Discovering one is in love

"The man or woman in love discovers that he or she is in love when all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions regard the beloved"
“discovers”
i.e., one becomes aware / knows what is happening
so the effects lead to the discovery
the effects: spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions
what is discovered?
That which makes these (tendencies and actions) possible: the conjugate form, the habit
The habit itself is a new spontaneity
Which gives rise to deliberate tendencies and actions

This is significant for the dynamic between gift and response.
One responds, one moves into the state of being in love, or perhaps one is gifted into that state, and then one discovers...
Already in Insight.

Remember that there need not be a temporal gap between grace as operative and as cooperative.

Love, agape + eros

All spontaneous and deliberate tendencies…
Lonergan is speaking here of a man or woman in love
And uses this to illustrate our love for God
This kind of love is more than agape? What I mean is that it somehow involves everything, the whole person: all spontaneous and deliberate tendencies and actions
I would imagine, also the feelings
So this is not the love where there is no particular feeling
Or else, we have to go with Benedict XVI who insists that (God’s) love is agape + eros – eros which delights in the existence of this particular, singular person: How wonderful that you are!
Is this ultimately the model of all love?
Are we, am I, called to love each brother and sister thus, with a love that reaches the particularity of the person?
The answer is yes.

God?

I found this unpublished draft blog entry:

We use the word 'God' so freely across religious traditions - but does it really mean the same thing? What would be the proper equivalent of the Christian word 'God' in India?

In the light of my recent reading of Caputo's On Religion, it might be interesting to pursue this line of thinking further.

Love of God

Hughes quoted Pascal last night: "If you are searching for God, you have already found him."

I thought it would be truer to say: "If you are searching for God, he has already found you." For you would not be searching for him if he had not first drawn you to himself.

So Lonergan's spiritual direction story of the young man who went to his director complaining that he did not love God. You ought to, said the director. I want to, said the young man. Then you do, said the director.

Even the desire comes from God. Operative actual grace. God has first loved us. The Lion is God.

The meaning of 'God'

We use the word 'God' so freely across religious traditions - but does it really mean the same thing? What would be the proper equivalent of the Christian word 'God' in India? There is a range of choices: deva, bhagavan, isvara, paramesvara, brahman, parabrahman.

When someone in India is called Bhagavan, what might that mean? Bhagavan Sri Rajneesh, Sri Swami Samarth, Sri Swami Suryanarayan... or even Sai Baba and Satya Sai Baba...

The whole area of translation is so fascinating - and so influential in the inevitable cross-cultural forays today.

What would have happened if Christ had been born in India? Would he have been able to reveal his identity as Son?

Which brings us once again to the question of the transition from description to explanation: it is not enough to use words; one has to determine the set of terms and relations of which it forms a part, and within which alone its proper meaning is fixed.

Against the background of his learning, Richard De Smet used to say that Brahman is perhaps a better word for translating God than Isvara. It is the Parabrahman, the nirguna Brahman of the Advaitic tradition, that might give us a proper equivalent finally.

But when I mentioned it in class some years ago, a girl pointed out to me that this kind of choice would unnecessarily privilege 'a particular community.' She happened to be a Christian girl of Dalit origin, and she brought to my notice this angle which I (and De Smet) had quite ignored. The many ramifications of translation besides the strictly metaphysical!

Natural or rational theology

If the separation of philosophy and theology had its (unwitting) origin in the piously Catholic Descartes' option to put all philosophy on the soundest possible footing, the canonization of natural or rational theology seems to have been done by Kant. Kant it was who excluded God from the reach of pure reason, and made place for him as a merely regulative idea or ideal... Kant it was who wrote of Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. And though Catholic seminaries have long been passing critical remarks about Kant's critical enterprise, they have also been unwittingly subscribing to his views by running courses under the name Natural Theology or Philosophical Theology or Philosophy of God...