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The Glory of Kings: A Festschrift for James B. Jordan
Fyodor Dostoevsky
(Christian Encounters Series)
Athanasius
(Foundations of Theological Exegesis and Christian Spirituality)
The Four: A Survey of the Gospels
Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom
From Behind the Veil: The Epistles of John
Deep Exegesis:The Mystery of Reading Scripture
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
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
I flew into Toronto recently on a smallish regional plane from Chicago. It was a wild landing, the plane flopping this way and that in a strong wind. At times, we seemed certain to land wing-first, not the kind of landing one dreams of. Even after we landed, we could feel the wind pushing the plane sideways. As soon as we were securely on the ground, we all clapped and everyone started chattering excitedly.
Do I owe the pilot – or United Airlines – my life? Perhaps. But, apart from a slightly heartier “thank you” to the stewardesses and pilot as I exited, I haven’t done anything to pay him back. Presumably, the pilot received his paycheck. I know I paid my fare. And we all went away thinking we were square. If I had done more to express my gratitude, I might eventually have had to answer to the TSA.
Suppose we had crashed, and the pilot had pulled me out of the burning wreckage? Would paying the ticket have sufficed? We all assume not, but what’s the difference?
Seneca muses on these questions in a section of On Benefits (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, February 1, 2012 at 1:28 pm
In a decades-old article, Robert Solomon criticizes the “liberal American sexual mythology” found in the work of Tom Nagel: “His analysis is cautious and competent, but absolutely sexless. His Romeo and Juliet exemplify at most a romanticized version of the initial phases of (hetero-)sexual attraction in a casual and innocent pick-up. They ‘arouse’ each other, but there is no indication to what end. They ‘incarnate each other as flesh,’ in Sartre’s awkward but precise terminology, but Nagel gives us no clue as to why they should indulge in such a peculiar activity. Presumably a pair of dermatologists or fashion models might have a similar effect on each other, but without the slightest hint of sexual intention. What makes this situation paradigmatically sexual? We may assume, as we would in a Doris Day comedy, that the object of this protracted arousal is sexual intercourse, but we are not told this. Sexuality without content. Liberal sexual mythology takes this Hollywood element of ‘leave it to the imagination’ as its starting point and adds the equally inexplicit suggestion that whatever activities two consenting adults choose as the object of their arousal and its gratification is ‘their business.’ In a society with such secrets, pornography is bound to serve a radical end as a vulgar valve of reality. In a philosophical analysis that stops short of the very matter investigated, a bit of perverseness may be necessary just in order to refocus the question.”
Further on, he questions why Nagel would consider what he calls “unadorned sexual intercourse” as the paradigm of sexuality:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Tuesday, January 31, 2012 at 10:31 am
In his treatise on the Passions of the Soul, Descartes gave a fairly traditional description of gratitude (reconnaissance) and ingratitude. Gratitude is “a sort of love, excited in us by some action of him to whom we offer it, and whereby we believe he has done us some good, or at least had an intention to do us some. So it includes all that goodwill does, and this besides, that it is grounded on an action we are very sensible of, and whereof we have a desire to make a requital. Wherefore it is far more strong, especially in souls never so little noble and generous.”
Ingratitude is not a passion but a simple vice, an inversion of gratitude:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 16, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Philosophy cannot be philosophy without theology. Philosophy has to exceed itself to be itself. Gratitude is the lever for philosophy’s fulfilling transcendence of itself.
Here’s a sketch of the argument:
Philosophy, let us say, is the analysis of human existence as such.
But we don’t produce our own existence. It’s not my own sperm and egg that made me, and for the first period of life, we receive the necessities of physical life from people who are capable of doing what we cannot do. We don’t invent our own language, or many of our basic cultural and personal habits. To analyze human existence as such, philosophy has to take account of our thrownness.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, January 14, 2012 at 6:29 am
“They draw near with their mouths, and honor Me with their lips, but they remove their hearts far from Me, and their fear for me is commandment of rulers” (Isaiah 29:13; cf. Matthew 15:8). This well-known prophetic condemnation of hypocrisy implies a neat theory of language.
First, it indicates that at least the intended purpose of speech, of the words of the mouth, is access. We speak in order to “draw near” to our hearers. The goal is personal access and personal presence. It is presence from a distance, presence across the space that separate persons, presence in the particular case across the space that separates heaven and earth. Speech has a limited range of access. It can draw near only to those who are within the range of hearing. Audio reproduction extends the range of speech, so media allows people to “draw near” with the mouth at a much greater distance, but the aim is still access to personal presence. Before the development of audio reproduction, we of course had books. Though the phenomenology of the printed word and reading is different, we can perhaps extend the point: Writing too is a bid for proximity, for intimacy, for access.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, January 9, 2012 at 7:29 am
Peter Gordon has an excellent discussion of Jurgen Habermas’s alleged “turn to religion” in the latest issue of TNR. Gordon wants to show that Habermas has long shown interest in religion, and that his recent obsession with it is not evidence that he has abandoned his commitment to secular reason.
