Being and the Between, by William Desmond

Being and the Between
by William Desmond; 557 pp. paper $39.95

Man lives in the middle. Plato wrote that he is neither god nor beast, but someone in between. In Pensées Pascal adds, “What else can [man] do then but perceive some semblance of the middle of things, eternally hopeless of knowing either their principles or their end? All things come out of nothingness and are carried onwards to infinity. Who can follow these astonishing processes?” Hegel scholar and philosopher William Desmond means to take a stab at it, and his effort is nothing short of a fully developed, comprehensively argued, philosophical system.

Being and Between is essentially a study of metaphysics. Desmond offers a system by which to understand “the nature of metaphysical thinking, and of the fundamental senses of being consonant with that thinking” and rethinks basic metaphysical questions in this light. Put more succinctly, Part I thinks on metaphysics; Part II thinks in metaphysics.

In particular, Desmond addresses the metaphysical themes of origin, creation, things, intelligibilities, selves, communities, being true and being good. His fourfold understanding of being includes the univocal (the sameness of mind and being), the equivocal (the difference of mind and being), the dialectical (a self-mediated reintegration of mind and being), and—uniquely—the metaxological. Desmond’s metaxolgical gives a logos of the middle. It suggests the intermediation of multiple sources rather than the singularity of self-mediation. In Desmond’s words, “the metaxological sense keeps open the spaces of otherness in the between, including the jagged edges of rupture that we never entirely smooth out.”

His resurrection of the metaphysical seeks to serve the being of the between, a place to stand and live in an honest and sustainable perplexity before the mystery of transcendence. “In a mindfulness beyond determinate knowing, the Unequal comes toward us, offering over and over again, the unearned gift of the agape of being, singing to our deafness the unbearable music of the ultimate amen.”

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The Destiny of Man, by Nicolas Berdyaev

[The following is part of a series of reviews on the work of religious thinker Nicholas Berdyaev. Click Here to read a short biography of his life, Here for his book, Freedom and the Spirit, and Here for The Meaning of the Creative Act.]

The Destiny of Man
by Nicolas Berdyaev; translated by Natalie Duddington; foreword by Boris Jakim
318 pp. paper $26.95

Nicolas Berdyaev’s “new ethics” encompasses not only knowledge of good and evil but also of the tragic, which, in his words, “is constantly present in moral experience and complicates all our moral judgments.” It is an ethics that emphasizes the personality, an ethics that arises in freedom and strives for compassion. Consistent with the whole of Berdyaev’s work, creativity not only animates but interprets moral life, bearing witness to man’s vocation as collaborator with God in the work of instituting goodness in the world. True creativity, he maintains, is not concerned with the new but with the eternal. “Eternity is attained in the actual moment, it comes in the present,” he writes. “Eternity is not a cessation of moment and of creative life; it is creative life of a different order…it is a mystery play of the spirit which embraces the whole tragedy of cosmic life.” In essence, Berdyaev’s is an ethics of Divine Humanity. He seeks to move beyond simplistic thinking about evil by recognizing its complicated nature. “If evil has a positive meaning and does not result in everlasting hell…evil proves to be an unrealized form of the good.” This “good” lies solely in “the enrichment of life brought about by the heroic struggle against it [evil] and the victory over it”—that is, evil’s transfiguration and redemption.

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The Meaning of the Creative Act, by Nicolas Berdyaev

[The following is part of a series of reviews on the work of religious thinker Nicholas Berdyaev. Click Here to read a short biography of his life and Here for his book, Freedom and the Spirit.]

The Meaning of the Creative Act
by Nicolas Berdyaev; translated by Donald A. Lowrie; foreword by Boris Jakim
352 pp. paper $26.95 

The Meaning of the Creative Act is the foundational embodiment of Nicolas Berdyaev’s philosophical convictions. Completed in 1914 (and significantly influenced by the revolution of its time), it reveals the philosopher at his most optimistic. “To-day I am inclined to greater pessimism,” he writes in his 1926 preface to the German edition. “But now as then, I still believe that God calls men to creative activity and to a creative answer to His love.” Berdyaev is often provocative, innovative even, in his thought. Discussing the antagonism between the saint and the artist, he writes, “The geniuses have created, but they were less: the saints have been, but they created little…A twofold tragedy of creativeness reveals the truth that there has not yet been in our world a religious epoch of creativity.” In the new creative epoch Berdyaev calls us to (and sees just over the horizon), creativity will bring about a new life and a new world—”man’s perfection and the perfection of what he creates will become one.” His thoughts tumble one upon another, ranging through philosophy, redemption, freedom, asceticism, sex, marriage, family, beauty, art, ethics, mysticism and culture, amassing a suggestive and rich—if not always comprehensible—trove of ideas. Berdyaev’s later books hone the tripping quality of his thought to solid, graspable theory, but The Meaning of the Creative Act stands as his brightest and sharpest critique of culture and his most impassioned call for “a Christian renaissance” through which man becomes “a free participant in the divine process.”

