tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-50355675778341112912024-03-12T16:50:55.147-07:00Moriae Encomiumrick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.comBlogger170125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-29423992179929333112023-06-11T14:37:00.000-07:002023-06-11T14:37:16.133-07:00Bookends<div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrzUv-AFmUkBQ8Xvc305YdI5MWuOELYLK5eNuA-A7zGEEGbZ6XneQfCVtEWbj32D4yvH_biQWq7g1bIZ3d-gdlrUUtOlWku_i9fqsampMDmPOqzpuYk9M9IN_Qli-UeAyBTu2dl4VZalnXNwPmyuqjPv3Sc26HxTNjTqvVE1Aw4YAFojUUjNPoHNWjFQ/s200/Bookends.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="200" data-original-width="200" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrzUv-AFmUkBQ8Xvc305YdI5MWuOELYLK5eNuA-A7zGEEGbZ6XneQfCVtEWbj32D4yvH_biQWq7g1bIZ3d-gdlrUUtOlWku_i9fqsampMDmPOqzpuYk9M9IN_Qli-UeAyBTu2dl4VZalnXNwPmyuqjPv3Sc26HxTNjTqvVE1Aw4YAFojUUjNPoHNWjFQ/w400-h400/Bookends.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Time it was</div><div style="text-align: left;">And what a time it was</div><div style="text-align: left;">It was....</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Thus begin the brief lyrics for the tune bookending Simon and Garfunkle's third album.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Bookends were what the Old Friends sat on a park bench like, occasioning Paul's "How terribly strange to be seventy."</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> Not there yet, but close enough to know he was right.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">So, it occurred to me, in the last post, that I have increasingly been doing what there I described, re-reading something that I read when young, sometimes in the original language, and not only remembering what I had forgotten, but seeing much new in it, and bringing a new understanding to it. Thus with Hegel's <i>Philosophie des Weltgeschichtes</i>, now with Heidegger's <i>Sein und Zeit.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;">Please don't misunderstand--I'm still over a hundred pages from China in Hegel. This is the usual overreach.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">But, as I've noted before (see two posts on August 8, 2014 and another on March 11, 2020) Martin Heidegger was a particular interest of mine in college, having finished up a philosophy major with an "honors thesis" (a kind of lengthy undergraduate paper) comparing some of his ideas to those of the English philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead. It's still the longest thing I've ever written.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Now the volume of <i>Sein und Zeit</i> I've just started I actually purchased in college before starting the honors thesis, but of course I relied almost entirely on the English translation, <i>Being and Time</i>, with a major assist from Michael Gelvin's <i>A Commentary on Heidegger's Being and Time.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i><br /></i></div><div style="text-align: left;">But why in heaven's name start the thing when there are so many reasons I may not want to or be able to finish it? Partly, for me, it's a more significant "bookend" than Hegel. And part of it is that odd dissatisfaction that <i>this is something I've already read, already studied</i>, but that I didn't really grasp it then, and what I did grasp I didn't really retain. And he seems important enough to the course of my lifetime to make that effort.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Why? Well, there is the attraction to what came to be called the existentialist tradition, conventionally attributed to the anxious cry of Kierkegaard, to the obsessions of Nietzsche, to the anguish of Unamuno, suddenly taken up analytically and set out in technical German by Heidegger--and then read backwards into Pascal, Augustine, and the psalmists. As one who's been attracted to philosophy since I was able to ask questions it's always seemed the closest to the heart of things, not divorced from the great tradition starting with the Greeks, but presupposing it and asking, That's all very well, but what does that mean for <i>me</i>, for <i>us, </i>those of us who don't sit outside of it all, but are caught up in it, a part of it, who must live and die in it?</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This is part of the paradox--all these writers who today are almost universally considered so difficult, so obscure, so elusive, are remembered because they are striving after what is arguably the simplest, the most central, the most burning questions of the heart, all stemming from the stubborn remembrance of one's own existence.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I think of a wonderful passage from Fielding's <i>Tom Jones</i>. Tom and his friend Partridge have been pressed into the English army and are marching to battle. Tom, good-hearted and clear-eyed, exhorts Partridge to courage: "Nothing can be more likely to happen than death to men who go into battle. Perhaps we shall both fall in it--and what then?" Partridge knows exactly: "What, then? why, then there is an end of us, is there not? when I am gone, all is over with me. What matters the cause to me, or who gets the victory, if I am killed. I shall never enjoy any advantage from it. What are all the ringing of bells and bonfires to one that is six foot under ground? there will be an end of poor Partridge." He is perhaps not a model existentialist, but he does remember his own existence. Tom, though he loves Partridge dearly, can't help but think of him as something of a coward. Neither can we--but we see he has a certain point.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">So, existentialism. What else? I have always had a certain attraction, not only to philosophy, but to Christian theology. I don't know why; to me it's more puzzling that so many people don't. But in looking at many of the most original twentieth century Christian theologians, the seminarian-turned-(conventional)-atheist Martin Heidegger seems to have had a decisive influence. Bultmann knew him and corresponded with him throughout his career. Rahner studied under him. Tillich, like the other two, considers Heidegger the embodiment of the modern, and shapes his theology around his categories of Being and Existence. Even Barth, whose landmark commentary on Romans was published shortly before <i>Sein und Zeit,</i> was so influenced by Kierkegaard that he and Heidegger come to look like intellectual cousins.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">And then I guess there is the challenge. Many not unintelligent people have waded into <i>Sein und Zeit</i> and found it unintelligible gibberish. The old joke is that, before you translate it into English, you have to translate it into German. Its hard going, and since Heidegger himself abandoned the thing before being near finished with it, there may be always the sneaking suspicion that he gave up on it as well. ("Later Heidegger" is still a closed book to me, though I own a couple of volumes of essays that I may someday finish.)</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I toyed with the idea of comparing it to <i>Finnegans Wake</i>, but the obscurities are really entirely different in nature. Joyce is trying to obscure, trying to parallel the patchwork obscurity of life, of dreams, of the night. And he loves to joke, and make puns, and use portmanteau words. Heidegger is working as hard as he can (I am convinced) to make clear and intelligible something that is hard to express, maybe impossible, the working out of what it means to be. Yes, I think at one point he did say something about his work being akin to a poetry of Being--but it's not. Though Heidegger has famously pointed to Holderlin as a poet sharing his sense of Being, <i>Der Ister</i> does not in the least read like <i>Sein und Zeit.</i></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">He starts off with his fundamental distinction of <i>Sein</i> and <i>Seiende</i>, of Being Itself from particular beings. He is interested in the former, but recognizes that he can only get at it through the latter. He wants to investigate a forgotten, pre-Socratic concern with what it means to be, and considers the focus of all Western philosophy on beings--things--or their totality--nature--not so much as misguided as premature.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Now Heidegger hardly can set out forgetting about the last 2500 years. In fact he takes us through a brief history of our false starts, though Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, Suarez, Descartes, Kant, Hegel and Bergson. But his program is explicitly destructive, and I have just reached his exposition of the method that must be followed to make progress--phenomenology.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Oh, and before I forget, he has also identified the being, the <i>Seiende</i>, whose analysis will be our focus: <i> Dasein.</i> Now <i>Dasein </i>in German is ordinarily translated into English simply as "existence." But Heidegger identifies it as the being which I am, which, being the same as the investigator, is the natural one to investigate. Or something like that. It seems a little rushed, and that fact that the being being investigated is human being seems a little, well, anthropocentric. Yes, human being is one I'm most concerned with, but human being seems rather a small part of Being Itself, and rather peculiar, and might possibly skew our results. No matter, that is where we will begin.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtEFDLCdQ-Iw2sDwv7A8pO2jNhp7aKeTuyrGwO9MtyhbNoc8a4kl_U2v091N1SmNw542zowsEBaNgR08u60E1bg5TgT2iy5Mbr_3q9nA19sA6W1zQSOYroB0GLUqdpUAlOPYHY0p74guz2otyISPuItV7_mPhyh6n-56EdBgm85g0-CgiaRNNlVqBmaQ/s1280/Heidegger.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtEFDLCdQ-Iw2sDwv7A8pO2jNhp7aKeTuyrGwO9MtyhbNoc8a4kl_U2v091N1SmNw542zowsEBaNgR08u60E1bg5TgT2iy5Mbr_3q9nA19sA6W1zQSOYroB0GLUqdpUAlOPYHY0p74guz2otyISPuItV7_mPhyh6n-56EdBgm85g0-CgiaRNNlVqBmaQ/w300-h400/Heidegger.jpg" width="300" /></a></div><br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div>rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-50959678271336134592023-03-19T17:16:00.000-07:002023-03-19T17:16:20.506-07:00Hegel's Philosophy of World History--well, why not?<p> </p><p>There's been a lot of water under the bridge, and many a time I've thought about writing here, but over the course of dismaying politics and the pandemic there seemed quite enough talk going around, and my wife and I have been largely content to keep doing the work we enjoy and be parents to our grown children and grandparents to a few new arrivals.</p><p>Completion of Girard's <i>Je vois Satan tomber comme l'eclair </i>led to a round of classical mythology through Apollodorus, Ovid, James Frazer, Robert Graves, ending with a quixotic and as-yet-unfulfilled determination to read Robert Calasso's <i>Le nozze di Cadmo e Armonia</i> in Italian. A detour to Aesop's animal fables, in various incarnations, led to Goethe's <i>Renard</i>, and then to early German romantic verse: Goethe, Schiller, Holderlin and Heine. And having read English translations of Proust's <i>Remembrance of Things Past </i>and Mann's <i>Doctor Faustus</i> in the 1980's, I thought the time might have come to re-read them in their original languages. Given my age and seriously undisciplined reading habits I realized I would probably never finish them, but decided I didn't care, and that in turn led me to pick any number of other things I realized I would probably never finish.</p><p>Among them was Karl Barth's commentary on St. Paul's letter to the Romans, which revealed anew how it's still possible at any age to be astounded by something not exactly new, but new to me, and the concomitant urge to read Tillich's <i>Systematic Theology, </i>Barth's mid-twentieth century dark twin which was, not unimportantly, the kernel of the thought that formed those who formed me among post-war mainline Protestants.</p><p>But Hegel's Philosophy of History? It is most correct that I have done little more than knock about in Hegel's work. I did indeed read an English version of the Philosophy of History in college. I took a Metaphysics course which emphasized Hegel and, oddly enough, in high school I had discovered, in my attic, a box of old books, of uniform size, black covers, with stiff yellow pages, printed around 1910, and one was Hegel's Philosophy of History. We were each supposed to choose a work of Hegel's and do a report to the class on it, and since I already owned a copy I chose the Philosophy of History.</p><p>Since that time I've taken superficial cracks at the Phenomenology of Sprit and the Science of Logic, quickly abandoned. But a little less than ten years ago I acquired a volume from a series of lectures entitled <i>Philosophie der Weltgeschichte</i> and thought that I might well one day tackle it. This set of lectures was given during the 1822/23 term at the University of Berlin, and, to the extent that I have understood the Preface, differs from later texts based on the 1830 lectures, edited after Hegel's death by his son Karl. I am fairly certain that it was that later edition that I read back in college.</p><p>My impression is that Hegel's reputation is quite mixed, even among (perhaps I should say especially among) the educated. His work generated an enormous reaction. In my own reading he was, to Kierkegaard, comic, to Marx, naive and utopian, and to many simply a pompous windbag who thought he know the mind of God better than God did. But...but...I don't know if Hegle created the post-Hegelian world or simply anticipated it. But so much seems to flow out of the Philosophy of History I am convinced that it is worth getting to know better.</p><p>Take our politics (please). Broadly we are Progressives or Nationalists.</p><p>Now for Hegel, as a philosopher, history is not simply a series of events, not just "one damn thing after another." It has a meaning. That meaning is, in a nutshell, to realize Freedom in the unfolding of Spirit's expanding wisdom. History has, so to speak, a motor and an end. Now I don't want to get ahead of myself, but insofar as Hegel asserts that history is necessarily unending change, that nothing persists in ist present form, that all institutions and peoples and empires pass away, all in the gradual realization of a universal, self-fulfilling, and absolute Freedom, Hegel is the father of the Progressives, what we broadly call the left, which strives for constant improvement, with constant criticism, sometimes with reform, sometimes with revolution, but, from Marxists to socialists to humble liberals, insisting on the world's imperfections, and with a firm faith that, no, the clock cannot be turned back.</p><p>But, on the other hand, in his Philosophy of History, Hegel does not describe a world of random, incremental changes. Just as the theory of natural selection produces, not a world of undifferentiated life forms, but a hierarchy of distinct species, so history, under the power of the Spirit, produces distinct peoples, nations, empires, civilizations. And these "species" of human political and cultural forms exist in a sort of hierarchy, defined by what stage of the Spirit's development they manifest. This cannot help but produce a ranking of higher or lower peoples, nations, empires and civilizations. </p><p>The crudest way to illustrate this is from those who don't get beyond the table of contents. The lectures begin with the Oriental World, then Greece and Rome, and end with the German world. Where else have we seen the idea that the German <i>Volk</i> is the highest form to appear in history, the superior race?