grandpasessions

[grandpasessions]

While it is true that God loves us with an infinite love, it is also true that He has given us free will; and since we have free will, it is possible for us to reject God. Since free will exists, Hell exists; for Hell is nothing else than the rejection of God. If we deny Hell, we deny free will.

Kallistos Ware, The Orthodox Church

[grandpasessions]

These two 'spiritualities' - of self-discovery and of self-making - possess, as it were, different moods. In the one predominates the mood and the language of passivity, of calm certainty, an untroubled sense of everything having been in place all the time; it is a spirituality whose metaphors of spiritual progress are those of restoration of lines of continuity which in fact were never wholly severed, so that what is restored is the sense of how things truly are and always have been - indeed, in at least an implicit and inchoate sense, were always recognized to have been.

It is a spirituality in which sin and failure are represented as the rupture of the conscious, actively desiring and knowing self from its true relationship with its true centre, in which sin is the condition in which the conscious self is focused upon a point 'outside' that centre within, like an image in double focus. It is therefore a characteristic of this spirituality of self-discovery that the goal of the spiritual life is reintegration, the readjustment of the image into single focus, the re-establishment of a unity, which sin has fractured, between conscious empirical selfhood and the pre-existing depths of one's being from which God can never be expelled.

The mood of the spirituality of self-making is, we might say, more 'existential'. If the emphasis of self-discovery is on continuity, the emphasis of self-making is on breaks, crises and novelty; less on the Plotinian theme of the soul's return to its source, more on the soul's reaching out to that which is not yet; less on the domestic emotions of return to what is already, however dimly, known, more on the erotic passions of a yearning for the inaccessible.

And the narrative of the soul's progress in the spirituality of self-making is punctuated by crises of loss of the familiar and of startling encounters with the unexpected, for it is the spirituality less of memory as recollection than of memory as reconstruction, of memory constantly challenged to re-make the past in new terms and, as of the past, so of personal identity. For the spirituality of self-discovery, I am what I was in my origins; for the spirituality of self-making, I am what I may hope for.

The Darkness of God Denys Turner

#denys turner #augustine #theory #theology #philosophy #psychoanalysis #sort of #christianity #self making #self discovery

[grandpasessions]

But where was this God who had been in his seeking? In Augustine's interiority. There Augustine had been unable to recognize God because he had been living foris, 'outside himself.

The God within had been beckoning him on, drawing Augustine within himself on an itinerarium intus - but inwards towards what? Towards 'memory', to that most intimate part of himself, to that depth within himself in which it would be possible to recognize the God whom he could not possibly wholly 'forget'.

But in what sense of 'remember' does Augustine 'remember' God, however minimally, within the erratic and apparently random course of his journey within? Augustine remembers God in the form of a restless dissatisfaction with all else that he seeks, a dissatisfaction which sharpens and intensifies as he draws ever nearer the goal of his seeking. That dissatisfaction is a 'remembering' because it is at once a longing for what he lacks and a recognition of the failure to reach it, which implies at least negative knowledge of the true nature of the goal.

That remembering is at once a knowing and a not-knowing of God, a knowing, we might say, in the form of a not-knowing.

The Darkness of God Denys Turner

#denys turner #darkness of god #philosophy #theory #theology #christianity #augustine #catholic #god is our true self #possibly

[grandpasessions]

One may be very far from the ascetic view of money as a curse and yet regret that analytic therapy is almost inaccessible to poor people, both for external and internal reasons. Little can be done to remedy this. Perhaps there is truth in the widespread belief that those who are forced by necessity to a life of hard toil are less easily overtaken by neurosis. But on the other hand experience shows without a doubt that when once a poor man has produced a neurosis it is only with difficulty that he lets it be taken from him. It renders him too good a service in the struggle for existence; the secondary gain from illness which it brings him is much too important. He now claims by right of his neurosis the pity which the world has refused to his material distress, and he can now absolve himself from the obligation of combating his poverty by working.