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Freedom and the Spirit, by Nicolas Berdyaev

[The following is part of a series of reviews on the work of religious thinker Nicholas Berdyaev. Click Here to read a short biography of his life.]

Freedom and the Spirit
by Nicolas Berdyaev; translated by Oliver Fielding Clark; foreword by Boris Jakim
370 pp. paper $26.95

Berdyaev calls himself a “Christian theosophist, in the sense in which Clement of Alexandria, Origen, St. Gregory of Nyssa…and Vladimir Solovyov were Christian theosophists. All the forces of my spirit and of my mental and moral consciousness are bent towards the complete understanding of the problems which press so hard upon me. But my object is not so much to give them a systematic answer, as to put them more forcibly before the Christian conscience.” To that end, Freedom and the Spirit is bound up with the problem of the spirit and its relationship with matter, myth, revelation, faith, redemption, evil, mysticism, spiritual development, eschatology, the Church and the world. While Berdyaev is obviously a philosopher, his writing is straightforward—fathomable but not undemanding. His philosophy is set on the attainment of authentic life, which for him means the replacement of the kingdom of this world with the kingdom of God. We are all capable of this creative act, Berdyaev claims, because divine creativity constitutes our true nature. To quote Boris Jakim in his appended overview of Berdyaev’s life and works, “Our mission is to be collaborators with God in His continuing creation of the world.”

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Nicolas Berdyaev

[Over the next few days, we'll be featuring three books by the religious thinker Nicolas Berdyaev, beginning with the following short bio:]

As legend has it, Nicolas Berdyaev once talked his way out of arrest by outlining to his Communist interrogators the moral and religious principles by virtue of which he did not adhere to their party politics. In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, “Now there is a man who had a point of view!” Born in 1874, religious and political philosopher Nicolas Berdyaev lived in the midst of Russia’s most tumultuous century, falling in and out of favor with the revolutionaries and their ideologies. A practicing member of the Russian Orthodox Church for the entirety of his life, Berdyaev was a proponent of Orthodox thought, which he believed “did not define man from the point of view of Divine justice but from the idea of transfiguration and Deification of man and cosmos” (from “The Truth of Orthodoxy”), though he was often critical of the Church as an institution. Eventually exiled by the Bolshevik government and sent to Germany on the so-called philosophers’ ship (along with some 160 other writers, scholars and intellectuals no longer sympathetic to the Bolshevik/Communist cause), Berdyaev eventually made his way to Paris after a time in Berlin, where he founded an academy of philosophy and religion. He brought his academy with him to France and wrote fifteen books in the last twenty-five years of his life, including most of his important works.

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Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor

Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor:
Sacrament, Sacramental, and the Sacred in Her Fiction
edited by Joanne Halleran McMullen and Jon Parrish Peede; 231 pp. cloth $38.00

Maybe the most interesting aspect of Flannery O’Connor‘s legacy is the way she came to resemble the rural evangelists she so often brought to life in her fiction, rather than the priests of her native Catholicism. “With Wise Blood she climbed into the pulpit as a pious young handmaiden,” writes Jon Peede in the introduction, “and left it twelve years later as an immutable voice through which a creator God powerfully spoke.” O’Connor made no secret of the fact that she wrote as a Roman Catholic, from a Roman Catholic worldview. To quote Jon Parrish Peede again, “her supporters not only believed her, but they helped to spread the gospel.” The same could be said of her dissenters. O’Connor isn’t known for subtlety, and readers tend to fall into one of two categories―the lovers and the haters.

This collection of essays is noteworthy for its inclusion of both voices. The dissenters―namely Joanne Halleran McMullen and Timothy Caron―find themselves at odds with O’Connor’s own interpretations as well as the majority of existing scholarship concerning her, namely, the work of W.A. Sessions, John Desmond, Jill Baumgaertner, Ralph Wood and John May (all included here), who share an affinity with O’Connor’s own views of her work. Also included are Helen Andretta, Stephen Behrendt and Robert Donahoo, whose theological, philosophical and cultural interests exist outside the believer/skeptic dichotomy.

