Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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History: Roman Panopticon?

After explaining the intrusive gaze of the Roman censor, Shardi asks whether the Romans created an ancient predecessor of Bentham’s panopticon, made famous by Foucault.  She recognizes the analogies, but says that the “differences are perhaps more striking than the similarities.”

First, in contrast to Bentham’s circular prison, the Roman gaze was reciprocal: “in republican Rome entire social groups are engaged in reciprocal acts of watching and evaluating, with the stakes highest (and most evident in our souces) at the highest levels of the political hierarchy.”  Romans were seen; but they also watched.

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History: Tribal Rome

Shadi Bartsch (Mirror of the Self) notes that the Romans sometimes regarded the wax death masks of their ancestor (imagines) to be their judges: “In his oration Pro Murena, for example, Cicero, as he tried to move the jurors to acquit a newly minted Roman consul, did not ask how the man could go home to face his living family if convicted, but what he would say to the grieving mask of his distinguished father that awaited him as he entered . . . . Elsewhere, Cicero introduces the dead Appius Claudius Caecus into his oration to ask his disreputable descendant, the libidinous Claudia, how she could ignore the imagines of her ancestors - including his.”  In short, “the imagines were there to be answered to or lived up to,” and so to “motivate as well as reprove.”

History: Typology and Conspiracy

As a philosophy of history, typology highlights the unintended consequences of our actions, the unintended meanings of our words.

Conspiracy theories have no room for unintended events.  If something happened, someone somewhere planned it.

Typology and conspiracy are competing theories of history.

History: From Creator-creature to Subject-object

MH Abrams notes that at the heart of Romanticism was a transfer of Christian concepts into a new, subjectivist, context: “Much of what distinguishes writers I call ‘Romantic’ derives from the fact that they undertook, whatever their religious creed or lack of creed, to save traditional concepts, schemes, and values which had been based on the relation of the Creator to his creature and creation, but to reformulate them within the prevailing two-term system of subject and object, ego and non-ego, the human mind or consciousness and its transactions with nature.”

History: Enlightened Romanticism

Gadamer points out that the Enlightenment operated on “an unshakable premise: the scheme of the conquest of mythos by logos.”  For the Enlightenment, this represented a progress.

Romanticism assumed the same development, but considered it a tragic lost.  Romantics found “that olden times - the world of myth, unreflective life, not yet analyzed away by consciousness, in a ’society closed to nature.’ the world of Christian chivalry - all these acquire a romantic magic, even a priority over truth.”

Romanticism produced the historiography of the 19th century, but given romanticism’s continuity with the Enlightenment, 19th century historiography can just as easily be considered “the fulfillment of the Enlightenment, as the last step in the liberation of the mind from the trammels of dogma, the step to an objective knowledge of the historical world.”

Gadamer proposes dispensing with the mythos-to-logos scheme altogether, recognizing the inherence of mythos in logos, the role of prejudice and authority.

History: Latitude Men

Rivers (volume 1 of Reason, Grace, and Sentiment) gives a sympathetic portrayal of the post-Restoration latitudinarians.  She cites Gilbert Burnet’s history several times.  According to Burnet, the latitude-men “and those who were formed under them, studied to examine farther into the nature of things than had been done formerly.  They declared against superstition on the one hand, and enthusiasm on the other.  They loves the constitution of the Church and the Liturgy, and could well live under them: But they did not think it unlawful to live under another form.  They wished that things might have been carried with more moderation.  And they continued to keep a good correspondence with those who had differed from them in opinion, and allowed a great freedom both in philosophy and in divinity: From whence they were called men of Latitude.  And upon this men of narrower thoughts and fiercer tempers fastened upon them the name of Latitudinarians.”

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History: John Toland

Among the many delightful character sketches in Paul Hazard’s The European Mind, 1680-1715 is this Chestertonian riff on John Toland (notorious author of Christianity not mysterious): “He had taken his M. A. at Glasgow; he had studied at Edinburgh, Leyden and Oxford.  He had delved into ancient history, only to discover that it was one colossal imposture and that its chroniclers were, one and all, a pack of deceivers.  The Scriptures he had gone into, only to inform us that they were apocryphal, and that the so-called miracles they recorded were susceptible of a perfectly natural explanation, laying about him right and left, slashing, dashing, foaming at the mouth, trumping up all manner of things and, altogether, making confusion worse confounded.  He acquainted himself with polite letters, poetry, great oratory, only to report that the utterances of the sanctified humbugs of every religion were merely their way of deceiving people, and leading them by the nose.  He was a born mischief-maker and scandal-monger, puffed up with vanity, fond of creating an uproar, very cock-a-hoop when fortune favoured, yet not averse to being pelted at because the brick-bats at least made a clatter about him.”

