In his contribution to Signifying Identities, Fredrik Barth suggests that our notion of political, economic and social boundaries is an extension of the feeling that a tool extends the body: When you hold a knife or a spoon in your hand and use it as an implement, the experienced limit of your body is no longer the skin of your hand, but the cutting edge of your knife or the cup of your spoon. Likewise, when we learn to use... Read more
In his Landscape, Liberty and Authority, Tim Fulford examines the paradox of William Gilpin’s travel writings and tour-leading in the picturesque wilds of Wales, England, and Scotland. Gilpin was aware that “the picturesque might be socially dangerous,” so much so that he apologizes to the noble landowners whose estates he presents as a series of view—afraid that he disrupts his professed discovery of an aesthetic and social order in those estates by selecting from them a few visual scenes for... Read more
The great question haunting late medieval piety was that of the inadequacy of human piety. As Berndt Hamm puts it (Reformation of Faith), the “harrowing question” was that of the “spiritual inadequacy” of Christians (88). The late medieval answer was to reduce the requirements necessary to meet with God’s favor. He discusses the Coelifodina (1502) of Johannes von Paltz, an Augustinian friar who was a member of the house of Erfurt when Luther entered the order. Paltz went the old... Read more
Wise words concerning shifts in Christian teaching on the family from Oliver O’Donovan (Desire of Nations, 266-7). He points out that Jesus’ teaching on the family is mainly critical, assaulting the family’s “claims to religious and social loyalty.” The apostles “re-envisage” the family “in a manner appropriate to the Gospel.” In our day, Christians come to the defense of the family. O’Donovan thinks the current support for family life is a good thing: “In late-modern Western civilisation families, like all... Read more
Oliver O’Donovan (Desire of Nations, 262-3) points to the difficulty in the concept of equality. A purely formal doctrine is uninteresting and thin. A theory of equality must be capable of posing a challenge to “alleged distinctions which may be supposed to justify differences in the way in which we treat people.” Yet this substantive doctrine of equality runs up against the constants of actual social life: “all the social structures of affinity . . . depend upon differentiated social... Read more
Karol Berger (Bach’s Cycle, Mozart’s Arrow) sets out to reassess what we mean by “modernity” in music. For Berger, that involves discovering a caesura somewhere between Bach and Mozart. They are not, he argues, to be considered part of a continuous tradition of classical music; rather, they stand on opposite sides of a rift. Nineteenth-century observers noted this rift. It was explored in “E. T. A. Hoffmann’s landmark essays ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ and ‘Old and New Church Music,” in which... Read more
Richard Sorabji observes (Time, Creation, and the Continuum) that there have been disputes among philosophers concerning the goodness of philosophical perplexity. Wittgenstein compared it to a fly trapped in a bottle, which suggests “it would have been better . . . never to have suffered perplexity at all” (149). There is a counter-tradition, one that includes Augustine, perhaps Cicero, to the effect that “for man, as opposed to God, happiness consists in seeking the truth” (150). Gregory of Nyssa is... Read more
Peter Matheson (Rhetoric of Reformation) recognizes that polemic is “both necessary and useful” (8). It enables underdogs to gain a foothold, and “enables us to see things as they are. Its caricatures are nearer to the truth than the smooth rhetoric and facile images beloved of politician, businessman and media mogul. It encourages us to laugh at those whom we otherwise tend to fear. It has an apotropaic function. . . . By laying bare the ‘realities,’ however unpalatable, of... Read more
In a 1971 essay, H.G. Koenigsberger challenged the notion that the Reformation broke up a unified Europe. He criticizes historians and social scientists for assuming a norm of unity: “We have assumed that the theological and ecclesiastical unity of Catholic Christendom was its natural condition and that, in consequence, the Reformation was a dramatic break in this condition which ran counter to all previous Christian experience and which, in a sense, destroyed the natural order of things.” Much of the... Read more
2 Chronicles 3-4, the Chronicler’s account of the temple, uses the phrase “left and right” several times. Jachin and Boaz, the two pillars, are “left and right” at the porch (3:17). Ten basins are set up in two groups of five on the left and right of the court (4:6). Inside the holy place, ten lampstands and ten tables are similarly divided “left and right” (4:7-8). In the inner sanctuary are two cherubim who stand behind the ark to the... Read more
Leithart
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