This struck me as interesting from Bernard of Clairvaux’s On Loving God:
To sum up: what infidel does not know that he has received light, air,
food–all things necessary for his own body’s life–from Him alone who
giveth food to all flesh (Ps. 136.25), who maketh His sun to rise on
the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the
unjust (Matt. 5.45). Who is so impious as to attribute the peculiar
eminence of humanity to any other except to Him who saith, in Genesis,
`Let us make man in Our image, after Our likeness’? (Gen. 1.26). Who
else could be the Bestower of wisdom, but He that teacheth man
knowledge? (Ps. 94.10). Who else could bestow virtue except the Lord of
virtue? Therefore even the infidel who knows not Christ but does at
least know himself, is bound to love God for God’s own sake. He is
unpardonable if he does not love the Lord his God with all his heart,
and with all his soul, and with all his mind; for his own innate
justice and common sense cry out from within that he is bound wholly to
love God, from whom he has received all things. But it is hard, nay
rather, impossible, for a man by his own strength or in the power of
free-will to render all things to God from whom they came, without
rather turning them aside, each to his own account, even as it is
written, `For all seek their own’ (Phil. 2.21); and again, `The
imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth’ (Gen. 8.21).
The last few sentences sound roughly similar to Luther’s understanding of the bondage of the will. Something to follow up, especially since Luther loved Bernard so much.
It’s been a couple of months since I wrote the first post with this title, so let me recap it. Dante engages in complex juxtapositions of mythological and historical figures in one and the same afterlife - the mythical heroes Hector and Aeneas are present, as are the real people Cicero and Seneca and St. Paul. Francesca da Rimini, a real person from Dante’s experience, is there as are the mythical women Dido and Helen of Troy. Guido da Montefeltro, another real person, is there, as are the mythical heroes Odysseus and Diomede. In discussing these juxtapositions, Lino Pertile notes that “The reason for this, rather than a lack of historical perspective on Dante’s part, is his belief in an eschatology to which history itself is subservient.”[1]
At the time of the first post I said I wasn’t yet sure what this means, but that I suspected it has something to do with the fact that the Divine Comedy is all about man’s final end and how he is to achieve it. Now, having finished the Comedy, having had the benefit of several excellent expository lectures in class, having written an expository paper of its central themes, and having done some extracurricular research, I think I can make a reasonable guess as to what the phrase “an eschatology to which history itself is subservient” means. I’d like to cover three headings: (1) the Augustinian theme of ascent from false loves to True Love, (2) the mystery of Divine Predestination, and (3) the Comedy’s view of the classical goddess Fortuna (”Fortune,” or “Chance”).
First, the Augustinian theme of ascent from false loves to True Love. The point of the Comedy is the Augustinian theme of the rise of the soul from numerous false loves to the true Love.[2] This is, of course, the Blessed Trinity - “the Love which moves the Sun and the stars” (Paradiso XXXIII.145). In the Inferno we see a downward progression from the best things the natural man can offer[3] to the greatest vice of all.[4] In Purgatorio, interestingly, we see God’s grace and love reversing all of this, taking natural man and joining him to the nature of Christ and progressively purging him of his false loves during the course of an entirely grace-powered ascent toward Himself. By the time we get to Paradiso, the intensity of God’s grace and love has made everything else dim, and has, as it were, “transhumanized” redeemed men. The best things that man has by creation are the least things he has by recreation. History itself, man’s whole story, has shown itself entirely subservient to God’s redemptive work.
Second, the mystery of Divine Predestination, which appears in Inferno VII.67-96, Purgatorio XVI, and Paradiso XIX-XXI. Among other mysteries which human reason cannot penetrate is the fact that most of the preeminent examples of natural human virtue (Virgil, Socrates, Cicero, etc.) are doomed to exist in Limbo, forever apart from God not, as Virgil laments, because they tried to reach Him but because they didn’t try to reach Him. And yet, several of their number (Cato, Statius, the Emperor Trajan, the Trojan warrior Ripheus) are inexplicably among the redeemed. Why these and not the rest, who seemed equally deserving from man’s point of view? Well, from a Christian point of view it would seem that although these had everything going against them, God’s grace and love reached down into history and subverted its power, raising up the undeserving for His own purposes and glory.
