Reading Paul's letter about love..

[T.C.]

At the beginning of Homer's Odyssey, his son Telemachus is at home wishing for his father's return and not knowing if he is dead or alive. The house is full of the suitors who are drinking all the wine and eating all the food, trying to woo his mother Penelope.

The Gods on Olympus decide it's time for Odysseus to return home from the island of Ogygia, and in referencing Orestes avenging the death of his father Agamemnon by killing his murderer Aegisthus, it is determined that Athena Goddess of wisdom will go to visit Telemachus and inspire him to grow up, take his place as the head of the household and put the suitors in their place - to tell him that his father is still alive and will return, and that Telemachus should be ready to kill the suitors either fighting them one at a time, or through some other plan.

So when Athena arrives, Telemachus greets her and welcomes her, setting out food and drink, and they get to talking. Their meeting is quite brief, but by the end of the conversation, Athena transforms Telemachus' inner character from that of a child, to that of a man.

In my translation, Athena says to him, "Childishness no longer beseems your years: you must put it away."

This transformative meeting with the 'clear-eyed goddess of wisdom' which in an instant transforms Telemachus from having an inner state of childishness to an inner state of manliness, seems to me to have been a reference from a work of epic literature which Paul would have surely been familiar with. And I think it's possible that when he wrote the part about putting away childish things in the passage on love, he was thinking about the instant and transformative nature of initiatory awakening in terms of wisdom, in the form of Athena, visiting Telemachus and instantly transforming him.

 

[Magnolia]

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[Magnolia]

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.

I started re-reading Mouravieff (I read all these guys so long ago, I need a refresher to replace the index cards/cheat sheets that are lodged in my mind). He mentions "face to face" - a phrase from the letter I keep thinking about:

The higher emotional centre is to be found at the level of the heart, and the higher intellectual centre at the level of the head. Their functions are
different. In the Tradition they are sometimes called the eyes of the Soul. Thus, St Isaac The Syrian said: 'While the two eyes of the body see things in an
identical way, the eyes of the Soul see differently: one contemplates the truth in images and symbols, the other face to face."° In other words, messages received through the higher emotional centre can be translated into pictures or language, but they always take the form of images or symbols. This is the case, for example, with the Book of Revelations. In its ensemble this text is unintelligible if one studies it only by means of the lower centres. To grasp its true sense, it must be read with the help of the higher emotional centre.

It is true that the ‘I’ of the Personality can read it, but he will only understand a very small part of it; the grandiose meaning of these magnificent visions will remain hidden from him. As for communications received through the higher intellectual centre, they are of such a transcendent nature that there is no way in which they can be translated into human language.