DESERT FATHERS
"The desert fathers provided the inspiration for Christian spirituality throughout the Middle Ages and beyond. The men and women who first embraced the life of solitude in the deserts of Egypt, Palestine and Syria were seldom clerics or scholars. Yet these uneducated peasants, shepherds, itinerant traders, former slaves and prostitutes soon attracted so many followers they were said to have turned the desert into a city. From the fourth century onwards, along with biographies and full-length treatises, their reflections were brought together and widely circulated. Powerful and moving in their depth of religious conviction and wholehearted, even joyful, commitment to poverty, simplicity and humility, the sayings directly influenced the Rule of Saint Benedict, and set the pattern for Western monasticism." "This edition makes freshly accessible the most influential Latin collection of sayings. The new English translations follow the original Latin organization around themes important to the monks, such as charity, fortitude, lust, patience, prayer, self-control and visions."--Jacket.
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- On the note of the Desert Fathers, the "Life of St. Anthony" written by St. Athanasius is one of my favorite books, and is a relatively short and accessible read: http://newadvent.org/fathers/2811.htm or for a facsimile of a print from 1697: https://archive.org/details/TheLifeOfStAntony/page/n5/mode/2...
- This has been a light reading year, for various reasons of circumstance and laziness, but here are the standouts in my mind:
* Thomas Merton -- The Wisdom of the Desert
A collection of quotes by and about the Desert Fathers of the early Christian church. I especially liked the ones that showed extreme mercy and selflessness, such as the monks who turned in a band of robbers, felt bad about it, and broke them out of prison, or the monk who would not count payments he received, as that might cause someone who cheated him to add lying about it to their sins.
* Alfred Lansing -- Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage
This is just an exciting adventure log, following Shackleton's expedition as they spent over a year stranded on an Antarctic ice floe.
"The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances." -- Alfred Lansing
* Seneca -- Letters from a Stoic
"I am not, mind you, against your possessing [riches], but I want to ensure that you possess them without tremors; and this you will only achieve in one way, by convincing yourself that you can live a happy life even without them, and by always regarding them as being on the point of vanishing." Letter XVIII
- John Cassian's "The Conferences"[0][1] is a collection of interviews with the Desert Fathers, and one of the subjects discussed is that of focus and concentration (a selection of excerpts was recently compiled into a small book entitled "How to Focus", a review of which was posted here on HN two months ago [2]).
At one point, one of the monks interviewed by John Cassian and Germanus (either Abba Moses, Abba Serenus, or Abba Isaac, all of Scetis) compares the mind to a millstone driven by a water wheel. As long as the water flows, you cannot stop the millstone from moving and grinding whatever has been put into it. We cannot stop the millstone, but we can control what we feed into it and what is ground up by it.
Of course, there is also a long tradition of mortification of the flesh ("The Conferences" also discusses such things), crudely parodied and ridiculed by bad literature and trash Hollywood films. The basic understanding is that our bodily appetites can be unruly, grasping, wanting, desiring, imprudently and with no regard for the objective good that the intellect knows. Mortification is a way of training these insubordinate appetites and passions into obedience to the intellect through exercises of denial. Fasting is one example. An element of discomfort, and even suffering, can be involved as the lower is sacrificed for the sake of the higher, and the appetites throw their tantrums as we persevere and dominate them, reigning them in like a man on horseback reigns in his horse.
Our culture has sold us the idea that indulging our whims and desires with no regard for our objective good is freedom, but nothing could be further from the truth. This kind of lifestyle is a recipe for misery and enslavement, both to the chaos and disorder of unruly and even disordered appetites and passions, but also those who gladly exploit the appetites of such weak and blind men, herding and using them like mindless beasts. As Augustine of Hippo wrote, "a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices." The relevance to focus here is that if you do not learn to exercise restraint and self-mastery, you will have trouble with focus as your appetites and passions will pull you away from the matter at hand. Perseverance is thwarted by such softness [3]. Pour only good things into your millstone. Do not pollute your millstone with darnel. Endure truth, whether pleasant or painful. Let is grind away your marble you bring forth your sculpture. It is not mastered, repressed appetites that come back to bite you. On the contrary. It is repressed truth that does.
[0] https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm
- > only to discover that you’d absorbed what amounts to a few sentences?
This is akin to saying that "F = MA so why do I need a whole series of lectures and chapters in a textbook to explain it!" Understanding the basic idea in physics that F=MA involves building a variety of intuitions about what this really means, what it entails in the real world, and how this influences the ways we think about this powerful idea. You need to see examples, experiments and applications of this idea for it to make sense, even though it can be perfectly reduced to 4 characters. Once the student of physics has all of the information in their head a vast amount of complexity can be reduced to F=MA.
An even more powerful demonstration of this is of course Einstein's famous E = MC^2. A pretty simple assertion, but really unraveling what that means and entails is easily many years of study.
On the other end of the spectrum, there are many books that genuinely defy reduction in this way. Hegel and Derrida are notorious examples of these. Scholars of either would tell you that not being reducible is an essential property of what each of these writers is trying to say. However I suspect the author of this post would very quickly become frustrated with these works and beg them to "get to the point!".
And another perspective outside of these are the "Desert Fathers", the early Christian ascetics, who would spend years meditating on single passages from the bible.
- Wow, this is a peak "I bet this guy is fun at parties" moment.
It's all incredibly ridiculous. If this man were really on a "dopamine fast", the conversation still would have ended, but not in the same way.
It would have ended because he would be wiggling around on the floor and making noises like a dying cat. His basal ganglia, starved of dopamine, would not be able to make any of the neural connections they need to coordinate any of the muscle movements in his body, including the muscles needed for speech. This guy seems like he was more interested in informing this person that he was fasting than actually keeping his "fast".
This incident reminds me of the Desert Fathers, the early christian monks who lived in the desert in Egypt. They took fasting very seriously as a way of keeping their religious purity. Many of their parables caution against keeping your fast for show. Here's one:
"Once two brothers went to visit an old man. It was not the old man’s habit, however, to eat every day. When he saw the brothers, he welcomed them with joy, and said: “Fasting has its own reward, but if you eat for the sake of love, you satisfy two commandments, for you give up your own will and also fulfill the commandment to refresh others.”
From "The Desert Fathers: Sayings of the Early Christian Monks" https://www.amazon.com/Desert-Fathers-Sayings-Christian-Clas...
- > In the west, the idea has had a profound cultural impact. Peter France explores this in his book Hermits, attributing the creation of monasticism to the example set by the earliest Christian hermits, the Desert Fathers of Egypt.
I'm curious why, given this little bit of insight, he never sought out any hermit monks? I personally know of an Orthodox Christian hermitage in Canada that's the real deal, not to mention there's plenty of Orthodox hermit monks in places like Greece, Russia, Romania, Egypt, and elsewhere... Not sure if there's any true Catholic hermit monks, but I'd guess there are. Instead we get this fluff piece about visiting an angry, drunk man who wanted to escape society, and obviously just became crazy rather than gaining any sort of insight.
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