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Upon the Search of the Grail

There are only a few times that something influences me greatly. This particular interview both amazed and gratified me. Somehow the reason for my own lack of belonging is actually my non-remembrance. Sunny mornings at my grandmothers where there was one empty bedroom with only a splendid bust of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the mantelpiece, is my own heaven.

Malcolm Guite, English poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest and academic, joins Matt Fradd's show to discuss Arthurian legend, the friendship of Tolkien and Lewis, and the deep human longing for mystery and enchantment. The shout that one has been robbed of culture by the last two generations is just in its relevation and truth. Nietzsche, Marx and Freud aren't evil, but they were very influencial indeed.

Like Kenneth Clark in his tv-series Civilization, a personal view, Guite offers his own thoughts that the disappointment of romanticism has left us with only heroic materialism, and it's really not enough. Derrida’s philosophy of language, deconstruction, argued that language is an unstable, ever-shifting system of signs. That's only one reason why we are left feeling as mere orphans.

I love how Guite also mentions one of my own favourite thinkers of recent past. George Steiner was an absolute delight to read at times. His book Real Presences was like dynamite that blewn away all the nihilism of the last century. His most prominent discussion of the Holocaust was with Bernard Pivot during his 1981 appearance on the legendary literary TV-program Apostrophes. Another memory almost lost.

Steiner argued that literature must confront the darkest aspects of human history—often by forcing the reader to examine the rhetoric of perpetrators. He deeply challenged the notion that the Holocaust was an isolated event, instead framing it as a catastrophic failure of Western reason and culture. Now that's what one needs to do more. After reading Aquinas no-one should be able to ridicule religious belief.

St Augustine wrote that we believe to understand, and not the other way around. The word intimacy has been corrupted too. I know hunger but that's not the actual definition of food. It's indeed not something that feeds only me nor exists out there ready made. We've somehow lost the experience how we grow intimate between human beings without an actual need for sex. It's a flower, intimacy is.

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Miram · 31-35, F
Why should we look at the finger instead of the moon?
The truthest of intimacy is when you dissolve completely in compassion , even towards those who hurt you. Maybe it is all simply a battle against one's ego, including the intellect.
@Miram Personally, I'll wait for the next orgasm just to make it special :) The body and the mind aren't two seperate things. It's the whole that's important. Like C.S. Lewis taught, one doesn't have a soul, but one is one and thus lives a soul.
Miram · 31-35, F
@GeretJan

We may be discussing different things.

I never suggested that body and soul are separate. In fact, I agree with Lewis and Aquinas that they are profoundly united. Although the quote itself I find bit questionable. My point was that unity is not the same thing as hierarchy.

An orgasm satisfies a desire.

Compassion can survive the absence of satisfaction altogether.

That is what makes it philosophically interesting.

The Christian mystics, the Sufis, and even Plato were not trying to escape embodiment.

They were asking whether every longing points beyond itself.

Hunger points to food, thirst to water, eros to the beloved. The question is whether love itself points beyond possession.

Aquinas did not spend his life denying the body. But at the end of his life as you probably know, after a mystical experience, he famously said that all he had written seemed like straw. Not because reason was false, but because reality exceeded it.

He let it go.

So I am not arguing against the body, the intellect, or even desire. I am only suggesting that they may be signposts rather than destinations.

The finger simply ceases to be the point once the moon appears.

 
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