Not Boiled

Last updated on: March 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In his famed “culinary triangle” (see Food and Culture: A Reader) Claude Levi-Strauss suggested a triple classification of food: raw, cooked, and rotten. Raw is the natural state; cooked is a cultural transformation of nature, and rotten is a natural transformation. Those formed the corners of a triangle. Along the sides were specific practices of food preparation: Boiling was nearest the “rotten” and roasting nearest the “raw.” Roasting and boiling paralleled nature and culture respectively. To boil, you need a pot,... Read more

A Cheer for Bishop Berkeley

Last updated on: March 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Milbank suggests that Berkeley makes some important breakthroughs in working out a Christian understanding of language and of a creation made by the Logos (“Theological Without Substance,” Journal of Literature and Theology 2:2 [1988]). Berkeley imagines a metaphysics without substance, but, because he believes in a God who communicates in creation, he doesn’t collapse into solipcism or abandon a form of realism. As usual, Milbank’s analysis is more than a mouthful, but it’s worth some careful study: “If, for Berkeley,... Read more

Dostoevsky the Liberal?

Last updated on: March 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

So, this is a moment of dialog with myself. I have been musing on Bakhtin and Dostoevsky, so the self-division seems appropriate. I have charged that Dostoevsky’s Christ is an ineffectual liberal Christ, using The Idiot as exhibit #1. But Diane Thompson’s essay on the biblical word in Dostoevsky’s poetics (Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition) brings me up short. Thompson emphasizes the absences in The Idiot: “Here, as opposed to Dostoevsky’s other novels, there are no readings or faithful interpreters of the biblical... Read more

Sermon in a Tavern

Last updated on: March 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In her contribution to Dostoevsky and the Christian Tradition, Diane Thompson offers a brilliant analysis of Marmeladov’s speech to Raskolnikov at the beginning of Crime and Punishment. Everything he says is seasoned with grandiloquent references to the gospels, and especially to the Passion and last judgment narratives. He says of himself “Behold the Man,” but hastily adds “I have the image of the beast.” “I should be crucified,” he says, but then he adds his hope that he and his daughter Sonya,... Read more

Sermon in a Tavern

Last updated on: March 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and the Outsider

Last updated on: March 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

George Pattison’s closing essay in Dostoevsky and the Christian Traditionexplores the similarities between Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky. It’s been common to read both as “prophets revealing to `modern man’ the abyssal freedom, the wild frontiers and the midnight cries that threaten both the rational system-building of philosophers and social engineers as well as the moral complacency of a bourgeois world that is only too happy to believe that `all is well’” (240). Pattison finds this a “deeply flawed” reading. Though acknowledging that... Read more

Do Guard Duty

Last updated on: March 26, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

Jesus comes like a thief to the unsuspecting, the sleepy (Revelation 3:3). That doesn’t simply mean that His coming is a surprise. It means that He comes to take. That’s what thieves do. To prevent this, the angel of the church at Sardis has to “keep” (tereo) or guard what he had received. Israel had to “keep” the statutes of Yahweh, and to guard the treasures of God’s house. They had to guard those against attacks of all sorts, not... Read more

Augustinian Semiotics

Last updated on: March 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In a 1988 article in the Journal of Literature and Theology (2:1), Milbank sketches the contours of a “theology without substance.” Along the way, he offers a critique of Augustine’s signum-res distinction and the implied metaphysics. On the one hand, Augustine pours some of the foundations for a Christian linguistics and semiotics. Milbank says that in de Magistro, he “is so aware of the sign-character of words, and the indispensability of the artificial system of language for thought, that in De... Read more

Irony and Proclamation

Last updated on: March 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In one of his late essays in Speech Genres, Bakhtin traces the secularization of literature to the solvent effects of irony: “Irony has penetrated all languages of modern times (especially French); it has penetrated into all words and forms . . . Irony is everywhere – from the minimal and imperceptible, to the loud, which borders on laughter. Modern man does not proclaim; he speaks. That is, he speaks with reservations. Proclamatory genres have been retained mainly as parodic and semi-parodic... Read more

Dostoevsky’s Moral Fiction

Last updated on: March 25, 2014 at 12:00 am By Peter Leithart

In an essay on Dostoevsky and evil in Between Religion and Rationality, Joseph Frank observes that Dostoevsky frequently leads readers into moral horrors, but his “unflinching explorations of evil” don’t leave readers paralyzed. How does that work? Frank traces Dostoevsky’s depiction of evil to his prison experience, recounted in Notes from the House of the Dead. Initially, his contact with evil was deeply unsettling, as his idealist views about human goodness were shattered. He emerged from his years in prison with a... Read more