Optativo Passado (Henry Purcell)

Do seu poema de nome 'Henry Purcell', em honra do epónimo, Gerard Manley Hopkins comenta:

‘“Have fair fallen.” Have is the sing. imperative (or optative if you like) of the past, a thing possible and actual both in logic and grammar, but naturally a rare one. As in the 2nd pers. we say “Have done” or in making appointments “Have had your dinner beforehand”, so one can say in the 3rd pers. not only “Fair fall” of what is present or future but also “Have fair fallen” of what is past. The same thought (which plays a great part in my own mind and action) is more clearly expressed in the last stanza but one of the Eurydice, where you remarked it." 1883.

A estrofe a que ele se refere é a seguinte:

And the prayer thou hearst me making
Have, at the awful overtaking,
    Heard; have heard and granted
Grace that day grace was wanted.

The Loss of the Eurydice

Religião ∧ Atheísmo ∧ Fé

Paul Ricœur. Religion, Atheism, and Faith in The Religions Significance of Atheism (com Alasdair MacIntyre), Columbia University Press (1969).

The subtitle I have chosen — "Religion, Atheism, and Faith" —expresses my intention fairly well. I have placed "atheism" in an intermediary position; for I wish to consider it as both a break and a link between religion of faith. I am aware of the difficulties of this viewpoint. We must not take for granted the distinction between religion and faith for granted. Nor should we use atheism as an indiscreet form of apologetics to save faith from the disaster of religion, an artful deception designed to regain from one hand what the other hand has been forced to yield.

Christus Heideggerianus

Alasdair MacIntyre. The Fate of Theism (The Debate about God: Victorian Relevance and Contemporary Irrelevance). in The Religions Significance of Atheism (com Paul Ricœur), Columbia University Press (1969).

Bultmann's revision of the Christian doctrine of salvation consists of identifying the Christian choice between redemption and damnation with the Heideggerian choice between authentic and inauthentic existence. Kamlah, Bultmann's student, has in turn argued that, if Bultmann's identification is correct, then Jesus Christ is important only because he happened to anticipate Heidegger in uttering a true doctrine, the truth of which, and our ground for believing in the truth of which, is quite independent of the truth of Christian orthodoxy.

I Am The Very Model of a Biblical Philologist

secundum ordinem angelorum

Moshe Barasch. Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea. New York University Press (1992)

Why, one cannot help asking, is John of Damascus so interested in angels or in souls? He is here trying once again to justify the icon. What is the significance of these spiritual beings in his doctrine of sacred images? It is not difficult to find the answer. The "spiritual creature" — whether angel, demon, or soul — offers "empirical" proof, as it were, that the image can reach further than the tangible, material reality. In the very existence of the "spiritual being" the apparently absolute connection between the tangible and the visible, the heavily material and the visually perceptible, is denied; the human eye can perceive what dwells beyond the limits of matter. The very existence of the angel, the demon, and the soul constitutes a sanction of the spiritual image.

Crucificação no regaço do Pai. (Cristo Crucificado, Seraph, Alma de Cristo)

— Tu es sacerdos in æternum.

Ícono russo. Inícios do séc. XVII. @ Moscovo, Museu de Ícones de Recklinghausen

objectivum transcendens

Moshe Barasch. Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea. New York University Press (1992)

[John of Damascus] wishes to show that the bodily and the visible are not inseparably linked to each other; they can, and should, be separated. In fact, in the domain of the transcendent there are beings that are altogether immaterial and yet visible. These bodiless beings can be visually experienced, without our having to ascribe to them a material nature. If they can be seen, it follows, they can also be represented in a painted image. 

In John's thought, it should be kept in mind, the transcendent world, the domain of the bodiless and the invisible, is neither vague nor ill defined; it has not the general psychological quality of blurred outlines that, since Romanticism, this notion so frequently carries. On the contrary, the transcendent world is characterized by a clearly outlined order that we can retrace. Speaking in human terms we could say that the nature of the transcendent world is, in a sense, "objective."