Gordon is also sharp in spotting the difficulties that Habermas has set for himself. He quotes a passage from The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere (A Columbia / SSRC Book)
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, December 29, 2011 at 7:15 am
Nietzsche in Beyond Good and Evil: “Philosophers . . . have wanted to furnish the rational ground of morality – and every philosopher hitherto has believed he has furnished this rational ground; morality itse,f however, was taken as a ‘given.’ . . . it is precisely because they were ill informed and not even very inquisitive about other peoples, ages and former times, that they did not so much catch sight of the real problems of morality – for these come into view only if we compare many moralities.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Monday, December 26, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Ramachandra notes a couple of limitations in recent post-colonial discussion. One is the blindness to the influence of Christianity. Christianity is “naively identified with Europe and the United states,” and thus missionaries, their achievements, and their disciples, are considered “mere pawns in the hands of colonial administrators.” Ramachandra notes the irony: This is precisely the “Orientalist stance in reverse, the division of the world into Christian West and exotic east.
More fundamentally, postcolonial theory is stuck between aligning “with humanist notions of an autonomous, sovereign subject,” which risks “subsuming heterogeneous identities and histories into an abstract essentialism” or, on the other hand, “embracing a post-structuralist antihumanism and do denying any universal moral platform from which to contest the material and epistemic violence of the colonial encounter.” That is, they must either embrace the colonizers metaphysics of the subject, or give up any ground for criticizing the colonizers.
Some recognize the dilemma: “Gayatri Spivak has suggested a ‘strategic essentialism” that rejects the idea of an essential human nature but adopts “an essentialist stance toward the colonized self” in order to pursue “emancipatory practice.” The schizophrenia is glaring. Others, like Said, contest the post-structural attack on essentialism “because of his commitment to a universal human solidarity,” which he recognizes developed and became universal in the colonizing West.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 21, 2011 at 9:09 am
Aristotle says his philosophical opponents “destroy necessity.”
So long as they are looking at the creation, his opponents are right: Nature is wholly contingent, entirely unnecessary, like art.
Aristotle searches for, and thinks he finds, necessity in creation. His philosophy is a refined idolatry.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 16, 2011 at 8:23 am
In the Metaphysics, Aristotle says that the metaphysical and epistemological errors of previous philosophers can be traced to their focus on the sensible world: “because they saw that that all this world of nature is in movement and that about that which changes no true statement can be made, they said that of course, regarding that which everywhere in every respect is changing, nothing could be truly affirmed.” In the end, Cratylus abandoned speech altogether: he “finally did not think it right to say anything but only moved his finger, and criticized Heraclitus for saying that it is impossible to step twice into the same river; for he thought one could not do it even once.”
To make true statements, Aristotle argues, we must be able to make assertions about some changeless, essential, necessary substratum behind the sensible appearances. But to draw that conclusion, he has to assume that statements of truth themselves take a changeless, essentializing form. Why, however, can’t statements of truth take a narrative form, capturing truth about the changing world by describing processes?
And to complicate things further: Even Aristotle’s fixed statements of truth are processes. His sentences took time to write and they take time to read; they are fixed in books, but those books make no difference to anyone until someone takes it up to read. (And this is not even to introduce the fact that textual meaning changes with time.) So linguistic processes describe the processes of nature and society.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, December 16, 2011 at 7:04 am
You can understand why the medievals, with their earthy practicality, responded to Aristotle, who offers arguments like this one against the irrationalism of monism: If everything is and is not simultaeously, yh not walk over a cliff? “Why do we observe him guarding against this, evidently because he does not think that falling in is alike good and not good?”
If “he judges one thing to be better and another worse. And if this is so, he must also judge one thing to be a man and another to be not-a-man, one thing to be sweet and another to be not-sweet. For he does not aim at and judge all things alike, when, thinking it desirable to drink water or to see a man, he proceeds to aim at these things; yet he ought, if the same thing were alike a man and not-a-man.”
It’s evident that “all men make unqualified judgements, if not about all things, still about what is better and worse.” And thus they practically refute their own philosophical theories.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, December 14, 2011 at 9:48 am
In a 2010 essay in Political Theology, Daniel Bell, Jr. offers a sharp critique of Hardt and Negri and Amgamben. He notes that, in contrast to other democratic theorists, Hardt and Negri hold out a modest hope for “democratic polities [that are] fugitive, episodic, on the run and generally overwhelmed.” Not a pep talk exactly; but Bell thinks the problem is worse: “their hope is not merely modest but impossible.”
One reason is ontological: “their univocal ontology precludes . . . an affinity that exceeds the usefulness of contract or the dominion of war.” He elaborates: “they speak of love and joy but they consistently distance what they mean by those terms from the kinds of social relations that are typically associated with them. Hardt and Negri reject any desire for community, for a social body, unity, bond. Agamben’s coming community is impersonal, established on the basis not of any particular relation but on relation in general, generic, anonymous being. We are left wondering what kind of love and joy this is.”
