Re-coming

Intensio et remissio formarum - we must have remissio formarum, at least when we sleep. And the dynamic story of grace appears when he's talking about charity - about whether it diminishes without practice or simply does not grow - and what would be the conditions for actually diminishing or crushing it or enabling it to remain. There is a possibility of maintenance of charity insofar as it is a habit but habit as power is not even third actuality.

Essentially what I have to do is present the human being as one thing. One girl. I am a girl. It is kind of weird to say that because I am always thinking of myself as "man" because that is the way translations happen in philosophy. But I am "girl". Anyway. I meant goal. Distraction. I have to write a monolithic - a monastic story almost - in order to make sense of sorrow in the way that I intend - taking the approach of the cause of sorrow being a desire for unity. It is difficult to write a monastic story of the human being when we experience ourselves as immersed in multiplicity. When even we are supposed to be in multiplicity - when we are called to find God through multiplicity. It is not so simple as to say that we are "distracted" by the things of the world because "the things of God are clearly seen in what he has made." It wasn't a cruel joke, or even something that we have to control and conquer quickly. It is supposed to be a pleasant and unique learning experience for all of us. We are beings that are made to come to perfection through multiplicity because this creates a specific kind of perfection that does not exist in this way except through us because God has wanted it so. But whence comes the "use" and the useful things becoming ends? What does Augustine say - does he say "useful" or "intermediate" - I don't know. But the problem is not starting there - the problem is staying there. And it is not a clear thing when we have outworn our stay - because in one sense we never outgrow our stay until we die. In the first sense - where we actually in a way outwear our stay - it is advancing from "virtue to virtue" - when we know the possibility or at least suspect the possibility of better things within our reach it becomes sheer pusillanimity, cowardice, laziness - acedia . Now the not-suspecting is the first quasi-moral area - becuase not everyone is equal or they don't respond equallly or any conjunction of these two or more factors. The second moral area is what you do with your knowledge - and sometimes your knowledge or your suspicion so far exceeds your capacities that it pains you - you don't know how you are going to get there - you become overwhelmingly conscious of your defects in light of what you want - you don't have experience or have not recognized the providential help of God to "all good things" - chief among them the high things that you pine so devastatingly for, chiefly things that make you capable of being a more intimate "friend" wiht God - I guess. That's what wisdom means for me - communion with God. And secondarily the desire to replicate. To reproduce for others. To hold the book of wisdom before other people's eyes. To point out bridges that they may cross. To give umbrellas in the rain, soup to the weary, warmth to the weeping.

I am able to explain more now than I was then. So what constitutes this appetite that makes the intensio of the defect something that is "sensed" or "felt" without being spelled out, and what is it about sorrow incidentally that impels one to enter into a diagnostic process - experimental process even of different remedies until the right one is alighted upon - or exerting oneself in therapies until one finds a medicine and the therapies actually then become useful because the imbalance was specifically directed at and the therapies one was using had developed other health habits in the meantime so that one is, generally, better off than the one who had just used medicine in the first place without engaging in therapeutic exercises.

So what is it about this appetite that is only sensed - that in a way points to the seeds of man's telos by mourning its absence? Its insufficiency? And what conditions would make it possible for such a sorrow to be the occasion of a real diagnostic, treating, and therapeutic process, instead of something to which false remedies and superstitious therapies are applied, or something which is ignored completely or drowned in a series of feel-good drugs?
And to what extent would someone who got sick end up being healthier than the "decently healthy" because we see these things happening even with people using art for bodily health?

So essentially I would be advocating a sickness and fatigue of the appetite under certain conditions as a most advantageous way of healing and even gaining better health than one would have had otherwise. This is the subconcious thesis that demands continually, over and over, to be reasserted.
The question that me as the detached per se -influenced observer would ask is why sorrow? Why wouldn't the positive way be better? I am convinced of the universality of sorrow. I don't know of any human being who has not suffered. I think this is the way we come into the world - i think this is the condition that prompts theologians to work in the conceptual terms of "original sin' - of "culpa' and "poena". This is the per accidens - but if you consider original sin a per accidens - we are all universally, without exception, living in this per accidens. That is essentially what Original Sin is about. We are there, but per accidens having difficulties which per se we shouldn't have.

