Inner word

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:44 pm By Peter Leithart

Colin Gunton has cited Augustine’s doctrine of the “inner word” as a sign of his preference for abstract over the material/concrete. John Cavadini (Theological Studies 1997) responds: “Augustine’s distinctions, between the presignified and the signified, are evidence unobserved and unaccounted for by Gunton, who sees a distinction only between the ‘abstract’ and the ‘concrete’ or ‘material,’ distinctions which Augustine’s categories seem to override (the inner word is not ‘abstract’ but knowledge ‘intended’ in some very concrete act of the will,... Read more

Multiple selves

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:10 am By Peter Leithart

In his 1969 book on self-deception, Herbert Fingarette pointed out that self-deception could only work if the self was divisible, and suggested that the self is not a unit but a community of “subselves.” Fingarette traced this theme to Plato, and saw it intensified by the New Testament polarity of Flesh and Spirit. The multiple self flourished in medieval morality drama, which exteriorized interiority with a collection of separate characters. Read more

Early Modern Skepticism

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:53 pm By Peter Leithart

John D. Cox points out in his recent Baylor Press book on Shakespeare that ancient skepticism was not a-religious in the Renaissance and Reformation, but often served the purposes of reform. Erasmus, for instance, deployed skeptical arguments in challenging traditional, but corrupt, practices in the Catholic church. Like More, he used Lucian “to excoriate abuses in early sixteenth-century church and society, continuing a late-medieval tradition of clerical satire.” Read more

Tennis scoring

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:56 pm By Peter Leithart

Why 15-Love? “Love” is a corruption of the French “l’oeuf,” “the egg,” as in “the big goose egg.” Read more

Germanic war

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Tacitus records in Germania , 7, concerning the Germans in warfare: “They therefore carry with them when going to fight, certain images and figures taken out of their holy groves. What proves the principal incentive to their valour is, that it is not at random nor by the fortuitous conflux of men that their troops and pointed battalions are formed, but by the conjunction of whole families, and tribes of relations. Moreover, close to the field of battle are lodged... Read more

Sermon outline

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:01 am By Peter Leithart

INTRODUCTION Hope is a spring of human action. We do what we do because we hope to accomplish something by our actions, and when we are truly hopeless we do nothing at all. Scripture teaches us that we raise our children in hope, as well as in faith and love. But what should we hope for in our families? THE TEXT “Blessed is every one who fears the LORD, who walks in His ways. When you eat the labor of... Read more

Plato’s anti-democracy

Last updated on: November 19, 2007 at 10:12 pm By Peter Leithart

Reviewing Malcolm Schofield’s Plato: Political Philosophy in the TLS, Jonathan Lear offers this superb precis of Plato’s politics: “For Plato, one cannot understand politics unless one grasps the nature and structure of human desire. Political scientists must be students of the human soul: for one cannot understand the problem of democracy if one sticks to the rhetoric of its self-understanding in terms of equality and freedom. One needs to see these values as underwriting, and giving license to, a form... Read more

Plato’s anti-democracy

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

Romantic form

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:02 am By Peter Leithart

Formalism seems a classical obsession, but Angela Leighton argues in her recent On Form that the key moment came with romanticism. Schiller said that in a beautiful poem “the content should do nothing, the form everything . . . . the real artistic secret of the master consists in his annihilating the material by means of the form.” Coleridge found that Shakespeare’s characters are “ideal: they are not the things but the abstracts of the things which a great mind... Read more

God and Gold

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Walter Russell Mead’s recent God and Gold explores the uncanny success of Anglo-American power since the seventeenth century, what Mead calls “the biggest geopolitical story of modern times: the birth, rise, triumph, defence, and continuing grown of Anglo-American power despite continuing and always renewed opposition and conflict.” Since the late 17th century, Anglos have been on the winning side of every major global conflict, and the reasons, Mead says, reduce to the alliterative factors given in his title. It came... Read more