</p><p>Now that crude example is in fact unfair to Hegel, but it shows one possible reading of his concrete account of the Spirit's march through history. China demonstrates Oriental bondage; in India the Spirit is dreaming. The West's embodiment of the genuine progress of the Spirt accounts for the superiority of the West over the East, and over the global South.</p><p>More than that, one talks about a people's Spirit, as a real, separate reality. It's all very well that Hegel asserts that every concrete people will decline, but, in the everyday Hegelian world, the Spirit of the Jews is essentially an oriental Spirit, alien to that of the "West," and if the Spirit of the global South is different from the Spirit defining the more advanced culture of an Anglo-Saxon America, then Jews and southern immigrants become a threat, and the only response must be culture war, to protect the nation from decadence and decline.</p><p>Hegel's reification of peoplehood, of nationhood, is, for him, simply a way of talking about the necessarily transient nature of such phenomena. But it also anticipates and to some extent justifies the claims of nationalism, the imperative to keep a given culture "pure," the need to preserve the superiority and maintain the control of a perceived superior race, the need to wall one's people off, or to bring others, by conquest, into the hegemony of the empire, into a superior "American way of life," or, more recently, into an autonomous "Russian World." It is not Hegel, but it is a way of thinking fostered by Hegel's judgment on civilizations, and thus for all that see the people, the culture, the nation, the empire, as the greatest value needing preservation and defense, he is, to that extent, speaking broadly, also their Father, their progenitor.</p><p>Many have noted that the philosophy of history is Hegel's more popular work, because it is his most accessible, and I can't disagree with that. The Phenomenology and the Logic are maddingly abstract; the philosophy of history tracks the development of the Spirit, so to speak, with a series of stories. The Spirit enfolds on stage in a play we mostly know already.</p><p>In a certain way Hegel uses history to exemplify his notion of freedom as Plato used the polis in the <i>Republic.</i> There recall that Socrates was asked to define justice, and he found it was easier to change his focus from the individual to the polis, where the ideal of justice, being exemplified in classes whose virtues were wisdom, courage and temperance, could then return to the individual as individual virtues. In much the same way Hegel writes the development of the Spirit over a large canvas, and thus makes it perhaps more accessible to those of us having difficulty with its more abstract manifestations.</p><p><br /></p>rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-75943231510019076292020-12-31T08:21:00.001-08:002020-12-31T08:22:12.907-08:00Tennyson: Begin Again<p><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-size: 17px;"><br /></span></span></p><p><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="font-size: 17px;">I have obviously been reading some Tennyson lately. This one, well known, seems particularly apt this year: </span></span></p><div itemscope="" itemtype="http://schema.org/CreativeWork" style="border: 0px; color: #333333; font-family: Nunito, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><div class="entry-content" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><p id="poem-full" style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-size: 17px; font-style: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: 24px; margin: 0px 0px 0.75rem; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,<br />The flying cloud, the frosty light;<br />The year is dying in the night;<br />Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.<br /><br />Ring out the old, ring in the new,<br />Ring, happy bells, across the snow:<br />The year is going, let him go;<br />Ring out the false, ring in the true.<br /><br />Ring out the grief that saps the mind,<br />For those that here we see no more,<br />Ring out the feud of rich and poor,<br />Ring in redress to all mankind.<br /><br />Ring out a slowly dying cause,<br />And ancient forms of party strife;<br />Ring in the nobler modes of life,<br />With sweeter manners, purer laws.<br /><br />Ring out the want, the care the sin,<br />The faithless coldness of the times;<br />Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes,<br />But ring the fuller minstrel in.<br /><br />Ring out false pride in place and blood,<br />The civic slander and the spite;<br />Ring in the love of truth and right,<br />Ring in the common love of good.<br /><br />Ring out old shapes of foul disease,<br />Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;<br />Ring out the thousand wars of old,<br />Ring in the thousand years of peace.<br /><br />Ring in the valiant man and free,<br />The larger heart, the kindlier hand;<br />Ring out the darkness of the land,<br />Ring in the Christ that is to be.</p></div></div>rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-17744940065814414892020-12-11T18:53:00.001-08:002020-12-27T12:04:44.913-08:00A late notice from Alfred, Lord Tennyson<p><br /></p><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: medium;">Below the thunders of the upper deep;<br />Far, far beneath in the abysmal sea,<br />His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep<br />The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee<br />About his shadowy sides: above him swell<br />Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;<br />And far away into the sickly light,<br />From many a wondrous grot and secret cell<br />Unnumbered and enormous polypi<br />Winnow the giant fins the slumbering green.<br />There hath he lain for ages and will lie<br />Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,<br />Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;<br />Then once by men and angels to be seen,<br />In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die. </span></div>rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-3629960565062737792020-11-04T10:28:00.001-08:002020-11-04T10:28:57.746-08:00My election night reading<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgZbjW6sJNURx0s-fMpjtcI8v8U1_fmFglV6LcEqF_RyPt0bzGsQuRrKU_IPCS3cJenW4Y_QQ-m4oC-h8yvGVT7kAgZNnFCKCuAY9a5Mna-f0HhvAs1l2a1UP4gJxTzHWbYcT86CBFPLpd/s1405/Jungle+rumble.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1405" data-original-width="1382" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjgZbjW6sJNURx0s-fMpjtcI8v8U1_fmFglV6LcEqF_RyPt0bzGsQuRrKU_IPCS3cJenW4Y_QQ-m4oC-h8yvGVT7kAgZNnFCKCuAY9a5Mna-f0HhvAs1l2a1UP4gJxTzHWbYcT86CBFPLpd/s320/Jungle+rumble.jpg" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>"Chew proof" and "rip proof."</div>rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-87420123788584283862020-10-31T15:17:00.000-07:002020-10-31T15:17:58.425-07:00The conclusion of chapter 47 of Dicken's Bleak House<div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJnHO8UiP0LFlv-gqelpffDE8oBNASHZIrFDfcrEw-becyK7NdaQeVyXN86EdIdDHVLbWwbgGhwA_y0u1Hpas_FADNe5USaaj6aXTukr_mzNr0sa2yHrJiDcpoZ-1KrRZXOiO4X_YT5a2z/s916/Jo+2+%25282%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="742" data-original-width="916" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJnHO8UiP0LFlv-gqelpffDE8oBNASHZIrFDfcrEw-becyK7NdaQeVyXN86EdIdDHVLbWwbgGhwA_y0u1Hpas_FADNe5USaaj6aXTukr_mzNr0sa2yHrJiDcpoZ-1KrRZXOiO4X_YT5a2z/s320/Jo+2+%25282%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><span> </span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Stay, Jo! What now?"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"It's time for me to go to that there berryin ground, sir," he
returns with a wild look.</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Lie down, and tell me. What burying ground, Jo?"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Where they laid him as wos wery good to me, wery good to me indeed,
he wos. It's time fur me to go down to that there berryin ground,
sir, and ask to be put along with him. I wants to go there and be
berried. He used fur to say to me, 'I am as poor as you to-day, Jo,'
he ses. I wants to tell him that I am as poor as him now and have
come there to be laid along with him."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"By and by, Jo. By and by."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Ah! P'raps they wouldn't do it if I wos to go myself. But will you
promise to have me took there, sir, and laid along with him?"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"I will, indeed."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Thankee, sir. Thankee, sir. They'll have to get the key of the gate
afore they can take me in, for it's allus locked. And there's a step
there, as I used for to clean with my broom. It's turned wery dark,
sir. Is there any light a-comin?"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"It is coming fast, Jo."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Fast. The cart is shaken all to pieces, and the rugged road is very
near its end.</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Jo, my poor fellow!"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"I hear you, sir, in the dark, but I'm a-gropin—a-gropin—let me
catch hold of your hand."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Jo, can you say what I say?"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"I'll say anythink as you say, sir, for I knows it's good."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"></p><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Our Father."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Our Father! Yes, that's wery good, sir."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Which art in heaven."</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Art in heaven—is the light a-comin, sir?"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"It is close at hand. Hallowed be thy name!"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">"Hallowed be—thy—"</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">The light is come upon the dark benighted way. Dead!</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, right
reverends and wrong reverends of every order. Dead, men and women,
born with heavenly compassion in your hearts. And dying thus around
us every day.</p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><a id="c48" name="c48"></a> </p><span style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: #fdfdfd; color: black; display: inline !important; float: none; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: large; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
</span><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; color: black; font-family: &quot; font-size: 18.06px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: justify; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 4%; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </p><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br /></div>rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-12780552174523129092020-05-23T08:56:00.000-07:002020-05-23T08:56:05.090-07:00It's not exactly a classic. Nevertheless, you ought to read it.<br />
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<br />
<br />
In Whit Stillman's<i> Metropolitan</i> two of his characters, Audrey and Tom, resume an earlier discussion about Jane Austen:<br />
<br />
"I read that Lionel Trilling essay you mentioned. You really like Trilling?"<br />
<br />
"Yes."<br />
<br />
"I think he's very strange. He says that nobody could like the heroine of<i> Mansfield Park</i>? I like her. Then he goes on and on about how we modern people of today with our modern attitudes bitterly resent<i> Mansfield Park</i> because its heroine is virtuous? What's wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?"<br />
<br />
"His point is that the novel's premise--that there's something immoral about a group of young people putting on a play--is simply absurd."<br />
<br />
"You found Fanny Price unlikeable?"<br />
<br />
"She sounds pretty unbearable, but I haven't read the book."<br />
<br />
"What?"<br />
<br />
"You don't have to have read a book to have an opinion on it. I haven't read the Bible, either."<br />
<br />
"What Jane Austen novels have you read?"<br />
<br />
"None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelist's ideas as well as the critics' thinking."<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
It's hard to remember how, a couple of years ago, the political world was on the edge of its seat waiting for the release of Mr. Mueller's report. When finished, it went first to Attorney General Barr. After a few days with it he released his four-page "summary." The President then spent the next few weeks proclaiming his two-word summary: "Total exoneration!" <br />
<br />
Finally the report, in a heavily redacted form, was released. And then a curious thing happened: no one read it. OK, that's not literally true. A few people read it. A vanishingly small percentage of the American electorate. And it put me in mind of Tom, for whom reading good literary criticism was sufficient to excuse him from reading novels.<br />
<br />
Those of us who did read it found it slow-going, hundreds of pages that might have been written by Sgt. Joe Friday. Facts, dates, places, supported by footnotes referring to documents and sworn testimony, followed by extensively-cited legal and policy analysis, compiled by a dour, twice-decorated Marine combat veteran and lifelong Republican.<br />
<br />
The fact that Mr. Barr and his boss are now hinting at prosecuting those whose first inquires led to the "Russia hoax" suggests that perhaps they are confident that the report's account of the shameful conduct of the last presidential election can now be not only denied, but discredited.<br />
<br />
But <i>The Mueller Report</i> is still out there. Yes it's still heavily redacted (just this week, after a federal Court of Appeals ordered the DOJ to finally provide the deleted material to Congress, the Supreme Court stayed the order). But even without the redacted material it's a powerful and damning document--if anyone bothers to read it. <br />
<br />
So I won't summarize it. There's been enough summarizing. There's no need for you to rely on good criticism. As we enter the next presidential electoral season, you ought to read it yourself.<br />
<br />
"What's wrong with a novel having a virtuous heroine?"rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-61445285590719431192020-05-14T10:32:00.000-07:002020-05-14T10:32:33.866-07:00The Last Three Stanzas of John Dryden's Imitation of the Twenty-Ninth Ode from the Third Book of the Odes of Horace<br />
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<br /></div>
Happy the man, and happy he alone,<br />
He, who can call today his own;<br />
He who, secure within, can say:<br />
"Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.<br />
Be fair, or foul, or rain, or shine,<br />
The joys I have possessed, in spite of fate, are mine.<br />
Not Heav'n itself upon the past has pow'r;<br />
But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour"<br />
<br />
Fortune, that with malicious joy<br />
Does man her slave oppress,<br />
Proud of her office to destroy,<br />
Is seldom pleased to bless:<br />
Still various, and unconstant still,<br />
But with an inclination to be ill,<br />
Promotes, degrades, delights in strife,<br />
And makes a lottery of life.<br />
I can enjoy her while she's kind;<br />
But when she dances in the wind,<br />
And shakes her wings, and will not stay,<br />
I puff the prostitute away:<br />
The little or the much she gave me is quietly resigned:<br />