Sigmund Freud, "On Beginning the Treatment," The Freud Reader, 370-371

[grandpasessions]

It is required in our warfare, dear brother, that we not rely on ourselves. Without this, truly you will not only fail to obtain the sought after victory, but you will be incapable of resisting the slightest assault of your foe.

Etch this deep in your mind and heart. From the first sin of our forefather, in spite of our weakening spiritual and virtuous abilities, we often highly esteem ourselves. Even though our daily experience proves the untruthfulness of his opinion, in our puzzling self-delusion we do not stop believing that we are certainly not unimportant.

But this spiritual sickness, which is so difficult to see and recognize, is more distasteful to God than everything else in us, as being the primary offspring of our self-love and the root of all our desires and failures and evil-doing. It shuts the door of our mind or spirit, by which Divine grace alone can come in, and provides this grace no entrance to abide in us. And thus it leaves.

Because how is grace, which aids and enlightens, able to enter that person, who supposes that he is great, that he understands all things and requires no help beyond himself? May God keep us from this sickness and desire of Lucifer!

God harshly reproves those who are afflicted with this vice of vainglory and self-regard declaring by the prophet, "Woe to those that are wise in their own eyes, and clever in their own sight" ( Isa 5:21 ) The apostles also says, "Do not be wise in your estimation" ( Rom 12:16 ).

Unseen Warfare

Theophan the Recluse

#theophan the recluse #theory #theology #philosophy #areogamce #arrogance #pride #self pity #hearing #understanding #christianity

[grandpasessions]

It is because - indeed, emphatically, it is only because - God has been and is seeking out Augustine that Augustine seeks God; if, for Augustine, his seeking is always for God, his seeking is before that from God. This is the foundational truth which, as we will see, underlies all Augustine's paradoxes about seeking and finding: God is not to be sought outside the self, for God is already there 'within', eternally more intimate to me than I am to myself. It is I who am 'outside' myself and it is the God within who initiates, motivates and guides the seeking whereby and in which God is to be found. Not only is God within my interiority; it is from the God within that the power comes which draws me back into myself, and so to God.

The Darkness of God Denys Turner

#denys turner #augustine #theory #theology #philosophy #christian #catholic #orthodoxy #psychoanalysis

[grandpasessions]

This is the crucial distinction between melancholia and the passive night, what John also calls dryness, for there is no desire for ‘recovery.’ It is here that we can see the radical nature of John’s spiritual direction.

Far from being the sentimental, feeling-oriented spiritual direction that has capitulated to a world of therapy, it is something wholly other. It is dark and destructive rather than healing and constructive.

In other words, it concerns the continued direction of desire rather than its premature end. The therapeutic self, for Turner, is backwards-looking, while this radical self-transformation is forward-looking to the extent that it looks directly beyond any sense of self and only to God.

Pain, uncertainty, and doubt are necessary requisites of a forward-moving desire since it is necessarily based on a painful loss of the self. The only way we can understand this idea of experience beyond experience is through the birth of a new self, which like God, stands in complete opposition to the current self. McIntosh suggests that the only way to fully grasp this contradiction of an experience of being beyond experience is to understand it Christologically.

John mirrors this sentiment, not viewing Christ as a metaphor leading to a monistic totality of experience. Instead, the premise is that by dying with Christ, we participate in the same self-emptying, kenotic process, extending to the moment of death and the subsequent emergence of the resurrected self. Consequently, John’s work does not locate spiritual direction on the side of dry intellectualism, nor does he locate it on the side of therapeutic voluntarism. Rather, he subverts the entire problem at the outset.

John uses the language of academic theology to describe a non-experiential process that results in a moment of interruptive Grace that goes beyond both the intellectual and the affective. This is where the night of the spirit leads to the totality of the unique nature of the night of faith. John is speaking of a desire that problematises the role of intellect, memory, and will.

