Descartes on the stupefied admiration

"But more often we wonder too much rather than too little, as when we are astonished in looking at things which merit little or no consideration.  This may entirely prevent or pervert the use of reason.  Therefore, although it is good to be born with some inclination to wonder, since it makes us disposed to acquire scientific knowledge, yet after acquiring such knowledge we must attempt to free ourselves from this inclination as much as possible.  For we may easily make good its absence through that special state of reflection and attention which our will can always impose upon our understanding when we judge the matter before us to be worth serious consideration.  But there is no remedy for excessive wonder [(d’admirer avec exces)] except to acquire the knowledge of many things and to practice examining all those which may seem most unusual and strange."

     Descartes, The passions of the soul 76, trans. Robert Stoothoff (The philosophical writings of Descartes 1 (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1985), 355) =the standard Œuvres de Descartes ed. Adam & Tannery, vol. 11, p. 385.  I have not read The passions, but was put onto this by Thibault Barrier, "La capture de l'esprit:  attention et admiration chez Descartes et Spinoza," L’attention au XVIIe siècle:  conceptions et usages =Les études philosophiques 2017, no. 1 (2017):  48-49 (43-58):  "voluntary attention is not opposed to simple impassibility, but to an admiration become hebetude" (49), i.e. stupor.

Aquinas on the unicity of truth

"there are indeed different and distinct domains of enquiry, each with its own standards for distinguishing the true from the false.  Mathematics is one such domain, physics another, history a third, theology a fourth.  But these domains are not self-enclosed, so that the truths in any one domain have no implications for what is true or false in any of the others.  Some truths in physics exclude certain historical possibilities.  Some truths in mathematics exclude certain physical possibilities.  Some truths in theology exclude certain physical and certain philosophical possibilities."

     Alisdair MacIntyre, channeling Aquinas contra the 13th-century Averroists on the doctrine of the two truths, in God, philosophy, universities:  a selective history of the Catholic philosophical tradition (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., A Sheed & Ward Book, 2009), 68.

"the disagreement between theistic and non-theistic cultures is not only a disagreement about God, it is also and perhaps as fundamentally a disagreement about intelligibility."

     Alisdair MacIntyre, God, philosophy, universities:  a selective history of the Catholic philosophical tradition (Lanham, MD:  Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., A Sheed & Ward Book, 2009), 61.

Ask, seek, knock

     "If, as H. Gouhier once remarked, the philosophy of Malebranche is one long systematic meditation on the various attributes of God, [then] one is entitled to suppose that attention constitutes one of these, and that, as N. Depraz indicates, the love of God is [(comprend)] a form of attention, as much cognitive as affective, in this [respect], that he is at once attentive and indistractably so [(attentif et attentionné)] in his divine providence.  Thus, the sometimes hard work that attention demands of us [(que réclame l’attention aux humains)] corresponds to the gracious movement of the divine attention.  As the third of the Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques indicates explicitly, that attention is nothing other than [the attention] of love:  'if you ask without attention, this is [for] lack of love', just as an attention without perseverance is only a ‘love too weak’[, a love] that will obtain from God only an inaudible reply."

     Michel Dupuis, "L'attention et l'amour de l’Ordre dans la morale de Malebranche," L'attention au XVIIe siècle:  conceptions et usages =Les études philosophiques 2017, no. 1 (2017):  69-70 (59-71).  On attentionner, see, for example, the CNRTL.

"the [idolatrous] thrill of the shadow of nothingness"

Department of Theology,
University of Notre Dame

"the great attraction of Heidegger's path" isn't just the attraction of what is "irrational, absurd, and superstitious."  It is "precisely the attraction of idolatry.  Indeed, Heidegger provides us with a bold statement of the very quintessence of idolatry in its purest and most distinctively postmodern form. . . . From the vantage point of Heidegger's enthrallment with finitude, we can see that people make idols and glorify the creature instead of the Creator, not because they just made a mistake and thought that the creature or the idol is the absolute being.  Rather, people make idols and glorify the creature instead of the Creator because they have made the judgment, at a deep level that is not altogether transparent to logical reasoning, that finite being is just more thrilling than absolute being.  And what is more indicative of the mood of our times than a mesmerization with finitude as such and a distaste, even repulsion, at the very notion of a perfection of being, a repulsion that even drives theologians to disparage the preoccupation of  'classical theism' with the attributes of divine being[?]  It is this mesmerization with finitude that is the existential wonder to which our epoch spontaneously gravitates!  Heidegger reveals to us that just as philosophy itself begins with wonder, so does idolatry.  But unlike the wonder invoked by both classical philosophy and theology, Heidegger's wonder is idolatrous because it is, despite all his elaborate protestations to the contrary, an arrested wonder.  It prostrates itself before the very combination of the eruption of being and the decline from being that characterizes finite beings, refusing to move on to the recognition of a perfect being that would lack the thrill of the shadow of nothingness falling over it.  Does not this 'mood' of idolatry utterly pervade our current existence?
     "If we compare the apologetic strategies of Athanasius and David Hart, we can see that they both make significant use of the argument from creaturely contingency to a perfect being, God.  But what is distinctive to Athanasius's approach is the insight that what prevents us from accepting this logical correlation is not just stupidity, the inability to appreciate the cogency of the logic which must posit necessary being as the ground of contingent being, but the deeper and more complex problem of idolatry, our intractable attachment to the finite things around us that makes us absolutize those finite things, both because they are sources of immediate pleasure and because they provide temporary evasions from the specter of death.  Heidegger, unwillingly, gives us an even bolder presentation of the distinctly postmodern form of idolatry, which is the glorification of finitude as such and the distaste for perfect being unadumbrated by the seductive shadow of nothingness."

