Simone Weil offered one of the most thorough-going Christian defenses of tragedy, though that defense comes at considerable cost to her orthodoxy. As Katherine Brueck points out in her study of Weil’s theory ( The Redemption of Tragedy ), Weil recognized that what was at stake in a discussion of tragedy was not simply the question of God’s justice but the doctrine of creation. The issue was how to reconcile a world that is manifestly unjust in its distribution of... Read more
Some more thoughts from Segal’s book: 1) He points out the optimism that gripped Athens in the Periclean period, an optimism about the ability of human LOGOS and NOMOS to stave off the savage potential of man’s PHUSIS. But that was short-lived: The Peloponnesian wars broke out, marked by several horrific acts of savagery (detailed by Thucydides), which had an affect on Athenian consciousness not unlike the effect of WW1 on the confidence of European civilization. Intriguingly, Segal points to... Read more
In his study of Sophocles, Tragedy and Civilization , Charles Segal points to several Greek terms that might be translated as “civilization” and that capture various aspects of civilized life: NOMOS = the established institutions, customs, and norms of a people POLITEIA = the form of government, especially the constitutional forms PAIDEIA = culture as manifested and transmitted in poetry and art All of these, he suggests, are to be contrasted with PHUSIS, nature, which when applied to mankind describes... Read more
More evidence of “poesis” in Renaissance notions of human nature and “self-fashioning.” The first quotation is from Pico, and is drawn from Lewis’s English Literature in the Sixteenth Century : God’s words to Adam at creation were: “To thee, O Adam, we have given no certain habitation nor countenance of thine owne neither anie peculiar office, so that what habitation and countenance or office soever thou dost chooses for thyself, the same thou shalt enjoy and posses at thine own... Read more
A couple of quotations from Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning , with a comment appended. He is talking about the changing meanings of “fashion” in the English Renaissance: “In the sixteenth century there appears to be an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of a human identity as a manipulable, artful process. Such self-consciousness had been widespread among the elite in the classical world, but Christianity brought a growing suspicion of man’s power to shape identity. As a term for the action... Read more
Some fun quotations from Michel de Montaigne, taken from Stephen Toulmin’s excellent Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity : “He who wants to detach his soul, let him do it. When his body is ill, to free it from the contagion; at other times, on the contrary, let the soul assist and favor the body and not refuse to take part in its natural pleasures.” “Since it is the privilege of the mind to rescue itself from old age, I... Read more
Slavoj Zizek has this to say at the beginning of his The Puppet and the Dwarf : “One possible definition of modernity is: the social order in which religion is no longer fully integrated into and identified with a particular cultural life-form, but acquires autonomy, so that it can survive as the same religion in different cultures. This extraction enables religion to globalize itself . . . .on the other hand, the price to be paid is that religion is... Read more
Joel Garver helpfully explains Derrida’s deconstruction of “presence/absence” by suggesting that Derrida is attacking a particular view that assumes absolute presence and absolute absence. Either a thing is here or it is not, we instinctively thing, but in fact in all kinds of ways absent things leave “traces” of their presence, and a thing can be present while being partially absent. In personal relations, past events are not “present” either temporally or spatially, but the past history of the relation... Read more
Barth has a wonderful discussion of the omnipotence of God in Dogmatics in Outline (pp 48-49). He disputes the notion of absolute power, power in itself, as a description of God’s almightiness, and concludes (in line with the tradition of God’s simplicity) that God’s power is His holiness, righteousness, mercy, patience, and kindness. Barth goes a step better, though, in insisting that this conformity of power to the constraints and channels of “law” is rooted in God’s triune nature. The... Read more
Barth has a wonderful discussion of the omnipotence of God in Dogmatics in Outline (pp 48-49). He disputes the notion of absolute power, power in itself, as a description of God’s almightiness, and concludes (in line with the tradition of God’s simplicity) that God’s power is His holiness, righteousness, mercy, patience, and kindness. Barth goes a step better, though, in insisting that this conformity of power to the constraints and channels of “law” is rooted in God’s triune nature. The... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In