On Those Evagrian Logismoi

Is it just me--and am I taxing your patience with a bit of psychoanalytic introspection you'd rather not be subject to?--or is it funny how certain topics or personages you did not really attend to deeply at the time nonetheless have a way of staying with you and surfacing at interesting, and often usefully timed, moments? I first heard of Evagrius in undergraduate course now 25 years ago (!) but find myself returning to him regularly. Just last week, in fact, I was recommending him to someone with interests in both patristics and psychanalysis and psychotherapy.

In any event, after a slew of books published about Evagrius in the last two decades, most of the good ones noted on here, we had a bit of a lull until last summer when Brepols brought out L. Misiarczyk, Eight Logismoi in the Writings of Evagrius Ponticus (vii+313 pp.). About this recent study the publisher tells us this: 

This book presents the teaching of Evagrius of Pontus (345-399) on eight passionate thoughts (logismoi), i.e. gluttony, impurity, avarice (greed), sadness, anger (wrath), acedia, vanity and pride.

This book presents the teaching of Evagrius of Pontus (345-399) about eight passionate thoughts (logismoi), i.e. gluttony, impurity, avarice (greed), sadness, anger (wrath), acedia, vanity and pride. The study first reconstructs cosmology, eschatology, anthropology and spiritual teaching of the monk of Pontus in order to show the nature, dynamics and ways of combating against the eight passionate thoughts as proposed by Evagrius. His teaching in this regard became the basis for later Christian teaching on the Seven Deadly Sins and an inspiration in the future for some currents of modern psychology.

We are further told this about the author: 

Leszek Misiarczyk studied philosophy and theology in Płock and theology at the Theological Institute in Cremisan-Bethlehem (Israel). In 1991-93 he studied biblical theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, obtaining a bachelor's degree and then in 1993-97, patristic studies at the Patristic Institute “Augustinianum” in Rome, obtaining a degree of doctor in theologia et scientiis patristicis. In 2008 he obtained the degree of Habilitation (Free Researcher) at the Faculty of Historical and Social Sciences of the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw, and in 2018 the title of professor in humanities. He teaches at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University in Warsaw and is the author of many publications in patristics, theology and history of ancient Christianity.

Almsgiving and Therapy in the Thought of Chrysostom

One of the things I learned in the early days of the pandemic last year, when so much was so unknown and we were all stuck at home doomfully ruminating, was that one of the best ways to manage my anxiety was to do something very concrete for others--take my kids for a walk, get groceries for an elderly shut-in neighbor, help pack boxes at the foodbank. If I were inclined--and I am most certainly not--towards immediately racing out to copyright this idea and market it as every other psychotherapist on the continent seems hell-bent on doing--I might call this ARCS ("Anxiety-Reducing Community Service"). Almost all such "modalities" and their jumble of acronyms are merely mercenary repackaging (dread and ugly word: "branding") of what has been obvious for centuries. 

In any event, my very minor and perhaps even banal discovery about myself not only took the focus off myself and the tendency to catastrophize, but even more important it helped serve someone else. Thus in my late 40s did I remember something I had once learned in my early 20s (when I did extensive volunteer work) but then gotten crowded out of my memory by the press of having a family and full-time job. 

In any event, my realization seems to have a long pedigree as a new book suggests. This does not really surprise me for as I've been arguing for some time in a variety of places, much that is good in modern psychotherapy was already to be found, however inchoately, in early Christian monastic practice. This seems confirmed by the recent advent of John Chrysostom: On Almsgiving and the Therapy of the Soul by Junghun Bae (Brill, 2021), 207pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us this: 

In recent years, there has been significant scholarly focus on John Chrysostom’s appropriation of ancient psychagogy, demonstrating that he was a skilled Christian physician of the soul who sought to promote the somatic and psychological health of his congregation by proposing preaching and various ascetic disciplines as medical treatments. 

