Originally posted by wolfgang59Thanks, wolfgang. Your direct approach and timely topic brought Oscar Wilde's Quip to mind: "True friends stab you in the front." lol I'm serious. It's a refreshing change of pace from the excessive subterfuge and cowardice elsewhere on this site.
When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly
what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that
is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
Cicero
- Joined
- 29 Dec 08
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Originally posted by wolfgang59LORD POLONIUS (with flourishes)
When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men's minds take in quickly
what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that
is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.
Cicero
This business is well ended.
My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day and time.
Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief: your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it; for, to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?
But let that go.
QUEEN GERTRUDE (exasperated)
More matter, with less art.
"The Problem of Pain (1940)"
"Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal.
Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world. God will look to every soul like its first love because He is its first love. Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself.
What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like, "What does it matter so long as they are contented?" We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, "liked to see young people enjoying themselves" and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, "a good time was had by all".
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
I call this Divine humility because it is a poor thing to strike our colours to God when the ship is going down under us; a poor thing to come to Him as a last resort, to offer up "our own" when it is no longer worth keeping.
If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is "nothing better" now to be had. If He who in Himself can lack nothing chooses to need us, it is because we need to be needed." C.S. Lewis
“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.”
-C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
Originally posted by Bosse de NageThe use of eros and agape to denote two kinds of love is purely modern. In both classical and koine Greek, the words do not carry this distinction, and in the Johannine literature agape is used for both types of love.
No one should forget: Eros alone can fulfill life; knowledge, never. Only Eros makes sense; knowledge is empty infinity;––for thoughts, there is always time; life has its time; there is no thought that comes too late; any desire can become a regret. -- Emil Cioran, The Book of Delusions
—Alan Watts in Behold the Spirit (written when he was the Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern University)
St. Symeon the New Theologian, one of the greatest Greek fathers, and the only one after St. John the Evangelist and St Gregory of Constantinople to be honoured by the Orthodox peoples with the epithet “Theologian”, wrote “Hymns of Divine Loves”. The Greek word for “loves” in this title is “Eroton”, i.e. genitive plural of the word Eros – not the word Agape. Many other great fathers, such as st Gregory of Nyssa, st Dionysious the Areopagite or st Maximus Confessor, use the word Eros and not only Agape, whether they refer to love for God or to love for men.
— http://www.ellopos.com/blog/?p=362
So it is that love as goodness, love as union, love as friendship are all to be found in God and man, between God and man, and between human beings. There is no form of true love which lays outside the realm of the spiritual life.
— https://oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/the-greatest-virtue-is-love/god-is-love
The inspired poet of eros is Dionysius the Aeropagite. And [St.] Maximus the Confessor, commenting on him, does not hesitate to equate eros with agapei].” Maximus, in his commentary on Dionysius’ On The Divine Names, writes: “The Song of Songs calls him [God] [i]agape, or ‘sensual pleasure,’ and ‘desire,’ which means eros”.
— Orthodox theologian Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism
For agape that is aroused is called eros.
—St. Gregory of Nyssa
In the patristic tradition, God himself in his internal triadic life will be defined as ‘the whole of eros,’ the fullness of continuous erotic unity: ‘This eros is love, and it is written that God is love’
—Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras
"The Four Loves is a book by C. S. Lewis which explores the nature of love from a Christian and philosophical perspective through thought experiments. The book was based on a set of radio talks from 1958, criticised in the States at the time for their frankness about sex.
Contents: 1. Need/gift love; 2. Pleasures; 3. The Four Loves 3.1 Storge: affection; 3.2 Phileo: friendship; 3.3 Eros: romance; 3.4 Agape: unconditional love.
Need/gift love: Taking his start from St. John's words "God is Love", Lewis initially thought to contrast "Need-love" (such as the love of a child for its mother) and "Gift-love" (epitomized by God's love for humanity), to the disparagement of the former.[3] However he swiftly happened on the insight that the natures of even these basic categorizations of love are more complicated than they at first seemed: a child's need for parental comfort is a necessity, not a selfish indulgence, while conversely parental Gift-love in excessive form can be a perversion of its own.[4]
Pleasures: Lewis continued his examination by exploring the nature of pleasure, distinguishing Need-pleasures (such as water for the thirsty) from Pleasures of Appreciation, such as the love of nature.[5] From the latter, he developed what he called “a third element in love...Appreciative love”,[6] to go along with Need-love and Gift-love.