The diversity of O’Connor scholarship being undertaken today speaks to a shift in O’Connor studies across the board; the scholars who knew her personally continue to decline “in number and canonical authority” (Peede) even as those approaching her as a field of study continues to grow. The editors of Inside the Church of Flannery O’Connor have arranged the essays to form a kind of dialogue among and between them. Work that explores the influence of John Henry Newman and Thomas Aquinas as well as “the rapid demystification of the Eucharist” are followed by more cultural takes on her work, including a discussion of Catholic womanhood, the influence of cartoon catechisms (popular during O’Connor’s youth), and a comparison of O’Connor and William Blake, especially in terms of apocalyptic language and thematic preoccupations.

Timothy Baron takes exception with the True Believers (his term), arguing that O’Connor’s fiction is plagued by “theological whiteness”―that is to say, she is preoccupied with the spiritual lives of white characters. Joanne Halleran McMullen also presents a contrarian view, arguing that O’Connor’s representation of baptism in “The River” does not conform to Church doctrine. Ralph Wood’s interpretation of that same story directly follows Ms. McMullen’s, celebrating the lead character’s escape from nihilism to “temporal and eternal salvation.” The final essay continues in this vein, exploring the difference between a Catholic writer and a writer of Catholic fiction.

In O’Connor’s words, “The Catholic novel can’t be categorized by subject matter, but only by what it assumes about human and divine reality. It cannot see man as determined; it cannot see him as totally depraved. It will see him as incomplete in himself, as prone to evil, but as redeemable when his own efforts are assisted by grace…so that a door is always open to possibility and the unexpected in the human soul” (Mystery and Manners).

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Apology for Origen, by St. Pamphilus

Apology for Origen with the Letter of Rufinus On the Falsification of the Books of Origen (Fathers of the Church) by St. Pamphilus; translated by Thomas P. Scheck
149 pp. cloth $34.95

A disciple of Pierius of Alexandria (known as “Origen the Younger”), Pamphilus of Caesarea (d. 310) was a much celebrated priest-martyr of the early church and friend of the church historian and later bishop of Caesarea, Eusebius (d. 339). He spent the last three years of his life in prison, during which time he collaborated with Eusebius on the five books of his Apology for Origen (Eusebius wrote the sixth book after Pamphilus’ death). Only the first book survives because of its translation into Latin by Rufinus of Aquileia (d. 411).

Book One―presented here for the first time in English―endures as a complete work in itself and contains a preface by Rufinus, a summary of Origen’s teaching based on one of Origen’s most disputed works, On First Principles, and a list of charges against Origen with accompanying rebuttals based on Origen’s other writings. Pamphilus begins by stating that Origen’s accusers overlook his deep humility and fear of God, adding that Origen did not claim to speak definitively and was, in fact, at a loss concerning many of his subjects. Pamphilus simply asks that Origen be assessed with charity and fairness. He also points out Origen’s own hostile stance toward heretics and the anti-heretical nature of Origen’s theology, based in the Trinitarian structure of his thought.

The second part of Pamphilus’ Apology tackles specific accusations raised against Origen’s doctrine, including: 1) Origen’s statement that the Son of God was not born; 2) his belief that the Son of God came into existence as an emission; 3) his view that Christ is a mere man; 4) that (in conflict with the preceding statement) Christ’s actions were allegorical rather than historical; 5) Origen’s proclamation of two Christs; 6) his denial of the literal historical narratives concerning the deeds of the saints in Holy Scripture; 7) his denial that penalties will be inflicted upon sinners at the resurrection; 8) his erroneous understanding of the origin of souls; and 9) his teaching of metensomatosis, the transmigration of human souls after death into animals.

Rufinus’ accompanying letter On the Falsification of the Books of Origen may, in the words of Francis Xavier Murphy, suffer from Rufinus’ “intense respect of the man’s [Origen] genius” and is “certainly exaggerated in claiming that all the contradictions to be met with in Origen’s works were due to interpolations,” but it is also invaluable for Rufinus’ discussion of literary frauds and forgeries carried out by heretics and the effect these had on a number of writers throughout this period.

 

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A Handful of Dust, by Evelyn Waugh

A Handful of Dust
by Evelyn Waugh; 320 pp. paper $14.99

Classified as one of Waugh’s “early works,” A Handful of Dust is considered by many to be one of his best. Written shortly after Waugh’s conversion to Catholicism in 1930, the story follows the breakdown of a marriage while satirizing the absurdities of upper-crust English society. Waugh borrows his title (Waugh is quite fond of borrowing, especially from his experiences but also from his own published work) from Eliot’s Wasteland―a not-so-subtle indication of the rather dark terrain he means to travel:

“I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

Much has been made of the autobiographical nature of A Handful of Dust. Waugh wrote it in a relatively short time directly following the dissolution of his first marriage to Evelyn Gardner—a painful, nasty affair, that permanently and demonstrably impacted the whole of Waugh’s fiction. Whatever Waugh’s motivation (or cathartic need) might have been, the novel is darkly funny and sometimes hysterical, balancing out the essentially tragic milieu it reveals.

