Broken Tools
June 6th, 2006, search relatedRelated posts :: broken tools :: Broken Tools :: Broken Tools :: Broken Tools
Man I’m enjoying reading the Church fathers. It’s a nice clear space of
contemplative thinking.
***
I use to read academic hermeneutics. I read, in my twenties, through
Ricouer, Gadamer, Dilthey and some other stuff. I was taught in the courses
I audited for a couple of years in a Lutheran seminary that Heidegger
apparently fits into this ‘tradition’. There is tons of secondary literature
to back this up. I always felt suspicious of this positioning of Heidegger
with protestant hermeneutics partly because at that time I was also reading
Derrida and lots of Lyotard but already had an interest in negative theology
and that is what I read in Heidegger. Now the bias is clear I understand
the, first, is the nineteenth century positivist bias that leaves Dilthey
looking for some epistemological foundation but there is the anti-monastic
and contemplative bias of so many protestant thinker that is inherited from
Luther’s rejection of monastic culture. Heidegger as a contemplative doesn’t
fit in very well with these hermeneutic thinkers. Like Levinas he is in a
completely different track which is much closer to the foundational
experience of the monastic contemplatives with their emphasis on _nepsis_
(attentive watchfullness). This aspect of ‘Russian’ philosophy is also
passed on through reading Levinas where there is also a thinking that goes
beyond a subjective intentionality.
***
I came across a good book and network of books and conversations relevant
for the modern therepeutic aspects of piety that are probably worth
following if you are interest in the merger of psychotherapy and
contemplation. An excerpt: “We want particularly to point to asceticism.
“The forceful practice of self control and love, patience and stillness,
will destroy the passions hidden within us” (56). Nicetas St. Stethatos,
disciple of St. Symeon the New Theologian, describes this ascetic practice.
Man has five senses, so the ascetic practices are five in number: vigils,
study, prayer, self-control and hesychia. The ascetic should combine the
five senses with these five practices: sight with vigils, hearing with
study, smell with prayer, taste with self-control and touch with hesychia.
When he succeeds in making these links, “he quickly purifies the nous of his
soul and by this refining makes it dispassionate and clear-sighted” (57).
We can say briefly that to practise asceticism is to apply God’s law, to
keep His commandments. The effort which we make to subordinate the will of
man to the will of God, and to be changed by this, is called ascesis.”
