Augustine’s non-Aristotelian Universe

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

Augustine argues in Confessions that time is not reducible to the movement of the celestial bodies. Aristotle agreed; but, as Ricoeur points out, the arguments that Augustine used departed radically from Aristotle. First, if the sun and stars stopped moving, and yet a potter’s wheel continued to move, time would continue. As Ricoeur says, by this argument “the stars are thus reduced to the level of other things in motion.” Second, Augustine hypothesizes about days of greater or lesser length.... Read more

Hugeness

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

Jason Zengerle has an interesting piece in the TNR on evangelical conversions to Orthodoxy. At the end of the article, he quotes Jordan DeRenzo, who converted to Orthodoxy when her Baptist pastor, Wilbur Ellsworth, converted. She says: “Coming to the Orthodox Church means that I am in communion with that church no matter where I am in the world, that I can go into that church wherever I am and have the same liturgy and celebrate the same way. I’ll... Read more

Faith and Reason

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:41 pm By Peter Leithart

For centuries, Christians have posed the dilemma of Christian theology as a problem of faith v. reason. That’s a non-starter, a concession of defeat, for it assumes that there can be such a thing as a faith-free rationality. But there cannot be. What we have is not a conflict of faith and reason, but a conflict of various faith-reasons or reason-faiths. Read more

Homoousios

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:43 pm By Peter Leithart

We fondly look back at the Council of Nicea as a solution to the problem of Arianism, and see the homoousios as the key to this solution. Things are not nearly so tidy. Robert Letham neatly summarizes the problems associated with the term in his recent book on Orthodoxy: “As for homoousios (of the same substance), this term had been used by the gnostics, never to mean equality or identity. Even worse, it was associated with Paul of Samosata and... Read more

Liturgical footwear

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:46 pm By Peter Leithart

Henry Chadwick notes, “Some Christians late in the fourth century, especially round Brescia, walked barefoot after the example of Moses at the burning bush or the prophet Isaiah who went barefoot for three years. Successive bishops deplored this, evidently in vain. Much ancient evidence records the axiom that for cultic acts bare feet are necessary; Augustine himself found it impossible to stop the practice when he became a bishop. Monks in ancient Egypt removed their shoes for communion. In Syria... Read more

Wordsworth and the Picturesque

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:48 pm By Peter Leithart

According to a 1964 article in Modern Philology by John Nabholtz, Wordsworth intended his Guide to the Lakes (first published in 1810; fifth edition in 1835) as a corrective to picturesque writers like Gilpin. He intended his book to model how landscape writing should be done, and most critics have taken Wordsworth at his word. Nabholtz, however, points out that Wordsworth makes regular positive reference to the picturesque tradition he is supposed to be combating. Wordsworth did observe that the... Read more

Pauline Wordsworth

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am By Peter Leithart

In a 1993 article in the Review of English Studies , Colin Pedley points out the similarities between the cadences of this passage from “Tintern Abbey” and Paul’s triumphant conclusion to Romans 8: My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make, Knowing that Nature never did betray The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege, Through all the years of this our life, to lead From joy to joy: for she can so inform The mind that is within... Read more

English Gesellschaft

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:36 pm By Peter Leithart

In an 1817 letter, Wordsworth complained to Daniel Stuart, “I see clearly that the principal ties which kept the different classes of society in a vital and harmonious dependence upon each other have, within these thirty years, either been greatly impaired or wholly dissolved. Everything has been put up to market and sold for the highest price it would buy . . . . All . . . moral cement is dissolved, habits and prejudices are broken and rooted up,... Read more

Gilpin and the Lakes

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

If Repton created the scenery that resonated with Romantics, William Gilpin was the one who put the Lake Country on the map. Travel writer and theorist of the picturesque, Gilpin was the writer most responsible for the 18th-century enthusiasm for scenic tourism. He was also the most influential of those who, according to Maggie Lane, “‘discovered’ and enthused about the Lake District in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.” Encouraged by Gilpin, “People of leisure began to travel northwards,... Read more

Repton and Romanticism

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

A mania for “improvements” gripped the upwardly mobile land-owning classes of the 18th century. By the end of the century, the landscape styles of Lancelot “Capability” Brown were in decline. Richard Payne Knight put the objections to Brownian style in poetic form in his 1794 The Landscape , launching the “picturesque controversy”: Oft when I’ve seen some lonely mansion stand, Fresh from th’improver’s desolating hand, ‘Midst shaven laws, that far around it creep In one eternal undulating sweep; And scattered... Read more