The story revolves around Tony and Brenda Last, a mismatched couple who move between their Gothic manor house and London’s high society. Tony spends his time tending to his ancestral home, Hetton Abbey, while Brenda embarks on an affair with an impoverished social climber (John Beaver) and takes a flat in London to escape her own boredom. Their young son, John Andrew, is exceptionally drawn. His curiosity, childish honesty and comic impertinences are a much needed foil to Brenda’s small-minded betrayals and Tony’s inability to recognize them.

Waugh is an instinctive writer with excellent pitch. He uses reticence to great effect (especially when revealing to the reader that Brenda is going to have an affair with Beaver) but stumbles a bit when he resorts to telling rather than showing, resulting in brief inconsistencies of character and plot. At first he seems to want us to like Brenda; she is sweet and loving toward Tony. The ease and shamelessness with which she enters into and perpetuates her adultery seem improbable. But when tragedy strikes, Waugh’s cinematic approach strikes the right balance of understatement and horror.

Much has been made of the strange direction the novel takes after Tony refuses Brenda a divorce. Waugh seems to have wanted him to come to a terrible end. He accomplishes this by inserting a previously published short story that sends Tony to the Brazilian jungle in search of a hidden city. The exchange of urban savagery for a savage landscape is thought-provoking, if somewhat erratic, but the shift provides a welcome departure.

Whatever inconsistencies Waugh falls prey to, his strength lies in his capacity to inhabit a place without illusion. His view may be dark, but the darkness has a clarifying quality. In the words of Hebrews 13:14, “for here we have no lasting city, but we seek the city which is to come” (RSV).

[Note: Due to a dispute over publication rights, Waugh wrote an alternate ending for the initial American edition of A Handful of Dust, which is not included here but is available to order. Just ask for The Everyman's Library edition.]

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Partakers of the Divine Nature

Partakers of the Divine Nature: The History and Development of Deification in the Christian Traditions; edited by Michael J. Christensen and Jeffery A. Wittung
325 pp. paper $29.99

Partakers of the Divine Nature is an uncommon anthology. Born from an academic conference exploring the topic of theosis/deification at Drew University, it is a collection of essays by writers representing the perspectives of both East and West, “across cultures and historical periods within the Christian tradition” (from the Introduction). From its early Greek origins to more modern constructions, the idea of theosis and its “compelling vision of human potential for transformation and spiritual perfectibility” (again, from the Introduction) has been increasingly explored in academic circles and simultaneously tarnished by deviations imposed upon it by the New Age movement. The editors of Partakers seek a restoration of sorts. This volume includes never-before-published essays by scholars on the concept of deification in the New Testament, as well as in ancient Greek, Syriac, and Copto-Arabic cultures. The authors parse its development in patristic, Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Protestant traditions as they consider the works of Athanasius, Ephrem the Syrian, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory of Nazianzus, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Palamas, St. Anselm, Martin Luther, John Calvin, John Wesley, Sergius Bulgakov, and Karl Rahner. The contributors list is just as impressive: Andrew Louth, Stephen Finlan, J.A. McGuckin, Vladimir Kharlamov, Stephen J. Davis, J. Todd Billings, Boris Jakim, and Francis J. Caponi (among others). Also included is an extensive bibliography of works on theosis with nearly 300 entries. In the words of one reviewer, Partakers of the Divine Nature is “a broad and reliable collection that…provides a sense of what is at stake.”

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On the Road: Coming Soon to a Conference Near You

Though we spend time on the road throughout the year, Spring and Summer conferences really keep us hoppin’. Peruse the list below (link through by clicking on the blue) to see if we’ll be in your neck of the woods any time soon. You’ll also find the conference dates highlighted in red on our Events Calendar to the right. Just slide over the dates with your cursor for more information. Even if you’re not attending a conference, stop by, meet our staff, and see our books—in person!

March 29-31:  Newman Literary Festival—Wichita, KS
(featuring Scott Cairns, Bryan Dietrich and Clare Vanderpool)

April 16-19:  National Workshop on Christian Unity—Oklahoma City, OK

April 19-21:  Calvin Festival of Faith and Writing—Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI

May 31-June 2:  C.S. Lewis and Friends Colloquium at Taylor University—Upland, IN

June 6-9:  Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America Parish Life Conference—Houston, TX

June 10-17:  Glen East Workshop—Mt Holyoke, MA

July 18-21:  Circe Institute Conference—Louisville, KY
(featuring Wendell Berry)

July 29-August 5:  Glen West Workshop—Santa Fe, NM

 

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