatigable efforts, the Open and Relational Theologies Group of the American Academy of Religion has been one of the best attended and most successful groups... (shrink)

St. Thomas Aquinas treats penance as both a sacrament and a virtue. In either form, penance’s principal human act is contrition—a willed sorrow for one’s sins and an intention to avoid future sins. A look at Aquinas’s understanding of penitential contrition reveals a complex interplay of the different objects of love, the gift of fear, and finally friendship with God. This article offers an analysis of Aquinas’s accounts of penance and contrition with respect to these key elements. I argue (...) that contrition performs a fundamental role in countering, restoring, and safeguarding a proper ordering of love and attainment of the ultimate good of union with God. In short, contrition is the act that directly counters the interior disorder wrought by sin and provides an ongoing counter to the threat of additional disorder. Sin’s disorder is the aversion to God and conversion to self, while contrition involves the aversion to self and a conversion to God. (shrink)

How can a God of love also be a God of wrath? There's a lot of confusion today about God's character. It is all too easy to rely on cheap caricatures rather than rich truth. From the Cosmic Cop to the Benevolent Grandfather, Syd Brestel debunks the common misconceptions about God and shows you a picture of a God who is complex, just, severe, kind, and more worthy of our love than we ever knew. God in His Own (...) Image explores the tension between what Paul called in Romans "the kindness and severity of God." Without giving cheap answers or quick solutions, Brestel will have you not only tolerating God's wrath, but celebrating it along with God's kindness. If you've ever wondered what to do with God's judgements, are trying to explain God's wrath to others, or are exploring who God really is, God in His Own Image was written for you. (shrink)

Children will see how God is a Loving Father who perfectly provides for all he has made.

In this article, I consider how pride and anxiety can prevent us from loving the neighbour, and how Søren Kierkegaard and K.E. Løgstrup offer two different ways in which these obstacles might be overcome. For Kierkegaard, this is made possible if we stand in the right relation to God, while for Løgstrup it is made possible if we understand life as a gift. The differences and respective merits of both approaches are explored, and in particular whether Løgstrup's approach can claim (...) to offer a secular alternative to the role that Kierkegaard gives to God's grace in making neighbour love possible. (shrink)

Examines issues in ethics and philosophical theology raised by the attempt to understand the relationship between particular creaturely loves and love for God.