World Self-Revealed

Last updated on: April 6, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his now-classic Sources of the Self (143-4), Charles Taylor observes that Descartes is “in many ways profoundly Augustinian: the emphasis on radical reflexivity, the importance of the cogito, the central role of a proof of God’s existence which starts from ‘within,’ from features of my own ideas, instead of starting from eternal being.” Descartes’s inward turn doesn’t come from Greece: “the language of inner/outer doesn’t figure in Plato or indeed in other ancient moralists.” But “Augustine does give a... Read more

The Triumph and Failure of Marx

Last updated on: April 5, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In the translator’s introduction to Augusto Del Noce’s Crisis of Modernity, Carlo Lancelotti outlines Del Noce’s theory about the “heterogenesis of ends” in Marxism, its simultaneous failure and success. Originally attracted to a synthesis of Christianity and Marx, Del Noce hesitated because of his moral objections to Marxism’s justification of violence. Marx’s popularity among Catholic thinkers led Del Noce to study Marxism more deeply, which in turn led to a thorough rejection of Marxism. As Lancelotti puts it, “The position... Read more

Poetry and Metaphysics

Last updated on: April 5, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a 1950 article on “Agrarianism in Exile,” Richard Weaver pointed out that the Southern Agrarians did not begin their careers are publicists or partisans, but as poets: “The served the music of poetry” (589). This is revealing: “It tells us a great deal about a man to know that he chooses as his form of expression the poetic medium. It tells us, I think, something about his system of ontology. The composition of poetry is evidence that for him... Read more

Autonomy v. Independence

Last updated on: April 5, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Matthew B. Crawford argues in The World Beyond Your Head that things discipline our attention and thus make genuine knowledge of the world possible: “things that can serve as a kind of authority for us, by way of structuring our attention. The design of things—for example, cars and children’s toys—conditions the kind of involvement we have in our own activity. Design establishes an ecology of attention that can be more or less well adapted to the requirements of skillful, unimpeded... Read more

Monotheism in Athens

Last updated on: April 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Paul’s apologetic sermon in Acts 17 is often taken as a model of apostolic accommodation. He quotes “one of your own poets,” speaks of “divine nature,” introduces the Athenians to a God they already vaguely know. His sermon is not so much news as an elaboration of what the Athenians already half-suspect. There is something to that, of course. Paul’s rhetoric is, as always, cunning. But the theology isn’t compromised a whit. Paul ends with judgment and resurrection and Jesus,... Read more

Foreknowledge and Freedom

Last updated on: April 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In The Dilemma of Freedom and Foreknowledge, Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski outlines a variety of solutions to the dilemma of the title – how God’s omniscience, which includes omniscience regarding the future, is compatible with human freedom. Is it possible to account for God’s foreknowledge in such a way that His foreknowledge doesn’t have a causal, determining relation to my actions? She believes that philosophers have shown that freedom is not logically incompatible with divine foreknowledge, but she also recognizes that... Read more

Wedding Homily

Last updated on: April 4, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Every wedding is a liturgy. Note, I didn’t say: Every wedding has a liturgy. Or, Weddings tend to take liturgical form. Rather: Every wedding is a liturgy. Not only weddings like this one, with formal dress, dignified processions, pre-scripted words and prayers, gorgeous music, dialogue between minister and people. Not only Christian weddings. In traditional Welsh weddings, the bridegroom and his attendants fight to capture the bride, and even when the couple is on the way to church, the bride... Read more

De-Aristotelianizing Plato

Last updated on: April 1, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Between 1900 and 1960, scholars believed that Plato held to a “cosmological” view of the divine, the notion that gods are “personified forces responsible for bringing order to the sensible world.” Since then, scholars have adopted a “metaphysical” interpretation, arguing that Plato’s god is finally a metaphysical principle. So argues Gerd van Riel in Plato’s Gods (2-3). The latter view, van Riel argues, is based on Aristotelian premises. In this outlook, “metaphysics and theology converge on the idea that the... Read more

Losing Face

Last updated on: April 1, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his 2013 book, Saving Face, Stephen Pattison observes that infants very quickly begin to notice and recognize faces, and to imitate the expressions they see. “To be and to become human socially and emotionally,” he writes, “is to engage in real, nuanced, face-to-face visual relations.” When a child doesn’t see approval in the face that looks back at him, however, the result can be deadening: “If the mother cannot let her eye gleam, or ‘light up her face’ with... Read more

Tribes of the Transjordan

Last updated on: April 1, 2016 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

When Israel conquered and settled in Canaan, two and a half tribes settled on the eastern side of the Jordan, in “transJordanian” territory – Reuben, Gad, and half of the tribe of Manasseh, the son of Joseph. The Chronicler treats these three tribes as a complex unit in 1 Chronicles 5. Structurally, the chapter is essentially chiastic: A. Reuben’s genealogy, vv. 1-10 B. Gad’s genealogy, vv. 11-17 C. War of Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh against the Hagrites, vv. 18-22 B’.... Read more

Where was Jesus Born?