Thursday, October 10, 2013

No Insolence of Satiety

For the life of the Supreme Being is love, seeing that the Beautiful is necessarily lovable to those who recognize it, and the Deity does recognize it, and so this recognition becomes love, that which He recognizes being essentially beautiful. This True Beauty the insolence of satiety cannot touch ; and no satiety interrupting this continuous capacity to love the Beautiful, God's life will have its activity in love; which life is thus in itself beautiful, and is essentially of a loving disposition towards the Beautiful, and receives no check to this activity of love. In fact, in the Beautiful no limit is to be found so that love should have to cease with any limit of the Beautiful.

St. Macrina the Younger in St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection. In one of my intro-level courses today I am discussing Neoplatonism, particularly Christian Neoplatonism, in preparation for Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy.