Massimo Montanari claims in his Medieval Tastes that medieval tastes and customs regarding food were changed by two revolutions. One involves the discovery of new foods from the new world. Think, for instance, of “the impact of the tomato on Mediterranean cooking or the potato on the continental diet, not to mention corn, which assumed first place in the diet of the peasantry, or plants like the chili pepper, which were adopted with such conviction in certain regions of Europe (in... Read more
George Friedman has written that the promise of the European union was not merely prosperity and peace, but joy: “the joy of joining men into a single brotherhood, overcoming the divisions of mere custom.” But here’s the rub: Europeans have to be willing to share the same fate if they are going to achieve the aims the Union set for itself. If the brotherhood is only a brotherhood in joy, it depends on perpetual prosperity and perpetual peace, which is... Read more
Michael Bruno’s Political Augustinianism is a thorough examination of recent interpretations of Augustine’s political thought, starting with French scholars like H.I. Marrou and H. X. Arquillière, whose 1933 L’Augustinianisme Politique set the terms for much subsequent discussion, through the realist uses of Augustine in Niebuhr and the “secularist” interpretation of RA Markus, on to contemporary interpreters like Robert Dodaro, Eric Gregory, John Milbank, Rowan Williams, and Oliver O’Donovan. Bruno highlights a number of recurring issues: The continuity or discontinuity between Augustine and his... Read more
“Do not move an ancient landmark,” Solomon says in Proverbs 23:10. Just what a king would say: Kings want to keep things just as they are, and convince everyone that they have always been so, so long as they can sit on top of the heap. But the sequel of the Proverb doesn’t fit that skepto-Marxist reading. Preserve the ancient landmarks, and do not “enter the fields of the fatherless.” In Israel, every clan within every tribe received a portion... Read more
Balances were essential to commerce in ancient Israel, weighing not only commodities to be bought and sold but in some cases weighing the gold and silver that served as the medium of exchange. A merchant could cheat customers by adjusting the scales to his advantage. According to Proverbs 11:1, such false balances are an abomination to Yahweh. “Abomination” is a loaded Levitical term. It expresses divine disgust, disgust of such intensity that it leads Yahweh to drive Israel from the... Read more
Proverbs 6:16-20 lists seven things that God finds abominable and hateful. It’s a rich text. For starters, the “seven” stands out. God loves His creation since it is good; what He hates is a seven-fold inversion of creation. At the very least, we can say that the wicked person who is sketched out in Proverbs 6 becomes a photo negative of creation, and leaves an unraveling creation in his wake. Creation is maintained in right order by humility, truth, productive... Read more
In an essay on Poe in NYRB, Marilynne Robinson observes that “the horror that fascinated [Poe] and gave such dreadful unity to his tales is often the inescapable confrontation of the self by a perfect justice, the exposure of a guilty act in a form that makes its revelation a recoil of the mind against itself.” More elaborately, “Poe’s great tales turn on guilt concealed or denied, then abruptly and shockingly exposed. He has always been reviled or celebrated for the... Read more
Philip Caldwell’s Liturgy As Revelation is a successful book on several levels. Caldwell fills out recent accounts of twentieth-century Catholicism by attending to some lesser-known figures associated in various ways with the nouvelle theologie: Rene Latourelle, Salvatore Marsili, Gustave Martelet, and, a later figure, Avery Dulles. Caldwell’s analyses of these writers is anything but superficial: He covers their lives and major contributions, in considerable detail. These writers were to liturgical theology what the “new theologians” were to Thomism and neo-scholasticism: “just... Read more
The TLS reviewer of Peter Unger’s Empty Ideas is not much impressed with Unger’s critique of analytic philosophy. According to Unger, “Contemporary analytic metaphysicians see themselves as theorizing boldly and systematically about the deepest and most general nature of reality. In Peter Unger’s view, they are deluded: far from resuming pre-Kantian metaphysics in the grand old style, they do little more than play with words. Their ideas are mostly empty.” What makes an idea “empty” in Unger’s sense? Not a lack... Read more
Writing at Stratfor, George Friedman offers a sobering, pessimistic view of the future of Islam in Europe: “We are entering a place that has no solutions. Such a place does have decisions, and all of the choices will be bad.” At the moment, he admits, “It is difficult to imagine another outcome save for another round of ghettoization and deportation. This is repulsive to the European sensibility now.” But that may change: “Unable to distinguish radical Muslims from other Muslims, Europe... Read more
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