Divine Love Research Articles

An Allegory of Divine Love: The Netherlandish Blockbook Canticum Canticorum by Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (review)

An Allegory of Divine Love: The Netherlandish Blockbook Canticum Canticorum. By Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. [Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts, Vol. 10.] (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press. 2014. Pp. viii, 238. $85.00. ISBN 978-0-916-10179-4.)The Canticum canticorum, a blockbook produced in the Netherlands around 1465-70, is a series (or Suite, as the author calls it) of eight double-page woodcuts comprising four individual pictures each, arranged in two registers per page. The woodcuts depict Christ; a crowned and haloed young woman (Mary); and various bystanders, mostly a group of three virgins (the daughters of Sion). The pictures contain banderoles with (xylographie) texts, taken from the Latin text of the Canticles but arranged in different from the Vulgate. By being inserted in banderoles, the texts are turned into a dialogue between the persons depicted, with the pictures serving as a aid to understand and to meditate on the text. Although the sequence of the pages varies in some of the approximately thirty surviving copies, they are here reproduced in the order accepted by the author as original (p. 222). Each of the eight double-page spreads is presented first in a reproduction from the (uncolored) copy held by the Pierpont Morgan Librar)' in New York; subsequently, each of the four pictures is analyzed individually in minute detail, beginning with a reproduction from a 1949 facsimile, a description, an iconographie study of visual parallels (p. 16), transcriptions and translations of the Latin inscriptions, interpretations of the verses by modern and medieval authors (Marvin Pope, Giles of Rome, Nicholas of Lyra, Denys the Carthusian), and a brief summary (analysis). The book thus allows the reader to immerse her- or himself deeply into the fifteenth-century blockbook. It is very attractively designed, with more than 200 color reproductions of works of art that can in some way be compared with the (highly unusual) iconography of the blockbook. Rather than putting the blockbook solely in the context of medieval illustrated manuscripts of the Canticles, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin draws on copious material from other forms of art-mainly Italian paintings and frescoes. This method, of course, raises questions as to whether direct influences between such different works of art, which originated in different regions, are possible; but instead of studying antecedents, Lavin intends to make the reader familiar with a widespread iconographie repertoire that allowed fifteenth-century users to understand and contextualize the blockbook. …

Divine love in the letter to the Romans

This article investigates divine love in the letter to the Romans from the perspective of love as a key motif in spirituality and in light of spiritual hermeneutics. After a short introduction about the significance of love as a spiritual motif, the article motivates why the notion of divine love is important for understanding the letter to Romans. It challenges existing interpretations of love in contemporary research on Romans that associates it mostly with the relationship between people, neglecting the significant passages in Romans in which love is first and foremost associated with the character and actions of God. In the rest of the article four essential characteristics of divine love is investigated, with attention to its originary, intimate, powerful and self-giving nature.1

Love and Service in Adolescent Addiction Recovery

ABSTRACTThis article is one of the first to examine the relationships among a specific combination of “spiritual virtues” (helping others and the experience of divine love) and outcomes related to criminal involvement, sobriety, and character development among adolescents. One hundred ninety-five adolescents with substance dependency court-referred to residential treatment were assessed at intake, discharge, and 6 months posttreatment. Higher service to others predicted reduced recidivism, reduced relapse, and greater character development. Experiencing divine love enhanced the effect of service on recidivism. Greater attention to spiritual virtues might improve treatment for youth involved with alcohol, drugs, and certain forms of crime.

Christ Was Not an Inerrantist, so Christians Should Not Be Either: How Jesus Read His Bible

Abstract Jesus’ interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures is skillfully eclectic, employing techniques of rejection, interiorization, prioritization, and synthesis. The eclectic nature of Christ’s interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures specifically precludes any ascription of the contemporary strategies of rigorism or inerrantism to his hermeneutic. Instead, Christ’s hermeneutic is best described as situational, agapic, and open—hence pastoral. It is situational insofar as no hermeneutical rule can predetermine how scripture will be applied to a situation. It is agapic insofar as all texts are interpreted in service of the divine love and repaired human relationship. It is open insofar as it: 1. is characterized by bricolage, hence open to experimentation with a variety of resources, 2. resists any rigidly predetermined interpretative outcome, thereby preserving openness to agapic outcomes, 3. valorizes the micronarrative, and 4. rejects totalization. Ultimately, Jesus’ interpretation of scripture is pastoral, preferring human flourishing through scripture to blind obedience of scripture.