And what convinced me that I wasn't completely sick, Kierkegaardian, whatever you want to think, is that Aquinas himself says "from the very fact that a man mourns the delay of eternal life, or repents of his sin, he thereby merits that eternal life". He would not say that if it essentially involved a "sin of the apprehension or of the appetite". There is a yearning for perfection - for God's will, if you like - that we can experience passionately - and only passionately, because it is something that exceeds our knowing capacity, although getting more "hints" of it only makes one more inclined to long passionately for it.

But this is already loading my thesis too theologically. How do I identify that intermediate space of sorrow? How do I stop it - take a movie, as it were, of several species of extended moments of a passion?

Without bringing in theology, how do I describe myself? For that is essentially what I am trying to do subconsciously right now. And I must pull away from that. Grace builds on nature - grace imitates nature - there are things wholly in nature that i can work with. God, please help me! I use grace to understand nature when I ought to be using nature to understand grace. When Aristotle puts the end of man in comptemplation/political life/undecide, he s doing someething that Aquinas can find appropriate for his own project.

Then, my object will be to describe felicity/beatitude using two poles - the part of the enjoyment of it - which is an intellectual thing - the part of the object, which is God - I must be able to say that philosophicallly - and the part of the means of access - or means of enjoyment - which must also be through love. Obviously I am having problems with contmeplation and love - they are the same thing. I have to figure out the distinction and the identity of the intellect and will better. Task number one. But I can't leave it now - this is how I ruin my thesis - I have to start finishing a question when I identify it instead of moving on - this is how I get extended bad work.
The intellect is that capacity for "regarding" - the "regaring" is stronger than "containing" even with respect to God as to himself - he does not know himself so as to "contain" himself but so that "nothing is hidden" from him. We know God by direct vision then - nothing of him would be hidden to us on his part but only on our part - (in a way like now but not really like now) - how does one distinguish between love and regardng - we are loving regarding - it is on eaction that is desribed doubly - when you look into the eyes of someone you love, are you looking or are you communing/loving? There is disentanglable aspect there. We experience the two as distinct because we aren't faced with the univesrality that is God - we get his perfections piecemeal in images of him so that we aren't overpowered by them, but indeed they are presented sensibly to us so that we have to in a way reconstruct what they represent - and this increases our love, but the knowative part of us would then in a way precede the adquate love, although the love would also precede in a way in the absence of knowledge - but the second love is a much more complete one than the first - although the first was enough to initiate and hold the relationship - to create the community - to create the power for perfect relationship. But when God in himself is presented to us, there would be no experience of such a division in us - although the two powers would be distinct, they woul be united so greatly in their unified object that we should experience ourselves as a unity - glory - everything meeting in their perfection in the object which flows down and unites everything else distinctly as one. But there would still be "learning" and "teaching" only it would be painless on both sides.

But such a unified experience of ourselves could only be gotten, it can be imagined, through contemplation - through something that satisfies the best an highest of ourselves - someone I am sure makes this argument somehow.

But "unity" in this sense is another way to perceive "telos" - the "craving for unity" is a cause of sorrow. But - unity must be related to perfection of essence as well as the disposition of powers from an essence - there are levels of saying "unity" - one thing - one thing one within itself in that all its potentialities are actualized - something that is never quite possible here in an absolute sense.

So. To get at this, perhaps the Causes of sorrow would be the best way to get into the experiential side of it - "present evil" is the first thing it notes.
The second is "desire for the good".
The third is "craving for unity" (getting more metaphysical and universal - the "good" can be general, but not general in the specific sense that "unity" is - i.e. a disposition and perfection of the subject).
The fourth is "an irresistible power". I was moving through these before quickly assuming the first three were subjective - emphasizing the subjective part of sorrow (with connotations for a relativistic status that I thought could make the right gateway for therapy - I guess I was going to be Stoic after all).
But the fourth - maybe the order is one of discernment - it is only after going through the whole process of taking the sorrow apart - find out that one a) experiences "something bad" b) wants "something good" c) wants one's own completeness and perfection
in light of this that one can see what the irresistible power is and begin to negotiate it. And then it is no longer irresistible.

