Beyond East and West: What ‘Ladder’ Did John Wu Use Towards This Goal? (Part Two)

John Wu Jingxiong (1899-1986) was a diplomat, scholar, and authority on international law. He was also a prominent Chinese Catholic convert. His spiritual autobiography Beyond East and West (1951) reminds us of the Confessiones of St. Augustine for its moving description of John Wu’s conversion to Catholicism in 1937 and his early years as a Catholic. The very title of Wu’s autobiography points to his spiritual ideal which let humanity go beyond cultural particularities (be they Western, Chinese, or other). John Wu found wisdom in China’s great traditions, i.e., Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, pointing to their universal truths that come ultimately from, and are fulfilled in, Christ. The author of this contribution has searched for John Wu’s universal traits which go beyond any culture and calls them, metaphorically, a “ladder”. He has found a threefold ladder, i.e. that of the Christian faith, of human friendship and human and divine love, and that of natural law.

Franny’s Jesus Prayer: J.D. Salinger and Orthodox Christian Spirituality

The Way of a Pilgrim and The Pilgrim Continues His Way—is a Russian hesychast text that was first published in 1881 and translated into English in 1931. It has gained popularity in the English-speaking world thanks to J.D. Salinger who mentions and re-narrates it in his stories “Franny” and “Zooey”. This reference has often been noted in both critical works on Salinger and studies dedicated to the book The Way of a Pilgrim. However, scholars have never actually attempted to fundamentally analyze the textual interconnections between Salinger’s stories and the hesychast work. In this article, the text of The Way of a Pilgrim is read within the framework of Salinger’s stories and is interpreted as being significant for his later texts. From the hesychast book Salinger borrows a number of images and presents its philosophy as a spiritual ideal. At the same time, he approaches it with a certain irony and exposes several pitfalls of incorrectly interpreting the Jesus prayer, as illustrated by Franny, one of Salinger’s characters. Having brought to light the nature of Franny’s mistakes and her peccant intention, Salinger reestablishes the hesychast ideal and connects it with Søren Kierkegaard’s principle of theistic existentialism.

SOCIAL-SPIRITUAL ENVIRONMENT OF SOCIETY AND SPIRITUAL IDEAL

The article analyzes the issue of the spiritual ideal, which is the basis of the spiritual factor, and its role in the development of society.

Discussion on the relationship of philosophy and rhetoric in the Hellenistic and Roman periods (from the Stoics to Cicero)

The article discusses the evolution of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric in Helenistic and Roman periods. In addition to discussing the value of such factors as eloquence and usefulness for rhetoric, the Hellenistic epoch drew attention to the problem of developing the foundations of rhetoric. These ideas were developed in schools of Stoics and Skeptics. Following the Aristotelian line, Chrysippus objectively contributed to the formalization of rhetorical knowledge. Cicero, who considered this approach narrow, actualized another Platonic line aimed at the "idea," while he translated the understanding of rhetoric as this kind of dialectical knowledge, which, being experience-oriented (in theory and practice), resembles art and corresponds to the spiritual ideal as the highest value. Ciceronian project is a variant of an expansive interpretation of rhetoric as the most complete generalization of reality.

Philosophy as a Way of Life

This chapter introduces some of the guiding questions of the investigation, here drawing on Pierre Hadot’s text Philosophy as a Way of Life. These questions include: how should we understand the nature of spiritual goods? What is the relationship between a tradition’s world view and its conception of the well-lived human life? How should we conceive of the connection between the different vocabularies that can be used to describe progress in the spiritual life, for instance, those involving metaphysical and experiential categories? What epistemic conditions, if any, does a world view need to meet if it is to be capable of informing a spiritual ideal of life? And what is the contribution of tradition in shaping our understanding of the spiritual life? The key concept that runs through this volume is Thomas Aquinas’s notion of infused moral virtue, and this chapter also introduces this notion and considers its fruitfulness for addressing the second of these questions, concerning the relationship between world view and ideal of life. A contrast is drawn between Aquinas’s account of these matters, according to which some spiritual goods—the goods that are the object of the infused moral virtues—cannot be identified independently of reference to our theological or metaphysical context, and Hadot’s account, according to which ethical or spiritual ideals come first, and provide the basis for metaphysical commitments. We note some reasons for thinking that this distinction between the two authors should not be too sharply drawn.

Tęsknota za ideałem. Rola dzieci w filmach i filozofii twórczej Andrieja Tarkowskiego

The topic of the article is the role of child characters in Andrei Tarkovsky’s oeuvre. The first part concerns the early films in which children appear as main characters and represent a spiritual ideal. In the second part, later films are analysed in terms of the presence of adult characters striving for this ideal.