{"id":1761,"date":"2022-11-21T14:12:25","date_gmt":"2022-11-21T14:12:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/11\/21\/neither-angel-nor-beast\/"},"modified":"2022-11-21T14:12:25","modified_gmt":"2022-11-21T14:12:25","slug":"neither-angel-nor-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2022\/11\/21\/neither-angel-nor-beast\/","title":{"rendered":"Neither Angel nor Beast"},"content":{"rendered":"

I read the Sufi mystic R\u016bm\u012b  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. The following observation from my Turkish journal is surrounded by quotations from him so he may have been the source of the idea. <\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Angels were created with reason, brutes with lust, man with both. A man who follows reason is higher than the angels, but a man who follows lust is lower than the brutes.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The angels face no ongoing battle with sensuality; so we who after long struggle master ourselves are greater than angels in self-mastery. We humans have both the vices of the flesh (lust, greed, gluttony) and the vices of the spirit (pride, envy, anger, and sloth)  to combat whereas the angels are tempted by only the latter four. The man who empties himself into the diaspora of the sense pleasures, however,  has degraded himself, reaching  a nadir inaccessible to any mere animal. While we, in our present state, cannot reach the celestial zenith, we can all-too-easily 'achieve' the sublunary nadir.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such is man, a strange hybrid, amphibious as between the realms of spirit and matter. Some will say that he is a sick animal, sickened by spirit (Ludwig Klages, Geist als Widersacher der Seele.<\/a> <\/span>Others that he is a fallen spirit. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I read the Sufi mystic R\u016bm\u012b  (1207-1273) when I lived in Turkey, 1995-1996. The following observation from my Turkish journal is surrounded by quotations from him so he may have been the source of the idea.  Angels were created with reason, brutes with lust, man with both. A man who follows reason is higher than … Continue reading “Neither Angel nor Beast”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,392,430,507],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-concupiscence","category-morality-in-the-light-of-religion","category-philosophical-anthropology","category-rumi-sufi-mystic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}