Through the Threshold
Something to pick you up during the dog days of summer. Here’s an essay I wrote on The Dead and agape. Hopefully more writing about religious aspects of The Dead coming soon… Read more
Something to pick you up during the dog days of summer. Here’s an essay I wrote on The Dead and agape. Hopefully more writing about religious aspects of The Dead coming soon… Read more
Filming of “The Seven Samurai” from Eiga no Tomo – Eiga no Tomo (映画の友) – Public Domain I started reading Helen DeWitt’s woefully under-appreciated contemporary classic The Last Samurai this week. It’s mind-blowing, tender, playful, brilliant. It’s more than I’d hoped for. If you’ve never had the pleasure, do yourself a favor and read it ASAP. The story begins proper when, after spending nearly 50 hours translating a dry German text, Aristarchs Athetesen in der Homerkritik, the protagonist Sibylla realizes that the author is... Read more
Csuk’s “Harrowing” – axioart – PD-US I feel like we’ve been stuck in Aquinas’ thought for a few weeks now. Maybe “stuck” isn’t the right word, maybe a more appropriate phrase might be “privileged to occupy” or something. And it makes sense that we (and Nault himself, the impetus for this deep dive) would spend so much time with Saint Thomas: 1. His work is complicated and demands a slow meander 2. His work is relevant and rewards a slow... Read more
Zwei ineinander geflochtene Hände – Mkoenitzer – CC BY – SA 4.0 Where were we? Right, gaudium. Joy. Specifically, the joy that springs from charity and how that relates to friendship as Saint Thomas defines it. Nault tells us that through the history of philosophy (and, one assumes, less formal modes of approaching wisdom), friendship has always been considered a value, but Saint Thomas was the first to define charity as a type of friendship. This is Saint Thomas Aquinas we’re talking about here, so of course... Read more
Thomas von Aquin – Sandro Botticelli – Public Domain It’s been a while since my last post in my ongoing exploration of acedia, which has been guided predominantly by Jean-Charles Nault’s The Noonday Devil: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil of Our Times. That’s partially due to a more hectic than usual work schedule, but predominantly it’s because I’ve been reading Saint Thomas Aquinas’ take on acedia. Pre-study, my knowledge of Saint Thomas (how Nault refers to him, and so how I will)... Read more
I picked this relatively simple (D, G, D, G, D, G) song because I had a blast this week recording a cover version at home. Anyone who’s left home and then struggled to “come back all the way”, as Dylan sings, can identify with the first verse of “Misunderstood”: When you’re in your old neighborhood the cigarettes taste so good but you’re so misunderstood so misunderstood Read more
Fra Angelico’s Scenes from the Lives of the Desert Fathers – Google Cultural Institute – Public Domain Spiritual remedies prescribed by the desert fathers can often be intimidatingly simple. Intellectually simple, at least, however spiritually profound. Building on Nault’s reduction of the manifestations of acedia to five, he gives us a mirror of those five in his remedies. I suppose it makes sense to use the same format as I did in my last post and include some quotes and music alongside the... Read more
Brueghel – Sieben Laster – Disidia.jpg – zeno.org – PD To add to my first post about Nault’s wonderful The Noonday Devil: Acedia, The Unnamed Evil Of Our Times, I thought it might help to better define acedia (so often confused with work-a-day laziness, another example of the secularization of a spiritual term coinciding with it also becoming more banal – not a coincidence) by listing the five principal manifestations that Nault reduces it to. He also pairs each manifestation with an... Read more
A sweet and melancholy song for the horse latitudes of summer Read more
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