The Seba library treats Creaturehood in 8 passages, across 6 authors (including Otto, Rudolf, John Cassian, Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Ph D).
deliverance from and conquest of the 'world' and from existence in bondage to the world, and even from creaturehood as such, the overcoming of
Otto identifies Christianity's redemptive ambition as liberation from creaturehood as such, establishing the term as a technical index of the creature's condition of radical bondage to finitude and world.
, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917thesis
He says that a God who cannot be angry cannot love either: and a God that knows neither love nor anger would be 'immobilis' and not the 'Deus vivus', the living God of Scripture.
Otto's engagement with Lactantius frames the living God in contrast to philosophical abstraction, implicitly defining creaturehood as that which stands in relation to — and is jolted by — a willing, wrathful, loving divine subject.
, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational, 1917supporting
this prayer will not only reject all representation of the divine and all that is of human shape — an impossibly criminal utterance — but it will not give a place to even the memory of some statement of the appearance and shape of any act whatsoever.
Cassian's apophatic discipline of prayer demands the systematic erasure of all creaturely images from the mind's approach to God, treating the creaturely form itself as an obstacle to genuine communion.
, Conferences, 426supporting
the word itself, animal, is from the Latin, meaning a living creature, even more properly 'anything living,' and especially, animalis: having the breath of life, from anima, meaning air, breath, and life.
Estés recuperates creaturehood as psychologically foundational by etymologically grounding the animal-soul connection, arguing that the denial of one's animal nature is a form of anthropocentric dissociation from psychic wholeness.
, Women Who Run With the Wolves Myths and Stories of the Wild, 2017supporting
The world itself, like the heavenly gods and man, is divine because it contains the divine element, reason. Reason, moreover, as Plato says here and elsewhere, cannot be present in anything apart from soul.
Plato's Timaeus positions the human creature as irreducibly double — mortal flesh animated by immortal reason — establishing the cosmological basis for all later depth-psychological reflection on the tension between creaturely finitude and transcendent capacity.
, Plato's cosmology the Timaeus of Plato, 1997supporting
the crawfish protects his tender flesh with an armor so impervious that his form has endured intact from prehistoric times. He even seems to wear his skeleton on the outside proudly, as if in mute testimony to the enduring structure underlying all life.
Nichols employs the crawfish as an archetypal image of creaturely ambivalence — the creature trapped by its own armored nature, unable to evolve, serving as a psychological symbol for the hero's encounter with primordial, unmodified creaturehood.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980supporting
The experience of the crossing is a familiar one to all who have made the journey into self-realization. The mystics called it the 'Dark Night of the Soul.'
Nichols situates the hero's confrontation with creaturely limitation within the mystical tradition of the Dark Night, linking depth-psychological individuation to the classic religious passage through radical creatureliness.
, Jung and Tarot: An Archetypal Journey, 1980aside
The curing of one animal by another — bears by a diet of ants; lions by a diet of apes — traditionally teaches psychological insights.
Hillman's survey of animal lore implies that creaturely existence harbors its own healing logic, independent of human rational intervention — a position that implicitly revalues the creaturely dimension of psyche.
, Animal Presences, 2008aside