Victor Zuckerkandl points out that Western music since the 17th century has been measured music, that is, music in which beats are organized into groups, into measures. This innovation in musical organization creates a complex rhythmic situation. At one level, there is a recognizable beat running through a piece of music, and this beat is organized into regular clusters of beats. Yet, the tones that make up the melody of the piece do not match the beats in a one-for-one... Read more
Some quite random highlights from Milbank’s very rich essay review of Rowan Williams’s Art and Necessity , published in Modern Theology . 1) Milbank makes a numerb of illuminating points about Aquinas’s theory of knowledge, supporting some aspects of Maritain’s Thomism. Instead of addressing the strictly “epistemological” question of how we know, Maritain asks “What is knowledge?” Milbank explains Maritain’s answer as follows: “And his answer here, after Aquinas, is that knowledge pertains not to information, nor to representation, but... Read more
This overlaps considerably with previous posts. INTRODUCTION According to John’s description, the world is formed by various “lusts” or desires, and by “pride” and “boasting.” We can respond faithfully to the world only when we discern the desires that shape the world and the desires and boasting provoked by the world. THE TEXT “Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all... Read more
Augustine describes “pride of life” in part as follows: “The temptation is to wish to be feared or loved by people for no reason other than the joy derived from such power, which is no joy at all. It is a wretched life, and vanity is repulsive . . . . When we try to amass such approval [from men], we are caught off our guard. We cease to find our joy in your truth and place it in the... Read more
1 John 2:15: If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. As we’ve seen this morning, John poses a stark either/or choice. Our lives are directed by our loves; what we love determines what path we take in life. Ultimately, there are only two choices: We either love the Father and walk in the light and life that He offers, or we love the world, and stumble through life in deep darkness. That’s the... Read more
John says, “Do not love the world or the things in the world,” and we immediately scurry around to find rationalizations and escape routes. Is John saying that cigarettes and beer and symphony orchestras and dancing and watching movies and art museums and playing video games are inherently sinful? Didn’t God Himself love the world enough to send His own Son to die for it? We don’t want to retreat from engagement with the culture and political life around us.... Read more
Stallybrass and White again: “increasingly from the sixteenth century pigs were present and high visible in the city . They wandered through the streets, sometimes biting and even killing small children: in 1608 the young Sir Hugh Cholmley was attacked by a sow. A Jacobean starchmaker kept 200 pigs in his London backyard, and as late as 1851 there were three pigs to every one person in the slums of North Kensington.” Read more
After a survey of the exotica on display in fairs in the 18th-19th centuries, Stallybrass and White conclude that the fairs do not, as Bakhtin argued, enact a grotesque inversion of civilized hierarchies, but instead reinforce those very hierarchies. Two passages are particularly important: “One could even mount the precise contrary argument to Bakhtin: that the fair, far from being the privileged site of popular symbolic opposition to hierarchies, was in fact a kind of educative spectacle, a relay for... Read more
English fairs in earlier centuries displayed wares and displays from all over the world. At one there was an animal described as “a noble creature, which much resembled a Wild Hairy man” whose main skill was to doff his hat and show “his respects to the Company, and smoaks a Pipe of Tobacco as well as any Christian.” Read more
English fairs in earlier centuries displayed wares and displays from all over the world. At one there was an animal described as “a noble creature, which much resembled a Wild Hairy man” whose main skill was to doff his hat and show “his respects to the Company, and smoaks a Pipe of Tobacco as well as any Christian.” Read more
Leithart
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