Content with poverty, my soul I arm;<br />
And virtue, though in rags, will keep me warm.<br />
<br />
What is't to me,<br />
Who never sail in her unfaithful sea,<br />
If storms arise, and clouds grow black;<br />
If the mast split, and threaten wreck?<br />
Then let the greedy merchant fear<br />
For his ill-gotten gain;<br />
and pray to gods that will not hear,<br />
While the debating winds and willows bear<br />
His wealth into the main.<br />
For me, secure from Fortune's blows,<br />
(Secure of what I cannot lose,)<br />
In my small pinnance I can sail,<br />
Contemning all the blust'ring roar;<br />
And running with a merry gale,<br />
With friendly stars my safety seek,<br />
Within some little winding creek:<br />
And see the storm ashore.<br />
<br />
And for those who may prefer the original, from the first Augustan age:<br />
<br />
...ille potens sui<br />
laetusque deget, cui licet in diem<br />
dixisse "vixi: cras vel atra<br />
nube polum Pater occupato<br />
<br />
vel sole puro; non tamen irritum,<br />
quodcumque retro est, efficiet neque<br />
diffenget infactumque reddet,<br />
quod fugiens semel hora vexit."<br />
<br />
Fortuna saevo laeta negotio et<br />
ludum insolentem ludere pertinax<br />
transmutat incertos honores,<br />
nunc mihi, nunc alii benigna.<br />
<br />
laudo manentem; si celeris quatit<br />
penna, resigno quae dedit et mea<br />
virtute me involvo probamque<br />
pauperiem sine dote quaero.<br />
<br />
non est meum, si mugiat Africis<br />
malus procellis, ad miseras preces<br />
decurrere et votis pacisci<br />
ne Cypriae Tyriaeque merces<br />
<br />
addant avaro divitias mari.<br />
tunc me biremis praesidio scaphae<br />
tutum per Aegaeos tumultus<br />
aura ferret geminusque Pollux.<br />
<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-72745337764991889492020-03-21T19:38:00.001-07:002020-03-21T19:38:40.815-07:00The World Turned Upside Down<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"Adeo mihi certe persuadeo res aequabili ac iusta aliqua ratione distribui aut feliciter agi cum rebum mortalium, nisi sublata prorsus proprietate, no posse." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">"<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Thus I am wholly convinced that unless private property is entirely abolished, there can be no fair or just distribution of goods, nor can the business of mortals be conducted happily."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
</span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Thomas More certainly didn't invent the idea of a community of goods. And though his is probably the best-known early modern articulation of the idea, there's nothing I know of in his later career where anything close to the idea was considered as a practical policy or political goal. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">A little over a century later the idea of a community of goods was no longer simply a humanist conceit but a political program, a program whose advocates were not rulers or lawyers or clerics, but peasants and tinkers and others of that ilk. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Christopher Hill is a distinguished British historian. His life's work was centered on the England in the mid-seventeenth century, the period of what is conventionally called the English Civil War, but which HIll insists on calling the English Revolution. He was raised in a pious Methodist family, but joined the Communist Party after losing his faith at Oxford in the thirtie</span><span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">s. He resigned from the Communist Party in the fifties after the Soviet Union suppressed the Hungarian Revolution, but remained, for the rest of his lift, identified as a Marxist historian. Hence his understanding of the English Civil War more as a class revolution, the displacement of royal feudal rule with parliamentary rule, driven (even after the return of kings) by an increasingly merchant, commercial class.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">In textbook Marxism phenomena like religion are considered "superstructure," things unreal in themselves which simply reflect the dominant mode of material production. A classic example of this is the assertion that catholicism reflected the traditional feudal mode of production, in contrast with protestantism, which came out of the emerging capitalist economies of early modern Europe. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">Hill never returned to his childhood faith, but he never forgot it either. Growing up in the fervent tradition of English religious dissent, outside of the established Church, left him with a real sympathy for working class religion and undoubtedly inspired his research into its more radical forms. It also perhaps supported his increasing understanding of religion as a force, not of course entirely divorced from economic relationships, but also impelled by its own interior logic.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">In </span><i style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">The World Turned Upside Down</i><span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"> Hill examines a variety of social and religious movements that rose in the wake of the war between king and parliament. The religious aspect of the war is conventionally presented as one between Anglicans and Puritans, with the Puritans, after the death of the king, breaking into strict Presbyterians, who themselves sought to establish a new national church, and the more tolerant Independents, whose strength lay in the military rule of Oliver Cromwell. Hill in this book is little concerned with any of these, focusing instead on the proliferation of more radical groups--Levellers, Diggers, Agitators, Muggletonians, Grindletoniams, Third Monarchists, Seekers, Ranters and Quakers--and their ultimate failure.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">The context of course is an England that has been Protestant for about a century, where the bible has been translated into English and sent out into the land. Early hope that the single written authority of the scripture would produce a single authoritative form of Protestantism soon foundered. The civil war was an inter-Protestant war, but Hill's heros, unlike the key players, declined to read the bible as Luther, or Calvin, or Cranmer did. Here is Gerrard Winstanley, the most eloquent of the Levellers:</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">"Not one word was spoken in the beginning that one branch of mankind should rule over another....But...selfish imaginations...did set up one man to teach and rule over another. And thereby...man was brought into bondage, and became a greater slave to such of his own kind than the beasts of the field were to him. And hereupon the earth...was hedged into enclosures by the teachers and rulers, and the others were made...slaves. And that earth that is within this creation made a common storehouse for all, is bought and sold and kept in the hands of a few, whereby the great Creator is mightily dishonoured, as if he were a respecter of persons, delighting in the comfortable livelihood of some and rejoicing in the miserable poverty and straits of others. From the beginning it was not so." </span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">The sources of this are purely biblical--the common origin of all mankind, God's breaking of the bondage of the children of Israel in Egypt, the denunciation of monarchy by the prophet Samuel, the execrations brought down by the later prophets against the oppressors of the poor, Jesus' virtual exclusion of the rich from the Kingdom of Heaven, and the holding of all goods in common by the earliest Christians, as related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. </span><span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">The Protestant freedom to interpret the bible was taking an unexpected turn. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">None of these emerging groups was formally organized. Levelers were those who sought to abolish distinctions in rank and wealth. The Diggers entered unused, "waste" land and began cultivating it, claiming a right based on just use and the alleviation of poverty, not feudal privilege or formal ownership.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">More radically, the Ranters began to question the bible itself, to ask on what basis laws and punishments were imposed. If the bible were truly subject to individual interpretation, what right had anyone to tell me that I could not interpret it as nonsense? The Ranters did indeed have some basis in the tradition for their claims, not only in Luther and Calvin, but going back to Augustine's "Love, and do what you will." The Ranters certainly did what they wanted, and gained a reputation for drinking, swearing and whoring which accounted, perhaps, both for their initial attractiveness and eventual violent suppression. They had no catechism, but if they did, it would surely read something like William </span><span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">Blake's </span><i style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">Marriage of Heaven and Hell. </i><span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">And they are certainly fun to read (e.g. Joseph Salmon's "the Lord grant that we may know the worth of hell, that we may forever scorn heaven," or Thomas Webbe's "there's no heaven but women, nor no hell save marriage").</span><br />
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: times, 'times new roman', serif;">Of all these movements, only the Quakers survive today, at least in name. (I should note that part of my interest in this subject comes from the fact that, in my paternal line, my ancestors who came to this country were Quakers, and remained so until the First World War). Hill is quick to emphasize that in their origin the Quakers were far different from their eventual successors. The commitment to pacifism came much later; many of the original Quakers served in the New Model Army. The standard source for Quaker history is George Fox's <i>Journal</i>, but Hill points out that Fox's later acknowledged leadership of the Quakers was not so apparent in the early days. They were then much closer to Ranters, a sect that refused to remove their hats before their betters, disrupted the worship of other sects, denied original sin, affirmed that a free man could attain perfection wholly apart from compliance with conventional Christian standards, and looked for guidance, not to the bible, but to the "inner light," by which God spoke to every individual. In the Ranters these ideas led to an intolerable libertinism. Fox managed, in contrast, to forge a new people with a new spirituality admired grudgingly even by detractors. But one of the ways he did it was by de-politicizing them. The Quakers were not particularly liked by the establishment under Charles II and James II and William III--but they didn't threaten it, either. And so they survived and later flourished in William Penn's Wood in America.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">A final note: I can understand how those of you reading this </span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">might have been surprised that a post called "The World Turned Upside Down" wasn't related to the current COVID-19 crisis. It's mainly my own slowness. I began this post at a time not so very long ago when Senator Sanders, ahead in the early delegate count, was being widely acclaimed as the all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee for the presidency, accompanied by much hand-wringing about the monstrousness of a major candidate advocating "socialism." This subject, I thought, was somewhat topical for providing some little-known historical context, and reminding ourselves that "socialism" didn't begin or end with Karl Marx. But in a way the two subjects seem to come together this morning when I read, in the <i>Santa Fe New Mexican</i>'s editorial page, a reader commenting that "The unjust criticism that Bernie is a socialist no longer has meaning. For the next few months, the country will be an effectively socialist country, or we will perish." Where we turn in a crisis is always revealing of our deepest values.</span><br />
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-58950094938221156712020-03-11T16:15:00.000-07:002020-03-11T16:16:42.905-07:00Speaking of Being<br />
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In an earlier post on the subject of Karl Rahner I observed that existentialism hasn't kept the edginess it still had in my college days. Its various proponents (express and otherwise) have retained their roles as significant thinkers, but, like the Hegelians before them, their successors and disciples are now less scruffy revolutionaries than safely-tenured seniors.<br />
<br />
So the experience of reading Sarah Bakewell's <i>At the Existentialist Cafe </i>was in some ways a nostalgic return to those dangerous days of the existentialists. The book is a narrative of a twentieth century movement; pre-1900 precursors are duly noted and largely ignored. The genre is collective biography, with a greater cast characters than those featured at the top of the cover above. Yes, we have Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Heidegger, Husserl, Jaspers and Merleau-Ponty. But we also have Arendt, Weil, Levinas, Brentano, Marcel and many lesser known figures. Ms. Bakewell not only takes us chronologically through these tangled lives (and loves) but interweaves the crises they faced with the kernal of their ideas. So it's an intellectual history of existentialism <i>plus </i>celebrity gossip.<br />
<br />
Now Ms. Bakewell is a serious scholar. She teaches at Oxford's Kellogg College and is the author of an award-winng biography of Montaigne. She begins her account with Sartre's decision in 1933 to attend Husserl's lectures on phenomenology in Berlin. In some ways Husserl's phenomenology is the source of the whole movement, the exhortation to go "Zu den Sachen selbst" ("to the things themselves"), to bracket out one's theories and systems and confront the bare phenomena of existence. ( I remember that for decades I owned one of those impossibly thick paperbacks, cover blazened only with the words: HUSSERL PHENOMENOLOGY, and never really cracked it between purchase and eventual re-sale.) <br />
<br />
And from there we're off. But despite the large cast of characters, the focus keeps returning to the two around whom the others, to some extent, revolve: Heidegger in Germany and Sartre in France. Each is a charismatic figure, drawing disciples to the cafes of Saint-Germaine-du-Pres or the rural fastness of the Black Forest. Each exemplifies what might be considered the fundamental ethical scandal of existentialism, that Heidegger was a member of the Nazi party, and that Sartre for too long defended the most violent excesses of Stalinism. They met once: after Sartre had defined existentialism as a "humanism" in which "existence precedes essence," Heidegger disclaimed any intent to respond to such superceded "metaphysical" categories--and denied being an existentialist. When finally brought face to face in 1952, their private meeting was apparently awkward and fruitless for both.<br />
<br />