More precisely, Turner writes that as intellect, we are dispossessed by this dark night of faith to construct a meaningful life world or even a meaningful concept of God. He argues that to desire even to feel God as if He were comprehensible or accessible is precisely what this unitive stage does not profess. Turner further suggests that as memory, we face spiritual, subjective destitution to the extent that our very sense of identity falls away

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

#direction of desire #lacan #john of the cross #theory #theology #philosophy #christianity #catholicism #mystical

[grandpasessions]

Several themes crop up in these maxims [of John of the Cross' work, entitled: The Sayings of Light and Love]:

a. The need to be open to God’s Grace through humility and simplicity. b. The importance not to become attached to sensual or spiritual goods. c. The importance of purging one’s self of desires to be open to a higher desire.

Although this work is short, his advice on seeking spiritual direction is crucial as it also reflects his theology of the community. This acts as an antidote for any tendency toward spiritual individualism. John writes:

Whoever wants to stand alone without support of a master and guide will be like the tree that stands alone in a field without a proprietor. No matter how much the tree bears, passers-by will pick the fruit before it ripens.

The implication here is that the spiritual director is much like a protector. While we are on our journey, and especially at the beginning of it, it is very easy to lose what we have gained. John further writes:

Those who fall alone remain alone in their fall, and they value their soul little since they entrust it to themselves alone.

John highlights the paradoxical combination of arrogance and low self-esteem of those who do not seek a spiritual director. They are simultaneously arrogant in assuming they can make spiritual progress by themselves. Yet, on the other hand, they also think so little of their souls due to the assumption that one can make spiritual progress alone.

The Direction of Desite Mark Gerard Murphy

#mark gerard murphy #direction of desire #theory #theology #philosophy #christianity #catholicism

[grandpasessions]

So, from the very beginning of the anxiety that leads people toward this moment of union of self-abandonment and transformation, one must be painfully purged. This painful purging is not to be confused with the self-flagellation of an austere legalism. Instead, it is to be compared to the pain of love. It is a pain mixed up with desire. It is contradictory, fragmented, and traumatic.

Throughout this process, the very fabric of the self is constantly questioned via our relation to a loss that cannot be articulated. It is an all-encompassing love that saturates us until we can no longer say ‘I.’ From this sense of the self’s dislocation and its relation to worldly knowledge, toward addressing this relation to the incarnation and the mystery of the cross, to the final interruption of God into the soul, we have traumatic wound following through to wound following through to wound.

Whether he is depicting the strenuous ascent up Mount Carmel, elucidating the essence of darkness, or discussing the purifying aspects of romantic desire, John is not providing a spiritual direction centred on healing. Instead, John is giving us a spirituality of laceration, kenosis, and uncertainty. These theological foundations serve as the basis for forming his spiritual direction.

The tendency here, as Tacker notes, is that there is a propensity to understand this latter stage as a type of psychological experience of dark satisfaction, a sense of receiving a positive experience for the martyred ego. Thacker teaches us that for John, dereliction, abandonment, and abjection are what formulate the core of his spiritual direction. Thacker cautions us not to approach John’s work as expounding some direct experience of the divine.

Instead, we should understand that for John, the mystical is the mystical precisely because it does not bolster the human subject. Moreover, he explains that it is an extended exposition of the impossibility of experience.

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

#direction of desire #john of the cross #christian #catholic #sort of #theory #theology #philosophy #lacan

[grandpasessions]

Rather than being seduced by this ‘thirst for annihilation’, this ‘will to nothingness’, this ‘truth of extinction’, this ‘exultation of dissolution’, and this speculative thanatropism, I just wanted to run as fast as possible in the opposite direction.

from On Pleromatica and its Harmonics by Gabriel Catren

[grandpasessions]

I contend that when it comes to interpreting these motifs of spiritual negativity within contemporary practical spiritual direction texts, they are often perceived as a type of negative signifier heralding an impending experiential fullness:

John’s dark night is not an empty space, although it does involve emptying, nor a barren one, although it may feel so in comparison to ‘the green pastures’ of our earlier spiritual experience.”