In these studies, however, relatively little attention has been devoted to his use of philosophical therapy in relation to almsgiving. To address this, this book aims to take a closer look at Chrysostom’s view of almsgiving and soul therapy within the context of ancient philosophical therapy. Ancient philosophers identified passions (πάθη), desires, and distorted thought as the diseases of the soul and developed various kinds of cognitive and behavioural remedies to cure these. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach between Greco-Roman philosophy and social ethics in early Christianity, particularly in the tradition of the Greek Fathers, what follows pursues a giver-centered analysis which has largely been ignored in the previous receiver-oriented research. 

Handbook of Christian Ethics

Starting a good decade or more now all the major academic publishers--led by Oxford, but followed by Cambridge, Routledge, T&T Clark, and others--got into "handbooks of" and "companions to" in a huge way. I have myself contributed to a few of them from Oxford.

Another one was released this year: The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics, ed. Tobias Winright (2021), 512pp. 

All the chapters range widely and look fascinating to Christians of every tradition. There are also at least two explicitly Eastern Christian chapters featured. About this collection the publisher tells us this:

The T&T Clark Handbook of Christian Ethics provides an ecumenical introduction to Christian ethics, its sources, methods, and applications. With contributions by theological ethicists known for their excellence in scholarship and teaching, the essays in this volume offer fresh purchase on, and an agenda for, the discipline of Christian ethics in the 21st century.

The essays are organized in three sections, following an introduction that presents the four-font approach and elucidates why it is critically employed through these subsequent sections. The first section explores the sources of Christian ethics, including each of the four fonts: scripture, tradition, experience, and reason.

The second section examines fundamental or basic elements of Christian ethics and covers different methods, approaches, and voices in doing Christian ethics, such as natural law, virtue ethics, conscience, responsibility, narrative, worship, and engagement with other religions.

The third section addresses current moral issues in politics, medicine, economics, ecology, criminal justice and other related spheres from the perspective of Christian ethics, including war, genetics, neuroethics, end-of-life decisions, marriage, family, work, sexuality, nonhuman animals, migration, aging, policing, incarceration, capital punishment, and more.

Why We Secretly Hate Freedom and Health

In having to choose books for next year for a moral theology class, I've had occasion to go back to old works I've used in the past, beginning with the Orthodox thinker Christos Yannaras's The Freedom of Morality, which I have often used over the years, having first read it a dozen or more years ago now. Like many of his books, it contains occasionally wild claims and polemical allegations, and Freedom of Morality in particular is grossly swollen on its own verbosity and badly in need of severe editing. Nevertheless, the core arguments still remain important in refusing the temptation on the part of too many Christians--Catholics especially--to reduce "morality" to some kind of discrete system or, worse, an ideology.

Following Heraclitus' famous aphorism that you cannot step twice into the same river, so I find that picking up books one has read several times over the years necessarily entails reading them differently as the river of one's life continues to move. So this time, in coming back to Yannaras, I read him in light of more recent reading along similar themes, including the social critic and psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom.

Fromm, in turn, let me to Nikolai Berdyaev's Slavery and Freedom. I don't know if anyone has ever read Fromm and Berdyaev together, let alone written and analyzed their similarities, but they are plainly there in both books for everyone to see. This is not entirely surprising as both men were near-contemporaries in living through both world wars. Both were also shaped by Marxism and existentialism in different ways.

All three--Yannaras, Fromm, and Berdyaev--have been on my mind lately because I have, since reading Adam Phillips, been especially taken with two of his insights: first, that most of us do not really want to be free because we find ourselves too much to bear. It is easier to restrict our freedom through submission to someone or something else--ideology, alcohol, authority figures--than it is to bear our freedom in all its uncontained unpredictability and ill-defined spontaneity.

I think our dis-ease with freedom is what led to D.W. Winnicott's powerful aphorism (quoted in Phillips' short biography of him, but originally found in his book on the child) that "health is much more difficult to deal with than disease." If we are suffering and diseased (spiritually, psychologically, physically) we are bound and unfree. Perhaps perversely, many of us seem to prefer it that way. That is both stranger and yet more widespread than many of us realize.

