The Ethics of Beauty Quotes

“The knowledge of Good and Evil, no matter how systematically or thoroughly consumed, will by no means make us gods. Rather, modern ethics, modern psychotherapy, and modern political ideologies all tend to produce not superhumans but pitiable slaves to the rationalizations generated by our distorted human desires. In order to gain control over the world, we have been too willing to renounce essential aspects of our own freedom.”
― Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

“the wise and healthy soul is not a hamburger to be mass-produced by the billions through the application of some efficient technique! Such an attitude is part of my dissatisfaction with our current American psychology.”
― Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

“That is the aim of this therapeutic relationship: to feel the emotions that he can’t feel – to recommune the person whose trauma has placed him outside of human communion.”
― Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

“When we experience trauma, our very being is thrust away from coherence and solidity and towards non-being – and this is hell. But Christ’s liturgy can absorb any amount of chaos and bring it back towards being.”
― Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

“Paradoxically, the mercy that we are asking for is exactly this: the strength and the clean joy to do as He did, to empty ourselves to the farthest extreme out of love for others. The mercy we ask for, you see, is nothing less than a share in Christ’s own anointing by his Father – the descent of the Holy Spirit upon him. When that hits us, we find ourselves overwhelmed by the sweet longing to do what Christ also did in that anointing, which was to suffer for the life of the world.”
― Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

“War, then – like every form of trauma experience – has always been an anti-liturgy.”
― Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty

“I came to the realization that the Byzantine employment of religious rituals around war – inviting priests to bless troops and weapons, to pray before battles – was not a blessing of warfare as such (although they certainly prayed for victories, partly because they saw them as the quickest route to peace). Rather the reverse: the primary purpose of such prayers was to inoculate the soldier against a particular kind of damage that could occur to his soul during war – what we would refer to as traumatic stress.3 These acts of blessing, still retained in Orthodox countries, are not to be understood as the Church pronouncing war good, but exist precisely because she knows that war is always evil.”
― Timothy G. Patitsas, The Ethics of Beauty