The problem with this interpretation is that it construes the Dark Night as a dark experience rather than a contemplation of the inherent obscurity and ambiguity of experience itself.

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

#mark gerard murphy #theory #theology #philosophy #psychoanalysis #john of the cross #christianity #hell yeah dude

[grandpasessions]

This interpretation suggests that desire would not have been something that leads us away from the desert but drives us further into its barren heart. Reflecting on this in more detail, Lane claims that John of the Cross uses this theme of the desert to demonstrate the necessity for us to conceive desire in terms of emptiness.

For John of the Cross, he writes that we do not find growth in spiritual direction and spiritual life through experiences of fullness and well-being but in being drawn toward emptiness. We discover John’s spiritual growth through a narrative of personal loss and tragedy.

The apophasis of God meets material lived-out kenosis. These ruptures can be a more accurate sign of God’s perpetual presence far more than so-called religious experiences. John points to the imagery of the desert to show us that we should not seek knowledge of God’s Grace in spiritual delights. Instead, God shows us a path in the metaphorical desert that is ‘no way.’ God leads us into a dry and barren land which is vast, deep, and immense—an infinite wilderness that, in its emptiness, inversely mirrors the abundance of God.

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

#Mark Gerard Murphy #theory #theology #christianity #apophasis #philosophy #orthodoxy #catholicism

[grandpasessions]

Lane, who has studied the above writers extensively, also reflects this view. He writes that this mystical spirituality and spiritual direction was grounded in epikistasis, an endless desire for God. It is an infinite ‘straining forward to what lies ahead’ that is alluded to in Philippians 3:13.

In Gregory’s conception of mystical desire, the excess of God’s being, insofar as it is utterly incomprehensible, results in a subject engaged in perpetual discovery. So, even after death, there is only ever a ‘satisfed dissatisfaction’. From this perspective, we can see that these early writers did not perceive desire solely as affective fulfillment. Instead, they understood that it had an ontological status linked to broader cosmology. Desire was caught up with the whole person and not just an affective part of the person.

Both McIntosh and Lane suggest that desire was an expression of the inherent incompleteness of our entire existence and that each action, whether this is intellectual, emotional, or physical, is ultimately incomplete and thus signals its relation to the infinite.

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

#mark gerard murphy #christianity #lacan #orthodoxy #ontology #not feelings #theory #theology #philosophy

[grandpasessions]

However, because of this focus on experientialism, a silent change over time has transformed what we mean by desire and its transition to psychologistic expressions. Today it is primarily understood as related to expressions of emotional gratifcation and wholeness.

I will designate this paradigm, which has its basis in the psychological turn instigated by William James,’ ‘positive affective experientialism,’ or what I will call the modality of D1b. The latter is a discipline of desire focusing on experientialism, positivity, wholeness, healing, happiness, and the primacy of feeling.

This results from a split in how we understood spirituality in the past. The spiritual becomes conceived as that which is not rational. Consequently, the spiritual becomes located in the realm of feeling.

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

#murphy #laca #william james #theory #theology #liberalism #therapy

[grandpasessions]

With this increasing tendency to imbue products and services with spirituality, the discourse surrounding mysticism has been extracted from its historical context. It has been secularised through the lenses of medicine, capitalism, and psychology and ultimately reincorporated into religious and pastoral scenarios. As McIntosh succinctly states, ‘spirituality without theology becomes rootless, easily hijacked by individualistic consumerism’.

Thus, spiritual directors commonly speak of John of the Cross’ Dark Night of the Soul in psychotherapeutic terms. By misconstruing the Dark Night as merely an experience of darkness, or an experiential indicator of psychological wholeness, we risk diminishing its complexity.

This misconception threatens to position the discipline of spiritual direction merely as an alternative technology promoting psychological well-being within a marketplace dominated by experientially focused methodologies and products. The risk is reducing the deeply nuanced nature of the Dark Night to the confines of contemporary experientialist ideologies.

