Bakhtin wrote that laughter “liberated, to a certain extent, from censorship, oppression, and from the stake. But . . . laughter is essentially not an external but an interior form of truth . . . . Laughter liberates not only from exterior censorship but first of all from the great interior censor; it liberates from the fear that developed in man during thousands of years; fear of the sacred, of prohibitions, of the past, of power . . . .... Read more
Thomas Chalmers wrote in his Application of Christianity to the Commercial and Ordinary Affairs of Life (1821 edition): “Tell us, if the hold we have of a man’s own personal advantage were thus broken down, in how far the virtues of the mercantile world would survive it? Would not the world of trade sustain as violent a derangement on this mighty hold being cut asunder, as the world of nature would on the suspending of the law of gravitation? Would... Read more
James J. O’Donnell notes in a superb introductory essay to Augustine’s City of God that the first 10 books, written in a classical, Ciceronian style that later yields to the plainer style of Christian exhortation, exhibit “measured symmetries” that “gradually disintegrate in books 11-22.” In particular, referring to the CCL printing of the Dombart-Kalb text, he observes, “Books 1 and 4 comprise 2569 lines together, Books 2 and 3, 2568; Books 6 and 7 comprise 2211, 8 and 9, 2222;... Read more
H. -I. Marrou wrote in his doctoral thesis, “Saint Augustin compose mal.” Like Augustine himself, though, Marrou later published a Retractatio to accompany a new edition of his dissertation, in which he described his comment on Augustine’s composition “jugement d’un jeune barbare ignorant et presomptueux.’ Read more
INTRODUCTION In the Pentateuch, Moses came down from the mountain and led Israel through a wilderness of rebellion and judgment. Jesus the new Moses comes down from the mountain at the head of a great multitude (8:1). But his journey is a journey of healing, not judgment. THE TEXT “When Jesus came down from the mountain, large crowds followed Him. And a leper came to Him and bowed down before Him, and said, “Lord, if You are willing, You can... Read more
Micah 7:1: For I am like the fruit pickers, like the grape gatherers; there is not a cluster of grapes to eat, or a first-ripe fig which I crave. As we saw in the sermon this morning, Micah’s search for fruit on the vines and fig trees of Israel anticipates Jesus’ similar search for satisfying, delicious fruit from the Israel of his day. Both Micah and Jesus are disappointed. Micah finds only briers, and Jesus finds only leaves, which cannot... Read more
Every church season has a color, and the color for Epiphany is green. Why? In Scripture as in life, green is a color of life. The righteous will flourish in old age, says the Psalmist; they shall be full of sap and very green. Solomon tells us that the one who trusts in riches will fall, but the righteous will be like a green leaf. (more…) Read more
Pamuk again: “to read well is not to pass one’s eyes and one’s mind slowly and carefully over a text: it is to immerse oneself utterly in its soul. This is why we fall in love with only a few books in a lifetime. Even the most finely honed personal library is made up of a number of books that are all in competition with one another. The jealousies among these books endows the creative writer with a certain gloom.... Read more
Pamuk again, summarizing a comment from Proust concerning reading: “There is, he said, a part of us that stays outside the text to contemplate the table at which we sit, the lamp that illuminates the plate, the garden around us, or the view beyond. When we notice such things, we are at the same time savoring our solitude and the workings of our imagination and congratulating ourselves on possessing greater depth than those who do not read.” From the same... Read more
In an essay on Notes from Underground , the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk suggests that Dostoevsky’s “anger was not a simply expression of anti-Westernism or hostility to European thinking: What Dostoyevsky[his spelling] resented was that European thought came to his country at second hand. What angered him was not its brilliance, its originality, or its utopian leanings but the facile pleasure it afforded those who embraced it. He hated seeing Russian intellectuals seize upon an idea just arrived from Europe... Read more
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