The Novelist and the Mystic: Swedenborgian Horizons in the Realism of William Dean Howells

The Novelist and the Mystic: Swedenborgian Horizons in the Realism of William Dean Howells Todd Barosky (bio) What happened to William Dean Howells in the spring of 1885? Shortly after moving into a new house in Boston’s Back Bay and while writing The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), he apparently suffered an emotional or psychological breakdown that triggered seismic shifts in his politics, his literary criticism, and his art. Howells left no detailed account of this incident, and his contemporaneous letters do not explicitly mention it, but a decade or so later a friend reporting a recent conversation with Howells revealed that spring 1885 had been a time of crisis: “His affairs prospering, his work marching as well as heart could wish, suddenly and without apparent cause, the status seemed wholly wrong. His own expression in speaking with me about that time, was, ‘The bottom dropped out!’”1 According to Edwin Cady, whose two-volume biography hinges on this very moment, Howells underwent “a decisive inner conflict which would bring about the last major change, the final act of growth in the development of his mind and personality.” Although providing a definitive diagnosis remains impossible, Cady suggests Howells likely experienced a specific spiritual crisis known as a Swedenborgian “vastation”: an episode of [End Page 535] purgatorial anguish marked by powerful feelings of guilt and shame and a concomitant desire for purification.2 This essay revisits Cady’s hypothesis in order to explore the possibility that The Minister’s Charge (1886), Annie Kilburn (1888), and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), the realistic novels Howells wrote following his 1885 crisis, were shaped by a vastation experience as well as by a renewed engagement with the writing and thought of the eighteenth-century Christian mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg. Following a brief introduction, this essay first examines the shared affective state of Howells’ protagonists from Silas Lapham to Basil March, showing how Swedenborg’s theology, particularly his vastation doctrine, underwrites this commonality. I argue that this doctrine, particularly as interpreted in the mid-nineteenth century by Howells’ friend and prominent Swedenborgian, Henry James, Sr., not only describes a paradigmatic conversion experience but also articulates a mystical sociology that anticipates the historical emergence of a utopian fellowship of individuals knit together by divine love. Section two suggests that this mystical sociology forms an aesthetic horizon circumscribing Howells’ post-1885 realistic fiction. Within this horizon, social awareness owes more to mystical intuition than to any analysis of objective material conditions; abstract social forces emerge in spiritual terms; and intimations of divine order and the spiritual unity of humanity counterbalance perceptions of social chaos and atomization. Finally, the prospective social change depends not upon revolution or benign institutional reform, but upon an imminent revelation Howells projects beyond the temporality of his narrative universes, depicting beatific images that evoke Swedenborg’s angelic communities. Contemporary critics typically agree with Cady that these three texts mark a major change in Howells’ career. For the first time, we find him deploying the realistic novel to address directly some of the Gilded Age’s more [End Page 536] intractable social problems: immigration, urban poverty, class conflict, and labor strife. Ever since Amy Kaplan’s The Social Construction of American Realism (1988), Howells’ realism during these pivotal years has been read as a genre that indicates an urgent need to understand—and perhaps restrict—such problems, which rendered inherited epistemologies and ethical codes obsolete. Thus Wai-Chee Dimock argues that we best apprehend Howells’ realism as a response to the “expanded causal universe” of capitalist modernity and its destabilization of traditional notions of “human agency, social relations, and moral responsibility.”3 More recently, William Morgan has suggested that Howells dramatizes the divergence between “worn-out universal ideals” and “emergent social conditions.”4 These critics see the author adopting and adapting various residual and nascent discourses as he cobbles together an art form that could impose some moral and aesthetic order on chaotic late nineteenth-century American life. For Kaplan, Howells’ primary source in this endeavor was the language of social control that urban reformers like Josiah Strong and Jacob Riis pioneered. For Dimock, it was the rhetoric of contract law. For Morgan...

