Great Reads V: Sayings of the Desert Fathers

The Desert Fathers. Before St. Athanasius established the first Christian monastery in 344 and about two centuries before St. Benedict, a group of Christians moved out into the deserts of Egypt, Palestine, and Syria in order to live a solitary and intensely ascetic life. The most famous of these is the man who started it all (for all practical purposes), St. Anthony of Egypt (not the one that helps you find shit-- that's St. Anthony of Padua). Dali has a very famous and quite powerful painting of him in the desert which I recommend you google right now if you haven't seen it.

Because these men-- and women, although they were less common-- entered the desert partially in order to withdraw from the newly-legitimized Christian society under Constantine Chlorus and his son, Constantine the Great, they wrote very little. Around the fifth century, many of their sayings and conversations were collected and written down. These were hermits, but hermits willing to share spiritual advice amongst themselves.

Because I don't know Greek, I can't speak to the accuracy of these translations. I can say that I own Penguin Classics edition of Virgil, Augustine, and Boehtius, and have found them all to be wonderful translations.

If you're a Christian, you need to own this book. If you're not, your life will still be poorer without it.

These sayings were not originally uttered with the thought that they would become part of a book. These are tips given from one hermit to another. I have revisited these sayings several times, and still I feel like I haven't come close to plumbing there depth. At the risk of sounding cheesy, I advise that you read them slowly and with a clear mind.

1. Antony said, "Our life and death are with our neighbor."
   
2. Joseph asked to Poeman, “Tell me how to become a monk.” He said, “If you want to find rest in this life and the next, say at every moment, ‘Who am I?’ and judge no one.”
   
3. They used to say that one of the old men asked God that he might see the fathers, and he saw them all, with the exception of Anthony; and he said unto him that showed them to him, "Where is Anthony?"  And he said unto him, "Wheresoever God is there is Anthony."
   
4. Abba Isidore the Priest said, "If you fast regularly, do not be inflated with pride, but if you think highly of yourself because of it, then you had better eat meat. For it is better for a man to eat meat and drink wine than to be inflated with pride and to glorify himself."

Great Reads IV

Blaise Pascal, Pensées (1662)

Always relevant.

1. "L’esprit croit naturellement, et la volonté aime naturellement; de sorte qu’a, faute de vrais objets, il faut qu'ils s'attachent aux faux." (It is natural for the mind to believe, and for the will to love; so that, for want of true objects, they must attach themselves to false.)
   
   
2. "On se fait une idole de la vérité même; car la vérité hors de la charité n’est pas Dieu, et est son image et une idole, qu’il ne faut point aimer, ni adorer." (We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and idol which we must neither love nor adore.)
   
   
3. "Nous ne nous tenons jamais au temps présent...si imprudents que nous errons dans le temps qui ne sont pas nôtres, et ne pensons point au seul qui nous appartient; et si vains, que nous songeons à ceux qui ne sont rien, et échappons sans réflexion le seul qui subsiste….Que chacun examine ses pensées, il les trouvera toutes occupées au passé et à l’avenir. Nous ne pensons presque point au présent; et si nous y pensons, ce n’est que pour en prendre la lumière pour disposer de l’avenir. Le présent n’est jamais notre fin: le passé et le sprésent sont nos moyens; le seul avenir est notre fin. Ainsi nous ne vivons jamais, mais nous espérons de vivre; et, nous disposant toujours à être heureux, il est inévitable que nous ne le soyons jamais." (We do not rest satisfied with the present. So imprudent are we that we wander in the times which are not ours, and do not think of the only one which belongs to us; and so idle are we that we dream of those times which are no more, and thoughtlessly overlook that which alone exists...Let each one examine his thoughts, and he will find them all occupied with the past and the future. We scarcely ever think of the present; and if we think of it, it is only to take light from it to arrange the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means; the future alone is our end. So we never live, but we hope to live; and, as we are always preparing to be happy, it is inevitable we should never be so.)
   
   
4. "Tout le monde fait le dieu enjugeant: “Cela est bon ou mauvais”; et s’affligeant ou se réjouissant trop des événements." (Each one creates his god, when judging, "This is good or bad"; and men mourn or rejoice too much at events.)
   
   
5. "Le christianisme est étrange. Il ordonne à l’homme de reconnaître qu’il est vil, et même abominable, et lui ordonne de vouloir être semblable à Dieu."(Christianity is strange. It bids man recognise that he is vile, even abominable, and bids him desire to be like God.

