Sublime

Eventually, the excessive hedonic test Kohelet devised in chapter 2 settles into a more modest eudaemonic mandate: “Go, eat your bread in gladness, and drink your wine in joy; for your action was long ago approved (ratza) by God”

Eros is impossible, Yannaras believes, outside of personhood, because Eros recognizes that we have our very being only in and through relationship.

Where have you dimmed the luster of your eye?

the removal of afflictions is the presence of nirvana.

I saw that I am heading (God willing) to a fat old age where I will have spent only twenty percent of any given day paying attention to life, to being where my feet are. The rest of the time will have been spent in the ticker tape of imaginings, a low-level fear about those I love, and the things I need to buy.

Fashioned from the earth, we are souls in clay form. We need to remain in rhythm with our inner clay voice and longing. Yet this voice is no longer audible in the modern world. We are not even aware of our loss, consequently, the pain of our spiritual exile is more intense in being largely unintelligible.

Indeed, your world can break down precisely because you live on after the death of everything you love. This “death” can be much more painful and fearful than the prospect of your own death, not least because it is a death that you have to survive. Hence, as long as you are attached to someone or something that you can lose, you are susceptible to

A religious faith in eternity cannot add anything to the dignity and pathos of mourning; it can only subtract from the mourning by diminishing the sense of loss. This is not to say that avowedly religious people do not mourn. But insofar as they do mourn, their mourning is animated by a secular faith in the irreplaceable value of a finite life rath

la prudence peut aisément admettre le renoncement à ce qu’il y a de meilleur dans la vie. L’adorateur de Dionysos réagit contre cette prudence. Dans l’exaltation, physique ou spirituelle, il retrouve toute la violence des sentiments que la prudence avait annihilés ; il découvre un monde plein de jouissances et de beauté et son esprit se trouve, sou