Tarot Symbolism

The Number Six ~ VI LAMOVREVX ~ :

“Augustine does not use cupiditas and caritas to distinguish lust from love; he uses them to distinguish two loves. Both count as amor. The point is critical if we are to understand Augustine properly. Cupiditas is not a yielding to blind lust. It is human love seeking fulfillment—happiness—in a sphere that does not and cannot provide fulfillment, the sphere of mortal and transitory things. Since these things are subject to loss, they leave us vulnerable to loss and our love for them unavoidably tinged with fear. The social consequence . . . is that person is set against person, each perceiving the other as a threat to self; and the personal consequence is a demeaning of the self. Augustine’s cupiditas is not mere lust. It is a rendering of the hopeless fragility and desperate outcome (both for self and for society) of love’s search for fulfillment where fulfillment cannot be found. Certainly this love is flawed, morally, as ‘the root of all evil’; but it is to be understood, all the same, as nothing less than love: love loving the wrong thing and thus love entangled in the web of unhappiness that it has spun for itself.

“Caritas, too, is a rendering of love, a love no less intensely passionate than cupiditas. In this case, of course, love seeks fulfillment where it can be found. Its object is not subject to loss; and its love, therefore, is untouched by fear. What is distinctively human—the soul with its capacities to think, to reason, to know—is not demeaned, but brought out of its emotive subjection to lesser things and realized in its full value: knowing is the mode in which this love attains it object. And this love does not set person against person, but rather joins person with person in the common bond of shared love for a shared object. Thus caritas is distinguished from cupiditas as love fulfilled from love unfulfilled, not by any diminishment of passion or of pleasure. In fact, just because caritas is love seeking and attaining the object that does afford human happiness, it would be more than strange if it lacked all intensity in its seeking and all pleasure in its attainment.

“If we do not see, then, that Augustine converted the question of happiness into a question of two loves—two loves differentiated, not first in the lover, but first by the loved—we are in danger of misconstruing what he meant both by cupiditas and by caritas, and we are in danger, too, of misconstruing the cultural and theological tradition within which we still largely, if often unwittingly, delineate our own notions of human love and human happiness, for that tradition was decisively shaped by Augustine and the Augustinian view of love.”

Augustine Today, published by Eerdmans ($12.99), edited by Richard John Neuhaus.

|  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this