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Aug 28Liked by Fr Thomas Plant

Ok, whoa. I just discovered your writing and I am totally here for this conversation. I’m assuming you’re familiar with Valentin Tomberg’s Christian Hermeticism?

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Very grateful for your attention! I am mildly familiar - the Tarot book has been sitting on my shelf part-read for some years now, but you have prompted me to open it again. Or did you have another book in mind?

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Yes, Meditations on the Tarot is definitely what I have in mind, but some of his other works have been translated and published or republished by Angelico Press (including his writings on the degeneration of jurisprudence, which he attributed to the ascendancy of nominalism.) Anyway, Tomberg was definitely a Christian Platonist and so learning more about that stream within the tradition from other writers is helping me better understand his "project."

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That was quite a bowl of wine!

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Your remark: "for all Dionysius’ reliance on Platonic tradition, this is where he explicitly turns from it. In DN IV.12, he denies any distinction between erōs and agapē. St John might just as well have said God is erōs. The terms are interchangeable. He admits, in CH 2.4, of the Platonic definition of erōs, as the hunger of the wise for the Good. But to him, the Good, or God, is not only the object of that hunger, but its source. It is two-way: it governs both pronoia and epistrophe. It moves not only the subordinate to “return” to the superior, but also the superior to “providence” for the subordinate. As such, Eros is the catalyst for unity, which Dionysius here names in a way resonant with both Platonic and Christian tradition: koinōnia, Communion."

reminds me of CS Lewis 'Four Loves', where one expects him to say that agapee is the 'correct' kind of Xtn love, replacing the other three which he considers. But (if my memory serves) Lewis says that Xtn agapee embodies & transfigures the other three, which include eros.

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In my experience a lot of weird theology has been based on the idea that a quite common Greek word is secretly a special one which can only mean one thing.

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Thank you as ever. It was Anders Nygren who famously polarised agape and eros, but I'm glad to say that his views are very much out of fashion. I don't think I've read Four Loves, or if I have, then I have forgotten it, so thank you for the prompt. I always enjoy the story about Hans Urs von Balthasar grumpily muttering on his way out of an academic conference something along the lines of, "we need more eros in theology!"

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Very interesting and erudite. Bravo.

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