all nine traits of its altruism, universality,
eternality, unconditionality, childlikeness, celibacy,
missionary love, purgatorial and love of love.
The passion, death and resurrection of Jesus shows us
how to love the other as more important than ourselves.
This agape is the fulfilment of bhakti in all nine ways
and lets us appreciate in the Bhagavad Gita
the two great ways of loving God.
Bataille brings all of this together by showing us
love’s nine great secret things in sex, death, religion,
art, sovereignty, transgression, sacrifice,
violence, and the economy of the gift.
Graduate School
From the Seminary to Loyola of Chicago
After being in the seminary for nine years
I still had to confess the sin of masturbation.
But then I met and fell in love with Jane
and soon I said to myself
“How cleansed and purified I feel.”
I had gone through the first mystical stage
of purgation and now I was ready for illumination.
One night I awakened from a dream about sex
and I just thought of my dear Janie
and the temptation fled away.
I knew that I would love her forever
and that I could be pure forever just like
Dante and the courtly lovers of the Middle Ages.
Ironically now that I could be pure
my confessor asked me to leave the seminary
because a priest should not be falling in love.
Jane was going to Northwestern University
in Evanston, Illinois, just north of Chicago
so I applied to the philosophy graduate program
at Loyola of Chicago and was accepted.
By the time I got to Loyola in January
Jane already had a real and normal boyfriend.
So we had some lovely meetings but I was free
to study philosophy which all seemed so real.
It seemed that at the heart of each philosophy
was a philosophy of love and I just loved
studying Plato especially his Symposium
and his Phaedrus which explained sublimation.
Aristotle, the Stoics, the Medievals and
the Postmodernists each had a new philosophy of love.
From Loyola to the College of St. Francis
Father Hecht SJ, the chair of the philosophy department at Loyola,
took excellent care of me by giving me a scholarship that took care
of everything from tuition, to room and board, to all of my books.
He introduced me to Mr. Kelling who took me to live with him
in a wonderful hotel right next to the downtown Loyola Tower.
Then he told me that they needed a philosophy teacher at St. Francis
College in Juliet, Illinois about fifty miles south of Chicago.
The wonderful sisters of St. Francis took me as their colleague
and after having lived in a community of men for nine years
I was now in a community of most beautiful ladies who had
the highest ideas of holy love and wisdom as they were educated
and then taught others in grade school, high school and college.
I could teach whatever I wanted to learn and we always thought
together about the Augustinian, Thomistic and Franciscan philosophies.
I took a course on Plotinus at Loyola from Fr. Nurnberger SJ
and I thought deeply about Augustine’s reflections on him.
Augustine’s motto came to be “credo ut intellegam,”
“I believe that I might understand,”
and that took him beyond mystical monism
to the gift of faith in the dignity of all persons as children of God.
The Franciscan nuns loved making clear how the Franciscans
built upon this and how Scotus showed the uniqueness of each person
and how Ockham showed how we can never know the complex person
but how our faith can let us love all as did St. Francis.
As a youth in the seminary I read the works of St. John of the Cross.
The active meditative night of the soul and the passive contemplative
night of the soul fit right in with Augustine fulfilling Plotinus
and with the Franciscan extension of love to all of God’s creatures.
I was so fortunate to be able to learn with the beautiful Sisters
and the beautiful students and for nine years absence made
my heart grow fonder then all of a sudden presence gifted me
with the heavenly delight of the other half of my soul for ever and ever.
From Loyola and St. Francis to the Phenomenology Workshop
In 1964, Herbert Spiegelberg got a grant and was able to invite
ten philosophers for a two-week seminar on phenomenology.
I was one of seven Americans and John Mayer, who founded the
philosophy