Only “contract or conquest” remain:
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, December 10, 2011 at 11:30 am
Biggar again, defending the Augustinian view that killing in some circumstances is not a violation of love of neighbor: “I may (intend to) kill an aggressor, not because I hate him, nor because I reckon his life worth less than anyone else’s, but because, tragically, I know of no other way to prevent him from perpetrating a serious injury on an innocent neighbour. My intentional killing is ‘loving,’ therefore, in two respects: first, its overriding aim is to protect the innocent from serious harm; and second, it acknowledges the aggressor’s equal dignity, it wishes him no evil, and it would gladly spare him if it could.”
On a similar note, Hays’s argument from the atonement, namely, that that God “deals with his enemies, not by killing them, but by seeking peace through ‘self-giving’ or ‘self-emptying service.’” Biggar argues on the contrary that in Romans “God is being likened to a civil magistrate, and his wrath to the execution of capital punishment.” Thus, “we should think of God as being prepared to respond to incorrigible sinners (should there be any) by authorizing their deaths, not at all because he wants them dead, but because he wants to secure the fulfillment of his creation, and because he cannot have the latter without the former. In this sense we may say that God ‘kills’ incorrigible sinners.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, November 17, 2011 at 1:18 pm
In his classic Leisure the Basis of Culture
Pieper noted that this was a sea-change in philosophy: “The Greeks -Aristotle no less than Plato – as well as the great medieval thinkers, held that not only physical, sensuous perception, but equally man’s spiritual and intellectual knowledge, included an element of pure, receptive contemplation, or as Heraclitus says, of ‘listening to the essence of things.’”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, November 11, 2011 at 5:33 pm
Some reflections on the metaphysics and politics of marriage and pornography at http://www.firstthings.com/
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, November 4, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Homi Bhabha (in an essay in Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies
Deconstruction first takes shape not in Paris but in Algiers and Delhi.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, October 28, 2011 at 12:58 pm
In Book 10 of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle ponders the nature of happiness, concluding from philosophical arguments that happiness consists in contemplation. He adds a theological argument:
“We assume the gods to be above all other beings blessed and happy; but what sort of actions must we assign to them? Acts of justice? Will not the gods seem absurd if they make contracts and return deposits, and so on? Acts of a brave man, then, confronting dangers and running risks because it is noble to do so? Or liberal acts? To whom will they give? It will be strange if they are really to have money or anything of the kind. And what would their temperate acts be? Is not such praise tasteless, since they have no bad appetites? If we were to run through them all, the circumstances of action would be found trivial and unworthy of gods. Still, every one supposes that they live and therefore that they are active; we cannot suppose them to sleep like Endymion. Now if you take away from a living being action, and still more production, what is left but contemplation? Therefore the activity of God, which surpasses all others in blessedness, must be contemplative; and of human activities, therefore, that which is most akin to this must be most of the nature of happiness.”
No wonder incarnation is foolishness to the Greeks.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:54 pm
A few comments on the physiology, psychology, and culture of aroma from Diane Ackerman’s A Natural History of the Senses
Like many writers, Ackerman links smell and memory: “Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary, and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the Poconos, when wild blueberry bushes teemed with succulent fruit and the opposite sex was as mysterious as space travel; another, hours of passion on a moonlit beach in Florida, while the night-blooming cereus drenched the air with thick curds of perfume and huge sphinx moths visited the cereus in a loud purr of wings; a third, a family dinner of pot roast, noodle pudding, and sweet potatoes, during a myrtle-made August in a Midwestern town, when both of one’s parents were alive. Smells detonate softly in our memory like poignant land mines, hidden under the weedy mass of many years of experience. Hit a tripwire of smell, and memories explode all at once. A complex vision leaps out of the undergrowth.”
She comments on the difficulty of using words to describe smells: “When we use words such as smoky, sulfurous, floral, fruity, sweet, we are describing smells in terms of other things. . . . Smells are our dearest kin, but we cannot remember their names. Instead we tend to describe how they make us feel” with words like disgusting, intoxicating, sickening, pleasurable, delightful, revolting. She thinks this is hard-wired in our brains, where the locus of smell is distant from the locus of language. Smells connect to objects and situations not to words. This is one of the reasons smells are so potent: We know them but “we cannot utter their names.” Smell is a mystic sense.
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, October 1, 2011 at 8:47 am
I offer some reflections on the timeliness of the work of JG Hamann over at http://www.firstthings.com/
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Friday, September 23, 2011 at 11:54 am
Not Wesleyan Methodism, but against the methodism attacked by Gadamer. As Anthony Thiselton notes (in his essay in The Promise of Hermeneutics
Thiselton explains “the historical finitude of fallen humanness characterizes every ‘Other’ with a givenness that calls into question all notions of unconstrained autonomy found in liberal optimism. More to the point, interpreters conditioned by their own embeddedness in specific times, cultures, and theological or secular traditions need to listen, rather than seeking to ‘master’ the Other by netting it within their own prior system of concepts and categories. This premature assimilation of the Other into one’s own prior grooves of habituated thought constitutes the ‘control’ and advance commandeering that Gadamer calls ‘Method.’ In a theistic context, listening to the God who is Other remains dependent on the priority of the Other as Giving and Given. Unless God chooses to give himself as One who is given, we listen in vain, and can ‘master’ nothing by constructing a prior ‘method’ in advance of understanding who it is who addresses us.”
posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, September 7, 2011 at 3:39 pm
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