VLVL 2 _Eros and Magic in the Renaissance_

[Glenn Scheper]

Plaudits here were sufficient for me to get it.

It has a six page index of names. The heaviest
were Bruno and Ficino, two inches each. Like a
new CD, wanting to hear all the tracks at once,
I flipped and found the right stuff referenced,
but laden with inanity. For Couliano, magic is
an infancy and modernity its maturity, failing
to see modernity is a lowest common denominator
of demonstrability, a filter to eliminate unique
(and sans gnosis, non-repeatable) direct gnosis.

His history starts with Plato, who already dropped
from Socrates how pneuma is ejaculation, something
now only transcendental for lack of its referent.
Within few pages he inveigles Eros, and Arisotle,
and St. Thomas into a yarnball in your simulacrum.

Nevertheless, this little book is full of facts
about the melancholy, and names of more fellows.
So I shall have to plow through it for breadth.

Reading it feels very against-the-grain, swimming
against current, not for the mere erudition of it,
but perhaps explaining why I did badly in college,
for the prospect of reading it parallels a quoted
Kierkegaard aspect of melancholia familiar to me:

"I wish for nothing. I do not wish to ride horsback,
it is too strenuous; I do not wish to walk, it is
too tiring; I do not wish to lie down, because then
either I should have to lie down constantly, and
I do not wish to do so, or I should have to get up,
and I do not wish to do that either. Summa summarum:
I do not wish for anything.

There are plenty of mentions of eros, but subsumed
under science, it's like watching a forensic chemist
describing various shit scraped from various toilets.

Couliano can be attributed using his own quote, p.6:
"... even the most astute, never grasped the essence
of many spiritual processes nor their basic unity.
So long as the phenomenon itself was not understood,
all the erudition in the world is useless, ..."

Yours truly,
Glenn Scheper
http://home.earthlink.net/~glenn_scheper/
glenn_scheper + at + earthlink.net
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