Adam DeVille Reviews Eros Crucified

Routledge

CWR Dispatch:The Idolatry of Eros and the Corporeality of God by Dr. Adam A. J. DeVille
Matthew Clemente’s Eros Crucified is philosophy of religion done by a young scholar in such a way as to give one great hope for the future not just of the discipline, but of Catholic letters and intellectual culture more generally.

Some thoughts:

DeVille writes:

One popular, and often dreaded, buzzword in the academy today is “intersectionality,” which is just a newer version of the idea Newman first demonstrated so winsomely: “all knowledge forms one whole.” Clemente, a young Catholic philosopher of religion at Boston College, lives Newman’s method in this book (without mentioning him). Clemente ranges freely across theology and philosophy, refusing to allow them to be forcibly separated via an act of what Paul Ricoeur famously called “controlled schizophrenia.” But Clemente’s point, and method, is not merely reflective of current academic preoccupations to bring things together. It is, in fact, the only method on offer to human thinkers, who cannot (and must not) be bamboozled into seeing the world as divisible, the end result of which is the creation of some “private” sphere labelled the “secular” from which God has been exiled into some other sealed sphere called “religion.” In philosophizing in this way, Clemente is reflecting some of the best insights of recent philosophers including Charles Taylor and one of Clemente’s mentors, the philosopher (and Greek Orthodox priest) John Panteleimon Manoussakis.

Is Clemente's book really philosophy of religion, as opposed to Christian theology? For an unbeliever who reasons accordingly, it might be philosophy of religion. But for a Christian who thinks thus? It is theology, even if the author's academic degree is in philosophy.

Clemente wants us to think about the corporeality of God and its nakedly erotic self-giving in the Eucharist (“this is my body”) as well as its implications for us as human beings in our quotidian living, desiring, and dying, our lovemaking and birth-giving. (Clemente’s one-and-a-half-page conclusion, a meditation on watching and waiting with his wife give birth to their first son, packs in more biblical theology than a year’s worth of homilies from your average preacher.) Clemente writes with verve and a wide sweep of philosophy and theology, ancient and modern. All this learning, including considerable insights from psychoanalytic thought, is rendered in a way that is at once lively and serious.

Might there be some truth in Freud's writings? Perhaps. Would it be better to rely upon sound philosophical psychology which is open to the insights of Christians with rich interior knowledge and wisdom? I would think so. But doesn't it depend on one's audience? What if one is reaching out to those who have been influenced by Freud? How many of those are left?

One does not have a conversation with the dead who can no longer answer for themselves, but with the living, and this is true even in the scholastic method. So how many committed Freudians are there who need an apologia of Christianity or of Christ?

Then there is the question of whether Freud's reasoning and not just his claims can be captured well in essay form... This does raise a question of what the best way of transmitting reasoning through the written word. Something for theologians and philosophers to consider, even if they reject the manualist approach.

Biblical Thomism

Jeremy Beer on David Schindler

Philosopher of Love

Lectures by Fr. Dominic Legge, OP

Related:

Why Amor and Not Caritas?

Besides the parallel with the title of the recent Apostolic Exhortation, but in that context, would caritas be better there as well? The consequence of the Church of Rome falling away from Greek?

Amor denique est lux unica quae mundum obscurum indesinenter illuminat.

— Papa Franciscus (@Pontifex_ln) April 14, 2016

English Translation of the Benedict XVI Interview

Italian translation was mentioned here; English translation at CWR blog.

He repeats his (and the conventional) understanding of Anselm's theory of atonement here.

Monastic Obedience

"Obedience, which is one of the basic principles of our monastic order, is nothing but love put into practice."

Posted by Orthodox Christian Network on Thursday, January 21, 2016

"Obedience, which is one of the basic principles of our monastic order, is nothing but love put into practice."

Posted by Orthodox Christian Network on Thursday, January 21, 2016

Professor Germain Grisez - The Restless Heart Blunder

An Ontology of Love: A Patristic Reading of Dietrich von Hildebrand's "The Nature of Love."

