“Who are these who fly like a cloud, and like the doves to their windows?” someone asks in Isaiah 60:8. It’s a puzzling question in a context having to do with the assembling of Gentiles at Zion for worship (vv. 6-7, note gold, frankincense, flocks and rams that ascend on Yahweh’s altar and are accepted). What hath a cloud to do with Gentiles? What hath doves to do with worship? The context gives us several possibilities. Perhaps “these” that fly... Read more
When the nations bring their treasures to Zion (Isaiah 60:6), they come with camels. It’s an unusual site. The patriarchs have camels (the word is used 18x in Genesis 24 alone, 25x in Genesis). After that, camels are typically the mounts for Gentile visitors or invaders. Midianites riding camels swarm over the land like locusts (Judges 6), and later the queen of Sheba’s entourage visits Solomon on camels (1 Kings 10:2; 2 Chronicles 9:1). For Isaiah, the pilgrimage of the... Read more
When Zion sees her sons and daughters returning home in the arms of the nations, she is stunned (Isaiah 60:5). Her heart trembles (pachad; cf. Deuteronomy 28:66-67) and grows large (rachab; cf. Isaiah 54:2). In short, she has a heart attack, and a flushed face to prove it (“you will see and be radiant”). Zion rejoices, but her joy is anything but frothy. It’s mixed with fear and awe at what Yahweh has done; it’s colored by amazement at the... Read more
Romanticism is often seen as a reaction against the Enlightenment. Louis Dupre thinks that’s too simplistic (The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism, 4-5). Rather, Romanticism transforms the values of the Enlightenment by turning them into a sublime. Dupre writes, “Romanticism incorporates what the Enlightenment had acquired while also transforming its meaning. The desire for political, social, and religious emancipation, to which it gave voice, had existed through most of the eighteenth century, but the Romantics... Read more
Augustine puzzled over the mysteries of memory and forgetfulness. Where are memories “stored”? Where do they go when we forget something? You forget where you left your phone, or forget what you were going to say, and then it comes back to you. Where was it in the meantime? Forgetfulness starts early. Researchers have found that “at ages 5 to 7, the children remembered over 60 per cent of the events they’d chatted about at age 3. However, their recall... Read more
In his introduction to Kierkegaard’s Kierkegaard’s Attack Upon “Christendom” 1854-1855, Walter Lowrie suggests that Kierkegaard was “moreevidently andmore fundamentally a Catholicor perhaps it would be better to say,more consciously in revolt against Protestantism.” His evidence: “This-appears plainlyin the Instant by his insistence upon works, and by the fact that herehe has nothing to say about faith, except that, according to the NewTestament (and the Gospels especially), it must not be ‘faith alone.’He was thoroughly aware that when he insisted upon... Read more
Modernity is marked by the reduction of causes to efficient causes, and the elimination of final causation, of teleology or purpose.Final causes are not so easily eliminated, Hart argues (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 78-9). Our experience is not “an immediate perception of phenomena – appearances, that is – which come to us directly through our senses, but through sensations as interpreted by thought, under the aspect of organizing eidetic patterns. We do not encounter the material substrate... Read more
Naturalistic explanations of nature’s existence are impossible, David Hart contends (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 96), because “nature . . . is that which by definition already exists.” Nature’s explanation thus inevitably and “logically” must lie “beyond the system of causes that nature comprises; it is, quite literally, ‘hyperphysical,’ or, shifting into Latin, super naturam.” Supernatural explanation doesn’t merely enter in when natural explanation is exhausted; it also means “that at no point is anything purely, self-sufficiently natural... Read more
The great change in the modern world picture was not the abandonment of the Aristotelian and Ptolmaic cosmology. That, argues David Hart (The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, 58-9) was only a ripple on the surface. The really big change came in the idea of causation: “The loss of the larger sense of an integral unity of metaphysical and physical causes, and of a spiritual rationality wholly pervading and sustaining the universe . . . opened an imaginative chasm... Read more
The nations will be saved. They will come to the light (Isaiah 60:3). How? We can work backward through Isaiah. They come into the light that shines from Israel. That light is the light of Yahweh Himself dwelling among and shining through His translucent people. Israel becomes that light after Yahweh takes up His armor against wickedness in Zion. A city of righteousness becomes the city of light (ch. 59). And that means that Zion becomes a city where yokes... Read more
Leithart
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