Ethical Issues of Divine Love in Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism

The extreme form of aesthetico-erotic emotionalism of prema-bhakti or prīti, divine love of Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavism has serious ethical implications. This paper touching upon the following perspectives has argued that, in the ultimate analysis, the issue of sexual immorality involved in the erotic imageries etc. of the nitya-līlā—the play of divine amour can only be settled by referring to its underlying metaphysical and theological postulations. The ethical issues of divine love being examined are with reference to (1) sexual immorality as a Medieval syndrome; (2) Kāma in Caturvarga-Trivarga discourse; (3) religious language, symbolic and nonsymbolic discourse; (4) amorality or supra-morality of divine amour; (5) Prema is the sublimation of desire and attachment etc.; and (6) divine amour, body and embodiment-theology. That is, the ethical implications of the divine amour do not lie in sex itself or in its being a constitutive element of religious language but in its larger religio-metaphysical context. In terms of the formal theory of language, the sensuous elements of divine amour involved in the concept of parakīyā-rasa are the self-expressions of the creative freedom of the Divine. But the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇavas are caught in the dilemma of their insistence on the nonsymbolic connotations of the concept of parakīyā-rasa—the extra-marital nature of Rādhā or Gopīs of the nitya-līlā and their fixation with the medieval sexual morality. Their metaphysical justifications do not satisfy the contemporary scholars who are still under the tight grip of the syndrome of Victorian era or the moorings of medieval sexual ethics.

Textually Enclosed and Marginally Open: Medieval Revelations and Early Modern Readers

ABSTRACT Serenus Cressy's XVI Revelations of Divine Love, his 1670 imprint of Julian's Long Text, is a curious text, maintaining much of the slightly modernized Middle English of the Long Text tradition. Throughout, Cressy includes glosses for the Middle English, and his choices, far from accidental or obvious, present a view of what the reader might know or not. More important, as an editor, Cressy re-creates Julian's own role, as her expansion of the Short Text into the Long involves both added material and added explanation, a kind of in-text glossing. Cressy's editorial activities not only follow Julian's example but also anticipate a modern scholarly agenda that reads and interprets many of the same topics and portions of her textual tradition. This essay explores the connection between Cressy's glossing of the servant-Lord exemplum, found in chapter 51, and his two prefaces to readers.

George Herbert and Post-Phenomenology: A Gift for Our Times by Malgorzata Grzegorzewska

