Am I an Intellectual Glutton? Evdokimov, Jackson, Precepts, and Counsels

Study everything! proclaims the first half of my masthead motto.  I live by it. Am I an intellectual glutton? The self-critical and conflicted Tom Merton asked himself that very question in a journal entry. I put the question to myself.

Example. I am up from a nap and enjoying an iced coffee. I will soon be banging on all eight. As part of the afternoon start-up I am reading back-to-back, and back-and-forth, Paul Evdokimov (The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Orthodox Tradition, St. Vladimir's Press, 1985, orig. published in 1980 as Sacrement de L'Amour), and the Blake Bailey biography of Charles Jackson, the alcoholic, married-to-woman,  homosexual who achieved minor literary fame as the author of the thinly-veiled autobiographical booze novel, The Lost Weekend (1944).  Jackson died at age 65 having destroyed himself with drugs and alcohol.

I have long been fascinated by the utterly wild diversity of human types. There is nothing like it it the animal world, and yet we too are animals. We are in continuity with the animals but an incomprehensible rupture, saltation, jump, metabasis eis allo genos, occurred at some point in the evolutionary process that gave rise to man who is, paradoxically, both an animal and not an animal. Heidegger is right; there is an abysmal/abyssal (abgruendig) difference between man and animal. An abyss yawns between the two. Heidegger  is echoing Genesis but going deeper, and some would say, off the deep end, with his talk of man as Dasein, the Da of Sein/Seyn. More on Heidegger when I dig into Dugin.

And then there is Paul Evdokimov (1901-1970). I have Merton to thank for bringing him to my attention. Here is a passage that struck me:

There is no reason . . . to call one path [the marital state] or the other [the monastic state] the preeminent Christianity, since what is valid for all of Christendom is thereby valid for each of the two states. The East [unlike the RCC] has never made the distinction between the "precepts" and the "evangelical counsels." The Gospel in its totality is addressed to each person; everyone in his own situation is called to the absolute of the Gospel. Trying to prove the superiority of the one state over the other is therefore useless . . . The renunciation at work in both cases is as good as the positive content that the human being brings to it: the intensity of the love of God. (Evdokimov, p. 65)

For the Roman Catholic distinction between precepts and counsels of perfection that Evdokimov is rejecting, see here. "It has been denied by heretics in all ages, and especially by many Protestants in the sixteenth and following centuries . . . "

Comments

[EG]

Hi Bill,

Would you say, Heidegger been a long-time motivation for a lot of your philosophical study?

I have been ruminating and doing various reading on existence, that article by Cottingham (What is Existence?) was very orienting, and your comment conversation was Dmitri was very useful to me. Another work that was useful to me that I came across is Richard Velkley's, "Heidegger, Strauss and the Premises of Philosophy."

There is something else that arose here too in connection with Heidegger and Strauss and thinking about how Plato, Socrates and Aristotle think about society, reality and what we are, and then how that is received in the intervening centuries, and whether we have lost a historical thread of what a human being is, as opposed to the more philosophical/analytic concept of a person a la rational agent. This implicates the tensions that you highlight between Athens and Jerusalem (consider: the Jews as a creedal people, i.e. a chosen people, see: Philip Rieff, "Triumph of the Therapeutic" and "Charisma, the Gift of Grace and How It has Been Taken Away from Us"; also the discussion you raised with Islam and the subsequent comment discussion about the contrasts with Christianity), and ultimately the "mythology" that tells us who we are, what we are and how we figure into the World. And thus understanding that this is really deep as it addresses the most fundamental questions of values and the things that ground our self-understanding, the present scene of the World starts making sense in its various incongruities and political tensions and conflicts.