Contemplating the Divine
Contemplating the Divine
This chapter focuses on Descartes’s more general articulation of our reliance on God, who alone, he says, can offer us continuing certainty. Descartes is struck by wonder at the beauty of God’s ‘immense light’, even if his own understanding is ‘shrouded in darkness’. In contemplating the divine, Descartes needs to come to terms with dramatic paradigms of necessity and contingency. Here, we consider Descartes’s statements about eternal truths. Like Virgil’s Jupiter, God simultaneously creates laws and sees them fulfilled. Contemporary debates about whether we can ‘univocally’ conceive of the divine and the human also return us, in this chapter, to themes of conversion, humility, and an attention that is strengthened even as it recognizes its own limits. Throughout, we observe cross-currents of association between philosophy, patristics, and poetics.
Keywords: eternal truths, Augustine, univocity, Antoine Arnauld, conversion
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
