Bauerschmidt notes that Aquinas frequently argues, especially when speaking of the incarnation, not for “proof” of doctrine but for its “fittingness.” Reason has the role of “manifesting how [the incarnation] fits together (convenire means literally ‘to come together’) with other things that Christians hold true about God.” Perhaps this can be seen as an aesthetic criterion: Theological arguments are not deductive proofs, but efforts to display the harmony of sacred teaching. Read more
In Epistle 137, Augustine writes: “The Christian teaching nowhere holds that God was so poured into human flesh as either to desert or lose – or to transfer and, as it were, compress within this frail body – the care of governing the universe. This is the thought of people unable to conceive of anything but bodily things . . . God is not great in bulk, but in might. Therefore the greatness of his might feels no confinement in... Read more
Commenting on ST I-II, q. 109, Frederick Bauerschmidt says that Thomas uses the word “merit” analogically when we speak of God rewarding human action “since we can act in the first place only because God has given us the capacity to act.” This applies even to Jesus: “even when Thomas speaks of Christ as a human being meriting on our behalf, it is in the context of speaking of the grace that was bestowed upon Christ as the head of... Read more
Seneca suggests that ingratitude is the worst of vices, and nothing is more “harmful to society” than ingratitude (I.1). Later in Book I, he lists a series of moral ills that plague society – “homicides, tyrants, thieves, adulterers, ravishers, sacrilegious, traitors” – but concludes that “worse than all these is the ungrateful man” (I.10). The only things that might be worse are the crimes that flow from ingratitude, “without which hardly any great wickedness has ever grown to full stature”... Read more
I am grateful to Ralph Smith for references to Frances Yates’ work on Shakespeare’s plays. In an analysis of The Tempest, Frances Yates writes: “It is inevitable and unavoidable in thinking of Prospero to bring in the name of John Dee, the great mathematical magus of whom Shakespeare must have known, the teacher of Philip Sidney, and deeply in the confidence of Queen Elizabeth I. In his famous preface to Euclid of 1570, which became the Bible of the rising... Read more
Educated Elizabethans lived in a world of similitudes. As EMW Tillyard argued, the Elizabethan world picture was constituted by a series of analogous chains of being. The social world manifested and was manifested by the natural world; the universe as a whole resembled human beings; there was a hierarchy among plants and rocks and animals that mirrored the hierarchy of planets and the hierarchy of political order. (more…) Read more
U Aldrovandi organized his treatise on serpents and dragons (mid-1600s) as follows (Foucault’s summary again): “equivocation (which means the various meanings of the word serpent), synonyms and etymologies, differences, form and description, anatomy, nature and habits, temperament, coitus and generation, voice, movements, places, diet, physiognomy, antipathy, sympathy, modes of capture, death and wounds caused by the serpent, modes and signs of poisoning, remedies, ephithets, denominations, prodigies and presages, monsters, mythology, gods to which it is dedicated, fables, allegories and mysteries,... Read more
According to Claude Duret (writing in 1613), Hebrew alone among the languages preserves the original meanings of language, naming the proper essence of things: “Thus the stork, so greatly lauded for it charity towards it father and its mother, is called in Hebrew Chasida, which is to say, meek, charitable, endowed with pity . . . The horse is named Sus, thought to be from the verb Hasas, unless that verb is rather derived from the noun, and it signifies... Read more
O Crollius in his 1624 treatise on “signatures” compared stars and plants: “The stars are the matrix of all the plants and every star in the sky is only the spiritual prefiguration of a plant, such that it represents that plant, and just as each herb or plant is a terrestrial star looking up at the sky, so also each star is a celestial plant in spiritual form, which differs from the terrestrial plants in matter alone . . .... Read more
Japan beats Cuba in the world baseball competition. According to the NPR report, during the final game, everyone in the stands – Japanese, Cubans, American spectators – does the wave and dances to YMCA by the Village People. After Japan wins, you can hear “We Are the Champions” in the background. The world comes together to play an American sport, and everyone is unified by American pop culture. Welcome to postmodernism. Read more
Leithart
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