{"id":5058,"date":"2017-11-07T05:05:41","date_gmt":"2017-11-07T05:05:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/11\/07\/of-death-and-detachment\/"},"modified":"2017-11-07T05:05:41","modified_gmt":"2017-11-07T05:05:41","slug":"of-death-and-detachment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/11\/07\/of-death-and-detachment\/","title":{"rendered":"Of Death and Detachment"},"content":{"rendered":"

St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death<\/em>, p. 11:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

My Lord, since Thou hast given me light to know that what the world esteems is all mere vapour and folly, give me strength to detach myself from it before death detaches me.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I find it very interesting that 'detach' is being used in two very different senses in this passage. The one sense is spiritual while the other is physical. <\/span><\/p>\n

The saint is praying that he be given the strength to detach himself spiritually<\/em> from the transient objects of worldly desire before  death physically<\/em> detaches him or his soul from his body.  The saint is not assuming that physical detachment will occasion spiritual detachment. To expect such a thing would be naive. It would be as if a man who spent his entire life 'on the make,' in hot pursuit of property and pelf, pleasure and power, were suddenly at death to renounce the earthly lures and to have a burning desire to meet his Maker.<\/span><\/p>\n

The saint is assuming, though, that spiritual detachment can be achieved only while one is in the body, and that after one quits it one will be stuck with the spiritual attachments one has at the hour of death. <\/span><\/p>\n

Physical death does not have the power to detach me spiritually from worldliness with its vapours and follies. For this is possible: my body dies but my soul lives on fully attached to the objects of worldly desire. We may speculate that Hugh Hefner is presently still lusting after nubile females. It is just that he presently lacks the physical apparatus with which to realize his lusts. <\/span><\/p>\n

This too is possible: I remain physically attached to my body while living spiritually detached from the bagatelles of this life.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is a fertile field for further thought.  What exactly is spiritual attachment? How is it put in place, and how is it mitigated? One mode of mitigation is by meditation: one distances mentally from one's thoughts; one observes them as from a distance, refusing to live in or lose oneself in them.<\/span><\/p>\n

And how can the soul be physically attached to the body if only one of them is physical?  Is perhaps the soul's physical attachment to the body reducible to a special sort of spiritual attachment whereby I become embodied by spiritually attaching myself to a chunk of the physical world, a particular animal organism? By taking a particular animal organism to be me?<\/span><\/p>\n

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St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death, p. 11: My Lord, since Thou hast given me light to know that what the world esteems is all mere vapour and folly, give me strength to detach myself from it before death detaches me. I find it very interesting that 'detach' is being used in two very different … Continue reading “Of Death and Detachment”<\/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":[184,54,106],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5058","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-death-and-immortality","category-mind","category-spiritual-exercises"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5058","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=5058"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5058\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5058"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5058"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5058"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}