Posts Tagged ‘literature’
What is Love after all
27
Oct
Although Hannah Arendt’s work is not definitive
regarding love, the advisor Karl Jaspers himself expressed this, developed and appropriated some fundamental categories in his doctoral thesis “Love in Saint Augustine”.
According to author George McKenna, in a review of her dissertation, Arendt tried to include a revision in her “The Human Condition”, but it is not very clear in the book (of the Arendt), which is excellent.
If we can also express an expression of this love in ancient Greek literature, such as agape love, the one that differs from eros and philia in this literature, from a Christian point of view the best development made is in fact that of Saint Augustine.
First because he separated this concept from good x evil Manichaeism, a dualism still present in almost all Western philosophy due to idealism and puritanism, then because he was in fact raptured upon discovering divine love, he wrote: “Late I loved you, O beauty so ancient and so young! Too late I loved you! Behold, you lived within me and I was looking for you outside!” (Confessions of Saint Augustine).
Then man must love his neighbor as God’s creation: […] man loves the world as God’s creation; in the world the creature loves the world just as God loves it. This is the realization of a self-denial in which everyone, including yourself, simultaneously reclaims your God-given importance. This achievement is love for others (ARENDT, 1996, p. 93).
Man can love his neighbor as a creation by returning to his origin: “It is only where I can be certain of my own being that I can love my neighbor in his true being, which is in his createdness.” (ARENDT, 1996, p. 95)
In this type of love, man loves the divine essence that exists in himself, in others, in the world, man “loves God in them” (ARENDT, 1996, 95).
The biblical reading also summarizes the law and the Christian prophets as follows (Mt 22, 38-40): “This is the greatest and the first commandment. The second is similar to this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’. All the Law and the prophets depend on these two commandments.”
Love contains all the virtues: it does not become conceited, it knows how to see where the true signs of happiness, balance and hope are found.
ARENDT, Hannah. (1996) Love and Saint Augustine. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Redemption Love
25
Oct
The book was inspired by the biblical narrative
of the prophet Hosea, a woman, Angel, who considered herself ruined, with no chance of salvation, a disbeliever of human love, discovers the unshakable love of God, but the context is the gold rush in California in 1850 .
The time is when men sold their souls for a handful of gold and women sold their bodies for a place to sleep.
Angel sold as a prostitute since she was a child, hates the men who used her and is invaded by contempt and fear of herself, until she meets Michael Hosea, a man who seeks the divine in all things, and believes he has a calling from God to marry Angel.
Redemption Love is a timeless, romantic, epic or tragic classic, it is a story capable of transforming human feelings into an unconditional, redemptive and absolute love that is within the reach of everyone who still thinks about true, lasting and deep love.
But Angel, a victim of her story, as many are today of erotic ideology and contempt for true happiness, runs away and returns to the darkness, away from her husband’s resilient love, from the new that is her definitive cure from a world of shadows and contempt. for the life.
Francine Rivers’ book, far from being just Christian fiction, is an appeal to real human love, the one capable of filling the void of souls that do not accept the passenger, the use of the body as a mere commodity or “instrument” of pleasure, where it is possible to find peace and happiness, of course with all the natural tribulations of life: bills, accidents and getting old, etc.
The book was turned into a film in 2022, written and directed by D. J. Caruso, with the cast: Abigail Cowen, Famke Janssen and Logan Marshall-Green.
Rivers, Francine. Redeeming Love. San Francisco: Multinomah Books, 2007.
The intermittents of death
31
Aug
José Saramago (1922-2010), in addition to his famous book
Essay on Blindness, written in 1995 and which later became a film directed by Brazilian Fernando Meirelles and scripted by Don McKellar, wrote many other novels: O memorial do convento (adapted from an opera), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ, Essay on lucidity, and many others, I highlight here As Intermitências da Morte (2005).
In 1998, he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, but two works seem prophetic for today: The essay on blindness, which we have already posted, and the Intermitências da Morte.
Skeptical and ironic, Saramago did not fail to notice the dramas of our time, but the unexpected way it ends. Lucidity, I would say using the Heideggerian metaphor that clearing is possible if we penetrate the existential drama of life.
In The Intermittencies of Death, he penetrates into the existential dramas of life, as a religious skeptic, he will also mock the outputs with an answer “from above”, that is, transfer to “another world” our permanently mundane dramas, among them, what it’s life itself.
He says in a passage on page 123: “It is possible that only a painstaking education, one of those that is already becoming rare, along, perhaps, with the more or less superstitious respect that in timid souls the written word usually instills, has led readers, although they were not lacking in reasons to manifest explicit signs of ill contained impatience, not to interrupt what we have been reporting so profusely and to want to be told what it is that, in the meantime, death has been doing since the fatal night when it announced the your return.” (in the photo a picture of Gustav Klimt’s painting).
After inquiring in every book about life, something unusual these days, because all you want is a return to frivolity, the normality of emptiness, the absence of life, consumption and false joys, the author will say in end of the book that death is normality, said like this:
“He stayed in his room all day, had lunch and dinner at the hotel. Watched television until late. Then he got into bed and turned off the light. Didn’t sleep. Death never sleeps.” (Saramago, 2005, p. 189).
And he concludes that his common irony in times when the pandemic was not even dreamed of (his pandemic was The Essay on Blindness), he says about death: “(…) I don’t understand anything, talking to you is the same as having fallen into a labyrinth without doors, Now that’s an excellent definition of life, You’re not life, I’m much less complicated than it, (…)” (Saramago, 2005, p. 198). Oh what a pity, a pity even that Saramago had never believed in a true life, this disbelief is also in all his work, especially “The Gospel According to Jesus Christ” (1991), but at least he was not indifferent to the theme, something “bothered him”.
SARAMAGO, José. (2005) The intermittence of death. Brazil, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras.