More on Eberhard Schockenhoff

Rorate Caeli: The Neo-Modernist Theology of Eberhard Schockenhoff

Related:
NCR
Who’s Afraid of the Theology of the Body? by Donna Bethell

An Orthodox Response to FSG

Post by Orthodox Christian Network.

But it, like Catholic socon essays, is unaware of the psychological dynamic involved in sexual attraction and desire, and how feminism has distorted it.

DSPT Aquinas Lecture 2014

The video is now available for the lecture:

Aquinas Lecture 2014: Diana Fritz-Cates, PhD "Hatred in the Light of Love: A Thomistic Analysis"

A complementary perspective offered by a Roman-rite priest to the article by Fr. Maximos: Do Homosexuals Exist? Or, Where Do We Go From Here? by Fr. Hugh Barbour

Related:
A REQUIEM FOR FRIENDSHIP by Anthony Esolen
Why Boys Will Not Be Boys & Other Consequences of the Sexual Revolution

I finished editing this post on the question of whether sinners naturally love God more than themselves and published it - it's not a complete reflection, but it does reflect my thoughts at the time I started it.

In his talk earlier this month at the DSPT, Fr. Sherwin discussed the impact of emotional development on moral development, using the work of Lewis, Amini and Lannon in A General Theory of Love. He also talked about John Senior, and the sort of [emotional] preparation that a solid Christian spiritual life requires. There was some disagreement between him and Dennis de Rougemont on the origin of romantic love, as Fr. Sherwin cited Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde as a counter.

What new insights would Conrad Baars have into our affective life if he were alive today?

The current model of catechesis (CCD class) doesn't seem to be effective. We need something like Dr. Senior's integrated humanities program. (Of course the discussion got me thinking about the topic of poetic knowledge, as well.)

The Public Discourse: The Family: What Is to Be Done?
by Scott Yenor
June 15, 2011
Marital love implies dependence on another instead of autonomy, and it shows that certain goods (sex and procreation, love and marriage, marriage and parenthood) are connected. We must recover the language of self-giving. The second in a two-part series.

I still have to finish that post on love as self-giving. The first part of Mr. Yenor's essay. From the second part:

Unable to find the permanence we need in anatomy, it is necessary to turn to moral philosophy to show how nature, as it manifests itself in marriage and family life, is connected to the permanent human good of betrothed love. For this, we must recover the logic of marital unity and put the necessities that are implicated in marriage and family life in their proper place. This is the logic of marital unity. When marriage concerns serious ends, it makes demands on the time and resources of the couple; the more serious the ends, the more serious the demands. The more time- and resource-intensive the demands, the more members of the family are likely to practice some form of the division of labor to meet those demands. Married couples strive for ends, in other words, that exist in time and space or in life—so they implicate “necessities” within a larger context of meaning.

The necessities of nature gain their dignity by their relation to the ends of marriage. While it is easy for feminists, for instance, to depict the mundane tasks of motherhood and housekeeping as Sisyphean tasks, such necessitous household activities contribute to the building of a home, which is, at least in part, a home of love. In the context of love, the household management of a mother takes on greater dignity and receives higher meaning. Dusting or washing are acts of self-giving that contribute to an environment of nurturing that can best take place in the intense order of family life. There are certainly contractual appearances to this relationship—the husband and wife say “I do” and they agree on how to divide household labors. The contractual appearance, however, is only a moment in the experience of marriage and family life. Marriage may, as Hegel, that oracle of clarity, tells us, “begin from the point of view of contract,” but it does so “in order to supersede it.” This supersession is love, and love is a permanent human good that defines the order of the family.

As we hear so often today, love makes the family. What is love? Most refrain from raising this more significant question, for fear that such a question would give rise to endless controversy or hopeless subjectivity. Here, again, I would suggest that nature or anatomy must be understood in the light of love, the permanent attribute that lends meaning to the natural. Nature points up, toward the love that defines marriage and family life. We see this in sex, which reflects a human search for completion by joining with another, and which cannot be consummated without another. Though sex does not really satisfy that desire for another and sexual desire is soon extinguished when satisfied, this does not mean that one is alone. Sex happens on the level of the passions and the body, but points to something higher than itself. Genuine love integrates and subordinates the moment of sex within this larger unified framework. A relationship based on sex is not a proper marital relationship—though sex is part of a marital relationship—because it does not put sex in its proper place.