In a book like this there must obviously be a lot of simplification in summarizing the thought of a dozen or so difficult and nuanced thinkers. I was a little surprised, myself, to realize about halfway through that, though I felt I was familiar with most of these characters and their characteristic assertions, I had really actually read the work of only a few: Heidegger's <i>Being and Time</i> and a couple essays, a pair of novels by Camus and his "Myth of Sysiphus," Sartre's essay on existentialism referenced above, and a book-length essay by Merleau-Ponty on Arthur Koestler's <i>Darkeness at Noon</i> and the Communist problem. It was good to get a broader overview, but at the same time I was more dissatisfied with the summations that covered ideas I thought myself most familiar with. It's not that I imagine that I could do a better job. It's more perhaps that the topic of existentialism well-illustrates the general limitations of reducing complexities to slogans, summaries, abstracts or maxims.<br />
<br />
And that of course leads me to wonder about the value of this very blog, or of any blogs, or of applications like Twitter. When I was growing up, the Reader's Digest company sold these things called "Condensed Books." They took mostly best-selling books, abridged them to about a quarter of their original size, and would publish four or five in a volume, on the assumption that writing required compression if it was to keep relevant to the frantic pace of modern life in the mid-sixties. We had rows and rows of the things, and I even had a twelve-volume set of condensed classics for young people. They were scorned, for good reason, and I rarely find them in used-book stores. But we modern readers are still impelled by that same impulse to epitomize.<br />
<br />
So I can certainly recommend the book as a page-turner, as something even of a pot-boiler, a portrait of an important part of the age, and an introduction to an increasingly remote climate of thought. But as Richard Bentley said of Alexander Pope's<i> Iliad</i>, "It is a very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." And one might, in the same vein, with Husserl insist, regarding the existentialists, that one there also go (however reluctantly and deliberately) "zu den Sachen selbst":<br />
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-8515039192425106082020-03-09T14:52:00.002-07:002020-03-09T14:52:50.248-07:00Max von Sydow, 1929-2020<br />
<img alt="Mr. von Sydow, right, in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” (1957), in which he plays chess against Death (Bengt Ekerot), an unforgettable image in film history." class="css-1m50asq" height="394" itemid="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/04/06/obituaries/06vonsydow5/merlin_146941617_4b4567d9-70d4-4511-9ca4-d411c2477b55-articleLarge.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale" itemprop="url" sizes="((min-width: 600px) and (max-width: 1004px)) 84vw, (min-width: 1005px) 60vw, 100vw" src="https://static01.nyt.com/images/2020/04/06/obituaries/06vonsydow5/merlin_146941617_4b4567d9-70d4-4511-9ca4-d411c2477b55-superJumbo.jpg?quality=90&auto=webp" style="background-color: transparent; border-image: none; border: 0px rgb(51, 51, 51); color: #333333; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; font: 400 16px/16px "times new roman"; letter-spacing: normal; margin: 0px; max-width: 720px; padding: 0px; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; vertical-align: top; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;" width="400" /><b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />
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"Everything begins and ends at exactly the right time and place."<br />
--Mirandarick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-83397855416009744812020-01-04T19:51:00.000-08:002020-01-04T19:51:59.503-08:00Exhausted (but happy) again after Christmas<br />
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Apologies for more silence through a busy fall and early winter.<br />
<br />
Many visitors, some from across the sea. No snow when forecast, snow when not. A round robin of minor winter illnesses. Friends who kindly loaned us the borry of their house. <br />
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Δόξα ἐν ὑψίστοις θεῷ καὶ ἐπὶ γῆς εἰρήνη ἐν ἀνθρώποις εὐδοκία.<br />
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Gloria in altissimis Deo et in terra pax in hominibus bonae voluntatis.<br />
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And may 2020 be the year we see clearly.<br />
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-38806372413006989352019-09-27T21:14:00.001-07:002019-12-03T18:54:30.232-08:00Varieties of tourism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I've recently returned from a brief visit to Paris, occasioned by a personal family matter that happily gave us a reason to go. The first week back, my wife was asked an unusual question, "Why would anyone go to Paris?" It's a question that could come from a variety of assumptions and motives, and one that normally wouldn't occur to most people, given the overwhelming popularity of Paris as a tourist destination. But it's a question worth thinking about.</div>
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One reason we travel is to see spectacular sights. Anyone who's been to the Grande Canyon, or to the mountains, can attest to the unparalleled sense of the sublime occasioned by natural grandeur. Sometimes it's just worth it to <i>see </i>something, and all around the world there are, in addition to natural wonders, human creations that satisfy that longing for the gasp of admiration and awe.</div>
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The Basilica of Sacre Coeur, pictured above, is one of those monuments I'd never visited. It obviously has a religious role, and a place in history related to the crushing of the Commune, and some architectural significance (though controversy still rages as to whether it is a "good" building). But standing on the summit of Montmartre it is, aside from those, a monument that evokes a kind of awe. Up close it is impressive. But its location makes it visible from all sides at fairly great distances, and, from a distance, whether from the escalator at the Centre Pompidou, or from a balcony of the Musee d'Orsay south of the Seine (see the final photo of my post of September 6, 2015), it fairly shimmers and hovers over the city like a fairy palace from the Arabian Nights.</div>
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HIstorical sites are a draw for some of us. Paris is obviously thick with them, from the occasional plaque informing you that Voltaire died in this house to the more spectacular, such as the Luxembourg Palace, built by Marie de Medici, (which I'd never before seen). Notre Dame has obviously seen its share of history, and unhappily made its way into the news this spring with a terrible fire and a brush with collapse.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The flying buttresses buttressed</td></tr>
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Not surprisingly crowds thronged the quais along the river to get a glimpse of the various measures taken to stabilize the wounded cathedral. Scaffolding covers much of the exterior, and some sort of translucent cover seems to be protecting most of the stained glass. When I learned, on the day after the fire, that the roof had been destroyed, I remembered that the great flying buttresses were there to counter the outward thrust of the weight of the roof, and I wondered whether, in the absence of that force, they might dangerously push the walls inward. I don't know if that was the reason, but, as can be seen above, the buttresses are now apparently supported from below by wooden supports, fitting precisely under each buttress, and having a kind of beauty of their own.</div>
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This being France, there is endless discussion of how to restore (or rebuild, or reconstruct, or renew) the cathedral. (The verb matters.) In America there would be no question of government involvement in the restoration of a damaged cathedral. In France, despite its considerably more radical commitment to a secular state, the collective social responsibility to protect the <i>patrimonie </i>is almost universally shared. I picked up, from a stack at the check-out of the bookstore of the Centre Pompidou, a longish essay called <i>Notre-Dame de l'humanite, </i>written by Adrien Goetz, a member of the Academy of Beaux-Arts and a professor of art history at the Sorbonne. It ranges from his personal observations and feelings witnessing the fire, to the present dire state of many prominent monuments, to reflections on the role of medievalism and romanticism, the effect of seeing the cathedral through the eyes of Viollet-le-Duc and Hugo, and the religious, national and artistic sides of a catastrophe that gripped even those with no such connections or commitments.</div>
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Another reason to visit Paris is of course the great art collections, most prominently in the Louvre and the Musee d'Orsay. We didn't go to the Louvre, and we only went to the d'Orsay because of a Berthe Morisot show. The d'Orsay was significantly more crowded than even four years ago, and it took us an hour in line just to get in. I would never say that it wasn't worth it; the collection is unmatched in the world. But as a way of seeing art, the giant museum has its down sides. </div>
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One reason for avoiding the Louvre was that the Mona Lisa has been moved, in anticipation of a Leonardo da Vinci exhibit this fall. A certain Young Friend complained that moving the Mona Lisa made certain other favorite collections practically unreachable, due to the crowds massing around Leonardo's disproportionately iconic painting. </div>
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What we discovered on this trip were a few of the smaller, more overlooked museums. One was the Musee Cognacq-Jay, the former home a nineteenth century couple who collected painting and sculpture from the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The Boucher Room at the Musee Cognacq-Jay</td></tr>
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Another was the Gustav Moreau Museum, the former home and studio of the nineteenth century Symbolist painter, the lower floors his meticulously preserved living quarters, the two upper floors his studio, the walls covered with enormous, often unfinished, and usually rather bizarre paintings. </div>
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A probably better-known smaller museum is the Rodin Museum, well-attended but hardly crowded, with bronze castings of much of Rodin's best-known work in the well-kept gardens of the exterior. The interior contained not only Rodin's own work, but work he collected (from classical antiquities to a Van Gogh) as well as work by his increasingly-appreciated apprentice, Camille Claudel.</div>
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And I shouldn't leave out the easy-to-overlook reconstruction of Brancusi's studio just across from the Centre Pompidou. </div>
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A perhaps less-inviting, but nevertheless worthwhile aspect of Paris is the great University, sprawling across, around, and beyond the left bank Latin Quarter. </div>
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The administrative center of the University can't normally be entered by those who are not students, faculty, or employees (and we were unable to talk our way past the polite but persistent guards). I have an earlier post on the University's origins (April 12, 2019), with a photo at the end of the Sorbonne's inner (and inaccessible to me) courtyard. I understand there are limited tours that we simple gawkers can sign up for, and though I would have liked to see Richelieu's tomb, the public Place de la Sorbonne (the "other side" of the afore-referenced photo) is a pleasant venue for people-watching and grabbing an inexpensive, student-priced lunch: </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The public Place de la Sorbonne</td></tr>
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The life of the scholar is a far cry from the life of the tourist. Per Ernest <span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">Renan, the great nineteenth century philologist and religious historian, "You Englishmen think of Paris as a great fair, a place of frivolity and amusement. I tell you it is nothing of the sort. It is the hardest working place in the world."</span></div>
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The best I could do was this: I had picked up, at the L'ecume des Pages bookstore, on the Boulevard St. Germain, a slim paperback called <i>Dieu, la mort et le temps,</i> a transcription of the last lectures given by Emmanuel Levinas at the University in 1975. Striking a studious pose under one of the trees I was able to at least begin--"Il s'agit ici, avant tout, d'un cours sur le temps--la <i>duree</i> du temps. Le mot <i>duree </i>du temps est choisi pour plusieurs raisons...."--and could imagine my 1975 self (who admittedly knew not a word of French) listening seriously to these novel ideas with excitement and puzzlement.<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; display: inline; float: none; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 16px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;"> </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Window shopping at the Sorbonne</td></tr>
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Speaking of reading, we also spent a day around Saint-Germain-du-Pres, the left bank neighborhood best known for the cafes that served as haunts of writers and intellectuals. Today of course they are more the haunts of us tourists (a natural progression). Below is a shot of Les Deux Magots, reputedly a favorite of Hemingway (though I don't think it's mentioned in <i>A Moveable Feast</i>). Next door is the Cafe de Flore, where Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir held court. </div>
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I am not a great fan of Hemingway. I enjoyed <i>A Moveable Feast</i>, but more for the celebrity gossip. And I re-read <i>The Sun Also Rises </i>this year, for that whole Lost Generation vibe, and enjoyed it and maybe had a little more appreciation for its clipped style (especially when juxtaposed with James' <i>The Ambassadors</i>, another part of the "Paris prep").</div>
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But over and above those, I had a plan with a French language book I had been creeping through for some time. Back in the eighties I had read Balzac's <i>Lost Illusions</i>, and last year I started to read it in French. <i>Illusions Perdues </i>is in three parts. The first part focuses on two friends in Angouleme, one of whom, the ambitious poet Lucien Chardon, attaches himself to the aristocratic Madame de Bargeton, managing, by the end of the first part, to accompany his would-be mistress to Paris. The second part of the novel takes up a common theme, the hapless provincial in Paris, where, after being thrown over, Lucien (never a particularly admirable character) descends into a foreordained sequence of [spoiler alert] poverty, despair, ruin and betrayal.</div>
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I had hoped to coordinate my own arrival in Paris with Lucien's, and came rather close. (Left the book on the plane (!), but easily found another copy). Happily I am even now still in Lucien's "poor-but-honest" phase, and the following, from a letter Lucien writes to his sister, sets out well the dazzling world that the young poet encounters: </div>
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; margin: 0px;">"Ce pays est celui des écrivains, des
penseurs, des poètes. Là seulement se cultive la gloire, et je connais les
belles récoltes qu’elle produit aujourd’hui. Là seulement les écrivains peuvent
trouver, dans les musées et dans les collections, les vivantes œuvres des
génies du temps passé qui réchauffent les imaginations et les stimulent. Là
seulement d’immenses bibliothèques sans cesse ouvertes offrent à l’esprit des
renseignements et une pâture. Enfin, à Paris, il y a dans l’air et dans les
moindres détails un esprit qui se respire et s’empreint dans les créations
littéraires. On apprend plus de choses en conversant au café, au théâtre
pendant une demi-heure qu’en province en dix ans. Ici, vraiment, tout est
spectacle, comparaison et instruction."</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , "serif"; font-size: 12pt; line-height: 115%; margin: 0px;"></span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rodin's Balzac</td></tr>
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So, those are a few of my own reasons that someone might want to visit Paris. I should add that, on this trip, we did a little more aimless wandering than usual. Paris is a walker's town; I actually lost four pounds. The Metro is cheap, clean, quick and reliable (admittedly, being footloose and fancy free, we could avoid rush hours, and it was August, when many true Parisians were elsewhere). But we had time to explore various neighborhoods and districts--Montmartre, the Marais, San Germain de Pres, l'Ile Saint-Louis, and the Bois de Vincennes and its environs.</div>
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France is no utopia, nor is Paris the celestial city. We never saw the Gilets Jaunes, as I think the July heat dimmed some of their enthusiasm. But the country and the city seem to work comparatively well, in contrast to the present discontents of our American Republic. </div>
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It's kind of like that old joke: Nobody goes to that restaurant any more; it's always too crowded. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Le reve et le souvenir</td></tr>
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-70601112951939326452019-08-09T15:34:00.000-07:002019-08-09T15:51:10.654-07:00An obvious lull<br />
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Apologies. Hope to resume in the fall. Just busy, and perhaps no bad thing to withdraw on occasion from the web's cacophony.rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-5830266209774745122019-05-26T20:53:00.001-07:002019-05-26T21:01:57.270-07:00It's not that most of us don't get the concept....<br />
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<br />
It was on the occasion of moving books from the garage back into my office, after a lengthy HVAC project, that I spotted my old Kierkegaard set, mostly picked up in the eighties and nineties when Princeton was first publishing these new translations, and I ruefully noted how few I had finished.<br />
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<i>The Concept of Anxiety </i>has the reputation of being one of Kierkegaard's more difficult works, though it is also mercifully short. But--anxiety. It's something most of us know. "Lives of quiet desperation," as Thoreau memorably put it. But of course for Kierkegaard it has a particularly unique significance for the psychological and dogmatic question of hereditary sin, and this obscure treatise has unexpectedly had a tremendous influence on the way we see human existence.<br />
<br />
"Existence" of course is meant to point to "existentialism," but what I don't want to do with Kierkegaard is to treat him too much as a "precursor," as someone who is important because he led to something that he might have disdained as yet another "system." Yes, of course, Kierkegaard had a great influence on the development of "existentialism," but he was also a seminarian, a Lutheran who never took orders, who in fact died refusing the sacrament, but was passionately, almost pathologically concerned with the question of what it means to be a Christian.<br />
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The difficulty of the book stems, I think, from two things. First, like many of his contemporaries in the mid-nineteenth century, Kierkegaard is writing in the wake of Hegel. The introduction to the book is a long rolling-of-the-eyes about Hegel's <i>Science of Logic</i>, how it doesn't understand the first thing about logic, especially and specifically how it erroneously brings logic to its natural end in <i>actuality.</i> The reader thinks, "Well, this may or may not be so, but how does this introduce me to the subject matter of <i>The Concept of Anxiety</i>?' Kierkegaard does, in fact, eventually come around to this, but it's not express, and it's a long time coming.<br />
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The second difficulty is with Kierkegaard's idiosyncratic categories: the moment, the leap, repetition, presupposition, positing. Perhaps some of these are Hegelian. Some probably are. But they take some getting used to. And even those we think we know can fool us (the phrase best associated with Kierkegaard is the "leap of faith," which I've never yet run across in his books.)<br />
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The starting point for the discussion proper is a subject arcane in Kierkegaard's day, and almost unintelligible in our own: how Adam brought sin into the world from a prior state of innocence. Adam's prior innocence is, to Kierkegaard, too fantastic for comprehension. If Adam was so constituted, he was so far outside of the human race that his actions could hardly have affected his descendants. But, after identifying the individual with the race, Kierkegaard asserts that each human being brings sin into the world, as Adam did, from a prior state of ignorance and innocence. But what conditioned, and conditions, that transition, from innocence to guilt? Anxiety.<br />
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Now I don't know a word of Danish. But I know some German, and Kierkegaard sometimes substitutes the German <i>Angst</i> for whatever the Danish word is. (I miss the older English translation, <i>The Concept of Dread</i>--so much more visceral, but perhaps not quite as accurate). And I wonder if the related Danish word works like the German. In English we say "anxiety about" or "fear of." In German one says "<i>Angst vor," "Angst </i>before." Perhaps in Danish, too. In any case, the anxiety that accompanies one from innocence to guilt is not an anxiety before something, but rather an anxiety before nothing. When in English we say someone is afraid of nothing we mean he is fearless. But for Kierkegaard, it is the <i>nothing </i>which is most terrifying. And here we perhaps see what he was getting at in taking Hegel to task for the exaltation of "actuality." For what makes the human spirit is not actuality, but the nothing, the absence that is <i>possibility.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
OK, a step back. I do think some Hegelian background helps, to the extent I've understood it correctly. To distill it to a sentence, history is the self-realization of Spirit, whose developing essence is freedom. We are all, mostly unwittingly, Hegelians, because we believe that history is progress toward freedom, that the arc of history bends that way, that it makes sense to talk about being on the side of history, that it is the most extreme folly to attempt to "turn back the clock." Freedom is what it's all about, and it's coming.<br />
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And Kierkegaard also values freedom, sees it as central to the human spirit. But freedom always stands in the face of the possible, and the possible includes the unimaginably dreadful. Hence freedom is always accompanied by anxiety, and the greater, the more realized the freedom the greater, the more unbearable the anxiety.<br />
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So in innocent anxiety one freely makes the leap into sin, and sin comes into the world, with Adam, with everyone. This is the secret of hereditary sin as preached by dogmatics, and as demonstrated by psychology. One does not have to sin, but one leaps into it in and through anxiety. We are dazzled by the nothingness that shades possibility.<br />
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So, in a frequently quoted sentences from this book, Kierkegaard observes that "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself." Where Kierkegaard goes from here is admittedly hard to describe, since I'm still far from sure I'm following him. But there seems to be four further possibilities, once we have lost innocence.<br />
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There is, first, the strategy to retreat into "spiritlessness." If to be human is to be a human spirit, and to be a spirit is to be free, and to be free is to be anxious--then perhaps it's not so great a thing to be human. To renounce freedom, to become a thing, this is one way out. And this, I think, is a thread picked up by later secular "existentialists," the notion that rigors of freedom can be too much for the mass of men, who retreat into inauthenticity, into <i>Alltaglichkeit.</i><br />
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But there are also two states--possibly two stages--of the entry into guilt, the first being anxiety before evil. Guilt is indeed engaging in sin in actuality, in having sin enter the world anew, but the creation of this new state does not exclude further possibility, but only orients it to a deepening guilt. But this anxiety before evil, open as it is to a deepening evil, is still redeemable, unlike the next stage, which Kierkegaard calls "the demonic," anxiety before the good. Here the model rests on the encounters of Jesus with possessing devils in the gospels, who fear him, and ask a characteristic question: "What have you to do with me?" It is what Kierkegaard calls an "enclosing reserve," an isolation and succumbing into guilt such that the good is more fearful than the evil, and anxiety acts to reinforce guilt rather than keep one anxious about it, as in the prior stage.<br />
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But did I mention that Kierkegaard is also a Christian? He is a highly unconventional one, professing a highly demanding Christianity, one that is there in such plain sight in the gospels that we work night and day not to look at it. Nevertheless Kierkegaard does not merely leave us with anxiety; he proposes faith as the means by which it saves us.<br />
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"Anxiety is freedom's possibility, but only such anxiety through faith is absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness." Faith teaches that "possibility is the weightiest of all categories." And further: "By faith I understand here what Hegel somewhere in his way correctly calls the inner certainty that anticipates infinity. Whenever the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will discover all the finitudes, but it will idealize them in the form of infinity and in anxiety overwhelm the individual until he again overcomes them in the anticipation of faith."<br />
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Well, here you begin to suspect, rightly, that I quote extensively to hide the fact that I'm at my wit's end to understand exactly what Kierkegaard is getting at in assigning to faith the task of making possibility a teacher, a teacher about finitude and infinity, and somehow thereby freeing us from anxiety's empire. This is a far cry from Luther, of course. But there is a similarity of pattern. We fear. We cry out. And we eventually come to rest in the infinite when the finite isn't sufficient.rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-70577319642918777262019-04-15T11:25:00.000-07:002019-04-15T11:25:28.010-07:00Prayers for Paris, again<br />
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It is, to begin with, a curious title. "An Essay...." Newman had before entitled a book-length treatment of a topic an "an essay" in his<i> Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine.</i> But here the genre seems, in one sense, strikingly inapt, and, in another, spot on.<br />
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Unlike a "monograph," or a "treatise," the word "essay" suggests a particularly personal reflection on a subject, and a perfunctory glance at the table of contents seems to put this work far outside of that category: "Modes of apprehending Propositions;" "Notional and Real Assents contrasted;" "Indefectibility of Certitude." It looks more like a treatise--an extraordinarily dry treatise--on epistemology than an essay.<br />
<br />
But in another sense, what Newman is doing here is precisely what an essayist in the mold of Montaigne is doing. He is taking himself as his subject matter, looking at and describing his own mind, not in the manner of a mystic, but in the ordinary sense of trying to set out exactly what is happening in one's own mind, in one's own consciousness. " <i>Ainsi, Lecteur, je suis moy-meme la matiere de mon livre</i>."<br />
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An essay on what? Assent. Assent to propositions. And let it be said up front, since this is a book by Blessed Cardinal Newman, who, I understand, was approved for canonization just this last February, the first post-seventeenth century Englishman so recognizaed, that, though we are, yes, commencing with all assent in general, Newman is most particularly concerned with <i>religious</i> assent, intent on defending, as the essay proceeds, the justification for religious belief in an increasingly doubting world.<br />
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But what is a "grammar of assent"? He is first talking about a way to talk about assent, trying to define his terms precisely so that he may describe it. That's not exactly "grammar," but there is perhaps an analogy in that we divide grammars into "descritive" and "prescriptive" grammars--how one does use a language versus how one ought to use a language. Newman is very clear that he is on the "descriptive" side, wanting to describe how a mind, his mind, arrives at assent. If he were German he might call it a "phenomenology of assent." But note that his assertion that he is describing the phenomenon of assent will not not keep him from criticising, later, what he understands as Locke's "prescriptive grammar"--i.e., Locke's (and much of the modern world's) strictures on how one should and should not assent.<br />
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And there is also that note of modesty, of tentativeness, perhaps of a hope that his "grammar" will be taken and further developed: "in Aid of." A contemporary writer might title it: "Toward a Grammar of Assent."<br />
<i></i><i></i><br />
So it is a very personal book, his own take based on his own long-pondered and painstakingly-written and re-written thoughts, not primarily a response or entry into a pre-existing controversy. Nevertheless, like the Essay on Development it is a book coming out of his conversion--how does one believe, how does one justify belief, or change of belief? And how can I be certain now of what I profess, when I was equally certain that what I professed before was true?<br />
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The long and the short of it? It's obviously impossible to do justice to the detailed and careful course of Newman's argument. But one of his primary points is that, <i>pace</i> Locke, there are not degrees of assent, and we are not obliged to give a higher degree of assent to those which rest on formal demonstration. To give an example (my own, not one of his), I do not experience a greater degree of assent to the proposition that there is no highest prime number than to the proposition that my children love me. The first can be shown with a brief and beautiful proof. The latter? Well, my reasons tells me that, yes, I could indeed be like King Lear--but in fact I do not doubt, and I am as certain of the second as of the first.<br />
