November ‘24 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Etienne Gilson)

In November’s 1-to-1 Wiseletter, we'll be discussing a quote from Etienne Gilson, a 20th century French philosopher and medieval philosophy specialist.

Quote

"Human love, in spite of all its ignorance, blindness and even downright error, is never anything but a finite participation in God's own love for Himself..."

Etienne Gilson wrote this in the The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, published in 1940. This book was part of Gilson's wider attempt to revive Thomism, a synthesis of Christian theology and Aristotelian philosophy generated by the 13th-century Dominican monk St. Thomas Aquinas.

Aquinas spent much of his life studying the texts of Aristotle, nearly lost to Europe had it not been for the Arabs who maintained connections with the Byzantines in the East while the West collapsed into chaos and obscurity for 1,000 years.

Aristotle believed that all finite beings, sentient and non-sentient alike, seek a state of perfection by striving toward their originator, the unmoved Mover, an eternal, unchanging, self-contemplating Being who put the cosmos into motion. The image of the unmoved Mover would be adopted by Aquinas one millennium-and-a-half after Aristotle to conceptualize the Christian God.

We can begin to see what Gilson means when he says that human love, even in its most degraded forms, is nothing more than God's love of Himself. Said in Aristotelian terms, the lowest and highest forms of love are the unmoved Mover's contemplation of reunion with itself through its myriad finite manifestations.

Love, then, is a longing for, or an awareness of, an original state of oneness between beings separate only in time or only in seeming. When I say in time I mean it as opposed to outside of time i.e. eternity. Eternity in the negation of time. A temporal state of separation is thus a temporary state of affairs, not because it's limited in duration, but because it's illusory.

Time is the illusion of succession and separation wrapped around an eternal moment in which all things and beings reunite in simultaneity. Love is the end state of the finite dissolving into the infinite. Love is the residue of eternity felt in time.

In this respect, separation, or duality, is necessary for us to know love. If the simplest reduction of evil is separation, then we can say that evil is not only real but necessary. This is also why the modern movement of self-love is paradoxical and futile. It's like kissing a mirror.

Gilson says that our love is not truly our own, so long as we confuse our true selves with our finite egos. But if we can re-member our finite selves out of our original dis-memberment from the unmoved Mover, recalling that our beloved identities as Kathy, Dave, or Jack are sub-identities of a playful Supreme Identity, then we become aware of our participation in that fundamental love that keeps the cosmos together, a love freely given and received.

Consider the fact that we cannot help but love those we adore. Our love comes from an inner sanctuary spontaneously, not by choice or will. It spills out of us into our spouse, our children, our friends, our pets. We overflow with it. Love is the act of the cosmos, of God, of reality. The moment we try to wield love as our own, for selfish purposes, intents, and ends, to twist situations for self gain and aggrandizement, it becomes a rigid, dead, and impotent thing.

QUESTION

If self-love is a paradox, then how can Gilson and Aquinas' Christian God possibly love Himself?

Cheers,

John

October ‘24 1-to-1 Wiseletter (Plotinus)