On Spiritual Love

by Anthony J. Damiani

Paper V09P

TOPIC: Soul

SUBJECT: Love

SUBSUBJECT: Virtues

ORIGINAL LOCATION & FILE NAME (of PDF used for typing): AD SUPPL 1.PDF

AD HANDWRITING: Typewriter typed, no AD edits

RETYPED by JF 2022, REFORMATTED by IT 2024

NOTES:

• RETYPED AD PAPER (V09P).

• From one of Anthony Damiani's old paper drafts/letters, read by Ella May Damiani in Astronoesis class on the Unit Soul, Friday, July 11, 2003, transcribed by June F. Original notebook that belonged to Ella May is lost.

• Was under consideration for publication in From the Heart.

On spiritual Love

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The assimilation of doctrinal truths is indispensable, but of itself does not bring about a transformation of the Soul except in rare cases in which the Soul is so well disposed for contemplation that even a glimpse of the doctrine is enough to plunge it into contemplation, as a saturated solution may even under the slightest shock be suddenly transmuted into crystals. In itself, doctrinal intelligence is purely static. It may deliver the Soul from certain tensions but cannot truly transform it without the concurrence of the Will, which represents the dynamic element of the way. The Will must become poor in relation to God, it must conform to spiritual virtue.

Primacy of virtue and concentration over doctrinal learning: Virtue is a qualitative form of the Will. It is centered on its own essence and this is a divine quality. Thus, it implies a kind of knowledge. The virtues retrace in the individuality and in an existential mode the stages or the modes of knowledge and they are consequently reflections of knowledge, not cerebral and fleeting reflections, but reflections firmly fixed in the Will. In other words, they are acquisitions of Being, and not improvisations of thought.

Love can be considered the synthesis of all the virtues. And indeed, if every virtue is a form of the Will, then spiritual Love is the Will itself transfigured by the divine attraction. Spiritual virtue and concentration have for their aim the dissolution of the knot of egocentricity, which prevents the heart from directly contemplating divine realities.

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