<br />
Newman treatment of "certitude" is one of the more surprising, counter-intuitive parts of his argument. He distinguishes it from infallibility. He cannot deny that we are often mistaken about what we are certain about. But he insists that the human mind is made to rest in certainty, and he further maintains that we are justified, by that psychological fact, in being certain about, in believing, any number of things which cannot be demonstrated logically or scientifically. And we do that through the exercise of what he calls the "illative sense," a comprehensive, largely unconscious synthesis of antecedent judgments.<br />
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This sense operates just as fully in an uneducated laborer as in a trained philosopher. And that has to be so, unless we are to concede that belief in God is deficient in one who can't follow the higher flights of speculative reason in a Spinoza, a Kant, a Rahner or a Newman. Ultimately, to come back to Newman's primarily religious concern, our spiritual beliefs are not philosophical or scientific in nature, and it is our attempt to re-cast them and justify them in those terms which sets up the conventional conflict between religion and reason, a conflict which Newman insists is an illusion.<br />
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And here my own thoughts turn strangely to Newman's contemporary Kierkegaard. In most senses these two men, and their thought, are poles apart. And yet there is an odd convergence in this notion that faith (as Kierkegaard calls it) and belief (as Newman's prefers) do not authentically arise out of logic, demonstration, science, but from untraceable sources that issue in a firm and life-changing conviction. Newman, I imagine, would have drawn back from Kierkegaard's "leap;" Kierkegaard, I imagine, would have been repelled by Newman's almost Olympian ease in Zion. But we can do no more than imagine. There was no engagement.<br />
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The book ends with a lengthy apologia for the Christian faith, very traditional in form, making first a case for natural religion, and then arguing that Christianity is the one true revealed religion that natural religion points to. It does not claim to be a demonstration of the truth of Christianity so much as a roster of antecedent justifications that make embracing it, with certitude, a fully defensible act, under the terms of the preceding pages. In some ways it is reminiscent of Pascal's specific defense of Christianity in the<i> Pensees</i>, a defense less remembered and honored than the harrowing description of the human condition forming its preface. Newman's essay is often treated primarily as an epistemological treatise, but his aim coincides with that of Pascal, to assert that the heart has reasons that the reason cannot understand, and that insight into our own very human constitution will take us to God.rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-71744365464778440252019-04-12T07:23:00.000-07:002019-04-12T07:23:39.863-07:00Scientia donum Dei est, unde vendi non potest.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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For many years I have heard the term "twelfth century renaissance," but have never really understood the rationale for it. More recently, for personal reasons, I've become interested in the origins of the University of Paris, and the connection of the two.<br />
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A "renaissance" is a not just a cultural flourishing, but some kind of re-birth, a recovery of the past, over and above the usual process of re-appropriation and re-consideration that is a normally continuous aspect of cultural life. What sets the twelfth century apart? The events I associate with that century--the foundation and fall of the crusader kingdom of Jerusalem, the careers of Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux, the murder of Becket--are significant, but not outstandingly indicative of any sort of re-birth.<br />
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There was, at this time, a European recovery of Aristotle that had long-range implications for a new conception of science. But I think what was distinctive was not so much the "what" that was brought forward as a new "how" that would institutionalize appropriating the past. In other words, what was developing rapidly was a new approach to education--the University.<br />
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"Universitas" in the middle ages didn't originally carry a strictly educational meaning. It referred to any kind of conglomeration of professions or persons that for whatever reason became recognized as a free-standing institution, like our word, "corporation." Peter Abelard, in the early twelfth century, was a teacher, attracted to a Paris where already one could make a reputation, and a living, among competing masters in a variety of scholastic settings. Within a century there was an established institution, the University of Paris, chartered by a papacy far enough away to give it a significant degree of independence from the crown, and the local bishops, and the monastic establishments that hitherto dominated education.<br />
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The subjects were not new, but their integration into a single institution was. One began with the seven liberal arts: the trivium (grammar, rhetoric and dialectic) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy). These prepared one for entry into one of the three higher faculties: law, medicine or theology. <br />
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The theology faculty of the University of Paris soon became a powerful, if non-magisterial, voice in Christian theology, hosting epochal thinkers like St. Albert the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas in its first century, in the formative years of what came to be called, for obvious reasons, "scholasticism."<br />
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But the "baptism of Aristotle" was not the only landmark "re-birth." Consider this quotation from the great English legal historian William Maitland: "Of all the centuries the twelfth is the most legal. In no other age, since the classical days of Roman law, has so large a part of the sum total of intellectual endeavor been devoted to jurisprudence." The study of the law does not sit comfortably with my ordinary notion of what is fit matter for a "renaissance" (and I remind my readers, I am a lawyer myself). But as the University of Paris was forming, another university, the only university vying with Paris for the honor of "first," Bologna, was attracting legions of students to the lectures of Irnerius on the newly re-discovered Digest of Justinian. And as the "second life of Roman law" formed the foundation for modern Continental Law, the foundation of English common law was being established in England under Henry II, and canon law was taking a systematic form in the Decretum of Gratian--all in the twelfth century.<br />
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But, to return to Paris, Stephen Ferruolo's book, as you might glean from the subtitle, focuses as much on doubts about the New Education as on its development. The monastics saw it as fostering spiritual pride. The humanists took it to task for channelling the best and the brightest into the more lucrative callings, medicine and law. The moralists looked with a jaundiced eye on the natural result of hoards of ungoverned young men exposed, far from home, to the vices of an incipient metropolis<br />
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These are all issues still relevant to contemporary education. But there is another, suggested by the title of this post: <i>Scientia donum Dei est, unde vendi non potest. </i>Knowledge is the gift of God, and therefore cannot be sold. Already in the twelfth century there was unease with the idea of turning the divine gift of knowledge into a marketable commodity. The occasional papal prohibition or royal regulation had little effect, and though the workman is undoubtedly worthy of his hire, our contemporary American problem with education is not so much with its content as its cost. Our educated young people often leave the university saddled with debts that may take half a lifetime to repay, or longer.<br />
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I can't suggest a concrete solution, but I can note that tuition at the University of Paris is still less than four hundred dollars per year. This is, unhappily, about to change for foreign students. Last fall the Prime Minister announced that, for non-EU students not yet enrolled, tuition would increate about fifteen-fold. That's still a bargain, compared to what comparable universities charge in English-speaking countries. But it highlights the challenge of how we collectively value learning, and what other costs we suffer when we fail to educate our people.<br />
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-79107684117733438062019-03-14T16:25:00.000-07:002019-03-14T16:25:09.175-07:00St. John and the Dragon<br />
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On a few previous occasions I've noted surprising juxtapositions of conventionally different worlds. In that vein I've just completed the book pictured above, in which, for two years, high school students in Beijing were introduced to a Western liberal arts curriculum, taught in the manner of the two St. Johns Colleges in the U.S.--reading and discussing the "Great Books" only, without lectures, without textbooks, without testing to winnow out right from wrong answers.<br />
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My interest in the book is personal. Martha is both a friend and a professional colleague. Though both she and her husband Grant are tutors at St. John's College here in Santa Fe, her occasional references in the book to being a lawyer rather underplay her well-known local expertise and experience in water law ( to follow Will Roper, "a study in effect able to occupy the whole life of a man"). Though never a teacher I would hope the contents of the blog suggest a similar love of the humanities, and the particular merit of this volume is its hazarding on introducing a liberal arts curriculum in modern China at a time when, here in the West (certainly not the first time), the relevance, the utility, the worthiness of the old canonical texts are seriously questioned.<br />
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And the cultural clash is three-fold. We have first, most obviously, portions of the Western "canon" being taught in China, with India one of the two great foci of ancient Eastern civilization. But it is also <i>Communist</i> China, an Eastern civilization professing to adhere to a distinctly Western ideology, the nineteenth century German dialectical materialism of Karl Marx, as mediated by Mao, still ubiquitously celebrated as the "Great Helmsman." But, finally, this is decidedly "post-Mao" China, which, if not exactly capitalist, officially celebrates the pursuit of individual wealth and innovation, if still under an authoritarian government and Party.<br />
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So when these high-achieving high-schoolers are asked, "Is Agamemnon a good king?" Or "Is Achilles right to withdraw from the fight after being dishonored?", they are challenged, first, by questions to which they are told have no "right answers"--a disconcerting assertion in a school system ruled to a very high degree by the assumption that successful test-taking is the be-all and end-all of education. (Would that that attitude were not gaining ground here in the West!). But they also bring the assumptions and values of an upbringing informed by traditional Chines values, and Communist values, and the newer and somewhat contradictory values of steel-eyed competition and individual achievement.<br />
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It is in the recorded dialogues with students that the book most shines. Should Agamemnon have sacrificed his daughter for favorable winds? No, that was murder. But, as king, shouldn't he have put the good of his people, his army, over that of his own family? Who determines what is good, the individual or the collective? And how is what is right determined, whoever makes the decision? Agamemnon killed his daughter Iphigenia, his wife Clytemnestra killed him, her son Orestes killed her. Should the avenging wrath of the Furies be restrained? In these and many other questions these students, after being prompted out of their habitual silence, take on each other with argument and counter-argument, appealing sometimes to the conformity encouraged by an authoritarian state, sometimes to a revolutionary fervor which doesn't quite always lie dormant, and sometimes to lingering implicit traces of long-suppressed Confucian ideas of propriety, inquiry and humanity. <br />
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We so take for granted that we can have these kind of discussions that we mostly simply don't have them at all. In China there are strong (if largely unspoken) memories of the Cultural Revolution among the old and an uneasy consciousness of the Tiananmen Square protests among the students. On occasion a group of observers from the Party will stop by and discussion is immediately dampened (Sinister? Yes, but of course the same thing happened when our parents entered the room when we were teenagers.) Discussion of the separation of powers doctrine grounding the U..S. constitution leads unexpectedly to a consensus that that just showed how much more corrupt the West must be than China. And perhaps most surprisingly, when it came time to read the Communist Manifesto, none of these children of the revolution had read it, or could easily grasp what it was all about. When pressed about what they really wanted from life, it was money, fame, maybe being a rock star. So much for communist indoctrination.<br />
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I could go on and on. As at St John's, science is approached, not through textbooks, but through reading Galileo, Newton and Darwin. And science as a practice and a method raises many of the same kind of questions as Greek drama:<br />
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"Do you think that science has made the world better,?" I asked.<br />
"Of course!" said many, pointing to medicine and iPhones.<br />
"No," said others, pointing to weapons and iPhones.<br />
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There are visits to the Great Wall and the Forbidden City and the home of Confucius, academic conferences and brief excursions into the Chinese classics, wonder at the differences and wonder at the similarities--in short, a juxtaposition of many marvelous new ways of seeing East meet West (and the Young meet the Old).<br />
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I do recommend my friend's surprising and enjoyable book. It's locally published, so not available from vendors such as Amazon, It can, however, be found at www.respondeobooks.com, under "New Products," for anyone interested.<br />
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-80135741702748620222019-02-02T20:57:00.002-08:002019-03-07T11:08:53.610-08:00A postscript on Newman<br />
