Wallace again on Timon of Athens . Wallace argues that Shakespeare has written a play to explore Seneca’s society of benefits and gratitude, and shows that the classical model of social order is impossible: “the cast would appear to have been designed to test the Senecan hypothesis about the nature of a just society and to find the classical model hopelessly wanting. Natural obligations derived from mutual benefits could never be the basis for a healthy society because mankind is... Read more
Wallace again on Seneca in Shakespeare: “The first separat e publication of De Benficiis in an English translation was Nicholas Haward’s The Line of Liberalitie in 1569, which included only the first three books, but William Baldwin’s popular Treatise of Morall Philosophie had appeared in 1547 and contained one chapter ‘Of benefyttes, and of unthankfulness’ which Baldwin soon expanded into a longer essay in later editions entitled ‘Of giving and receiving.’ Arthur Golding’s translation of De Beneficiis was published in... Read more
In a 1986 article in Modern Philology , John Wallace argues that Timon of Athens is “Shakespeare’s Senecan Study,” reflecting on the issues raised by Seneca’s de Beneficiis : “Shakespeare must have been thinking of Seneca, but a safer argument could have been constructed on the premise that Shakespeare was testing the prevalent Senecan ethos rather than the book itself. Gift giving was a regular feature of Elizabethan and Jacobean courts, and many contemporary references to benefits do not refer... Read more
Paul Cantor describes three of Shakespeare’s Roman plays as a trilogy, moving from the Republic ( Coriolanus ) to the early empire ( Julius Caesar ) to the decadence of Octavian ( Antony and Cleopatra ). Together they form “a kind of historical trilogy, dramatizing the rise and fall of the Roman Republic, in a sense the tragedy of Rome itself, in which the Republic is eventually destroyed by its very success in conquering the world.” (more…) Read more
In her Leviticus as Literature , the late Mary Douglas offers some interesting possibilities for interpreting the prohibition of eating fat and for the arrangement of animal portions on the altar. Her interpretation is guided by her recognition of analogies between Sinai, the tabernacle, and the body, both of the animal and of the person. Within this overall parallel, which she finds in Jewish mystical writing and early Christian poetry (like that of Ephrem), the fat corresponds to the “boundary... Read more
James Jordan points out in an essay on the Ascension offering that the early chapter of Genesis follow a sacrificial sequence: Sacrifice outside the garden, then Enoch ascends to the Lord, then the world is washed in the flood, and finally Noah joins his forefather on a high place. This sequence helps to fill out Peter’s claim that the flood is a baptism: It would seem that Noah is saved from the water, rather than saved by water. But in... Read more
Michael Oakeshott says that the university provides one central gift, the “gift of the interval”: Here was an opportunity to put aside the hot allegiances of youth without the necessity of acquiring new loyalties to take their place. Here was an interval in which a man might refuse to commit himself. Here was a break the tyrannical course of irreparable human events; a period in which to look round upon the world without the sense of an enemy at one’s... Read more
In his social history of Christian Worship, Frank Senn summarizes the developments of the medieval period with regard to the Eucharist. He begins by challenging the assumption that medieval society was held together by “the church.” He notes that the church was often divided and conflicted, and that there were also political conflicts between ecclesiastical and political leadership. It was not the church that provided the “social glue of the Middle Ages,” but the specific rite of the church –... Read more
Eucharistic prayers were eventually removed almost entirely from the Eucharistic celebration, so that the church ended up, as Louis Bouyer has provocatively put it, “a eucharist in which there is no longer and eucharist at all properly speaking.” To grasp what Bouyer is saying, it is helpful to cite some prayers from different stages of liturgical history. From the Apostolic Constitution of Hippolytus: (more…) Read more
Christoph Schwobel has a dense but helpful overview of Pannenberg’s theology in David Ford’s The Modern Theologians. Pannenberg insists from the beginning of his career that history is revelation, and his whole theology is an effort to hammer out the implications of that claim. Like Barth, he insists that revelation is not the disclosure of truths about God, but God’s own self-disclosure in history. Yet, he also insists that this revelation in history is always indirect, and that it will... Read more
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