Typically, the parable of the tares and wheat has been understood as a description of church history. Jesus is the owner sowing the field, the devil sows tares into the church (like Judas), and for that reason the church remains a “mixed multitude” until the end of the age. The parable of the mustard seed is a parable about the history of the church as well. Jesus has only a handful of close disciples during His lifetime; the kingdom is... Read more
Athanasius again: As a musician brings out “a single tune as the result, so also the Wisdom of God, handling the Universe as a lyre . . . produces well and fittingly, as the result, the unity of the universe and of its order, himself remaining unmoved with the Father . . . (for) by one and the same act of the will he moves all things simultaneously, and not at intervals, but all collectively.” Read more
Classical theology is often charged with dealing in static timeless categories, and there is no doubt something to this in some writers. But, not all by any means. In his account of sin, Athanasius says that sin has momentum because of the nature of the soul. The soul is “mobile” ( eukinetos ) and “she cannot at all cease from movement.” This, of course, is what makes sin so dangerous: Like a mad charioteer, she drives “the members of the... Read more
Of all the people I’ve seen on film recently, the one I’d most want to be is David Berlinski, whom Ben Stein interviewed extensively in his Paris apartment that reeked with sophistication and culture. Berklinski, by his own definition a “secular Jew” with no memory of Hebrew, has just published The Devil’s Delusion , a response to the militant atheists. I like his Paris home; I also like the way he writes: “A little philosophy, as Francis Bacon observed, ‘inclineth... Read more
In an intriguing piece in TNR , writer Cinque Henderson – who identifies himself as one of the few remaining Clinton supporters among African-Americans – explains Obama’s use of “hoodwinked” and “bamboozled” (not the first words to spring to Obama’s lips, one would think) in the South Carolina primary: “It comes from a scene in Malcolm X , where Denzel Washington warns black people about the hidden evils of ‘the White Man’ masquerading as a smiling politician: ‘Every election year,... Read more
Kristeva says that contemporary culture separates affects from language, which leads to a loss of soul. Souls are empty. To help, our culture offers drugs and entertainment. Drugs flatten experience to a drone; entertainment dazzles momentarily with two-dimensional images. So do our solutions increase the problem. Flat remedies for flat souls. Read more
Kristeva’s distinction of semiotic and symbolic is intended to overcome the dualism of traditional linguistic theories, the dualism of body and language, or matter and language. For Kristeva, the “semiotic” is the way drives are organized or “discharged” in language, and thus includes everything that is meaningful in language but which is not part of the signifying or representational aspect of language. The “symbolic” is the realm of meaning as traditionally understood, the realm of structure, grammar, semantics. (more…) Read more
Julia Kristeva notes that Saussure’s linguistic theory permits “linguistics to claim a logical, mathematical formalization on the one hand, but on the other, it definitely prevents reducing a language or text to one law or one meaning.” This latter point is true because by splitting the sign into signified and signifier, Saussure allowed his followers to envision “language as a free play, forever without closure,” though this was never developed by Saussure himself. (more…) Read more
Desmond thinks that dialectic makes some gains: It affirms the “complex sense of unity,” appreciates mediation, critiques dualism, defends the “interplay and community of immanence and transcendence.” But dialectic cannot be the final moment of metaphysics. Why? (more…) Read more
Desmond points out that an origin but be both one and more than one: “even if we want to say that the origin of coming to be possesses some kind of ‘unity’ with itself, this ‘unity’ cannot be univocal. Why so? Because, such a univocal unity would be hard to distinguish from inert self-sameness. And were the latter the ‘unity’ of the origin, the origin could not be an origin at all. For an origin is that out of which... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In