The Song of Songs and the Eros of God

The Song of Songs and the Eros of God PDF Author: Edmée Kingsmill
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191573590
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
Modern biblical scholarship interprets the Song as a collection of love lyrics. For Edmée Kingsmill, on the contrary, the essence of the Song is mystical. A principal concern of this study, however, is to uncover the relationship between the 117 verses of the Song and those biblical books to which they point. Beneath the metaphors a network of allusions is being woven, conveying a picture opposite to that we find in the prophets who, confronted with the continual 'adultery' of Israel, poured forth their condemnations with unwearying passion. In dramatic contrast, the Song presents a paradisal picture: 'For, lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear in the land, and the time of singing is come' (Song 2: 11-12). Thus, in presenting the ideal, the intention of the Song's author is shown to be encouragement. The inclusion of this poem in the biblical canon is understood, therefore, to be central to the purpose of the biblical literature: to bring all people to love the God of love. The book is in two parts. The first and longer part is concerned with themes, including the relationship of the Song to the early Jewish mystical literature. The second part is a short commentary intended for the reader interested in the text as much as in the related questions to which the text gives rise.

The Song of Eros

The Song of Eros PDF Author:
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809386844
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 128

Book Description
This collection of new translations of eighty poems provides a pleasant, thought-provoking reminder of love’s vagaries as captured through the wit, charm, and insight of the master poets of antiquity. All the emotions and experiences associated with love—rejection, infatuation, ecstasy, desperation, loneliness—are rendered accessible to contemporary readers through this lively, modern, yet faithful English translation of works that date from the seventh century B.C.to the sixth century A.D.Illustrations accompany the poetry of Plato, Sappho, Stratto, Meleagros, and others, capturing both the flavor of the age and the theme of the texts.

Eros

Eros PDF Author: Bruce S Thornton
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 042998040X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

Book Description
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Sexuality is a controversial book that lays bare the meanings Greeks gave to sex. Contrary to the romantic idealization of sex dominating our culture, the Greeks saw eros as a powerful force of nature, potentially dangerous and in need of control by society: Eros the Destroyer, not Cupid the Insipid, is what fired the Greek imagination. The destructiveness of eros can be seen in Greek imagery and metaphor, and in their attitudes toward women and homosexuals. Images of love as fire, disease, storms, insanity, and violence—top 40 song clichés for us—locate eros among the unpredictable and deadly forces of nature. The beautiful Aphrodite embodies the alluring danger of sex, and femmes fatales like Pandora and Helen represent the risky charms of female sexuality. And homosexuality typifies for the Greeks the frightening power of an indiscriminate appetite that threatens the stability of culture itself. In Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek Seualily, Bruce Thornton offers a uniquely sweeping and comprehensive account of ancient sexuality free of currently fashionable theoretical jargon and pretensions. In its conclusions the book challenges the distortions of much recent scholarship on Greek sexuality. And throughout it links the wary attitudes of the Greeks to our present-day concerns about love, sex, and family. What we see, finally, are the origins of some of our own views as well as a vision of sexuality that is perhaps more honest and mature than our own dangerous illusions.

Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature

Eros and Music in Early Modern Culture and Literature PDF Author: Claire Bardelmann
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 9780367666606
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Book Description
What is the relationship between Eros and music? How does the intersection of love and music contribute to define the perimeter of Early Modern love? The Early Moderns hold parallel discourses on the metaphysical doctrines of love and music as theories of harmony. Statements of love as music, of music as love, and of both as harmonic ideals, are found across a wide range of cultural contexts, highlighting the understanding of love as a cultural construct. The book assesses the complexity of cultural discourses on this linkage of Eros and music. The ambivalence of music as an erotic agent is enacted in the controversy over dancing and reflected in the ubiquitous symbolism of music instruments. Likewise, the trivialization of musical imagery in madrigal lyrics and love poetry highlights a sense of degradation and places the love-music relationship at the meeting point of two epistemes. The book also shows the symbolic deployment of the intertwined ideas of love and music in the English epyllion, and offers close readings of Shakespeare's poems The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. The book is the first to propose an overview of the theoretical, cultural and poetical intersections of Eros and music in Early Modern England. It discusses the connections in a richly interdisciplinary manner, drawing on a wealth of primary material which includes rhetoric, natural philosophy, educational literature, medicine, music theory and musical performance, dance books, performance politics, Protestant pamphlets and sermons, and emblem books.

