The city of Jerusalem is the focal point of Augustine’s exegesis of the Psalms of Ascent. In Enarratio in Psalmum 121, Augustine presents Jerusalem as a collective unity contemplating God’s being. The city is thoroughly established in peace and love and participates intimately in the divine life. The essential features of the Jerusalem described in Enarratio in Psalmum 121 align neatly with the created intellectual realm of contemplation outlined in Confessiones Book 12. Both texts envisage a city that participates in (...) the divine idipsum. This city is a creature so intimate with God’s being that its creaturely mutability is checked. Both texts articulate this created intellectual realm as participating in God’s eternity. In both cases, this participation is realized in contemplation: through the constancy of its vision, it is conformed to that which it sees. Finally, both the aeterna Ierusalem and the caelum caeli are a communion—in fact, a city—united in love. In Enarratio in Psalmum 121, Augustine urges his congregants to join themselves to this edifice that is still under construction; in the Confessiones, he presents himself as a pilgrim groaning and longing with desire to be part of the Jerusalem that is above, his mother and patria. (shrink)

This article is an analysis of the Socratic account of love presented by Diotima in Symposium 210a–212a. The author explores and responds to two philosophic objections to this account of love: first, that it is self-absorbed and, second, that it is incapable of loving a particular person. He argues that this criticism misses the mark. Diotima’s account of eros is not so much egotistical as ordered to an objective good. Further, in the final analysis, eros is not grasping and acquisitive (...) but generous and diffusive. Finally, the author argues that the Socratic account of love is, in fact, especially well equipped to love the particular. (shrink)