Reviewed by: George Herbert and Post-Phenomenology: A Gift for Our Times by Malgorzata Grzegorzewska George B. Zornow Malgorzata Grzegorzewska, George Herbert and Post-Phenomenology: A Gift for Our Times. Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture, Volume 16. Peter Lang: Frankfurt am Main, 2016. 245 pp. $62.95 cloth. For us to consider a book that connects the poetry of George Herbert with the philosophical study of phenomenology and post-phenomenology requires some basic definition of terms. In the field of philosophy, phenomenology is an intellectual discipline that seeks to describe objects of experience, and how awareness of such objects of experience takes place, without making any claims concerning the existence of such objects. Post-phenomenology, particularly as related to religious experiences, is a revision of phenomenology that aims to get around the limitations of phenomenology's subjectivism, especially with experiences that are overwhelming and which lie beyond our ability to completely comprehend. This includes the consideration of the spiritual realm and the attributes of God, who is beyond all that our human senses can understand. Regarding the concept of "incarnation," this post-phenomenological movement also strives to reach beyond phenomenology's limited earthly objectivism. With this in mind, let us look at how Malgorzata Grzegorzewska considers George Herbert and Post-Phenomenology. In describing her approach, she notes that she has "sought to appropriate concepts in contemporary philosophy, in particular in the works of the French post-phenomenologists Michel Henry, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Chretien and Jean-Luc Marion" (p. 9). The concepts she finds directly relevant include: the God-givenness of being, language, and grace; the inherent doubt or puzzlement surrounding the giving of such gifts, and specifically the gift of divine love; the reality that these gifts must efface their own givenness in order to be genuinely gratuitous; the provision of a depth of hospitality which forces us to open the door to an unknown stranger (the gracious God who we have yet to fully experience) who may change our life; the saturated experience of this God; and, how a "subject" can receive and comprehend such a godly saturation. For Grzegorzewska these theological-philosophical concepts "provide a remarkable fertile context for interpreting Herbert's poetry" (p. 9) and applying them yields insights into this poetry that are intriguing and evocative. [End Page 106] As Grzegorzewska focuses on these theological-philosophers, she affirms that Herbert himself has a poet's "listening I," in contrast to the "speaking I" of other poets," and that his listening I "is shaped by the Word made flesh" (p. 8). Furthermore, she clarifies that Herbert's "rich, multilayered literary allusion serves only one purpose: to provide in his poetry space for the voice of another, and then let this voice call, entice, and seduce the speaker and the reader alike" (p. 23). This voice, heard throughout Herbert's poetry, is the voice of God, one that is heard within the bounds of the Word of Scripture and the Word made flesh in Christ and that is audible within the sacraments and other ministries of the Church. As Grzegorzewska guides us through the thoughts of Jean-Luc Marion, Emmanuel Levinas, and Matthew Henry, she reveals that we may see in the poetry of Herbert a poetics of the "dative subject." What this suggests is that a poem's poetic character, Herbert himself as writer, and the reader of his poems are to receive something of significance from the poems – and even more so, from God. The writing or reading of a Herbertian poem is not about reaching for something and grasping something intentionally. It is more about being given something–being gifted something from and by God. For Grzegorzewska, what happens in the poetry of Herbert, and is clarified by French post-phenomenal writers, is summarized well in a quotation from Tamsin Jones's A Genealogy of Marion's Philosophy of Religion: "The self does not access or experience itself for an other (Levinas) or as an other (Ricoeur)–but becomes itself by an other. More explicitly as a gift . . . that comes ultimately from God" (p. 66, footnote 89). Grzegorzewska emphasizes that in Herbert's poetry the writer and reader alike receive...

أنساق متناغمة بين الغزل العذري والعشق الإلهي دراسة تحليلية في نصوص جميل بثينة وابن الفارض

يسير العشق الإلهي على ذات خطى قرينه الغزل العذري مستعيرا القالب وساترا التجربه بستار المحبوبة البشرية. تسائل المقالة البنى النصية العذرية والعشقية عما تحمله من أبعاد ومضمرات نسقية في محاولة لاکتناه مرجعية النص الثقافية، واستخراج الرموز التي يتشاطر فيها الاثنان ويحملانها العمق والأسرارية في المعنى. لقد کشفت الثنائيات الضدية التي حفلت بها نصوص جميل بثينة وابن الفارض عن حجم الصراع الذي يعيشه الشاعران، وعن خصوصية وأسرارية التجربة الصوفية. لقد استطاع کل منهما أن يشفر ويمرر من خلال رموزه أبعادا وأطيافا من معان يغلف واحدها الآخر مغيرين بذلک قناعات ما، أو باثين مفاهيم جديدة لکثير من المسلمات. إن النسق ثقافي الذي استطاعت المقالة أن تکتنهه وتؤکد على وجوده من خلال تتبع الرموز الواحد تلو الأخر، ثم الإشارة إلى معانيه الظاهرية والباطنية، ليؤکد خضوع الشعر تماما وقبوله للتحليل بناء على نظريات النقد الثقافي. فالرمز يستدعي الصورة وتتکرر تلک الصورة أکثر من مرة، ومن ثم تخاتل وتمرر من خلالها صورة أخرى لاتتأتى إلا بالتحليل، وبذلک يکون بلا شک الغزل العذري أبا شرعيا للشعر الصوفي متمثلا في مدرسة العشق الإلهي. Abstracte : Divine love poetry that stems from the Sufi experience follows in its form, and style the Udhri poetry, in a way of masking the holy love under a pretended human-female figure. This paper questions the similarities and differences between those two types of poetry. There is a common dominator and a thin line that runs in both of them creating a theme and a cultural format, both can be discovered through the analyses of symbolism, binary oppositions, and imagery. Binary oppositions have unveiled the amount of tension both poets have gone through, it has also showed somewhat the level of secrecy elevated in divine love poetry. Symbolism is portrayed as a code that hides the massage from normal readers, yet make it possible for special readers to decode it and unveil the meaning meant for the elevation of soul. The form of Udhri poetry was a mean to spread the new Sufi beliefs in a discreet manor unreachable expect through literary and secularly analyses

