All Things Shining by Hubert Dreyfus

Author:Hubert Dreyfus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press

ARISTOTLE’S DESCRIPTION OF the Prime Mover is that it moves all other beings by way of the attraction of its perfection. The last lines of The Paradiso describe the Christian version of the Greek Supreme Being taking control of Dante’s desire and will:

. . . I could feel my being turned . . . by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.19

The Dante who, thanks to the troubadours, found that the most important experience in his life was his love for an individual woman, has been drawn into the orbit of The Prime Mover. His individual will along with his love of Beatrice and his political commitments have been overwhelmed by the bliss of contemplating God. One might say Dante has been blissed out. While bliss wipes you out, joy makes you more intensely you. And in Dante’s world every joy is meaningless compared to the bliss of the beatific vision. “Bliss beyond bliss, all other joys transcending,” he says.20 Dante is ultimately absorbed into the love of all creatures for their Creator.

But is this really the way to a fulfilled existence? It seems more like the way to avoid a meaningful life rather than the way to attain one. Indeed, it might be a medieval form of nihilism; for it says that there is nothing in this life that has any meaning whatsoever—even Beatrice’s saving love or Dante’s deep political motivations are trivial compared with the love of God. It is here that Dante inadvertently shows us that the Greek metaphysics Aquinas is working with undermines the agape love we saw in the early Christianity of John and Paul. On the early Christian model one lives in the world with Jesus in you, and that means you live in the mood of joy not bliss, a mood that guides you to definite and directed action in the world of the Word made Flesh. The concept of the love of God is therefore ambiguous. In Dante’s world it turns out to mean the love of each of us for Aristotle’s Supreme Being, whereas in the Gospel it means Jesus’ love for each of us. In Dante’s final mystical merging there is no place for Jesus as an embodied object and paradigm of agape love. Dante’s final experience is merely that God’s radiance is “painted with man’s image.”21 Jesus is just a face, in Dante’s view, with no body beneath it to hold it up.

In sum, the medieval attempt to articulate Christianity in Aristotelian terms must fail. The negative message of the Inferno is phenomenologically apt: autonomy really does lead to active nihilism, since when all meaning originates with us nothing has authority over us or the power to move us. But, if we try to put the Christian love of an incarnate Jesus into Aristotelian terms we end up with a Supreme Being and a love so overwhelming and passive that it wipes out individuality and all meaningful differences. Dante’s unconditional commitment that has drawn him to

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