Priest by the Cross

Last updated on: February 10, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Amalar of Metz’s On the Liturgy, recently published in a handsome two-volume Latin-English edition in the Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, represents the kind of “mysteriological” piety against which modern liturgical scholars like Bouyer and Schmemann fulminated. For Amalar, every moment and movement of the liturgy symbolizes some event of biblical history. Liturgy becomes re-enactment, rather than a journey to the kingdom coming. Bouyer, Schmemann and the others are right. But what Amalar lacks in sophistication, he makes up in good old Carolingian... Read more

Buying Up the Bard

Last updated on: February 9, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The TLS reviewer of Stephen Grant’s Collecting Shakespeare summarizes some of the intrigue, skullduggery, and determination that lie behind the creation of Washington’s Folger Shakespeare library: “During their long marriage, the diminutive couple (he was five foot four, she five foot) devoted themselves to collecting books, pictures and objects (relics made from the Stratford mulberry tree were especially sought after) related to Shakespeare. What started as ‘an agreeable recreation,’ Henry Folger said, soon became ‘a delightful hobby’ and eventually ‘rather a... Read more

Europe’s Jews

Last updated on: February 9, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

The essays in Edward Alexander’s forthcoming Jews Against Themselves are an excoriating assault on Jewish “apostates”—Jews who, in the words of Maimonides, separate themselves “from the community” or “hold aloof from the congregation of Israel” and is “indifferent when they are in distress.” In Maimonides’s opinion, such no longer “belong to the Jewish people” and they have “no share in the world to come.” Alexander’s apostates are Jews who are not only indifferent to the distress of Jews in Israel, but... Read more

God’s Pets

Last updated on: February 9, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Hosea 2 offers a lovely evocation of a new exodus and new covenant. After Yahweh threatens to destroy Israel’s vines and fig trees because she has prostituted herself with the Baal’s (2:9-13), He promises to lure her into the wilderness, take her to the vineyards where she will sing the song of Exodus again (2:14-15). Then, she won’t call out to Baal; Yahweh will be the only name on her lips. In this new marriage, Yahweh promises to “betroth you... Read more

Disenchantment?

Last updated on: February 9, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

As Carlos Eire has documents (War Against the Idols), some Reformation iconoclasts were motivated by a spiritualizing piety that denied that God could be encountered in material things. Some, but not all. Some opposed images for precisely the opposite reasons. There is something of the spiritualizing tendency in Bucer’s Einigerlei Bild. Bucer mounts a biblical and patristic argument against the use of images, and occasionally says that bodily things are useless to piety. At several points, however, his argument moves in... Read more

Trinity, Tabernacle, and Mathematics

Last updated on: February 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

I confess. I’m a sucker for books on the Trinity, and for books on the tabernacle. When someone combines these two topics in a discussion of the foundations of mathematics, as Vern Poythress does in Redeeming Mathematics, I’m hooked. Poythress has been busy redeeming nearly everything recently – Science, Philosophy, Sociology. There are common themes throughout his body of work: The use of Trinitarian concepts and patterns of thought; the deployment of the Symphonic multi-perspectivalism that Poythress developed along with John Frame; a commitment to work... Read more

Original Monotheism

Last updated on: February 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Winfried Corduan’s In the Beginning God is largely an effort to rehabilitate the reputation and theory of Catholic linguist Wilhelm Schmidt, whose 12-volume Der Ursprung der Gottesidee (1912-54) argued that monotheism was the original form of religious belief. As Corduan describes it, the “narrative behind the method” assumes that peoples migrate, that they take their cultures with them, and thus that cultural forms diffuse, penetrate, and mix. By a sophisticated set of criteria, Schmidt attempted to explain the evident similarities among... Read more

Expanding Temple

Last updated on: February 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

First there is only a tabernacle in the wilderness. Yahweh’s house, by itself, surrounded by a curtain. No priests live on the tabernacle grounds; the sanctuary is bounded off from everyone. By the time of Samuel, the little boy is sleeping in “the temple” at Shiloh. It’s still a tent, and surely Samuel’s hasn’t put up a little cot in the holy place. The tabernacle apparently has been in permanent place so long that the priests have build up their... Read more

Age and Time

Last updated on: February 6, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

“One could say that age is to time what place is to space,” says Robert Pogue Harrison (Juvenescence, 3), and he’s surprising that with all the attention given by philosophers to time, so few make the connection with age. Even Heidegger, who understood time as “a kind of movement, or kinesis, that allows the phenomenon to appear and be taken up in thought and word” and who recognized that “place, in its situated boundedness, is more primordial than space” –... Read more

Neoteny

Last updated on: February 5, 2015 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Neoteny comes from two Greek words, “new” and “hold.” As Robert Pogue Harrison defines it (Juvenescence, 18), evolutionary biology speaks of neoteny as the “persistence of fetal, larval, or juvenile features in adult organisms.” Harrison means something more broader, “a modified type of development that brings juvenile traits to new levels of maturity, where they are preserved in their youthful form” (21). Einstein enjoyed the benefits of neoteny: “Toward the end of his life Einstein claimed that his breakthroughs in... Read more