Educational Management Tasks

Transcending desire: The shaping of Christian thought by classical ideals of restraint and transcendence Ted Lynch BA, MA, DLIS, ATII(Int). # 24154113-2012 Thesis submitted for the degree Philosophiae Doctor in Church and Dogma History at the Potchefstroom Campus of the North- West University Promoter: Prof Dr J O’Hanlon Co-promoter: Prof Dr PH Fick June 2016 DEDICATION For my late father, Ted Lynch and Triestino father Nino Sterle —un abbraccione con tutta l’anima, per sempre. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Professors Joseph O‘Hanlon and Rikus Fick; Peg Evans and Tienie Buys: I can never thank you enough for your patience, solid criticism and equally solid support. Bless you all many times. Also Dean Maria Jannsen, Christchurch, Waterford; Abbado Magris, Trieste; Biblioteca del Dipartimento di Filosofia dell‗Università degli Studi di Padova: Anna Khorda; Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Morland): Justina Konin. Malina above all. Shane, Mam, Niall, Anne and Ashling. Thank you all. iii ABSTRACT Transcending sexual desire in favour of spiritual goals, while valuing the latter above the former in terms of importance and virtue, is a defining feature of early Christian theology. Some biblical scholars interpret the body and divinity in early Christianity as integrative— sublimation of sexuality was seen as liberation from the prevailing ethos of the body, or a form of promotion of the spiritual within the human dimension. By contrast, the current research will attempt to demonstrate that the symbiosis of Platonism and dualistic thought shapes the concept of sublimation in early Christian writers in a powerful and consistent way; further, the residual legacy of this continues to guide Christian perceptions and concerns on human sexuality. The purpose of this study then is to examine the philosophical and (to a lesser extent) the religious genealogy of this feature of early Western thought and theology. Keywords Ancient Philosophy, Aristotle, Augustine, Body, Corporeal, Dualism, Early Church, Mind, Neoplatonism, Plato, Presocratics, Sexuality, Spirit, Sublimation. iv PREFACE One of the philosophical ideas that was the foundation of my Christian education was that the appearance of Christ profoundly changed everything about the human outlook, about our worldview and about people themselves. This particular claim, made by my school head, seemed to have been made in a state of ignorance regarding everything that had come before c. 33 CE. As a teenage know-all this bothered me. I saw clearly, through my initial and rudimentary study of classics, that human thought and outlook was surprisingly similar both before and after Jesus Christ. In particular, the trial and death of Socrates struck me as having significant parallels to the death of Christ. I wondered how many other times this basic dynamic had occurred and recurred, not just in human history, but specifically in Western history. I suppose my choice of topic stems from a basic attempt to reconcile what I was first taught with what I later learned, or perhaps even to prove that I was ‗right‘ all those years ago. In the process, I found that I was both correct and incorrect in my first assumptions as a teenage scholar. I wanted to examine the primary texts with fresh but grown-up eyes, and trace the evolution of a concept discernible within the primary texts. It is true that some additional historical information might have further informed the analysis, as might the addition of further secondary sources; however, it seemed to me that there was sufficient and readily accessible material in the primary texts themselves to support my central argument and approach, and that, moreover, concentrating on the texts themselves can still produce fresh interpretations. Of course this approach presents problems and the main one is the usual one: the fact that we do not have a full range of texts from all the philosophers studied— before Plato, for instance, most of the writings that exist are in fragments. It is possible that ideas are misinterpreted, or, rather, that the degree of emphasis on certain ideas is misrepresented relative to the original intent of the authors. But that is a universal problem in scholarship. In my case, because I am tracing (and therefore emphasising and looking for) reference to a certain key concept, it is possible that I have fallen into the trap of over-representing and emphasising it. I can only plead that I have tried also to add context to the discussion by showing that the central ideas v in the research are integrated with reasonably well-known systems of thought, while being careful of the other trap of presenting a commonplace history of ideas. Another problem is answering the modern challenge of those who value philosophy primarily for the ‗use‘ that it has for us as humans—who deny the existence of an objective and absolute ‗truth‘ and discount much of religious thought, with its orientation toward the spiritual, idealised world that transcends physical and temporal reality. Part of me imagines, for example, that even if a philosopher like Richard Rorty1 thought favourably of any sort of ancient philosophy at all (he seems to have favoured the Epicureans, and possibly the Stoics) he would regard the whole of my research as useless, because it engages and traces the development of a view of philosophy that he does not endorse. Platonic thought—with its vast and prevailing effect on Western thought—has been perceived in its totality as misguided and sometimes downright harmful with regard to the viewpoints it engenders. Of course, my study is not an endorsement of sublimation, dualism, platonism or even religion, but merely an attempt to de-mystify, to show what I think went on. This is where Rorty‗s thinking and my own project might intersect. Rorty, following Wittgenstein, is cognisant of the power of language, and the words that create understanding. The ideas regarding sublimation—how it developed—are in my opinion fundamental to supplying an understanding of how Western thought developed, what it consists of, how we are influenced and inspired and limited by it. The ideas might not be important from a pragmatic sense in and of themselves but their effect on human thought, historically and in the present, is vitally important. Sublimation is a concept that we have all lived on at some level and to some degree but it is also the result of a specific refraction of ideas through social/historical events. In the end any society is governed by sets of philosophical concepts that produce a way of thinking. If we grow up among them, and live with heritage and traditions, there is a tendency to think of them as universal or inevitable; we do not question why they are there, or how valid they are. But all concepts, all ideas, had to start somewhere. The idea that the ‗spirit‗ is superior to the body, and that physical impulses should be tamed or managed or even 1 I have taken the liberty of using Rorty as representative of a viewpoint. He is, I think, a toweringly authoritative representative. vi eliminated for the overall development of the person is sublimation, and many of us recognise it as an element of religion. Ignoring the working of these ideas in human thought is not pragmatic because it simply keeps us from seeing something which has always been influential. At the same time, admitting the influence of dualism, sublimation, religious thought and refusing to disparage those concepts does not bind us to them, or set them up as an unchangeable image of truth. Rather, such a process is realistic and useful in that it allows us to decide objectively how much credence to give these ideas. Personally, the process has had this effect on me. Despite my prior assumptions concerning ancient philosophy and Christian theology, it was only when I traced elements of sublimation from their Presocratic incarnation, through the development of Christian thought and beyond, that I gained a sense of objectivity about these ideas. As a result, they seem both more and less powerful than before. An unseen world—its elevation above our own and the negotiation needed to attain it—is (I was most fascinated to learn) not a foregone conclusion and perhaps the product of a specific, subjective even, line of reasoning which is vulnerable to perversion and manipulation. Nonetheless it points at a world that is unseen, and which is emphatically proposed as more powerful and less temporal than what we see around us—and also intelligible. If the seen and unseen can be learned through each other it is wise to pay attention. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...................................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT iv PREFACE v CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................. 1 1.1 BACKGROUND ....................................................................................... 1 1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT ....................................................................... 1 1.3 JUSTIFICATION FOR THE RESEARCH .............................................. 4 1.4 AIM AND OBJECTIVES ....................................................................... 10 1.4.1 Aim .......................................................................................................... 10 1.4.2 Objectives ................................................................................................ 10 1.5 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS .......................................................

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