Man and the Divine

Introduction

“Man and the Divine” appeared in Mexico in 1955; a second, expanded edition followed in 1973. Zambrano describes the history of the sacred as a history of human experience: first an undifferentiated sacred reality that weighs on human beings, then its articulation in the figures of the gods, the Greek passage from the gods to philosophy, the Christian God and finally the withdrawal of the divine in modern nihilism, which she discusses in connection with Nietzsche’s “death of God”. Each stage changes the way human beings understand themselves. Against a reason that knows only concepts she sets attention to the forms in which the sacred is lived, such as piety and love. The book is one of her main works and links her philosophy of religion with her critique of modern rationalism.

More works by María Zambrano

• 1939Philosophy and Poetry