God has no needs. Philo, Seneca, and classic Christian theology agree on that. But I think the explanation differs. Seneca ( On Benefits (The Complete Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca) , bk. 4) explains that “God bestows upon us very many and very great benefits, with no thought of any return, since he has no need of anything bestowed, nor are we capable of bestowing anything on him.” The gods’ “own nature sufficient to them for all their needs.” No... Read more
The Christian conviction that Jesus had defeated the powers and brought an end to old rites had major effects on early Christian social engagement, Gary Ferngren implies in his 2009 Medicine and Health Care in Early Christianity . “Before the advent of Christianity,” he says, “there was no concept of public officials to prevent disease or to treat those who suffered from it. Alex Scobie speaks of a ’ cynical acceptance of the state’s indifference to the lot of the... Read more
For all its reputation for iconoclasm, modernism, says Robert Alter in Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) , is more accurately described as a “paradoxical amalgam of iconoclasm and hypertraditionalism” (p. 8). Alter’s book explores this phenomenon, along with the “double canonicity” (religious and literary) of the Hebrew Bible, in Kafka, Haim Bialik, and Joyce. Joyce’s debt to canonical Homer is on the surface of Ulysses , but Alter argues that... Read more
A passage from Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits, Revised Edition pinpoints the internal tensions of liberal order. Nietzsche writes, “If there are to be institutions there must be a kind of will, instinct, imperative, anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will to tradition, to authority, to responsibility for centuries to come, to the solidarity of chains of generations forward and backward ad infinitum .” Institutions cannot reinvent themselves every generation, cannot rest on sheer consent.... Read more
Descartes is accused of proposing that the human soul is a “ghost in the machine.” Does he think of the body mechanistically? It’s true that he speaks of “our body’s machine” that operates in large measure “unaided” ( The Passions of the Soul: An English Translation of Les Passions De L’Ame , sections 7, 17). Yet he no sooner explains digestion and the circulation of the blood and other bodily functions than he introduces the category of “animal spirits” (... Read more
Peter Leithart is one of the most creative and provocative theological writers today. He manages to combine sound critical scholarship with accessible writing and a flair for the dramatic. Who else would think of defending the Emperor Constantine against his legions of critics today? Leithart does so not just to stir the pot, but because he is deeply interested in challenging the church and the world to move beyond lazy and clichéd thinking. Peter Leithart and I do not agree... Read more
Shapin again ( The Scientific Revolution (science.culture) , 72-73): He offers a fascinating description of the challenges of persuasion in early modern science. Galileo claimed that his telescope proved there were moons around Jupiter. Many of those who looked through his device didn’t see what he saw. Some refused to look at all, perhaps considering it to be impious to be gawking into the heavens like that. Others peered through and saw things, but were not convinced that they could... Read more
Debates among historians about the relative weight of “intellectual” and “social” factors seem “rather silly” to Steven Shapin. What’s needed, he argues in The Scientific Revolution (science.culture) is a sociology of scientific knowledge “to display knowledge making and knowledge holding as social processes” (p. 9). He thinks too that the notion that social factors exert “external” pressure on science is also misleading (p. 10): “There is as much society inside the scientist’s laboratory, and internal to the development of scientific... Read more
My pastoral colleague, Toby Sumpter, has just come out with a wonderful commentary on Job, Job Through New Eyes: A Son for Glory . I am biased in favor of my friend, but I’m confident that even an unbiased reader will find a lot to like. Toby reads Job as something more than theodicy or a meditation on suffering, something more than a story of loss and restoration. He sees in Job a theology of glorification, as Job moves from... Read more
Welcome to the blog formerly known as Leithart.com. Readers of the earlier incarnation of my blog will, I trust, find the new site comfortably familiar. The contents will be consistent with what I have written over the years. Over to your right you’ll find a drop-down list of archives and a search box so you can relive old posts. For anyone new to this site, let me explain what I do here. Since 2003, Leithart.com has been my public notebook.... Read more
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