Throughout the rest of the book, Lewis would go on to counterpart that three-fold, qualitative distinction against the four broad types of loves indicated in his title.[7]
The Four Loves: In his remaining four chapters, Lewis treats of love under four categories (the highest does not stand without the lowest), based in part on the four Greek words for love: affection, friendship, eros, and charity. Lewis states that just as Lucifer—a former archangel—perverted himself by pride and fell into depravity, so too can love—commonly held to be the arch-emotion—become corrupt by presuming itself to be what it is not. A fictional treatment of these loves is the main theme of Lewis's novel Till We Have Faces.
Storge: affection: Affection is fondness through familiarity (a brotherly love), especially between family members or people who have otherwise found themselves together by chance. It is described as the most natural, emotive, and widely diffused of loves: natural in that it is present without coercion; emotive because it is the result of fondness due to familiarity; and most widely diffused because it pays the least attention to those characteristics deemed "valuable" or worthy of love and, as a result, is able to transcend most discriminating factors.
Affection, for Lewis, included both Need-love and Gift-love; he considered it responsible for 9/10th of all solid and lasting human happiness.[8] Ironically, however, affection's strength is also what makes it vulnerable. Affection has the appearance of being "built-in" or "ready made", says Lewis, and as a result people come to expect it irrespective of their behavior and its natural consequences.[9] Both in its Need and its Gift form, affection then is liable to 'go bad', and to be corrupted by such forces as jealousy, ambivalence and smothering.[10]
Phileo: friendship Phileo is the love between friends. Friendship is the strong bond existing between people who share common interest or activity.[11] Lewis immediately differentiates Friendship Love from the other Loves. He describes friendship as, "the least biological, organic, instinctive, gregarious and necessary...the least natural of loves"[12] - our species does not need friendship in order to reproduce - but to the classical and medieval worlds the more profound precisely because it is freely chosen.
Lewis explains that true friendships, like the friendship between David and Jonathan in the Bible, are almost a lost art. He expresses a strong distaste for the way modern society ignores friendship. He notes that he cannot remember any poem that celebrated true friendship like that between David and Jonathan, Orestes and Pylades, Roland and Oliver, Amis and Amiles. Lewis goes on to say, "to the Ancients, Friendship seemed the happiest and most fully human of all loves; the crown of life and the school of virtue. The modern world, in comparison, ignores it".
Growing out of Companionship, friendship for Lewis was a deeply Appreciative love, though one which he felt few people in modern society could value at its worth, because so few actually experienced true friendship.[13]
Nevertheless Lewis was not blind to the dangers of friendships, such as its potential for cliqueyness, anti-authoritarianism, and pride.[14]
Eros: romance: Eros for Lewis was love in the sense of 'being in love' or 'loving' someone, as opposed to the raw sexuality of what he called Venus: the illustration Lewis uses was the distinction between 'wanting a woman' and wanting one particular woman - something that matched his (classical) view of man as a rational animal, a composite both of reasoning angel and instinctual alley-cat.[15] Eros turns the need-pleasure of Venus into the most appreciative of all pleasures;[16] but nevertheless Lewis warned against the modern tendency for Eros to become a god to people who fully submit themselves to it, a justification for selfishness, even a phallic religion.[17]
After exploring sexual activity and its spiritual significance in both a pagan and a Christian sense, he notes how Eros (or being in love) is in itself an indifferent, neutral force: how "Eros in all his splendour...may urge to evil as well as good".[18] While accepting that Eros can be an extremely profound experience, he does not overlook the dark way it may lead even to the point of suicide pacts or murder, as well as to furious refusals to part, "mercilessly chaining together two mutual tormentors, each raw all over with the poison of hate-in-love".[19]
Agape: unconditional love: Charity (agape) is the love that brings forth caring regardless of the circumstance. Lewis recognizes this as the greatest of loves, and sees it as a specifically Christian virtue. The chapter on the subject focuses on the need of subordinating the natural loves - as Lewis puts it, "The natural loves are not self-sufficient"[20] - to the love of God, who is full of charitable love, to prevent what he termed their 'demonic' self-aggrandizement.[21]" (C.S. Lewis/wiki)
Woe to the heart
who cannot sense
the beauty in music!
Never waste your time
discussing love’s ways
with a stone heart.
Strangers to love
are not invited
to the Spiritual Concert.
Only those who burn
will give off smoke.
—The Sufi poet Saadi (in Love’s Alchemy: Poems from the Sufi Tradition, translated by David and Sabrineh Fideler)
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How tragic for the single flame to fear
annihilation in the larger fire—
