Reproduction

Last updated on: September 7, 2012 at 4:43 am By Peter Leithart

John Paul II, waxing Frankfurtian and Benjaminist, reflects on the effects of technologies that enable us to reproduce images of the human body – film and photography ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body , 366-7 ): “Artistic reproduction, when it becomes the content of representation and transmission (television or cinema), loses in some way its fundamental contact with man/body, whose reproduction it is, and very often becomes an ‘anonymous’ object such as, for example,... Read more

Infant Christendom

Last updated on: September 6, 2012 at 6:50 pm By Peter Leithart

In an interview in The Legend of the Middle Ages: Philosophical Explorations of Medieval Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (p. 22 ), Remi Brague argues that the early Christians transformed everything because they were obsessed with Christ not “Christianity itself.” They tracked “the reverberations of his coming in the whole of human existence.” But this tracking was not instantaneous: “It took centuries to translate Christian reality into institutions. Think of the time it took for the Church to reverse inveterate habits... Read more

Three Loves

Last updated on: September 6, 2012 at 6:44 pm By Peter Leithart

Dan Glover offers these expansions on an earlier post where I quoted Edward Vacek’s analysis of the threefold love of God ( agape , philia , eros ). The rest of this post is from Dan. Adding to your comments, perhaps each person of the Godhead serves particularly, though not exclusively, to represent and manifest one of these forms of love to those with whom God has entered into relationship. For example, the Father particularly demonstrates agape toward his children... Read more

Between Beast and Babel

Last updated on: September 6, 2012 at 3:59 am By Peter Leithart

There’s an interview regarding by recent book on empire at http://thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevinwax/ this morning. Read more

Tragedy of Shylock

Last updated on: September 5, 2012 at 10:54 am By Peter Leithart

Shylock has been played for sympathy frequently in the past century. But the sense that his character fits badly in a comedy is an old one. Already in 1709, Nicholas Rowe wrote, “Tho’ we have seen that Play Receiv’d and Acted as a Comedy, and the Part of the Jew performed by an Excellent Comedian, yet I cannot but think it was design’d Tragically by the Author. There appears in it such a deadly Spirit of Revenge, such a savage... Read more

Merchant as Allegory

Last updated on: September 5, 2012 at 9:52 am By Peter Leithart

In an old article in the Shakespeare Quarterly , Barbara Lewalski suggests that Merchant of Venice is a moralistic allegory depicting the character of Christian love. In the play, Christian love involves “giving and forgiving: it demands an attitude of carelessness regarding the things of this world founded upon a trust in God’s providence; an attitude of self-forgetfulness and humility founded upon recognition of man’s common sinfulness; a readiness to give and risk everything, possessions and person, for the sake... Read more

Shylock on the Gospels

Last updated on: September 5, 2012 at 8:41 am By Peter Leithart

Mahood again ( The Merchant of Venice (The New Cambridge Shakespeare) ), describing Shakespeare’s and Shylock’s use of the gospels in the play (p. 198-9). “On Shylock’s first meeting with Bassanio, his detestation of the Christians breaks out in the dactylic rhythm and harsh consonants of ’ to eat of the habitation which your prophet the Nazarite conjured the devil into’: a phrase of virulent contempt which must have startled early audiences and indeed so shocked Johnson that he omitted... Read more

Shylock is Jacob

Last updated on: September 5, 2012 at 8:36 am By Peter Leithart

In an appendix to his edition of The Merchant of Venice (The New Cambridge Shakespeare) (pp. 197-8) , M. M. Mahood explores Shakespeare’s use of the Bible in the play. He notes the extensive echoes of the Jacob narrative, some explicit some not so much. “Shakespeare is unlikely ever to have known an orthodox Jew, and any Marranos he may have met in London would have been at pains to conceal their religious origins. To get at these origins and... Read more

Disinterested love

Last updated on: September 4, 2012 at 10:55 am By Peter Leithart

Should we love God disinterestedly, without expectation or desire for return from Him, without any desire for happiness? It’s a common idea, but Milbank rightly argues against it. He asks “what constitutes God’s loveability”? His answer” “every charm, every attractive feature of anything whatsoever, radiates outwards, rendering things apprehensible and therefore specifically loveable only in the measure that they affect the state of the observer in a positive fashion. If therefore follows . . . paradoxically, that to love anything... Read more

Self and Self-sacrifice

Last updated on: September 4, 2012 at 10:23 am By Peter Leithart

In the first part of his article “Soul of Reciprocity,” Milbank contrasts Cartesian generosity with Christian: “if the cogito is the donum , it is an impoverished donum . Generosity, in Descartes, begins as generosity towards oneself, or rather, as an expansive willing, that already is, auto-effectively, generosity. It is just this Cartesian generosity, which, we have seen, Marion re-works as a pure self-instigating will that must affirm the reality of the gift, and itself as cogiven. If such generosity... Read more

I fall like lightning from heaven. I will be bound in the Abyss for a thousand years. Who am I?