‘THESE ROMANTIC IRRITATIONS’: T. S. ELIOT AND LOVE POETRY

The word ‘love’ is conspicuous by its virtual absence from T. S. Eliot's early poetry, the only occurrence in verse published before 1930 being in the ironic title of J. Alfred Prufrock's song. Eliot is also associated with the modern critical reaction against nineteenth-century sentimentality, itself invariably linked to love poetry. Yet this review of Eliot's attitudes towards love poetry reveals that the subgenre and its concerns function as a persistent shadow presence throughout his oeuvre and that the rival claims of sentimental, erotic, and divine love profoundly influenced his own writing as well as his views on other poets. The essay concludes by arguing that Eliot's own late love poem, ‘A Dedication to my Wife’, which critics have tended to marginalize, disparage, or ignore, can best be understood and accommodated within the broad context of this underlying concern.

A Trinitarian Logic of Divine Love: Richard of St. Victor’s Rational Argument for the Trinity and Modern Appropriations of His Trinitarianism

A Trinitarian Logic of Divine Love: Richard of St. Victor’s Rational Argument for the Trinity and Modern Appropriations of His Trinitarianism

Escaping Plato’s Cave: Some Platonic Metaphors in Symeon the New Theologian

This article proposes that the imagery Symeon the New Theologian employs for expressing his mystical experience in several passages of his Hymns of Divine Love might have been inspired by the texts of Plato and the Platonic tradition. The Hymns showing the traces of St. Symeon’s rethinking of the allegory of the Cave, the metaphor of the wings of the soul, and the intellectual Paradise of virtues are analyzed, opening the discussion on the earliest stages of the Platonic revival in eleventh-century Byzantium.

Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God , written by William C. Chittick

Divine Love: Islamic Literature and the Path to God , written by William C. Chittick

Medical magnificat: Souls proclaiming God's greatness.

Medical magnificat: Souls proclaiming God's greatness.

Revelation and love

Revelation has traditionally been understood either as a propositional phenomenon or as a matter of the creation of a relationship with God. This article argues that, while there is truth in both views, revelation's central purpose is the manifestation of divine love, and the calling forth of love (for God and other humans) in response. To make its case, the article considers ‘special’ revelation in the Old and New Testaments and, finally, briefly examines the implications of this view for fundamental theology in general.

The “Beloved Sons” of Jubilees

This paper focuses on the Jubilean portrayal of Shem, Isaac, and Jacob as beloved sons. In all three cases, their parents’ affection for their scions is modeled on Jacob’s favoring of Joseph, thus indicating that Shem, Isaac, and Jacob were loved more than their brothers. The themes of human parental love, divine election, birthright, and inheritance being interwoven in all three cases, human parental love functions primarily to signal the status of those sons who form the heirs through whom the Israelite line will be maintained. Their characterization as “beloved” also highlights Israel’s prominence amongst the nations – their siblings, in contrast, being destined to become the fathers of the gentile nations. On basis of the fact that the biblical texts relate the image of God as father to His love for and election of His children, Jubilees also presents human parental love as following (upon) God’s election of a favored son. The combination of the motif of God as a loving father with the verse that “Because He loved your fathers, He chose their heirs after them” (Deut 4:37) appears to have led the Jubilean author to assume that the Israelites’ ancestors were the object of divine parental love. He then takes this idea one step further, presenting patriarchal parental love as paralleling God’s love/election.

