God and Romance Love in Religion and Interpersonal Relationships.

• Autores: Roland Karo
• Localización: Antonianum, ISSN 0003-6064, Nº. 2-3 (Aprilis-September), 2014, págs. 359-378
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • In this artivle I put forth the argument that being in love is the primal religious experience. in a seminal paper published in 1997, Jeffrey Saver and John Rabin convincingly showed that, neurologically, religious affection is a slight variation of interpersonal affection. This is exactly what one might expect, because evolutionarily all varieties of affective bonding - including religious - are traceable to infant-parent attachment. Romantic love combines this primal bonding with the sex drive and the so-called courtship attraction. The result is an ecstatic, uplifting altered state in which the numinous other is experienced in ways that are clearly related to those traditionally perceived as religious. I shall investigate the links between the idealization characteristic of romantic love and that typical of religious/spiritual imagination, concluding that while traditional types of spirituality neurologically draw on parentinfant attachment, the more mystical and prophetic religiosity at least partly borrows its neurological apparatus from romantic love.