Routledge The Metaphysics of Night: Recovering Soul, Renewing Humanism

The Metaphysics of Night acknowledges a post-secular philosophy, one that puts philosophy into serious dialogue with religion, rather than considering religion a thing of the past. Matthew Del Nevo deals with the cultural unconscious, inseparable from religious consciousness, and draws on psychoanalysis and literature as well as philosophy. The metaphysics of the night is Del Nevo's metaphor for the deep and mysterious expanse of the soul. Philosophically, the book is critical of Enlightenment presumptions about knowledge and truth and overly spiritualizing tendencies in religion. Its critical edge cuts against materialist and historicist tendencies in the humanities and abstract intellectualism in philosophy. Arguing for strong aesthetic values, Del Nevo defends and explains soul and soulful experience, the creation of depth, the ineffable, real presence, beauty, and saving words, noting that the sources of all these are in us, but often are blocked. Each of the five parts of this book testify to what the author notes may be forgotten, but which ought not to be forgotten. It is necessary for life as socially, religiously, and educationally instituted within culture and as constitutive for culture. Del Nevo deals with sensibility as a form of wisdom and instinct that is not cognitive or knowledge/information based. He argues for a shift of emphasis in culture from intellect to intuition. This well-written work, filled with Catholic, philosophic, and artistic thought will be of interest to all philosophers, theologians, and students of culture. Review -This volume argues that modernity has lost its soul because of its focus on a -day world- substance metaphysics (rational, scientific, objective) at the expense of the night's symbolic, preconscious, intuitive, and relational metaphysics. Soul needs to be reclaimed by inner spiritual work that recovers the wonder and inspiration of night--understood both metaphorically and literally. . . . [Del Nevo] offers a set of essays exploring this night imagery in Meister Eckhart, St. Francis de Sales, Arthur Schopenhauer, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Rainer Maria Rilke.- --S. Young, Choice -Demanding, provocative, and often polemic, these five chapters--each a small book in itself--are wide-ranging, thought-provoking, and stimulating. Artists, therapists, and social activists alike will find that an integrative thinker addresses here their often disparate concerns and shows that the gaps between them are merely apparent. This makes The Metaphysics of Night a timely book indeed.- --David Stendl-Rast, author; co-creator, Gratefulness.com -Matthew Del Nevo combines erudition, artistic sensitivity, and passionate spiritual feeling. At times he writes with the soul of music as he calls for a meditative listening, experiencing participation in, and with vibratory life force energies. In a disenchanted critique of today's deadwood technological/scientific/academic materialist thinking, he reaches back to pick up threads of devout humanism with heart, to weave alongside intellectual intuition as a way of the future, in active alignment with an irradiating Source of all there is.- --Clair Dunne, author, Carl Jung: Wounded Healer of the Soul -The Metaphysics of Night is required reading for those who want to engage seriously with all that is encompassed under the trope of darkness. This embraces the themes of silence, the unconscious, and the Real. This book shows the range of Del Nevo's interests, which incorporates manifold disparate topics.- --John Gale, editor, Insanity and Divinity--studies in psychosis and spirituality -Should be of interest to serious scholars of the field as well as to the interested general reader. The concept of the night in Catholic theology, as well as in secular verse and prose, is analyzed in such a manner as to bring out the subtle nuances of this most important of doctrines.- --Farasha Euker, author, Luvah, Journal of the Creative Imagi