Liberating Eros: Confession and Desire

Our point of view for analysing the religious confessions is dialectical and rhetorical inventio and the theory of argumentation; our method is the reading of some confessions from a topical point of view, so rhetorical and dialectical. With this approach, that needs a literary text, we consider confessions' communicative efficacy and the way by which the human reason works in them, in order to express the intellectual vision. What cannot be perceived by human senses is described by using analogically the words: for example the word Father is analogically assigned to the first person, in order to indicate his relation to the second person, even though the first person generated the second one in a different way than a human father generates his son. The concepts of the various confessions acquire and enlarge their meaning on the base of their usage in different contexts. In the Renaissance the rhetoric was bound for its composition technique to dialectic, to theory of status quaestionis and to the topic: for their structure and function both rhetoric and dialectic need two opposite opinions, each of which should understand the other one, in order to have a complete comprehension of the problem, to know its weak points and to accept the mutual complementarity. For this reason they used argumentative topics and the theory of status quaestionis, these were an important literary technique too: they were based on an interpretative scheme, that the speakers had in common and on the categories which codify experience.

Maximus the Confessor's Ambiguum 7 has long been considered the anchor of a substantial refutation of Origenist cosmology and teleology, with Maximus still seeking to rehabilitate the ascetical "gospel" of Origen. Yet in commenting on Gregory Nazianzen's Oration 14 in Ambiguum 7, Maximus acknowledges that Gregory is dealing less with the scheme of human origins per se than with the miseries attending life in the body, which opens up the whole question of how embodied, passible human existence is the frontier of human salvation and deification. I argue that for Maximus human desire in all its cosmological and psychosomatic complexity-both as a register of creaturely passibility and affectivity, and as integral to the definition of human volition and freedom-is central to the subtle dialectic of activity and passivity in the creaturely transitus to deification. The morally malleable character of desire and the passions, and their ambiguous but ultimately purposive status within the economy of human transformation, decisively manifest the divine resourcefulness in fulfilling the mystery of deification-especially in view of Christ's use of human passibility in inaugurating the new eschatological "mode" (tropos) of human nature. In his engagement of Gregory of Nyssa, in particular, Maximus develops a sophisticated dialectics and therapeutics of desire that integrates important perspectives of the Confessor's anthropology, christology, eschatology, and asceticism.

Connects Book I and XIII and indicates how the rest of the Confessions may be placed between two forms of the Trinity found Book XIII. Confessions culminates in radical divine - human mutuality. The rest and the Being Knowing and Loving of God are in the human, the human rest, being, knowing and loving are in God. Augustine leads to Eriugena.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

How is it that confession – a highly ritualized, dialogically structured speech act – appears to transparently reflect and reveal the inner states of confessants? This article explores this question by closely engaging select post-Vatican II defences of the Sacrament of Penance, which lay out the requirements of ‘modern’ confession in striking detail. A close reading of these theological texts demonstrates that felicitous confession is the product of three correlated (meta-)semiotic processes: (1) the figuration of the pentinent memory as a storehouse for sin; (2) the management of ritual time into discrete stages of ‘private’ meaning-making and ‘public’ pronouncement; and (3) the erasure of the social scenery of the confessional utterance. In concert, these processes render indexical signs as iconic ones and, in so doing, naturalize confession as the cathartic revelation of inner truths, already constituted as such.

In "The Fountain and the Flood: Maximus the Confessor and Philosophical Inquiry," Studia Patristica, edited by Sotiris Mitralexis. Leuven: Peeters, 2017