He was not original: “His head was crammed with things he had read, and the ideas of his predecessors keep cropping up in little shred and patches in everything he wrote.  No; for originality in the man we shall look in vain, but what we shall find in him is a sort of morbid mental excitement, uncontrollable rage: the explosion of feelings longed damned up by Irish Catholicism and English Puritanism, to say nothing of respect for common decency - all these shackles one day burst asunder and the report sounded like a mighty shout of defiance.”

History: Saving Knowledge

Peter Harrison (‘Religion’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment) argues that there was an epochal change in the understanding of Christianity during the seventeenth century.  Over the protests of such puritans as Robert Harris and Richard Baxter, who argued for what Harris called “true religion in the old way” of faith and love, English writers increasingly attempted “to encapsulate in propositional form the essence of ‘the Christian Religion,’ ‘the Protestant Religion,’ the true Catholic Religion,’ or just simply ‘Religion.’”  He provides a small survey of these efforts:

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History: End of the Mainline

In a characteristically fascinating article in the August/September edition of First Things, Jody Bottum argues that, given the informal Protestant establishment that has existed since America’s founding, “the death of the Mainline is the central historical fact of our time: the event that distinguishes the past several decades from every other period in American history.  Almost every one of our current political and cultural oddities, our contradictions and obscurities, derives from this fact: the Mainline has lost the capacity to set, or even significantly influence, the national vocabulary or the national self-understanding.”  The collapse of Protestant America makes it very difficult for Americans to combine patriotism with profound criticism, with the result that “any attempt to speak in the old-fashioned voice of moral criticism turns sour and bitter - segueing into anti-Americanism, regardless of its intentions.”

Bottum poses, more sharply and profoundly than any one else has, the question of whether America can survive the loss of this “leg” of the three-legged stool of democracy, capitalism, and religion.

History: Civilization of Word

In the introduction to his Elements of Semiology (1964), Roland Barthes argues that for all the icons and images that surround us, we remain a civilization of the word:

“Semiology has so far concerned itself with codes of no more than slight interest, such as the Highway Code; the moment we go on to systems where the sociological significance is more than superficial, we are once more confronted with language. it is true that objects, images and patterns of behaviour can signify, and do so on a large scale, but never autonomously; every semiological system has its linguistic admixture. Where there is a visual substance, for example, the meaning is confirmed by being duplicated in a linguistic message (which happens in the case of the cinema, advertising, comic strips, press photography, etc.) so that at least a part of the iconic message is, in terms of structural relationship, either redundant or taken up by the linguistic system. As for collections of objects (clothes, food), they enjoy the status of systems only in so far as they pass through the relay of language, which extracts their signifiers (in the form of nomenclature) and names their signifieds (in the forms of usages or reasons): we are, much more than in former times, and despite the spread of pictorial illustration, a civilisation of the written word. Finally, and in more general terms, it appears increasingly more difficult to conceive a system of images and objects whose signifieds can exist independently of language: to perceive what a substance signifies is inevitably to fall back on the individuation of a language: there is no meaning which is not designated, and the world of signifieds is none other than that of language.”

History: Social objects

Fabian links the ocularcentrism and spatialization of Ramism with the social science tendency to regard its object of study as, well, objects: “Once the source of any knowledge worthy of that name is thought primarily to be visual perception of objects in space, why should it be scandalous to treat the Other - other societies, other cultures, other classes within the same society - comme des choses?”  He acknowledges that Durkheim, from whom the French phrase derives, didn’t want to treat persons as objects, but argues that “he did postulate in that context that the social and cultural must assume, through observation, quantification, and systematic generalization, the same facticity that is exhibited by the choses in our field of vision.”

Durkheim followed Enlightenment predecessors, who themselves derived their categories and instincts from ancient rhetorical sources, in formulating a “methodologie du regard.”

History: Grenzwissenschaft

Anthropology, Fabian says, is border control: “It patrols, so to speak, the frontiers of Western culture.  In fact, it has always been a Grenzwissenschaft, concerned with the boundaries: those of one race against another, those between one culture and another, and finally those between culture and nature.”

Fabian thinks that this “liminal” preoccupation makes it difficult for anthropology to settle “in any one of the accepted domains of knowledge” other than the catch-all of “social science.”

Two comments: First, if Milbank is right, anthropology is an extension of earlier forms of social theory, which patrol the boundaries within Western civilization; second, Fabian is offering something of an anthropological analysis of anthropology, one that clarifies its role as a kind of priestcraft, making distinctions “between holy and profane, and between clean and unclean.”