Betrothed love also grows from two becoming one in the procreation of children. A couple practices a form of self-giving in their life together, providing a fertile ground for the self-giving of parenthood. Parenthood is a picture of marital unity. A couple’s unified love is literally present in the person of the child, which explains why parents so often love their children more than their children love them: children are living embodiments of marital unity. Married couples are more than parents, yet parenthood points to the betrothed love that makes parents, in part, more than parents.

Modern thinkers, with partial exceptions, initiated a revolution in marriage at the level of betrothed love. They questioned whether self-giving was healthy, possible, safe, or consistent with human liberty and equality. Love implies dependence on another instead of autonomy, and it shows that certain goods (sex and procreation, love and marriage, marriage and parenthood) are connected. When the self-giving of betrothed love is no longer the end of marriage, the preparation ground for parenthood erodes; divorce seems more tenable as partners hold something back; more individualistic principles fill in to justify or define marriage; and sex and procreation, no longer pointing beyond themselves toward a higher good, come to be seen as individual goods or burdens instead of as common goods.

Buzzwords in contemporary [Catholic] moral philosophy (personalism?): "dignity" and "meaning."

Whether sinners love God more than themselves with a natural love?

Mr. Kevin F. Keiser writes in response to my use of Garrigou-Lagrange to argue that we cannot love God more than ourselves without grace:

I am well aware of these texts of Garrigou-Lagrange, as well as other similar ones in the Christian Perfection and Contemplation, The Three Ways, and in his commentary on the Summa. I had to undertake the study of them for my doctoral thesis. 

Nevertheless, I still maintain what I said, that in St. Thomas’ mind, the deliberative love of the will is perverted through sin, but not even sin can remove the natural love of God as principle of nature and as extrinsic common good. See for example De Veritate 22, a. 2, ad 3: 

“To the third it must be said that God can be considered in two ways: either in himself, or in his effects. In himself indeed, since he is the essence of goodness, he cannot be not loved. Wherefore, by all those seeing him through his essence, he is loved, and there as much as someone knows him, so much does he love him. But in some of his effects, insofar as they are contrary to the will, such as punishments inflicted, or commandments which seem heavy, God himself is refused, and in a certain way is hated. And nevertheless, it is necessary that they who hate him as so some effects, love him in other effects; just as the Demons themselves, according to Dionysius in the 4th book of the Divine Names, they desire to be and to live naturally, and in this, they desire and love God himself.” 

It is perhaps better explained in the Commentary on the Sentences, lib. 4 d. 50 q. 2 a. 1 qc. 1: “I answer that, A twofold will may be considered in the damned, namely the deliberate will and the natural will. Their natural will is theirs not of themselves but of the Author of nature, Who gave nature this inclination which we call the natural will. Wherefore since nature remains in them, it follows that the natural will in them can be good. But their deliberate will is theirs of themselves, inasmuch as it is in their power to be inclined by their affections to this or that. This will is in them always evil” 

The upshot of this is that… (qc. 5): “Now God is apprehended in two ways, namely in Himself, as by the blessed, who see Him in His essence; and in His effects, as by us and by the damned. Since, then, He is goodness by His essence, He cannot in Himself be displeasing to any will; wherefore whoever sees Him in His essence cannot hate Him. On the other hand, some of His effects are displeasing to the will in so far as they are opposed to any one: and accordingly a person may hate God not in Himself, but by reason of His effects.”

Even better is II-II, q. 34, a. 1: “I answer that, As shown above (I-II, 29, 1), hatred is a movement of the appetitive power, which power is not set in motion save by something apprehended. Now God can be apprehended by man in two ways; first, in Himself, as when He is seen in His Essence; secondly, in His effects, when, to wit, “the invisible things” of God . . . “are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Romans 1:20). Now God in His Essence is goodness itself, which no man can hate–for it is natural to good to be loved. Hence it is impossible for one who sees God in His Essence, to hate Him. 

