The scene that greets John when the fifth seal is broken is at the altar, and the saints are “underneath the altar.” When John ascended to heaven in the Spirit, he did not see an altar in the heavenly sanctuary. There was a throne (ark) and a lampstand and a sea, but no table and no altar. The reason the altar is missing is because it is not a heavenly item; heaven is the throne room, the heavenly equivalent of... Read more
Gadamer’s notion that things “come into language” can sound rather abstract and abstruse. I think it’s a powerful idea. It’s powerful first because, as Gadamer is at pains to demonstrate, it means that language is not a screen that keeps us from access to the world (as Derrida and others tend to say). Because things can “come into language,” because every thing can come into language, we have access to everything. Language is potentially as big as the world; it... Read more
Insofar as anything appears to us, it radiates itself. Insofar as it radiates itself, it is light. Insofar as it is light, it is the glory and beauty of God. We need to wear dark glasses all the time so as not to be blinded by the light that blazes from everything. Dark glasses, or eyes as bright as the world around us. (Inspired by the closing section of Gadamer’s Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) ). Read more
Secularization is not for Carl Schmitt, a Weberian disenchantment or “detheologization.” Rather, Agamben says (p. 4), “theology continues to be present and active in an eminent way.” The substance of theology and modernity may not be identical; instead, secularization “concerns a particular strategic relation that marks political concepts and refers them back to their theological origin.” Citing Foucault and Enzo Melandri, Agamben calls this a “signature”: something that in a sign or concept marks and exceeds such a sign or... Read more
Agamben ( The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) , p. 2) is surprised that there is so little attention paid to oikonomia by theologians. He thinks he understands: “It is probably that, at least in the case of theologians, this peculiar silence is due to their embarrassment in the face of something that could only appear as a kind of pudenda origo of the Trinitarian dogma.” To which ones wants... Read more
At the beginning of his 2011 The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) , a sequel to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics) , Girgio Agamben raises the question that, he thinks, students of political ceremonial (like Ernst Kantorowicz) fail to ask: “Why does power need glory? If it is essentially force and capacity for action and government, why does it assume the rigid, cumbersome and ‘glorious’... Read more
In his lucid introduction to The Market System: What It Is, How It Works, and What to Make of It , Charles Lindblom notes the divergence of the contemporary market system from the ideals of Adam Smith – “a market system tied to a minimal state.” He notes (p. 8), “In our time it is a governed market system, heavily burdened or ornamented with what old-fashioned free marketers decry as ‘interferences.’ In these systems, the state is the largest buyer:... Read more
Here is a brief outline of a presentation I gave today. The suporting evidence is scattered about various posts from the past two weeks. 1) The thesis: It may be true, as free market economists say, that the economy would be more stable and perhaps even more prosperous if the state left the market to itself, with the qualifications that Smith, Mises, and other classical liberals offer. But we don’t know that in historical fact, because free markets in this... Read more
Gadamer (p. 317) cites this example from Tolstoy to illustrate the difference between the meaning of a great event and the question of whether the great event went according to plan: “Tolstoy’s celebrated description of the council of war before the battle – in which all the strategic possibilities are calculated an all the plans considered, thoroughly and perceptively, while the general sits there and sleeps, but in the night before the battle goes round all the sentry posts.” That’s... Read more
In a wonderful section in Truth and Method (Continuum Impacts) about questions, Gadamer says this: “We say that a question has been put wrongly when it does not reach the state of openness but precludes reaching it by retaining false presuppositions. It pretends to an openness and susceptibility to decision that it does not have.” He offers the example of the “slanted question”: “There can be no answer to a slanted question because it leads us only apparently and not... Read more
Leithart
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