History: Medium limits message

After summing up Ong’s work on Ramus, Johannes Fabian (Time and the Other) suggests an analogy between Ramist pedagogy and anthropology: “Having learned more about the connections between printing and diagrammatic reduction of the contents of thought, one is tempted to consider the possibility that anthropological kinship theories (at least the ones that take off from data collected with River’s chart) are actually determined by the presentability of whatever knowledge they may contain in terms of diagrams that fit onto a conventional printed page.  In other words, it is the mode of storing reproducing, and disseminating knowledge in print (in articles, monographs, and textbooks) which . . . prejudge the What and How of large portions of enthnography.”

Anthropologists tend to forget that their diagrams showing ideas “in the heads of the natives” are in fact “unquestionably artifacts of visual-spatial conventions whose function it is to give ‘method’ to the dissemination of knowledge in our society.”

History: Starry sky above

On clear nights, I can see the Milky Way stretching across the sky from my drive way.   Since the mid-nineteenth century, fewer and fewer have easy sight of the night sky.  In Hong Kong, the buildings stretch and loom so high that the streets below are a cavernous indoor mall, a throbbing dystopian under-city.

Hans Blumenberg wonders what this does to the imagination: Night-lighted cities constitute “a secession from one of the most human possibilities: that of disinterested curiosity and pleasure in looking, for which the starry heavens have offered an unsurpassable remoteness that was an everyday reality.”

History: From court to promenade

Jay notes that the mid-19th century witnessed shift in the setting of “oracularcentric spectacle” from the “aristocratic court” to the “bourgeois equivalent in the massive sheet glass windows [of department stories] displaying a wealth of commodities to be coveted, and, if money allowed, consumed.  Here the dandies’ quest to distinguish themselves by nuances of fashion, visual signifiers of taste and style, became a tantalizing possibilities for the masses. . . . Here the accelerated panoramic view of the railway journey was replicated as the consumer faced a bewildering plethora of possible commodities to buy.”

History: What Is Enlightenment?

In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Kant described humanity’s coming-of-age.  Enlightenment makes man’s deliverance from the tutelage of external authorities and the achievement of mature autonomy.

Earlier, Descartes had constructed an entire philosophy on the foundation of “clear and distinct ideas.”  The Enlightenment billed itself as the end of blindness and the beginning of effortless, undistorted vision.

In these and other ways, the Enlightenment implicitly claimed to have reached the eschaton.  Its epistemology was, Knight says, a “beatific vision of the object.”  And its claim to maturity was a claim to have arrived at full human development, to have achieved the status of the Last Man.

What is Enlightenment?  It’s a false eschatology, the heavenly city of the philosophers.

History: Bully Secularism

Knight defines “secularity” as “the term for the determination of an elite to be autonomous and to make the polis the servant and expression of their autonomy.  Some are then free of external intellectual authority, but they themselves comprise an undeclared intellectual authority over others.  The state would then not be the project of the formation of plural acting and enabling; rather, it would be a closed economy and property of a clique.  This redefinition of religion created a sphere of tight control over public discourse with the intention of extinguishing disunity and disagreement and of bringing about acquiescence and unity under the state.”  Politics because “the private function of a small group,” which amounted to a “clerisy and technocracy.”

He admits that there is a certain greatness in the rationality and politics of secularism, but concludes that “it is also just the flamboyance that hides the act of a bully.”

History: Monastic time

Since Lewis Mumford and Max Weber, historians and sociologists have recognized the importance of the Benedictine monastery in the development of time-keeping, scheduling, and Western notions of time in general.  Zerubavel notes that in developing their regulated common life, the Benedictines deliberately broke with the natural and temporal rhythms of the surrounding society.  In bed early, and rising long before sunrise for Lauds.  They created an alternative temporal world, and asserted their dominion over time.

Zerubavel also nicely notes the analogy between liturgical sequence and the sequence of the Benedictine horarium.  Their alternative temporal world was a world liturgically ordered.

History: Private and public time

We’re used to thinking of privacy in terms of protected spaces, and often hear comments about how isolated individuals and families are in modern society.  A guy opens his garage door remotely so his Lexus can slip into the garage, and the door is closed before he’s out of the car.

In the last chapter of his study of schedules and calendars (Hidden Rhythms) Eviatar Zerubavel discusses public and private in temporal rather than in spatial terms.

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History: Idle warriors

An eighteenth-century French missionary, Joseph-Francois Lafitau, wrote of the Iroquois: “The men who are so idle in their villages, regard their indolence as a sign of glory in order to make everyone understand that they are actually only born for the great things and particularly for war.  For there they can put their courage to their hardest tests.  War gives them many occasions to show to the greatest advantage all their exalted sentiments.”

Elias, who quotes this passage, comments:

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