In short, the centrality of experientialism in spiritual direction refects and resonates with many forms of psychotherapeutic practices to the extent that the dividing line between psychotherapy and spiritual direction is sometimes difficult to distinguish.

The Direction of Desire Mark Gerard Murphy

#murphy #lacan #theology #psychology #experientalist #liberalism #psychoanalsysi #philosophy

[grandpasessions]

"Poet of the heavens and the earth," one could call God, translating word-for-word the Greek text of the Credo. Thus we can penetrate the mystery of the created being. To create is not to reflect oneself in a mirror, even that of prime matter, it is not vainly to divide oneself in order to take everything unto oneself. It is a calling forth of newness. One might also say: a risk of newness. When God raises, outside of Himself, a new subject, a free subject, that is the peak of his creative act. Divine freedom is accomplished through creating this supreme risk: another freedom.

Orthodox Theology V. Lossky

#lossky #theology #christianity #theory #philosophy #creation #god #hell yeah

[grandpasessions]

Only by taking into serious consideration the biblical and Greek patristic concept of the original destiny or theosis of man can we gain a deeper understanding of how badly the West's theologians have misunderstood Eastern theology's focus on man's redemption from death and corruptibility. Having eudaemonistic conceptions of human destiny and believing death to be from God, the West is unable to grasp the moral significance of the patristic doctrine of salvation from death.

This is to be expected, however, since the West's theologians view man's inclination to self-satisfaction as natural. And since death is the underpinning of that inclination, they do not understand how death could be a moral obstruction to man's living in accordance with the Western notion of his original destiny, that is, selfish eudaemonia.

When we take into account the fact that man was created to become perfect in freedom and love as God is perfect, that is, to love God and his neighbor in the same unselfish way that God loves the world, it becomes apparent that the death of the soul, that is, the loss of divine grace, and the corruption of the body have rendered such a life of perfection impossible. In the first place, the deprivation of divine grace impairs the mental powers of the newborn infant; thus, the mind of man has a tendency toward evil from the beginning.

This tendency grows strong when the ruling force of corruption becomes perceptible in the body. Through the power of death and the devil, sin that reigns in man gives rise to fear and anxiety and to the general instinct of self-preservation or survival. Thus, Satan manipulates man's fear and his desire for self-satisfaction, raising up sin in him, in other words, transgression against the divine will regarding unselfish love, and provoking man to stray from his original destiny.

Because of death, man must first attend to the necessities of life in order to stay alive. In this struggle, self-interests are unavoidable. Thus, man is unable to live in accordance with his original destiny of unselfish love. This state of subjection under the reign of death is the root of man's weaknesses in which he becomes entangled in sin at the urging of the demons and by his own consent.

Resting in the hands of the devil, the power of the fear of death is the root from which self-aggrandizement, egotism, hatred, envy, and other similar passions spring up. In addition to the fact that man "subjects himself to anything in order to avoid dying," he constantly fears that his life is without meaning. Thus, he is strives to demonstrate to himself and to others that it has worth.

He loves flatterers and hates his detractors. He seeks his own and envies the success of others. He loves those who love him and hates those who hate him. He seeks security and happiness in wealth, glory, bodily pleasures, and he may even imagine that his destiny is a self-seeking eudaemonistic and passionless enjoyment of the presence of God regardless of whether or not he has true, active, unselfish love for others.

Fear and anxiety render man an individualist.

And when he identifies himself with a communal or social ideology it, too, is out of individualistic, self-seeking motives because he perceives his self-satisfaction and eudaemonia as his destiny. Indeed, it is possible for him to be moved by ideological principles of vague love for mankind despite the fact that mortal hatred for his neighbor nests in his heart. These are the works of the "flesh" under the sway of death and Satan.

Ancestral Sin John Romanides

#romanides #theory #theology #philosophy #christianity #orthodoxy #the west #psychoanalysis #eudaemonia #liberalism #enlightenment