Eros, Unbroken

Eros, Unbroken PDF Author: Annie Kim (Lawyer)
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781944585372
Category : American poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Art. Music. Winner of the 2019 Washington Prize. Kim explores to devastating effect the complicity between art, intimacy, and violence. Weaving contemporary meditations with an ongoing dialogue between two musicians in 18th century Spain on the nature of friendship and creativity, Kim's brave new collection explores our nature--to live both broken and whole. Says Peg Alford Purcell, Here is charged beauty, the rich and generous consciousness in which nothing is forgiven, everything laid bare. The lyrical and narrative genius of these poems interweaves two voices, one that's contemporary and autobiographical and one in the persona of an eighteenth-century castrato opera singer.

Music & Eros

Music & Eros PDF Author: Hans-Jürgen Döpp
Publisher: Parkstone International
ISBN: 1780429274
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Music is not only a pleasure for the ear, it is the echo of the heartbeat, breath and desire. Professor Döpp revisits music as the catalyst for dance, love and sex. From the music sheet to dance and through instruments, music is the expression of our profound desires and most violent passions. The text revisits the history of music and art from the dances of the first men to pop and electronic music and through belly dance. Music and Eros take us on a time-travelling journey to discover the interaction of music and sex.

The Power of Divine Eros

The Power of Divine Eros PDF Author: A. H. Almaas
Publisher: Shambhala Publications
ISBN: 0834829134
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Two innovative spiritual teachers show how to use desire and passion—eros—as a gateway to realizing our fullest potential What do desire and passion have to do with our spiritual journey? According to A. H. Almaas and Karen Johnson, they are an essential part of it. Conventional wisdom cautions that desire and passion are opposed to the spiritual path—that engaging in desire will take you more into the world, into egoic life. And for most people, that is exactly what happens. We naturally tend to experience wanting in a self-centered way. The Power of Divine Eros challenges the view that the divine and the erotic are separate. When we open to the energy, aliveness, spontaneity, and zest of erotic love, we will find it inseparable from the realm of the holy and sacred. When this is understood, desire and passion become a gateway to wholeness and to realizing our full potential. Through guided exercises, the authors reveal how our relationships become opportunities on the spiritual journey to express ourselves authentically, to relate with openness, and to discover dynamic inner realms with another person. Through embodying the energy of eros, each of us can learn to be fully real and alive in all of our interactions.

Love and its Critics

Love and its Critics PDF Author: Michael Bryson
Publisher: Open Book Publishers
ISBN: 1783743514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 380

Book Description
This book is a history of love and the challenge love offers to the laws and customs of its times and places, as told through poetry from the Song of Songs to John Milton’s Paradise Lost. It is also an account of the critical reception afforded to such literature, and the ways in which criticism has attempted to stifle this challenge. Bryson and Movsesian argue that the poetry they explore celebrates and reinvents the love the troubadour poets of the eleventh and twelfth centuries called fin’amor: love as an end in itself, mutual and freely chosen even in the face of social, religious, or political retribution. Neither eros nor agape, neither exclusively of the body, nor solely of the spirit, this love is a middle path. Alongside this tradition has grown a critical movement that employs a 'hermeneutics of suspicion', in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase, to claim that passionate love poetry is not what it seems, and should be properly understood as worship of God, subordination to Empire, or an entanglement with the structures of language itself – in short, the very things it resists. The book engages with some of the seminal literature of the Western canon, including the Bible, the poetry of Ovid, and works by English authors such as William Shakespeare and John Donne, and with criticism that stretches from the earliest readings of the Song of Songs to contemporary academic literature. Lively and enjoyable in its style, it attempts to restore a sense of pleasure to the reading of poetry, and to puncture critical insistence that literature must be outwitted. It will be of value to professional, graduate, and advanced undergraduate scholars of literature, and to the educated general reader interested in treatments of love in poetry throughout history.

Cupid and Psyche

Cupid and Psyche PDF Author: Apuleius
Publisher: Phoemixx Classics Ebooks
ISBN: 3986774955
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 45

Book Description
Cupid and Psyche Apuleius - Cupid and Psyche is a story from the Latin novel Metamorphoses, also known as The Golden Ass, written in the 2nd century AD by Apuleius. It concerns the overcoming of obstacles to the love between Psyche (Soul or Breath of Life) and Cupid (Desire), and their ultimate union in a sacred marriage.

Eros and Allegory

Eros and Allegory PDF Author: Denys Turner
Publisher: Liturgical Press
ISBN:
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
Monks and priests - male celibates - have for centuries described, expressed, and celebrated their love for God in the language of sex, most prolifically and characteristically in a thousand-year tradition of theological commentaries on the scriptural Song of Songs. As their allegory for the intimate love between God and man, they chose the most intense human model available - erotic love. After analyzing the tradition, its logic, and its imagery, Denys Turner provides translations of a dozen medieval commentaries never before available in English. From Gregory the Great in the sixth century to John of the Cross in the sixteenth, lovers of God speak in their own words across a thousand years a message as compelling today as it was in the Middle Ages.