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Specifications
The book "Hunger and Thirst" by Christos Yannaras is being reissued by IANOS publications, the first edition of which was published in 1961. The first edition of the book came out 54 years ago, in 1961, while the second edition (1969) was published during difficult times: a military dictatorship in Greece and the suffocation caused by the plundering of our humanity and the misuse of the spirituality of this place mark its preface.
In the fourth edition (1981), the author took the opportunity to make some phrasing corrections and to adjust the text to current grammar, as well as to add the short travel dedication "desolate," which complemented the atmosphere of that first Hunger and Thirst. In the present edition (2015), three more related texts (The Land of the Living, Memory of T.S. Eliot, and The "Sign" of Jonah) have been added.
Author's preface from the second edition: "This small book gathers approximately autobiographical texts that had been published a few years ago. It is not something more significant than a teenage confession with the main stimulus being the first experiences of human inadequacy. If anything stands out in the following pages that perhaps justifies their publication, I would say it is a discreet metaphysical quest that struggles to be preserved as a painful alertness at the limits of the personal experience of truth.
This coexistence of faith—trust with personal alertness has become something rare, perhaps even incomprehensible, while it should be the most natural path. Nevertheless, it means walking on the edge of a razor, far from any comfort and rest, and from satisfaction and quenching. But the way to gain the essentials is personal hunger and thirst, the passion of a person who sells everything to buy one jewel.
And such craziness, no matter how genuinely evangelical it is, remains incomprehensible to our contemporary Christianity. Therefore, these texts are not being republished now for their particular maturity and literary value, but only because they represent a pilgrimage of personal hunger and thirst, as preserved from the flattering traps of capitulation that abound in our time.
When I was writing the following pages, about ten years ago, I was enlisted in a religious “movement.” I was then struggling between the ideal of absolute dedication, as embodied by every totalitarian form, and the thirst for freedom, which is truth and life. That struggle is expressed in these pages, which is why they often give the sense of an internal adventure that begins from forms separated from life.
This is missing, as well as the bond with the earth, that is, with the people, the Church, the life that is Tradition, and the roots of humanity, so my teenage thoughts often remain suspended in cerebral forms. Nevertheless, the texts of Hunger and Thirst have been read and loved, judging by the letters and reviews I received.
Perhaps because many have passed through the same paths or perhaps because expressing the anxiety of a person to be saved was not very common then, even from the religious industrialization of his being. Now that the friend publisher wanted to reprint these texts, they seem to once again have a relevance: In less than ten years, at least in our country, the forms of ready religious solutions happened to be stripped bare in their attempts to enforce secularized industrial salvation.
Religious nakedness is now heartbreaking, and the garment of Tradition remains unused, condemned to be preserved in the Museum. At least let us cry out once more this agony of nakedness, the hunger and thirst of our souls, with the only hope of saving as much humanity as we can within us at the time when they deny our humanity in every possible way.
Manufacturer
- Author
- CHristos Giannaras
- Publisher
- Ianos
- Theme
- Theology & Doctrine
- Cover
- Soft
- Number of Pages
- 152
- Language
- Greek
- Release Date
- 05/10/2015
- Publication Date
- 2015
- Dimensions
- 17x23 cm
- Pocket Size
- No
- ISBN-13
- 9786185141127
Important information
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