The foundational efficiency of love: reconciling with Aquinas

AbstractAnabaptist theologians who vie for the most convincing theory of divine non-violence in the contemporary ‘atonement debate’ quite often fail to appreciate the contributions of medieval scholars such as St Thomas Aquinas. Of course, that failure does have a rationale. Aquinas does, indeed, support various systematic expressions of a satisfaction theory of atonement. In doing so, he insists upon God's violent solution to the problem of sin and also employs language fraught with quid pro quo, mercantile and penal images. Aquinas does attempt to ‘correct’ Anselm and rearticulate the satisfaction theory of atonement; however, his expression of that motif still hinges upon the divine demand for remuneration, balanced accounts or an economic transaction in order to repair the damage done by sin. God's desire for this redemptive reparation results in the necessity of the violent death of an innocent man. Consequently, although Aquinas expresses the notion of necessity differently than Anselm, his theory also necessitates, at best, divine complicity with violence and, at worst, divine insistence on violence. Anabaptist theologians who remain true to the tradition's pacifist roots rightfully cry ‘foul’ in response to Aquinas’ theory. If Jesus of Nazareth fully reveals the character of God as indicated in John 14:7 with the words, ‘if you have seen me, you have seen the Father’, theories of atonement which depict God as condoning or requiring violence do not harmonise with the life and teachings of the man Christians call the Prince of Peace, especially if that violence pertains to the redemption of a loving God's good creation. As a result, those who oppose the implicit divine violence embedded in Aquinas’ satisfaction theory of atonement may opt to disengage with him, to expel him completely from the conversation. Yet I suggest that non-violent atonement theologians pause and rethink their indictment of the angelic doctor. Satisfaction remains the prevalent theme surrounding Aquinas’ atonement motif, but it is not by any means the only image he brings to bear on the topic. In fact, throughout his ruminations on the passion of Christ, St Thomas focuses explicitly on the unfathomable, extravagant and immeasurable divine love as the primary motivation for God's desire and subsequent actions to redeem and restore a sinful humanity. I suggest that, given Aquinas’ emphasis on divine love, Anabaptist theologians may well discover a satisfying interlocutor for further theological conversation which carries significant implications for the life of the church. Indeed, scholastic savants such as Thomas Aquinas still do warrant a place at the communal table.

Readers Respond

Readers Respond

Reading the Song of Songs through a spiritual direction lens

Research on the use of the Song of Songs in spiritual direction is rare; yet, the Song of Songs (or Canticle of Canticles) is a highly conducive case as it provides in nuce the poetics, lyrics, erotics, and aesthetics of human and divine love which is found nowhere else in Scripture. This article draws on these unique features, integrates the biblical and the experiential, and offers a poetics-praxis paradigm for use in contemporary spiritual praxis. With the poem’s metaphorical vineyard (a figurative term for the beloved herself) serving as hermeneutical key, the beloved’s experience of love is interpreted through a multifaceted reading that is intrinsic to the poem, namely: eros [yearning]; mythos [searching]; mustikos [finding]; and kosmos [birthing]. In following the inner dynamism and dramatic tensions across the eight chapters of the Song, the fourfold reading traces the beloved’s transformation from a neglected vineyard (Can 1:6) to a generative vineyard (Can 8:12). The article concludes that transformation in love is a journey from depletion (the giving away of self) towards deification (the giving of self in love), and suggests tending one’s own vineyard as a living testament to divine love and a living sacrament in the world.

The Ontology of Virtue as Participation in Divine Love in the Works of St. Maximus the Confessor

The Ontology of Virtue as Participation in Divine Love in the Works of St. Maximus the Confessor