Agape and Bhakti with Bataille and Mark at Loyola and St. Francis. David L. Goicoechea

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СКАЧАТЬ all nine traits of its altruism, universality,

      eternality, unconditionality, childlikeness, celibacy,

      missionary love, purgatorial and love of love.

      The passion, death and resurrection of Jesus shows us

      how to love the other as more important than ourselves.

      This agape is the fulfilment of bhakti in all nine ways

      and lets us appreciate in the Bhagavad Gita

      the two great ways of loving God.

      Bataille brings all of this together by showing us

      love’s nine great secret things in sex, death, religion,

      art, sovereignty, transgression, sacrifice,

      violence, and the economy of the gift.

      Graduate School

      From the Seminary to Loyola of Chicago

      After being in the seminary for nine years

      I still had to confess the sin of masturbation.

      But then I met and fell in love with Jane

      and soon I said to myself

      “How cleansed and purified I feel.”

      I had gone through the first mystical stage

      of purgation and now I was ready for illumination.

      One night I awakened from a dream about sex

      and I just thought of my dear Janie

      and the temptation fled away.

      I knew that I would love her forever

      and that I could be pure forever just like

      Dante and the courtly lovers of the Middle Ages.

      Ironically now that I could be pure

      my confessor asked me to leave the seminary

      because a priest should not be falling in love.

      Jane was going to Northwestern University

      in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago

      so I applied to the philosophy graduate program

      at Loyola of Chicago and was accepted.

      By the time I got to Loyola in January

      Jane already had a real and normal boyfriend.

      So we had some lovely meetings but I was free

      to study philosophy which all seemed so real.

      It seemed that at the heart of each philosophy

      was a philosophy of love and I just loved

      studying Plato especially his Symposium

      and his Phaedrus which explained sublimation.

      Aristotle, the Stoics, the Medievals and

      the Postmodernists each had a new philosophy of love.

      From Loyola to the College of St. Francis

      Father Hecht SJ, the chair of the philosophy department at Loyola,

      took excellent care of me by giving me a scholarship that took care

      of everything from tuition, to room and board, to all of my books.

      He introduced me to Mr. Kelling who took me to live with him

      in a wonderful hotel right next to the downtown Loyola Tower.

      Then he told me that they needed a philosophy teacher at St. Francis

      College in Juliet, Illinois about fifty miles south of Chicago.

      The wonderful sisters of St. Francis took me as their colleague

      and after having lived in a community of men for nine years

      I was now in a community of most beautiful ladies who had

      the highest ideas of holy love and wisdom as they were educated

      and then taught others in grade school, high school and college.

      I could teach whatever I wanted to learn and we always thought

      together about the Augustinian, Thomistic and Franciscan philosophies.

      I took a course on Plotinus at Loyola from Fr. Nurnberger SJ

      and I thought deeply about Augustine’s reflections on him.

      Augustine’s motto came to be “credo ut intellegam,”

      “I believe that I might understand,”

      and that took him beyond mystical monism

      to the gift of faith in the dignity of all persons as children of God.

      The Franciscan nuns loved making clear how the Franciscans

      built upon this and how Scotus showed the uniqueness of each person

      and how Ockham showed how we can never know the complex person

      but how our faith can let us love all as did St. Francis.

      As a youth in the seminary I read the works of St. John of the Cross.

      The active meditative night of the soul and the passive contemplative

      night of the soul fit right in with Augustine fulfilling Plotinus

      and with the Franciscan extension of love to all of God’s creatures.

      I was so fortunate to be able to learn with the beautiful Sisters

      and the beautiful students and for nine years absence made

      my heart grow fonder then all of a sudden presence gifted me

      with the heavenly delight of the other half of my soul for ever and ever.

      From Loyola and St. Francis to the Phenomenology Workshop

      In 1964, Herbert Spiegelberg got a grant and was able to invite

      ten philosophers for a two-week seminar on phenomenology.

      I was one of seven Americans and John Mayer, who founded the

      philosophy СКАЧАТЬ