This paper briefly explores the ontological ethics of St. Maximus the Confessor in light of the modern shame/guilt distinction. As many prominent commentators have affirmed, a virtue-based or ontological sense of ethics is intrinsic to or at least presupposed by the Confessor's great theological synthesis. Appropriating but simultaneously transcending Aristotelian and Stoic naturalism, Maximus establishes the chief virtue of love as the ontological locus of being, the δύναµις that enables the eschatological wholeness of nature and a genuine reciprocity between rational beings. Inasmuch as every authentic virtue constitutes a manifestation of love and its nature-constituting properties, the habituation of virtue and the resulting disposition occurs in relation to an 'other'. The activity of virtue is an ontic movement towards one's Creator and fellow creatures, achieving a functional community of nature and a perichoretic relationship with the divine. Conversely, an unvirtuous disposition and the habituation of vice facilitate a rupture in nature and movement towards solipsism, a reality that is represented par excellence by Maximus's discussions of the ontological mechanisms involved in humanity's fall. As this essay proposes, the reciprocal or relational approach to virtue manifested in the Confessor's synthesis is consistent with the criteria of certain modern ethical approaches that affirm the natural superiority of shame over the individuating emotion of guilt. Indeed, it seems quite probable that Maximus would have great sympathy for Bernard Williams's endorsement of shame as an ethical emotion, insofar as it implies that the subject who undergoes shame is the member of a community who fails to live or act in a " cooperative or self-sacrificing manner. " The ethical dimensions of the Confessor's synthesis, therefore, constitute a very interesting and provocative alternative to the majority of contemporary Christian approaches to morals, which, in Kantian fashion, typically fixate upon the autonomous fulfilment of abstracted principles and rely on the inner-directed or insular emotion of guilt to correct behavioural lapses. In his provocative and challenging work, Shame and Necessity, Bernard Williams argues for the inherent inadequacy of modern approaches to morality, outlooks that are dependent, in his view, upon modes of 'inner-directedness and guilt'. (1) Following Nietzsche's spirited critique of European morals in his Genealogy of Morals, Williams argues that the Judeo-Christian tradition has bequeathed a moral psychology to the modern western human that is primarily guided by

En Route to the Confessions: The Roots and Development of Augustine's Philosophical Anthropology, 2013

In the Confessiones, soon after his elevation as bishop, Augustine presents his first mature synthesis of his Paulinizing Stoic psychology of action and his (originally) Platonising penchant for contemplation. Chapter five focuses on Augustine’s analytic depiction of the lower soul as the root of human action presented in Confessiones 1. The Roman Stoics, responding to a complex history of internal debate, transcendentalized the old Stoic doctrine of οἰκείωσις and thereby conceptualized a underlying threefold commendatio to bodily preservation, interpersonal association, and knowledge. They, likewise, reasserted its old Stoic twin doctrine of διαστροφή as peruersio in two forms: first hand error in judgment rooted in deceitfulness of appearances and a social echoing of verbalized misjudgments. Augustine incorporates the Roman Stoic account of commendatio and peruersio with a handful of crucial alterations. Because the corruption of sin precedes individual experience in this life, no temporal-developmental distinction exists between commendatio and peruersio in Augustine’s account. Confessiones 1 describes the sequential emergence of a threefold commendatio already perverted by sin. The first form of peruersio is completely subsumed by the corruption of nature in Augustine’s thought. However, the second form of peruersio by social echoing is employed to describe the social perversion perpetrated by late Roman schools, the remnants of the cursus honorum, heretical religious teaching, and the pretensions of pagan philosophy. These perverting factors are presented specifically as parodies of an ecclesially based program of human formation intimated allegorically in the hexaemeron.

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2021

A contribution at the intersection between Freudian psychoanalysis and Christian thought, Eros Crucified argues for the need of a Christian revision of the Freudian account of desire. Psychoanalysis and Christianity, Clemente suggests, are complementary, in that each corrects shortcomings in the other. Christianity has a tendency to spiritualize the message of its founder, falling prey to Platonic prejudices against the body and sexual desire. Freudian eros, on the other hand, is incapable of truly embracing the other, remaining stuck in a conception of desire that is excessively masculine, and indeed exhibits onanistic and sadistic traits. Only the Christian 'crucifixion' of eros is able to save Freud. Each of the eight chapters of Eros Crucified is wide-ranging, drawing upon a dizzying array of sources. Occasionally, we are treated to Clemente's own poetic compositions. The ideas presented are often interesting, but rarely developed in great detail. The author himself acknowledges that his book reads like a detective novel, a characteristic that his 'Brief Disclaimer' (xiixiii) presents as a strength. The reader is urged not to expect 'that his first reading (or his tenth) will tell him what the author means' (xiii). I would be willing to entertain this as valid advice in the case of a Platonic dialogue, biblical revelation, or Finnegan's Wake; the author of a dissertation (defended at Boston College in 2019) must demonstrate an ability to control his material and write about it in a lucid, well-structured fashion. Not many of us are literary giants or prophets, who enjoy the license of throwing off petty academic conventions. The first chapter centres on a comparison between the respective founding myths of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and Freudianism, namely, the Genesis story of the creation and 'fall' of the human being and Freud's 'hypothetical account', in Totem and Taboo, 'of how the Oedipus complex may have first manifested itself in the human psyche' (19). Freud's myth has two brothers kill and devour their father. The most important insight which Clemente gains in this chapter is that Freud's theory privileges murder and death as the driving forces of the human psyche, whereas the biblical account views the human being as originating in, and longing to return to, the Life that is God. Yet, according to our author, the 'fall' narrative displays significant parallels with the Freudian theory: just as, for Freud, it is conflict with the figure of the law-giving father which stands at the origin of desire, so in the biblical story the human being is INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