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Two posts back I had mentioned my failure thus far to make any headway with the <i>Grammar of Assent</i>. Having so confessed in public made me think I ought to give the thing one more serious try, and to encourage that resolve I did a few web searches looking for contemporary discussions of it<i>.</i><br />
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I didn't find that many, but I did run across the selection below, part of a 1990 talk by then-Cardinal Ratzinger.<br />
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Now I am always reluctant to just post other people's work here. For whatever reasons of vanity or self-importance I like to make this a place for my own observations and associations. But the selection below seemed such an apt expansion, an enlargement of that whole idea of change and development, reflecting not only what I have experienced in myself, but what I believe I have seen in others, as the ideas and convictions of a lifetime are long pondered, and then have their effect. <br />
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So:<br />
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"It is known how Newman's insight into the ideas of development influenced his way to Catholicism. But it is not just a matter of an unfolding of ideas. In the concept of development, Newman's own life plays a role. That seems to become visible to me in his well-known words: "...to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often".<br />
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"Throughout his entire life, Newman was a person converting, a person being transformed, and thus he always remained and became ever more himself.<br />
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"Here the figure of St Augustine comes to my mind, with whom Newman was so associated. When Augustine was converted in the garden at Cassiciacum he understood conversion according to the system of the revered master Plotin and the Neo-Platonic philosophers. He thought that his past sinful life would now be definitively cast off; from now on the convert would be someone wholly new and different, and his further journey would be a steady climb to the ever purer heights of closeness to God.<br />
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"It was something like that which Gregory of Nyssa described in his <i>Ascent of Moses</i>: "Just as bodies, after having received the first push downwards, fall effortlessly into the depths with ever greater speed, so, on the contrary, the soul which has loosed itself from earthly passion rises up in a rapid upward movement... constantly overcoming itself in a steady upward flight".</div>
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"Augustine's actual experience was a different one. He had to learn that being a Christian is always a difficult journey with all its heights and depths.<br />
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"The image of <i>ascensus</i> is exchanged for that of <i>iter</i>, whose tiring weight is lightened and borne up by moments of light which we may receive now and then. Conversion is the <i>iter</i> - the roadway of a whole lifetime. And faith is always "development", and precisely in this manner it is the maturation of the soul to truth, to God, who is more intimate to us than we are to ourselves.<br />
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"In the idea of "development" Newman had written his own experience of a never finished conversion and interpreted for us, not only the way of Christian doctrine, but that of the Christian life.</div>
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"The characteristic of the great Doctor of the Church, it seems to me, is that he teaches not only through his thought and speech but also by his life, because within him, thought and life are interpenetrated and defined. If this is so, then Newman belongs to the great teachers of the Church, because he both touches our hearts and enlightens our thinking."</div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"></span><a href="http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_19900428_ratzinger-newman_en.html#top"><img alt="top" border="0" height="28" src="https://www.vatican.va/img/top.jpg" width="49" /></a>rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-10572328903773537912019-01-12T15:21:00.000-08:002019-01-12T15:21:10.296-08:00And now, a giddy romp through the funny papers of an allegedly more innocent time....<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">From Walt Kelly's Pogo, June 8, 1953, featuring a certain "Simple J. Malarky," reprinted in The Complete Syndicated Comics, Vol. 3, Fantagraphics Books</td></tr>
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-25610306775291749472019-01-05T18:34:00.000-08:002019-01-05T18:34:39.559-08:00The continuing relevance of Dr. Newman<br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Kingsley addressed him principally as "Dr. Newman" in the attacks that led to the <i>Apologia</i>. Since his death he has more customarily been called "Cardinal Newman," raised to the Sacred College in his eighties by Leo XIII. During the pontificate of Benedict XVI he was recognized as "Blessed John Henry Newman." Many hope to see him canonized, and even named a Doctor of the Church--which would bring us back around, I suppose, to "Dr. Newman."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">I recently came across and purchased a used copy of the <i>University Sermons,</i> in part because these various homilies on faith and reason, theology and science, conclude with an address entitled "The Theory of Developments in Religious Doctrine."</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The achievements of Newman are many and varied. He was a leader in the Oxford Movement, the effort to return the Church of England to a more Catholic sense of order and doctrine, ending, notoriously, in his conversion to the Church of Rome. His English is remarkably beautiful, best known through the autobiographical history of his religious opinions, <i>Apologia pro Vita Sua, </i>and his hymn, "Lead, Kindly Light<i>." </i> <i>The Idea of a University </i>is a significant contribution to the literature of Christian humanism and a classic defense of the inherent value of liberal knowledge. And many consider his <i>Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent</i> an important analysis of the psychology of and justification for belief (though I have to confess I've never gotten much further than the first few pages).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">But, in my view, Newman's greatest significance lies in the theory intimated in that last University Sermon, and set out most fully in his <i>Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Now this sense of significance happens to turn on some personal circumstances. The development of doctrine was at the center of Newman's concerns at the very moment of his conversion. And as a convert myself from Protestantism I was, very conventionally, asking many of the same questions and turning over many of the same concerns addressed by the <i>Development of Christian Doctrine.</i> Given a life-long Protestant distrust of Catholic innovations, and to the undoubted Catholic additions to the Christian creed, how could those additions, always termed by Protestants "corruptions" or "traditions of men," be justified?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">Newman begins with a forthright turning of the tables: "[W]hatever history teaches, whatever it omits, whatever it exaggerates or extenuates, whatever it says and unsays, at least the Christianity of history is not Protestantism. If ever there were a safe truth, it is this." Change happens, and always happens. Human beings can't help but think about their religion, and raise new questions, which leads to theology, which leads to disputes, and which therefore require a resolution (or a schism).</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">So the question is not change or no change. The question is appropriate change, what Newman calls a "development," as opposed to a "corruption." And this puts Newman in a peculiar place in regard to current Catholic wars between "traditionalists" and "progressives."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">On the one hand Newman was always adamant that the touchstone of his life's work was opposition to theological "liberalism." As stated in the first appendix to the <i>Apologia</i>:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: #fff2cc;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">"Whenever men are able to act at all, there is the chance of extreme and intemperate action; and therefore, when there is exercise of mind, there is the chance of wayward or mistaken exercise. Liberty of thought is in itself a good; but it gives an opening to false liberty. Now by Liberalism I mean false liberty of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters, in which, from the constitution of the human mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place. Among such matters are first principles of whatever kind; and of these the most sacred and momentous are especially to be reckoned the truths of Revelation. Liberalism then is the mistake of subjecting to human judgment those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it, and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">But if reason, criticism, judgment, cannot touch these first principles, the truths of revelation, they necessarily take them up and work with them. In his final University Sermon Newman takes his text from Luke's nativity account: Mary pondered all these things in her heart. Mary thereby becomes, not only a pattern of faith in her "Fiat," but a pattern of theology in her reflection.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In fact many traditionalist Catholics deeply distrust Newman, and see his theory of development as providing a back door for the entry of an earlier-disavowed theological liberalism. If the result of a development is a hitherto unarticulated <i>doctrine</i>, how is that any different from a direct critique of revelation using unaided human reason?</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">It is not an unreasonable question, but surely history and experience have shown that there is no workable point at which Christian doctrine can say, "Thus far and no farther." However much some have asserted that the closing of the canon, or the completion of the four common councils, or the seven common councils, have answered all questions, our experience is that there can be no ending of moral or theological or liturgical or ecclesiastical questions. That continuous ferment does not mean that all these remain permanently "up for grabs." But it does imply that these expressions will remain permanently subject to controversy, even with a commitment to the idea that the foundational revelation remains unchanged. How, then, is one to steer between the unrootedness of simple theological liberalism and the impossibility of honestly maintaining the existence, since the first century, of a static and unchanged dogmatic? </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">In his University Sermon Newman does little more than assert and defend the idea of development. In his later book-length <i>Essay</i> he goes further and tries to set out criteria (or "notes") for differentiating unjustified changes ("corruptions") from legitimate ones ("developments"). These are (1) preservation of its type, (2) continuity of its principles, (3) assimilative power, (4) logical sequence, (5) anticipation of its future, (6) conservative action on its past, and (7) chronic vigor.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">The exposition of these notes provides an instructive and readable overview of and justification for the emergence of a variety of doctrines, some distinctly Catholic, others more broadly held across the professing Christian world. But, in my view, they provide little actual guidance for determining, today, whether a proposed addition is justified or unjustified, other than providing a vocabulary for controversy.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">For example, in his exposition of the first note, Preservation of its type, Newman sets out three chapters reviewing Church history: the early ages, the fourth century, and the fifth and sixth centuries, ending each chapter with a series of characteristics plainly pointing to characteristics of the contemporary Catholic Church. Here is his conclusion to the third one:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="background-color: #fff2cc;">"If then there is now a form of Christianity such, that it extends throughout the world, though with varying measures of prominence or prosperity in separate places;—that it lies under the power of sovereigns and magistrates, in various ways alien to its faith;—that flourishing nations and great empires, professing or tolerating the Christian name, lie over against it as antagonists;—that schools of philosophy and learning are supporting theories, and following out conclusions, hostile to it, and establishing an exegetical system subversive of its Scriptures;—that it has lost whole Churches by schism, and is now opposed by powerful communions once part of itself;—that it has been altogether or almost driven from some countries;—that in others its line of teachers is overlaid, its flocks oppressed, its Churches occupied, its property held by what may be called a duplicate succession;—that in others its members are degenerate and corrupt, and are surpassed in conscientiousness and in virtue, as in gifts of intellect, by the very heretics whom it condemns;—that heresies are rife and bishops negligent within its own pale;—and that amid its disorders and its fears there is but one Voice for whose decisions the peoples wait with trust, one Name and one See to which they look with hope, and that name Peter, and that see Rome;—such a religion is not unlike the Christianity of the fifth and sixth Centuries."</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">This is a marvelous example of Newman's rhetoric, as well as a very specific set of defenses against various contemporary attacks on Catholic claims in Newman's day. But a defense of specific positions, practices and shortcomings is not quite the same as a criterion for present controversies. Reading this passage, one can see how a similar conclusion, with different antecedents, could be made for the Orthodox Church, or various Protestant Churches. History consists of real and objective (if not always entirely ascertainable) events, but its enormity makes it a convenient source of justification for a wide variety of present courses. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">That said, Newman remains an important theologian for tackling, head-on, the issue of change and continuity in theology. (The Reader is referred to an earlier post, dated August 17, 2012, "The More Things Change," in which I tried to summarize and contrast three nineteenth century models of historical change, Hegel's dialectic, Darwin's evolution, and Newman's idea of development.) The contemporary Church is, as usual, divided and in an uproar about various doctrines and practices which some seek to modify, some to change, and some to defend--all with the conviction that the fate of the Faith lies with the correct resolution. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">From the evidence of the internet it is a source of anxiety for many--an unfortunate result, because such perennial controversies rarely touch the heart of the faith, and can provide a convenient rationale for our failing to do what, in fact, we know we ought to do (do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God). Newman's "notes" are, I have suggested above, very little help in resolving these controversies. But Newman's work helps establish how the cycle of controversy is indeed ubiquitous, and he suggests that, even if one one plunges into it, all will nevertheless be well, and that, even if nothing is finally settled, beyond any further possibility of development, we need not be unsettled ourselves about that.</span></span>rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-91479289486948135552018-12-20T10:16:00.001-08:002018-12-20T10:16:35.122-08:00Moriae Encomium; or, Laus Stultitiae; or The Praise of Folly; or, Stupid talks up Stupid<br />