ὑπὲρ μίμησιν

Moshe Barasch. Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea. New York University Press (1992)

For centuries it had been taken for granted (mainly in the culture of Antiquity) that the aim of painting is the representation of what can be visually perceived in the world around us. In defining painting as the rendering of perceived nature, one also set the limits of the art. It is only what we actually see that can become the subject matter of painting. But if you believe that the icon shows what otherwise cannot be seen, you enlarge the scope of painting as compared to the views held earlier. A new dimension is now incorporated, as it were, into the domain of the image.

o paradoxo byzantino

Moshe Barasch. Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea. New York University Press (1992)

In commenting on an early Christian text, John [of Damascus] explicitly says, "Devils are in fear of saints, and flee from their shadow. A shadow is an image; therefore I make images to terrify the demons." Here John's intellectual conscience seems to have awakened. He continues, as if speaking to himself, "If you say that only intellectual worship is worthy of God, then take away all corporeal things: lights, the fragrance of incense, prayer made with the voice." Adding an example, he comes back to the image, and quite specifically to the relationship between archetype and copy in the image of the divine: "Purple cloth by itself is a simple thing, and so is silk, and a cloak is woven from both. But if the king should put it on, the cloak receives honor from the honor given to him who wears it." Note that the cloak receives honor not because it means the king, or reminds us of the kind, but rather because the king has worn it, because there was some kind of bodily meeting and thus a flow of subtle matter, as it were, from the king himself into the cloak. 

The constant interaction between conceptual reflection of a highly intellectual character and the almost tangible reification of bodiless, spiritual beings is typical of John's complex personality. A modern student may find it difficult to reconcile the sophisticated distinctions made in John's theological views of the image with the crude beliefs in its miracle-working power. How can a thinker, one cannot help asking, who subtly unveiled the complex dialectical nature of the image as a spiritual revelation of the invisible also believe that the painted icon drives off almost tangible demons? This incongruence, as I have said, is a pervasive characteristic of John's thought, and perhaps also of Byzantine culture as a whole. It is found in the reflection on many themes.

yet in my flesh I will see God

Moshe Barasch. Icon: Studies in the History of an Idea. New York University Press (1992)

Sceptics and philosophers of the critical tradition, who so violently denounce idolatry and even the production of idols, seem hardly to have asked in detail why these images are made, and what it is that moves people to making and worshiping them. Philo [of Alexandria] seems occasionally to have departed from this inherited limitation; he did wonder, at least from time to time, what might be the reason for such production. In one of his most interesting essays, On Drunkenness, we read,

Man, who is devoid of any consideration, who is blinded as to his mind, by which alone the living God is comprehensible, does, by means of that mind, never see anything anywhere, but sees all the bodies that are in the outward world by his own outward senses, which he looks upon as the causes of all things which exist. 

On which account, beginning to make gods for himself, he has filled the world with images and statues, and innumerable other representations, made out of all kinds of materials, fashioned by painters and statuaries, whom the lawgiver banished to a distance from his state.

Philo uses passionate language to describe humanity's desire to see God. Of Moses he says that he "so insatiably desires to behold" God that "he will never cease from urging his desire," and though he "is aware that he desires a matter which is difficult of attainment, or rather which is wholly unattainable, he still strives on." But people who do not have the spiritual powers of Moses, we understand, attempt to substitute images of their own making for the true God they cannot attain. People, then, make idols not simply out of stupidity, but because of profound desire that will forever remain unfulfilled. In modern parlance one could say that images are the product of humanity's tragic limitation.

o que te os deuses dão, dão no começo

W. J. T. Mitchell. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. UCP (1986)

Perhaps a simpler way of saying all this is just to note that æsthetics is Marx's blind spot, the one major philosophical topic that remained relatively undeveloped in his writing, the one topic on which his opinions tend to be conventional and derivative. Lessing, Diderot, Goethe, and Hegel were his aesthetic mentors, and however much he might quarrel with their idealism in the sphere of political economy, his fragmentary opinions on the arts reflect basic agreement with the Enlightenment idealization of art. That is why æsthetics and the Marxist tradition have always confronted each other in a state of mutual embarrassment. Marxism is embarrassed because, if it follows the logic of Marx's economic thought, it seems inevitably to fall into a vulgar reduction of the arts to mere commodities, or to "mechanical reflections" in the camera obscure of ideology. If it follows the idealism of Marx's actual opinions about the arts, sustained by the humanism of his early writings, then "Marxist æsthetics" seems to become soft, neo-Hegelian, and un-Marxian.