Pure Aesthetics

Last updated on: December 12, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Hugh Grady opens his Shakespeare and Impure Aesthetics (6-10) with a brief and illuminating discussion of Kant’s aesthetics of purity. By “pure” here is meant the freedom of aesthetic experience from cognitive reason and teleological judgments, from practical or moral interests. This disinterested experience of art is an encounter with beauty that is not determined by or subordinate to the good or the true. The purity of the experience is in fact the criterion for judging a truly aesthetic experience. It... Read more

Un-Secular Age

Last updated on: December 12, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Our secular age can be sustained only if the secular has been carefully distinguished from the sacred, and only if the boundary between the two is vigorously, not to say violently, guarded. But boundary-drawing between the sacred and profane is the work of a priest. It is the sacred act par excellence (cf. among many many texts from many religions, Leviticus 10:10). So our secular age depends on a sacred gesture. Which means that our secular age isn’t ultimately a... Read more

Sacrificial Politics

Last updated on: December 12, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Semyon Frank was a Russian emigre to London. Michael Burleigh (Sacred Causes, 39) sums up his life: “Born in 1877 into a Russian-Jewish family, he had quickly outgrown a juvenile Marxism, converting to Orthodox Christianity in 1912, on the ground that the Jewish God was as remote from the world as the utopia of socialist imaginings. He rejected a Russian-Jewish sympathy for messianic radicalism in favour of liberal conservatism too.” More incisively than many of his contemporaries, Frank discerned the “nihilistic moralism of the... Read more

Islamic Revolutionaries

Last updated on: December 12, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his brilliant Earthly Powers (3), Michael Burleigh cites a passage from Tocqueville’s book on the French Revolution. Taking a note from Schiller about “how early modern religious wars spilled across political boundaries, which reminded Tocqueville of the ideological struggle between Jacobins and counter-revolutionaries in late-eighteenth-century Europe,” Tocqueville drew a comparison between the revolutionary pursuit of human regeneration and the aims of Islam: “Because the Revolution seemed to be striving for the regeneration of the human race even more than for the reform... Read more

Individualist Collectivism

Last updated on: December 11, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

I have a great deal of sympathy with Jose Miranda’s claim (in Marx and the Bible) that Paul is writing about justice in Romans, and that the apostles is concerned “with the problem of society . . . of human civilization. His anguish is over the injustice which reigns in the world, the collective slavery which has gained control of human history” (178)_ I have no sympathy for what he takes as the corollary: Paul’s “concern is not individual salvation. . .... Read more

The Weapons of Our Warfare

Last updated on: December 11, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In The Empty Men, his study of the heroic theme in the Bible, Gregory Mobley catalogs some of the odd weapons used by biblical warriors: “In Judges and 1 Samuel, the relative inferiority of the weapons of the biblical heroes is emphasized. Shamgar ben Anat is lauded for killing six hundred Philistines with a malmad habbaqar, probably a wooden pole with a nail at the end, a cattle prod (Judg 3:31). In the prose version of the battle in the Jezreel... Read more

After the Temple

Last updated on: December 11, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jonathan Klawans is a great one for cutting through nonsense. In his Purity, Sacrifice, and the Temple, he points to the oddity that “documents composed three, four, or even five centuries after the destruction are labeled as delayed responses to the destruction. . . the suggestion that it took the rabbis centuries to respond to the destruction, because it ostensibly took that long to assert that the temple could be bested by something else, is insulting both to the rabbis themselves... Read more

Horizontal Hierarchy

Last updated on: December 10, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his monograph on Israel’s Tabernacle as Social Space, Mark George makes the observation that tabernacle space is “configured horizontally”: “There is not a single step, platform, or dais in tabernacle space. No steps differentiate court space from common space, holy space from court space, or most holy space from holy space. There are not steps up to the burnt altar or incense altar. The only possible raised space within the entire tabernacle complex is the place where the deity meets... Read more

The Universe is a Kitchen

Last updated on: December 10, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a recent article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Natalie Gummer lays out the sacrificial cosmology embodied in early Buddhist texts. The premise is that the world is a kitchen, in which things take the forms of ingredients in a cosmic stew – saps, juices, broths, remedies, poisons (1094, in a quotation from Francis Zimmerman. Gummer elaborates: “In one of the founding myths of the sacrifice . . . the creator deity Prajapati, conceiving the desire... Read more

Sacrificial death?

Last updated on: December 10, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In some ways, Daniel Ullucci’s The Christian Rejection of Animal Sacrifice helpfully complicates our picture of views on ancient sacrifice, both pre-Christian and Christian. He challenges the standard narrative that claims that Christians straightforwardly and pretty much immediately recognized Jesus’ death as a final sacrifice, and pretty much immediately abandoned animal sacrifice. A debate about animal sacrifice was already going on before Christianity appeared, and it usually did not involve a rejection of animal sacrifice per se. “Critics” of sacrifice were... Read more