Jesuits and Casuists: A Note on Understanding Amoris Laetitia

I was on a panel last spring with Matthew Ashley of Notre Dame talking about Francis's methods as pope, and alluded in passing to a book that very much bears mentioning now in light of this endlessly jejune furor in the Catholic Church over Amoris Laetitia. It is a book I read twenty years ago now in a graduate class on the history of ethics, and has remained with me both as a wonderfully written and deeply fascinating work of history, but also as a clear reminder of the importance of treating cases on their own terms, something which the Catholic tradition used to pride itself on doing. I went back to it for my lecture last spring, and found that it described, in often uncanny ways, the approach of Pope Francis to moral questions in the aforementioned exhortation and elsewhere.

Published in 1990 by the University of California Press, this book remains very timely in the Catholic Church today. I submit you cannot understand how and why Pope Francis operates as he does until you read Stephen Toulmin and Albert Jonsen in The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning.

Equally I submit you cannot understand why his opponents (including authors of that "filial correction") are driven to apoplexy by the man until you realize, thanks again to Jonsen and Toulmin, that this pope is not content with abstract denunciations or universal declarations that fail to discern their particular applications in the context of individual lives. As the authors note of the early Jesuit leaders, "they prepared their charges to meet problems of conscience with 'discernment'--a favourite Jesuit word." Anyone who has read and listened to Pope Francis knows that 'discernment' remains if not his favourite word then certainly one of his most frequently uttered. He is a Jesuit casuist of the old school. Understand that and you understand something fundamental about the man.

Clement of Alexandria's Moral Psychology

What is it about the great city of Alexandria that so many of its leading Christian intellectuals seem to have never shaken off a certain soupçon of heterodoxy? Whether we're talking Origen, Cyril, or Clement (inter alia--to say nothing of the infamous Arius of course) there remains in the minds of some just a bit of doubt, a bit of unease, as to how sound these men are.

Among them, Clement of Alexandria occupies a pivotal if at times controverted position within early Christianity, as I noted here. Some traditions have canonized him and recognize him as a patristic figure of great authority; others have done neither; still others view him as guilty of  heresy. A new book, set for September release, may shed more light on him: Kathleen Gibbons, The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria: Mosaic Philosophy (Routledge, 2016), 208pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In The Moral Psychology of Clement of Alexandria, Kathleen Gibbons proposes a new approach to Clement’s moral philosophy and explores how his construction of Christianity’s relationship with Jewishness informed, and was informed by, his philosophical project. As one of the earliest Christian philosophers, Clement’s work has alternatively been treated as important for understanding the history of relations between Christianity and Judaism and between Christianity and pagan philosophy. This study argues that an adequate examination of his significance for the one requires an adequate examination of his significance for the other.

While the ancient claim that the writings of Moses were read by the philosophical schools was found in Jewish, Christian, and pagan authors, Gibbons demonstrates that Clement’s use of this claim shapes not only his justification of his authorial project, but also his philosophical argumentation. In explaining what he took to be the cosmological, metaphysical, and ethical implications of the doctrine that the supreme God is a lawgiver, Clement provided the theoretical justifications for his views on a range of issues that included martyrdom, sexual asceticism, the status of the law of Moses, and the relationship between divine providence and human autonomy. By contextualizing Clement’s discussions of volition against wider Greco-Roman debates about self-determination, it becomes possible to reinterpret the invocation of “free will” in early Christian heresiological discourse as part of a larger dispute about what human autonomy requires.

We are also given the table of contents:

Acknowledgements
Note on Translations
Introduction
Chapter 1: The Mosaic Law in early Christianity
Chapter 2: Miming Moses: Clement’s Self-Presentation and the Dependency Theme
Chapter 3: Moses, Statesman and Philosopher
Chapter 4: The Logos of God, the Problem of Evil, and Clement’s Transformation of Providence
Chapter 5: Right Reason and the Gnostic’s Grasp of the Mosaic Law
Chapter 6: Clement’s Idiosyncratic Concept of Autonomy in the Context of Ancient Thought
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index