Maximus the Confessor, in his early Ambiguum 7 1069C-D writes, attempting to refute Origen’s theory of pre-existent minds that fell away from God out of a desire to exist for themselves:
[I]f our opponents should say that intellects could have adhered to the divine goodness, but did not, because they wanted to experience something different, then the beautiful would of necessity be loved not for itself, but because of what had been learned from its opposite. That would mean the beautiful is loved for some other reason than that it is itself lovable by nature. What is not good and lovable in itself, and does not draw all movement toward it simply because it is good and lovable, cannot properly be the beautiful. (tr. Blowers, Wilken 2003)
In order to love something, one must know it. Ferdinand de Saussure, in his Course on General Linguistics went to great lengths to explain how meaning, and hence knowledge, is produced by the play of signifiers operating in a network of differentiation. Meaning, as the post-structuralists were fond of saying, is thereby endlessly deferred. Taken to its extreme (I won’t say illogical) conclusion, this attitude leads to such relativist epistemological stances as ‘uncanny’ deconstruction. Knowledge is considered a mere construct, open to endless revision, with the consequence of a complete annihilation of meaning. When we approach the Absolute, however, we have left behind the network of differentiation that makes linguistic comprehension possible. Yet who will deny that we, as creatures of God, by necessity approach the Absolute from the uneasy ground of our indeterminate primordial state, poised between being and non-being? In order to know anything, much less love it, we must create a system of intelligibility derived from a reference-point. That reference-point is our active intellect (nous which, as the Church Fathers held, is that part of our soul most akin to God.
Plato, and the entire Platonic tradition in antiquity, held that like always desires like, and that to love something means that one desires to possess the object of one’s love. In the Symposium (206 ff.), Diotima explains to Socrates that the lover’s desire to possess his or her beloved is really a desire for immortality; for erotic love produces an overwhelming passion that results in procreation. The desire to procreate points to an even deeper lack, i.e., the inability to achieve immortality on one’s own. The knowledge of our immanent demise produces a longing for perpetuity which is only satisfied, on the biological level, by procreation. One seeks to live on, if only by proxy, in the continued life of one’s offspring. This is not, as John Zizioulas has pointed out, a survival of the person, but a continuation of the species – necessary in itself, but not sufficient to fill the existential void opened up by the knowledge of one’s finitude. The erotic lover, then, is really only a lover of the body, i.e., of that which is perishable, universal (as species) and therefore opposed to the uniqueness of the person. A philosopher, one who desires wisdom, does not seek personal immortality, but the eternal, changeless, undying Beauty itself, the divine source of all that is. The philosopher, the lover of wisdom, is “pregnant with beauty,” as Diotima puts it, for s/he is akin to the Good-Beyond-Being, which is Beauty itself, not merely an instance of beauty in the ever-decaying realm of time and matter.
The image of God within us, our nous, is the source of our desire for the Good-Beyond-Being; it is also that part of us which is capable of being perfected, of attaining likeness to God (homoiôsis theô). … TBC ...
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