Moreover some of His effects are such that they can nowise be contrary to the human will, since “to be, to live, to understand,” which are effects of God, are desirable and lovable to all. Wherefore again God cannot be an object of hatred if we consider Him as the Author of such like effects. Some of God’s effects, however, are contrary to an inordinate will, such as the infliction of punishment, and the prohibition of sin by the Divine Law. Such like effects are repugnant to a will debased by sin, and as regards the consideration of them, God may be an object of hatred to some, in so far as they look upon Him as forbidding sin, and inflicting punishment.” 

I realize that these texts are speaking about hatred of God, and not about the inability to love him. Nevertheless, they are quite pertinent, since they all speak of a natural love of God that cannot be subverted or displaced by sin, not even by the obstinacy in actual mortal sin found in the demons and the damned.
It is not sufficient, then, simply to assert that my previous post “goes against the plain meaning of I II 109, 3.” Does St. Thomas go against the plain meaning of I II 109, 3. I should say not, unless by plain you mean not requiring any understanding of the terms used, But I think the plain meaning is, well, what St. Thomas says there, namely, “in statu naturae corruptae homo ab hoc deficit secundum appetitum voluntatis rationalis.” It is quite plainly consistent with St. Thomas’ other thought elsewhere. 

As for Garrigou-LaGrange, my adherence to him is quite strong, but my adherence to St. Thomas is stronger, And I have found that Garrigou-LaGrange is a sure guide to Thomas’ thought, with few exceptions. This is one of those exceptions, where, with the Carmelites of Salamanca and many others, he placed an already existing aversio to God in the will of man in Original Sin, an aversio with which he is born, present even before a child’s first motion of will (as the texts you supplied so clearly point out). St. Thomas, on the other hand, does not think so; he says that in original sin, there is “something corresponding to the aversion [i.e. of actual sin], namely, the destitution of Original Justice” (De malo, q. 5 a. 2). For St. Thomas, the essence of Original Sin is not an inordinate love of self that we are born with, but the loss of the gratuitous integrity of our Original State (which makes it so that our first rational act will certainly be one of inordiinate love of self unless we are helped by grace, I-II, q. 89, a. 6), plus the real culpa that accrues to our nature, since the loss of Original Justice was perpetrated by the human will in the active principle of our nature, i.e. Adam. Even the wound of malice for St. Thomas is by way of privation of a previous order, not by way of position of a perverting self-love (I-II, q. 85, a. 3). 

As for religion in sinners, we agree. As for whether the State can compel acts of religion, I’m not sure, but you might want to look at De Regimine Principum, Bk. 1, ch. 15. My first interpretation would be that before Christ, the State could command acts of religion, but afterwards, it must leave that to the Church,

Mr. Keiser (apologies for misspelling your last name earlier):

I concede that according to these texts, the demons and sinners love God in the way spelled out in those texts. But, we need to keep in my the distinction between an inclination and the will act or volition. Commentary on the Sentences, lib. 4 d. 50 q. 2 a. 1 qc. 1 identifies the natural will with an inclination. Just because the will is inclined to certain acts, does not mean that it is reduced to those acts necessarily. None of the texts show that sinners or the demons actually love God more than themselves. So, the damned may be inclined by nature to love God more than themselves, but they do not actually do so.

The inclination to the love of God (and to love God more than one's self), being natural, is present in children before the age of reason. I believe St. Thomas stipulates that once a child reaches the age of reason he must make a true choice between God and sin. For those who reject God sinfully, they have turned themselves away from God, and they cannot love God more than themselves even with a natural love. The inclination to love God remains but it is not actualized.

Regarding your last comments: here and here -
Also the texts do not directly speak of loving God more than one's self - I think it is correct to say that the love of God more than one's self is possible when we understand that God is greater than our selves, is the final end of all creation, and so on. Is it possible for someone to love God naturally and yet not love Him more than himself [once he has this understanding]? I think it is possible for a disordered or sinning will to do so - the love of God in such a manner is nonetheless made subordinate to the love of one's self (and the rejection of God as the [supernatural] last end). Is it possible for those who are damned to have multiple or successive acts of the intellect and will? It seems that this is the case for the demons and the blessed in heaven while we have not reached the Last Day - but afterwards?