But much, MUCH less dismissive than a "therapy" of sorrow which would be understood as a "therapy of perception". Even if it is all about perception - there is a real ravage in the personality that must be treated from within because in the reflexive aspect of it - what lies in each negotiation is the wholeness of the person - not just "their sadness" or "their disease" - they are present at every part - it is more than a doctor bargains for when treating a gangrenous limb, for example. Sorrow is never something localized, in this sense - it attacks every pleasure - and the closer it is to the cognitive seat - the closer it is to the interior, the more intense the reverberations of every movement. This is why you get things like shame growing symbiotically with sorrow - the more intellectual a sorrow is, the more dangerous it is, while I nevertheless want to say the more admirable it is. If one is sorrowful concerning intellectual things, it means first of all, that one has an intellect. One might be wrong in how one is sorrowful, but if one is not, it means that one is more perceptive than one might be regarding the "evil" "quality" (for its not really a quality) of what one is sad about. There is more that is wounded, there is more at work that can produce more and be nobler when well. Also the fact that one can be sad abotu intellectual things means that one has built up a capacity for relating intellectual matters with oneself - one has a unity such that the passions follow in a place in which it takes habits for them to even be familiar with.
Again this is all supposing that one is rightly sad about something.
But even here, pointing out the admirablenss - there is a mode and measure in intellectual sadness for it to be something virtuous. When would it have the character of a disease? And what do I mean by intellectual sadness? Supposedly all sadnesses are those which are accompnaied by bodily momvements. And suffering and loving divine things can happen without a bbodily movmeent. What about sorow? There is a displeasure that occurs in virtuous mercy. Does displeasure involve a bodily movement? Mercy would be a special case because it would be from a "vantage point" - so to speak - having compassion, for example, is not the same as suffering.
The defect that one is suffering makes it a passion. It is when one is sad about the present and wants a future good that it about "passion" - it cannot not be about passion because of the "remissio' - the "intensio" of the defect is what we are pointing out.
This is why sorrow is about present evil - irresistible power - sorrow is not properly per se about the "delay" of "eternal life" - sorrow can be said of that - but it would not be the most passionate version of sorrow - which is about present evil - which concerns delights that one has already known than those which one looks forward to. Neither is sorrow properly about repentance, because repentance already constitutes a kidn of pleasure insofar as those things are passed - I have been known to repent unmitigatedly, not becuase I didn't think God was unmerciful, for I had every hope in his welcoming me, but because I could not conceive any good in myself even in the act of repudiation. All I could see was defect. And thus I did not have enough pleasure in repentance to move even to God's open arms, because I was not living the truth completley in that I could not see "good" where "good" was, but only saw places to accuse.
So while he says somehwere that repentance is not a kind of special sorrow because it is about one's proper evil it is still not hte most special kind of sorrow because it regards an evil that is now under the aspect of "past". And neither is "moruning the delay' properly passionate sorrow because it doesn't concern what has already been enjoyed - it is enduring the present - but not suffering the loss of what it has not known - but awaiting the arrival of what it is tensed toward but has not been yanked from. So this would not tend to excess in and of itself, particulaarly because it is mixed with the pleasure of love and anticipation. Neither would repentance (unless it saw the evil as "present" as I continued to do) oppress because it regards evil as past in which 'past' aspect pleasure consists.

SO SORROW ABOUT THIS THING IRRESISTIBLY CRUSHING ME NOW is that "intensio defectus" that I want - it is the one that is crushing life - it is the one that requires remedies NOW.
I saved my "positive" sorrows with considerably less difficulty than I thought it would take. Deo Gratias!