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You may have guessed from the title of this blog that I am a longtime fan of Erasmus' famous declamation.<br />
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Why? I think it captures and expresses a number of important truths, put in the guise of a lengthy jest, under multiple layers of irony, in a form common enough in its day, but rarely used in our own.<br />
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The title alone gets us started. "Moriae" is Greek, "Stultitiae" Latin, typically translated into English as "folly," "foolishness," "stupidity." The term "folly," perhaps party due to standard translations of Erasmus, has acquired a kind of polish; "foolishness" and "stupidity" less so. But however turned into English, moria is not normally praiseworthy.<br />
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And then there is that "ambiguous genitive." The title suggests that someone is praising folly. But, read another way, some encomium, some laudatory oration, is being made <i>by </i>folly, folly as the subject praising. In contemporary English we do not typically personify abstract moral and intellectual qualities--but not so among Renaissance humanists, who breathed the atmosphere of a revived paganism, and whose mental universe was full of gods and goddesses embodying abstract ideas, and for whom Folly was (or could be) a goddess.<br />
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(And Folly is a goddess rather than a god because "moria" in Greek and "stultitia" in Latin are both feminine nouns. Does this make Erasmus a misogynist, as some have asserted? Not necessarily, since Sophia--Wisdom--is also feminine, and hence also a goddess.)<br />
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So we either have <i>someone</i> praising the unpraiseworthy vice of folly, or perhaps the goddess Folly praising <i>something. </i>Or, in fact, we have both genitives working--the goddess Folly praising folly, making a speech praising...herself.<i> </i>This is in fact the situation, made plain in the very first lines.<br />
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So, how do we take it when Stupid praises Stupid? With an enormous grain of salt.<br />
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This set-up, it must be said, is first of all a protective device. Princes and prelates had various means at their disposal to punish those who wrote against them. Putting the whole declamation into the mouth of Folly gave Erasmus a little deniability. "Did I offend? Look at who's speaking!" As Erasmus writes in his dedication to More, "pulchrum esse a Stultitia vituperari." To be called a fool by Folly is surely great praise, yes?<br />
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And yet Erasmus is doing more than protecting himself. He is going to play with the various meanings and connotations of foolishness that may indeed be praiseworthy, but may be beneath the notice of the wise<br />
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So first he delves into the folly of love--erotic love, romantic love, the love of children. What is Erasmus' sternly dignified Stoic to do when he falls in love, when he wants children? It's not that mighty brain, Folly notes, with which one procreates children. What foolishness love is--but how worthless human life is without it.<br />
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Plato called love a divine madness, so Erasmus veers into the subject of whether the mad and the stupid are happier than the sane and the learned, and this gives Erasmus, the life-long student, who never in his whole life had a secure position, scope to expound on the miseries of the poor, neglected scholar.<br />
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There is then a long excursion into the various professions, the warriors, the lawyers, the philosophers, the theologians, the princes, the prelates. All are held up to merciless ridicule, again and again because their logic, their quibbling, their learned distinctions--in short, the various conventional demonstrations of their superior wisdom, show them in fact to be fools. What have a lawyer's subtile distinctions to do with justice? Or the unfathomable arguments of the theologians with faith, hope and love? Or the pride, display, and arrogance of bishops and cardinals with the humility and self-giving commanded by Jesus?<br />
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But as Erasmus approaches the end, he turns to an encomium on the foolishness of faith and devotion. Ranging through the scriptures, he repeats St. Paul's rhetoric about the foolishness of God, and the folly of the cross. He notes the praise of the child-like and the seemingly absurd condemnation of seeking after the world's rewards.<br />
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At this point, of course, things come quickly to an end--before the declamation becomes a sermon. We can't be too surprised. Erasmus is, after all, a cleric himself, and a professed religious (though a runaway who hated the cloister). He may have been the greatest scholar of his age, editing the ancient Latin classics, producing the first accessible printed Greek text of the New Testament in the Latin West, publishing guidebooks for improving one's style. And he was a theologian--just not a scholastic one. His <i>Handbook for the Christian Soldier</i> promoted a Christian philosophy for the devout laity, emphasizing the simplicity of the written gospels over the ceremonial devotion so characteristic of the later Middle Ages.<br />
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But then along came Luther. The <i>Moriae Encomium</i> was published in 1509. In 1520, Luther publishes his <i>Freedom of a Christian</i>, <i>Address to the German Nobility,</i> and <i>Babylonian Captivity of the Church</i>. The gauntlet has been thrown down--a gauntlet Erasmus never had any intention of throwing. His refusal to cast his lot with Luther was puzzling. Had they not said the same thing about the fat prelates, the corrupt abbots, the hypocrites, the time-servers and the wolves in sheeps' clothing? Yes, indeed. But it is part of Erasmus' foolishness to see that such folly is not going to end when new prelates are installed. "I have never entered their churches, but I have seen them return from hearing the sermon, as if inspired by an evil spirit, the faces of all showing a curious wrath and ferocity."<br />
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So the time of jesting came to an end. Erasmus was held in such esteem during his lifetime he was offered a cardinal's hat (he turned it down). Shortly after his death his <i>Moriae Encomium</i> was put on the newly-created Index of Forbidden Books. Europe was moving into a century of religious war.<br />
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It is ironic, perhaps, that the doctrine of original sin, so emphatic in Protestant theology in Luther's <i>Bondage of the Will</i> and Calvin's notion of total depravity, also grounds Erasmus' broad tolerance of human folly. Individuals can improve, but foolishness is part of the human condition, and attempts to wrench it out or tamp it down are doomed to failure. We can't eradicate stupidity, but we can laugh at it. That may be the best we can do.<br />
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It some ways Erasmus' exultation of folly mirrors the nineteenth century's Romantic Rebellion against the the eighteenth century's Age of Reason and Scientific Revolution. Reason and science are tremendous, but they cannot be the whole of human life. Neither, of course, can folly, even in its more benign forms. God knows we live in a time when ignorance is flaunted, science derided, and the great freedoms won in the Age of Reason under siege. Stupidity simple and unadulterated produces hatred as well as love, tears as well as laughter.<br />
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But, ultimately, the folly that Erasmus truly praises is like the wisdom of Socrates. The Delphic oracle proclaimed Socrates the wisest of all men. Unconvinced, Socrates spent the rest of his life seeking out those thought wise, and questioning them, and finding their reputations overblown (and making quite a few powerful enemies in the process). He concluded that he <i>was</i> the wisest man because he knew nothing, and knew he knew nothing, whereas those reputedly wise also knew nothing, but did not know they knew nothing. It was an ignorance won after study and reflection.<br />
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At the risk of multiplying examples, consider Newton, one of the few incomparable geniuses of human history, comparing himself to a child picking up seashells on the beach, with the great undiscovered ocean of truth before him. The more we know, the more we know that we don't know.<br />
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So the irony of Erasmus is never cynicism, or despair. There is a claimed worldly wisdom in becoming corrupt to fit into a corrupt world, a corrupt church. Erasmus suggests that the better way is the foolishness of love, friendship, faith, devotion and the pursuit of truth. The world is what it is, but we ourselves remain free to choose the good, the true and the beautiful, with God's help. It is for this vision of Christian humanism that I hold in such esteem the runaway monk of Rotterdam.<br />
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-23917983596263330602018-11-02T16:02:00.002-07:002018-11-02T16:02:56.177-07:00A pretty good definition<br />
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"Fascism might be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence, and without ethical or legal restraints, goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."<br />
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--Robert Paxton, 2009rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5035567577834111291.post-39337507054649912402018-08-04T20:51:00.000-07:002018-08-04T20:51:03.233-07:00The War between Men and Women<br />
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The battle of the sexes has gained an unprecedented prominence in our political and social life. According to convention we had a sexual revolution a few decades back, and in some respects this last election sealed the revolution's victory, with one candidate representing the Betty Friedan wing, the other the Hugh Heffner wing.<br />
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Be that as it may, the sometimes tumultuous relationship between men and women is one which our literature has long noted, and which has become, in the last century, a central concern of our politics. But I think it not inappropriate to observe initially that the relationship between the sexes, and the attempt to address some of the historic injustices it has entailed, stands in a category of its own. That's the point that Chesterton makes here, in his inimitable fashion:<br />
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<em>Alone among all such institutions [the family]begins with a
spontaneous attraction; and may be said strictly and not sentimentally to be
founded on love instead of fear. </em><i><em>The attempt to compare it with coercive institutions complicating later
history has led to infinite illogicality in later times. It is as unique as it is universal.
There is nothing in any other social relations in any way parallel to the
mutual attraction of the sexes. </em></i><i><em>By missing this simple point, the modern world has fallen into a hundred
follies....A Prussian does not feel from the first that
he can only be happy if he spends his days and nights with a Pole. An Englishman does not think his house empty
and cheerless unless it happens to contain an Irishman....</em></i><i><em>All the other revolts
against all the other relations are reasonable and even inevitable, because
those relations are originally only founded upon force or self interest. Force can abolish what force can establish;
self-interest can terminate a contract when self-interest has dictated the
contract. But the love of man and woman is
not an institution that can be abolished, or a contract that can be terminated.
It is something older than all institutions or contracts, and something that is
certain to outlast them all. </em></i><br />
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This kind of observation has not gone unchallenged. In fact, the whole notion of marital love seems sometimes up for grabs. It is a commonplace, almost a contemporary dogma, that "marriage for love" is a new phenomenon. It's a point too broad for arguing here. At best I can point to what seem to be significant counter-examples. Shakespeare's comedies. Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Giovanni Pontano's Renaissance cycle on married love. And, quite apart from literary examples, the nagging feeling that surely human nature doesn't so radically change so quickly. Marital love is a complex emotion, compounded of sexual attraction, affection, friendship, and faithfulness, raised to a higher key (but also attended with new difficulties) by its ordinary consequence, the arrival of children. <br />
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The oft-repeated claim that our ancestors married for "dynastic" reasons, or for economic advantage, isn't so much false as incomplete. Of course material considerations entered into when and to whom people married. It often did in the past, and it often does now. Not everyone married for love then, nor does everyone now. And of course, ultimately, I don't know if it's possible to say why <i>anyone </i>marries, what motivations predominate, what interests and desires and expectations may be primary, whether in ancient China, or medieval Provence, or contemporary America. But the witness of literature--even if one can't parse out what factors may have, on average, moved our ancestors--does certainly testify to the reality and strength (if not necessarily to the ubiquity) of marital love. <br />
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Not that it's always easy. The Navajos have a legend that, long ago (I think in a prior world), men and women quarreled so badly that they separated, and lived entirely apart from one another. The results were not pretty, and one result was the birth of the monsters. The slaying of those monsters--after the men and women made up--forms, if I recall correctly, the next round of stories, and the plain implication was that, however difficult men and women find life together, that is immeasurably better than life apart.<br />
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<br />rick allenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07612435616018593956noreply@blogger.com0