Amor Dei in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-90-420-3686-4
Verlag: Brill | Rodopi

Buch, Englisch, Band 265, 170 Seiten, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 297 g

Reihe: Value Inquiry Book Series / Philosophy and Religion

Amor Dei, “love of God” raises three questions: How do we know God is love? How do we experience love of God? How free are we to love God? This book presents three kinds of love, worldly, spiritual, and divine to understand God’s love. The work begins with Augustine’s Confessions highlighting his Manichean and Neoplatonic periods before his conversion to Christianity. Augustine’s confrontation with Pelagius anticipates the unresolved disputes concerning God’s love and free will. In the sixteenth-century the Italian humanist, Gasparo Contarini introduces the notion of “divine amplitude” to demonstrate how God’s goodness is manifested in the human agent. Pierre de Bérulle, Guillaume Gibieuf, and Nicolas Malebranche show connections with Contarini in the seventeenth-century controversies relating free will and divine love. In response to the free will dispute, the Scottish philosopher, William Chalmers, offers his solution. Cornelius Jansen relentlessly asserts his anti-Pelagian interpretation of Augustine stirring up more controversy. John Norris, Malebranche’s English disciple, exchanges his views with Mary Astell and Damaris Masham. In the tradition of Cambridge Platonism, Ralph Cudworth conveys a God who “sweetly governs.” The organization of sections represents the love of God in ascending-descending movements demonstrating that, “human love is inseparable from divine love.”

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Kirchengeschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Christentum, Christliche Theologie Systematische Theologie Fundamentaltheologie, Dogmatik, Christologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Kenneth A. Bryson: Editorial Foreword
Preface
Introduction
Augustine: The Experience of Love
Interpreting Love in Augustine
Nature and Knowledge
Problems with Love in Augustine
Truth, Conversion, and Conflict
Augustine’s Intellectual Journey
Manichean Conversion
Plotinian Influences
From “Darkness” to the Free Will
Augustine and Pelagianism
Augustine on Grace
Augustinianism: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
Early Modern Philosophy
Gasparo Contarini
L’École Française and Pierre de Bérulle
Guillaume Gibieuf
William Chalmers
Jansen of Ypres
Scotus Eriugena and Dionysius the Areopagite
Divine Amplitude: The Agency of Love
Malebranche and the Love of God
Malebranche, Lamy, and Norris
“Vision in God”
John Norris: Malebranche’s Disciple
God’s Knowledge
Three Letters to Bernard Lamy
Vision in God and Divine Love
Sweetness of God
Ralph Cudworth and the Divine
Free Will
Cudworth’s God of Love
Human Response to Divine Love
Cudworth and Augustine
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author
Index