Amor Dei intellectualis and the ‘daemonic’ intuition. Archaeology and anatomy of the pantheistic sensibility

Abstract

Intellectual love for God appears a bit out of place in the contemporary dictionary of passions, which has been shaped by Romanticism. Romanticism (or, rather, its vulgarization) has acquainted us to conceive the two ideas of “love” and “intellect” as mutually incompatible, so that the expression “intellectual love” appears something as an oxymoron.

But Spinoza’s idea of Amor Dei intellectualis is not a solitary and isolated example in the landscape of history of Western philosophy, since its ascendance can be traced back to the role of Love as the main passion of the philosopher in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus.

Perhaps, the key to a proper understanding of what the philosophers of the past meant when they spoke about this passion is precisely the fact that such an amor intellectualis is directed toward a “God” that is often very different from the anthropomorphic divinities that were venerated in the societies these philosophers lived in: Plato’s god is very different from Athens’ gods, and Spinoza’s god is very different from the god of the Jews and Christians.

In my paper, I would like to draw a sketch (1) of the most general profiles of the ontologies that could ground, from a nowadays laical point of view, a theory of passions in which Amor Dei intellectualis could appear; (2) the way in which in some of the nowadays ontologies (and specifically in the science-informed ones) this cardinal passion of Spinoza's pantheism could be reactualized.