Book contents
- Spiritual Life
- Talking Philosophy
- Spiritual Life
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Philosophy and Religion in the Thought of Kierkegaard
- 2 De Consolatione Philosophiae
- 3 The real or the Real? Chardin or Rothko?
- 4 Love and Attention
- 5 Descartes’ Debt to Augustine
- 6 Visions of the Self in Late Medieval Christianity: Some Cross-Disciplinary Reflections
- 7 Refined and Crass Supernaturalism
- 8 Religious Imagination
- 9 Moral Values as Religious Absolutes
- 10 Revealing the Scapegoat Mechanism: Christianity after Girard
- 11 Philosophy vs. Mysticism: An Islamic Controversy
- 12 Non-Conceptuality, Critical Reasoning and Religious Experience: Some Tibetan Buddhist Discussions
- 13 ‘Know Thyself’: What Kind of an Injunction?
- 14 Facing Truths: Ethics and the Spiritual Life
- Index
- References
4 - Love and Attention
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 April 2024
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Book contents
- Spiritual Life
- Talking Philosophy
- Spiritual Life
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Philosophy and Religion in the Thought of Kierkegaard
- 2 De Consolatione Philosophiae
- 3 The real or the Real? Chardin or Rothko?
- 4 Love and Attention
- 5 Descartes’ Debt to Augustine
- 6 Visions of the Self in Late Medieval Christianity: Some Cross-Disciplinary Reflections
- 7 Refined and Crass Supernaturalism
- 8 Religious Imagination
- 9 Moral Values as Religious Absolutes
- 10 Revealing the Scapegoat Mechanism: Christianity after Girard
- 11 Philosophy vs. Mysticism: An Islamic Controversy
- 12 Non-Conceptuality, Critical Reasoning and Religious Experience: Some Tibetan Buddhist Discussions
- 13 ‘Know Thyself’: What Kind of an Injunction?
- 14 Facing Truths: Ethics and the Spiritual Life
- Index
- References
Summary
The matched pair ‘love’ and ‘attention’ is familiar to most of us from the essays in Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good. Although she tells us in that book that there is, in her view, no God in the traditional sense of that term, she provides accounts of art, prayer and morality that are religious. ‘Morality’, she tells us, ‘has always been connected with religion and religion with mysticism’ (Murdoch, 1970, p. 74). The connection here is love and attention: ‘Virtue is au fond the same in the artist as in the good man in that it is a selfless attention to nature’ (ibid. p. 41).
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- Information
- Spiritual Life , pp. 94 - 116Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2024
References
Augustine, . 1988. St. Augustine’s Christian Doctrine, trans. Rev. Prof. J. F. Shaw. The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, First Series, Vol. II. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns).Google Scholar
Nussbaum, Martha. 1986. The Fragility of Goodness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar
Gregory of Nyssa. 1979. ‘On Virginity’, trans. Moore and Wilson. The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. V. (Grand Rapids: Eerdmanns).Google Scholar
O’Donovan, O. 1980. The Problem of Self-Love in Augustine (New Haven and London: Yale University Press).Google Scholar
Ruddick, Sara. 1990. Maternal Thinking: Towards a Politics of Peace (London: The Women’s Press).Google Scholar
Taylor, Charles, 1989. Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).Google Scholar