The Mind and Heart of Love: Lion and Unicorn, a Study in Eros and Agape

by Martin Cyril D'Arcy

This is a new release of the original 1947 edition.

Genres: Philosophy

334 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 2007

About the author

Martin Cyril D'Arcy SJ (1888–1976) was a Roman Catholic priest, philosopher of love, and a correspondent, friend, and adviser of a range of literary and artistic figures including Evelyn Waugh, Dorothy L. Sayers, W. H. Auden, Eric Gill and Sir Edwin Lutyens. He has been described as "perhaps England's foremost Catholic public intellectual from the 1930s until his death.

Educated at Stonyhurst, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1907 and was ordained priest in 1921. He was Provincial of the English Province of the Society of Jesus from 1945 to 1950.

He spent much of his working life at the English Jesuit house in Oxford, Campion Hall, but also spent periods in residence at American universities, including Georgetown University, Gonzaga University, Cornell, and at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey.

His major work is The Mind and Heart of Love, published by T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber in 1945, which explores theological relation of eros love and agape love.

The permanent collection of Loyola University Museum of Art is named in his memory the Martin D'Arcy Collection

Reviews

[meshkalina · Rating 5 out of 5]

“No way of life is more open to delusion, and many seem to confuse the means with the end, or, what is worse, to find in the emptiness to which the exercises in self-denial lead a substitute for that supernaturalization of the self and communion with a living and bountiful God. They mistake, that is, a relation, which may suit beings other than persons with one between person. A person cannot throw away his unique status and lower himself to a means.”

“So invisible is God and infinitely removed in point of excellence, that the self is overcome at the comparison and blames its limitations. The only way to find God is by the path of unknowing—and it is here that the danger begins.”

“But when the experience is described in terms which seemed to exclude a personal God, it is possible that the soul has stretched itself out to its highest receptivity, and it is this very condition which is being related, […] But as the spirit cannot be entirely inactive, it’s sublimates the desire inherent in the anima and conceives itself as lost to itself and fused with some all-comprehensive perfection or Absolute.”

[Jennifer]

it was at a used book store for a dollar.

theologians can suck the life out of anything--even love! i'm sure there are some interesting points in there that could be condensed into a nice 5 paragraph essay, but i will never know what they are...because i GIVE UP. you win *this time* MC D'Arcy!! poor God, he's really not this boring in real life.