     Khaled Anatolios, "The witness of Athanasius at the (hoped-for) Nicene Council of 2025," Pro ecclesia 25, no. 2 (Spring 2016):  234-235 (220-236).
     Have Hart and Milbank then, the two writers upon whom Anatolios relies, succeeded in reversing the French reversal of c. 1960 on Heidegger?

From the Neothomist point of view, Neoplatonism seemed an ally of modernity, a movement that preceded it and sustained its idealisms.  But the positive character of the current interest in Neoplatonism adheres to a reversal of that judgment.  In the last third of the 20th century, it is Neoscholasticism rather than Neoplatonism that dreams of an objectivizing rationalism and an ontotheology.  Towards 1960, the French discovered, despite the judgment of Étienne Gilson, that Heidegger would not object to [(ne ferait pas une exception à)] the identification by Thomas of God with ipsum esse subsistens.  Thus, Neoplatonism, above all in its Proclean and Dionysian branches, and medieval thought in the measure in which it is Neoplatonic, becomes more interesting for every attempt to respond to the questions raised by modernity.

Wayne J. Hankey, "Le role du néoplatonisme dans les tentatives postmodernes d’échapper à  l’onto-théologie," La métaphysique:  son histoire, sa critique, ses enjeux, Actes du XXVIIe Congrès de l’Association des Sociétés de Philosophie de Langue Française (A.S.P.L.F.), Québec, 18-22 août 1998) (Paris:  Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin; Québec:  Les Presses de l’Université Laval, 2000):  38-39 (36-43), citing Heidegger's 1959 "Le Retour au fondement de la métaphysique" and G. Prouvost, "La question des noms divins," Revue thomiste 98, no. 3 (1997):  485-511.

Losing one's life as distinguished from saving it

Biblical "sexuality is not . . . an expression of an absolute power, but of relationship, the gift to the other, and reciprocal dependence.  In the Platonic myth [of that third kind [(γένος)] of human being, that 'double nature which was once called Androgynous'], the search for the partner [from whom one has been cut away, that other half, that person of the opposite sex,] is not oriented to the gift of self, but to nostalgia for a state of omnipotence.  Androgyny proceeds from the same principle, whether it be religious or not."

     Jean-Baptiste Édart, “L’androgyne ou la communion des personnes?,” Communio:  revue internationale catholique 31, no. 5-6 (septembre-décembre 2006):  95 (83-96).
     The point, I suppose, is that Zeus separated the three kinds of human being, the male-male, the female-female, and, most importantly for our purposes here, the male-female or "androgynous", in order to weaken them, "as punishment for the wrong we did him" (Symposium 193a, in the Hackett edition ed. Cooper).  Their original spherical wholeness or integrity, by contrast, stood (as in the divinity) for "absolute power", self-sufficiency, perfection (Eliade, 85).
     But in the biblical view, according to which God created them male and female, there is no fall into differentiation (indeed, sexual differentiation is presented in Gen 2 as a solution, not a fall), and no room for these other options.  (For a list of the ways in which the Genesis myth corrects the Platonic one, a list taken from Xavier Lacroix, see p. 93.)  There is only the one kind of human being, who "can only become fully aware of his identity in the encounter with the other sex, image of the encounter with God."  For this reason it can come as no surprise that Saint Paul, a very careful reader of Genesis 1-3, "associates idolatry with homosexual acts, making of these latter the consequence of the former", i.e. idolatry:  "If the sexual difference is the expression of the relational capacity characteristic of God, then he who chooses to adore the creature in place of the Creator, he who denies the true nature of a God [of] love, source of all communion, denies relationship, founded on the difference, in order to enter into the fusion that is sought with one's double [(identique)], with an eye to omnipotence" (96).

Biblical "sexuality is not . . . an expression of an absolute power, but of relationship, the gift to the other, and reciprocal dependence.  In the Platonic myth, the search for the partner [from which one has been cut off] is not oriented to the gift of self, but to nostalgia for a state of omnipotence.  Androgyny procedes from the same principle, whether it be religious or not."

     Jean-Baptiste Édart, “L’androgyne ou la communion des personnes?,” Communio:  revue internationale catholique 31, no. 5-6 (septembre-décembre 2006):  95 (83-96).