10/1/07

I may never understand love because Commentary charges to view its content


So I see this article that looks interesting in my agglomerator and it is by some fella named Soloveitchik. So I go to read it and the magazine wants from me twenty bucks.

Okay so I read the abstract for free and say to myself that we are seventy one years past Nygren's book of 1936 so what value could there be in this article anyway? But maybe just because I am too cheap, so now I will never understand love.
Of Priests, Rabbis, and Wives
Meir Soloveichik
October 2007
Abstract –

When Benedict XVI issued his first papal encyclical on Christmas day last year, it was greeted by a fair amount of surprise. The new pope, an outspoken theologian of a pronounced conservative bent, had not chosen to write on an obviously headline-grabbing issue like the priestly ordination of women or homosexuals. Instead, he focused on an age-old question—the nature of love—which he treated in a measured, philosophical manner. But if that was one surprise, for some readers another surprise lay in what he had to say.

Like other Christian thinkers before him, Benedict took care to distinguish between love for one’s own, such as the love of a man for his wife, and the unmotivated and unearned love for that which is not one’s own, for the outsider. According to the Swedish Protestant theologian Anders Nygren, whose influential book on the subject was titled Eros and Agapé (Swedish edition 1930-36), these two forms of love are diametrically opposed: one preferential and selfish, the other generous and open. Indeed, the two types also encapsulate a stark difference between Judaism and Christianity. In the Hebrew Scriptures, Nygren wrote, “love is exclusive and particularistic”; Christian love, by contrast, “overleaps all such limits; it is universal and all-embracing.”

Note: this abstract was auto-generated and may contain errors.

About the Author - Meir Soloveichik is a doctoral candidate in the philosophy of religion at Princeton and associate rabbi at Congregation Kehilath Jeshurun in New York. He contributed “Of (Religious) Fences and Neighbors” to the March COMMENTARY.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

The Talmud is 1500 years old so what value could there be in it? Unless translated by Neusner or his students in which case it doesn't represent the original at all.

Anonymous said...

Now this is gonna sound weird, coming from me:

Umm, rabbi ba, didja think that maybe Tzvee was talking in hyperbole?

Anonymous said...

Not when his comments over at hirhurim are disparagement of YU scholars. Sometimes he's funny but sometimes he's not. The bottom line: I always laugh at him.
BTW, my sobriquet is an allusion to a famous error (also laughable) by his "rebbe"

Tzvee Zahavy said...

fine, laugh, cry whatever. whatever is your problem, I don't care.