La funzione della memoria nell’estasi amorosa dei Dialoghi d’amore. Una questione gnoseologica, fisiologica e profetica

The aim of this essay is to show the position and the role of memory in the love rapture or alienation in Yehudah Abarbanel’s Dialoghi d’amore (1535). Best known as Leone Ebreo, Abarbanel develops clearly Ficinian-inspired psychology (theory of the soul), in which memory plays an essential conservative role for the imagination and for the other superior cognitive faculties in order to reach God. The argumentation will be divided into three main sections: in the first, I will explain how memory preserves the images of both corporal and intelligible realities, analysing the gnoseological functions of the mnemonic faculty in the love contemplation; in the second, I will consider the parallel physiological state of the body as a consequence of the soul movements during the contemplation of the loved object, focusing on the theory of the spirts; thirdly, I will analyse the theological implications of the erotic alienation, addressing the idea of the end of individual memory in the final and higher love ecstasy within God.