Diakrisis, 2022

This paper analyses the relationship between lack and possibilities of bearing witness in a "posthistorical" context. We wanted to see how discussions about indeterminacy and testimony change the way in which we understand possibilities of truth in relation to the speaking subject. The limit of the language of testimony and memory generate experiences of incompleteness and inadequacy which make us negotiate the position of the subject between an impossible historical truth and the non-discursive truth of revelation. We argue that the resistance to representation which drives the language of testimony reflects the improper position of the witness or between historicity and existence or between attention and inattention. There is always an already lost historical event that we have to testify for and that foreshadows possibilities of significance. The witness can only generate discourse from inside a dislocated position which also describes the layered discursive structure of revelation.

2021

This contribution focuses on grief (dolor) in Augustine’s account of the death of his friend in the Confessiones (4.4.8–4.7.12), with particular attention to the stage of Loss. I concentrate especially on the implications of Augustine’s grief for lived experience and religious practise. I argue that Augustine’s reflections can inform our own response to grief during the pandemic. Augustine is struck with grief at the death of his friend, and his entire experience is transfigured, becoming a living torment (4.4.9). Now everything reminds him of his loss, intensifying his pain. How often have the sights of empty streets only irritated our own feeling of grief? Moreover, Augustine finds no refuge, for he carries his grief with(in) himself (4.7.12; cf. Coyne 2015). Our own experience of confinement, especially for those completely alone, is reflected in Augustine’s own struggle to be with himself. Augustine locates the source of his misery in loving finite things as if they were infinite. Thus not only does their loss cause one grief, but even the fear of their potential loss (4.6.11). The suddenness with which the world changed little more than a year ago serves as a stark reminder of the finite and contingent nature of human existence. Augustine’s reflections may also teach us something about religious practise. O’Donnell (1992) describes Augustine’s haunting psychological account of grief as ‘God-less’. Because he held a false conception of God (phantasma), not even prayer could provide Augustine with any relief. However, this traumatic loss serves to move Augustine to look for God, and so becomes a kind of contact with God, albeit oblique (Fischer 2013). To what extent is God ‘present’ in absence? Can God be found even in the most apparently negative experiences of life?

International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2017

Maximus the Confessor has been the subject of numerous subsets of the historical, philosophical, and theological disciplines, but the prominent role virtueand above all else loveplays in his corpus remains vastly underexplored or misunderstood in secondary scholarship. The ascetic thinker's understanding of virtue is fascinating in its own right since it implies and decodes the enormity of his theological vision by serving as the locus in and through which the created and the uncreated encounter each other. But the distinctive edge of his aretology is all the more peculiar by the way in which he forged it from the remaining shards of the late antique philosophical schools and honed it against the theological touchstones of anchorites, monastics, and Biblical commentators. The result was a multilayered theology of virtue that reimagined the place of love in the Christian life and remained a constitutive aspect of Greek monastic practice and lay piety until the fall of Constantinople and beyond. This chapter situates Maximus within the intellectual horizons wherein he expressed his theology of virtue, analyzes the relationship of love to knowledge and personhood, and examines how the virtues, and especially love, function as the mediating principle between divine condescension and human deification.