Great Reads I: Žižek

Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, Or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting For

Žižek is not a faithful Marxist in several aspects, being equally indebted to Hegel and Lacan; nevertheless, he has remained a staunch atheist. Yet, tabling the point that Marx was far more sympathetic toward religion-- "an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering"-- than the infamous "opium" utterance (removed from context) credits him with, Žižek does break with orthodox Marxism in his defense of the Christian tradition as a force not only helpful but necessary to liberation. This, in essence, is the thesis of this relatively short book. This probably isn't the best place to start if you're new to Žižek, but then again, I don't think anywhere is. It demands far less knowledge of psychoanalysis than The Ticklish Subject, and-- this is the clincher for me-- less knowledge of German idealism than, say, The Fragile Absolute. Of course I can't take some of the pop culture references seriously (My Best Friend's Wedding, Kung-Fu Panda): it seems to be a far less annoying equivalent of pomo writers like David Foster-Wallace who think allusions to mass culture and long hair will render their poor writing less intolerably convoluted and pretentious. Still, as it's difficult to think of a cultural critic more widely-read by those outside the confines of academia, there is clearly a populist element here. I think.

1.  “In short, there is a way to avoid responsibility and/or guilt by, precisely, emphasizing one’s responsibility or too readily assuming one’s guilt in an exaggerated way, as in the case of the white male PC academic who emphasizes the guilt of racist phallogocentrism, and uses this admission of guilt as a stratagem not to face the way he, as a ‘radical’ intellectual, perfectly embodies the existing power relations towards which he pretends to be thoroughly critical.”
   
   
2. "Pre-Christian religions remain at the level of ‘wisdom’; they emphasize the insufficiency of every temporal finite object, and preach either moderation in pleasures or the withdrawal from temporal reality in favour of the True Divine Object which alone can provide Infinite Bliss. Christianity, on the contrary, offers Christ as a mortal-temporal individual, and insists that belief in the temporal Event of Incarnation is the only path to eternal truth and salvation. In this precise sense, Christianity is a ‘religion of Love’: in love, one singles out, focuses on, a finite temporal object which ‘means more than anything else.’"
   
3. "In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbour to my mirror-image, or to a step along the path of my own self-realization. Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbour-- the Neighbour remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. (Another aspect of this same constellation-- the reverse of the fact that the Jewish God is emptied of jouissance, reduced to a self-referential Name, to the subjectivity of a pure, non-substantial enunciator-- is that the only terrain on which to demonstrate your devotion to the Divine Law is that of ‘love for thy neighbour,’ of your social-ethical activity-- again, there is no direct short cut to contact with the Divine dimension through the ‘inner path’ of mystical spiritual self-realization….This injunction [to love thy neighbour] prohibits nothing; rather, it calls for an activity beyond the confines of the Law, enjoining us always to do more and more to ‘love’ our neighbour not merely in his imaginary dimension...not merely in his symbolic dimension (the abstract symbolic subject of Rights), but as the Other in the very abyss of the Real, the Other as a properly inhuman partner, ‘irrational,’ radically evil, capricious, revolting, disgusting...in short, beyond the Good."
   
4. "Here [in the Pagan cosmos] the supreme Good is the global balance of Principles, while Evil stands for their derailment or derangement, for the excessive assertion of one Principle to the detriment of others (of the masculine Principle to the detriment of the feminine, of Reason to the detriment of Feeling…); the cosmic balance is then re-established through the work of Justice which, with its inexorable necessity, sets things straight again by crushing the derailed element. With regard to the social body, an individual is ‘good’ when he acts in accordance with his special place in the social edifice...and Evil occurs when some particular strata or individuals are no longer satisfied with this place. Christianity (and, in its own way, Buddhism) introduced into this global balanced cosmic Order a principle that is totally foreign to it...the principle according to which each individual has immediate access to universality...Buddha pointedly ignored castes and (after some hesitation, true) even sexual difference. And do not Christ’s scandalous words from Saint Luke’s Gospel point in the same direction: ‘If anyone come to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters-- yes, even his own life-- he cannot be my disciple’ (14:26)? Here, of course, we are not dealing with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous God: family relations stand here metaphorically for the entire socio-symbolic network, for any particular ethnic ‘substance’ that determines our place in the global Order of Things. "