Amor Dei and amor sui
Let us begin by again looking at the quote from Eric Voegelin with which we began part one of this post : "Nevertheless, as early as the consciousness of autonomy becomes tangible at all there is also to be found the awareness of a crucial split in the psyche between spirit and power. As witnesses to this awareness I mention... finally the Christian climax in the Augustinian concepts of amor Dei and amor sui . However multifarious the desires may be, and however many of them may be distinguished by psychological description, they are overshadowed by the sense of a basic dualism in the psyche: autonomous man can order himself in society either by orienting himself toward transcendence or by emancipating himself as a world-immanent existence." -- Eric Voegelin, "What Is History?" The Collected Works , Vol. 28, p. 32. Let us say that someone has no personal experience with transcendence: how is such an individual to choose between the two orientations? Here, hist...