My third and last thought on the eschatology to which history itself is subservient rises from the same passages just cited. This is the theme of Fortune. The Ancient Greeks and Romans worshipped Fortune as a goddess whom they thought capriciously dealt out good and ill to men, irrespective of their just desserts. Cicero, following the Greek Pindar, spoke freely of “the Wheel of Fortune” (In Pisonem, 22). The poet Terence claimed that “Fortune favors the brave” (Fortuna favet fortis), while a popular saying held to the contrary that “Fortune favors the foolish” (Fortuna favet fatuis). One of the most famous passages expressing this belief in Fortune’s divinity and capriciousness comes from Pliny’s Natural History II.22, which says:
Among these discordant opinions mankind have discovered for themselves a kind of intermediate deity, by which our skepticism concerning God is still increased. For all over the world, in all places, and at all times, Fortune is the only god whom everyone invokes; she alone is spoken of, she alone is accused and is supposed to be guilty; she alone is in our thoughts; is praised and blamed and loaded with reproaches; wavering as she is, conceived by the generality of mankind to be blind, wandering, inconstant, uncertain, variable, and often favouring the unworthy. To her are referred all our losses and all our gains, and in casting up the accounts of mortals she alone balances the two pages of our sheet. We are so much in the power of chance, that chance it- self is considered as a God and the existence of God becomes doubtful.
Dante, well aware of these classical beliefs about “Dame Fortune,” will have none of it in his Christianized Aristotelian world. In Inferno VII.67-96, Dante inquires of Virgil:
“Master,” I asked of him, “now tell me too:
this Fortune whom you’ve touched upon just now -
what’s she, who clutches so all the world’s goods?”And he to me: “O unenlightened creatures,
how deep - the ignorance that hampers you!
I want you to digest my word on this.Who made the heavens and who gave them guides
was He whose wisdom transcends everything;
that every part may shine unto the other,He had the light apportioned equally;
similarly, for worldly splendors, he
ordained a general minister and guideto shift, from time to time, those empty goods
from nation unto nation, clan to clan,
in ways that human reason can’t prevent;just so, one people rules, one languishes,
obeying the decision she has given,
which, like a serpent in the grass, is hidden.Your knowledge cannot stand against her force;
for she foresees and judges and maintains
her kingdom as the other gods do theirs.The changes that she brings are without respite:
it is necessity that makes her swift;
and for this reason, men change state so often.She is the one so frequently maligned
even by those who should give praise to her -
they blame her wrongfully with words of scorn.But she is blessed and does not hear these things;
for with the other primal beings, happy,
she turns her sphere and glories in her bliss.[5]
Here Dante simply rejects the notion that Fortune is an independent goddess, dealing with men in a truly arbitrary fashion - rather, she is a created minister of God, carrying out His plans, plans which the reason of man cannot fathom. The theme is further developed in Purgatorio XVI.67-81, in Marco Lombardo’s discourse on free will, the relevant part of which is this:
You living ones continue to assign
to heaven every cause, as if it were
the necessary source of every motion.If this were so, then your free will would be
destroyed, and there would be no equity
in joy for doing good, in grief for evil.The heavens set your appetites in motion -
not all your appetites, but even if
that were the case, you have received both lighton good and evil, and free will, which though
it struggle in its first wars with the heavens,
then conquers all, if it has been well nurtured.On greater power and a better nature
you, who are free, depend; that Force engenders
the mind in you, outside the heavens’ sway.[6]
Here we see Dante denying pagan determinism and advocating instead the theologically-pregnant notion of human free will which, though truly free, is yet somehow mysteriously derived from and accountable to a “Force” outside of itself so that human beings, though resident within space and time, are, like their Creator Himself, not determined by space and time. In the following several lines, Lombardo argues that the soul, initially like a child, is prone to misuse its free will to seek after things it inappropriately loves more than they deserve and which beguile it from its true object of love, God. Free will thus needs law to guide and rein in its love, and this law comes from God.[7]
The theme of Fortune / Providence / Predestination culminates in Paradiso XIX-XXI, from which three Cantos this excerpt from XIX seems the most important to me:
therefore, the vision that your world receives
can penetrate into Eternal Justice
no more than eye can penetrate the sea;for though, near shore, sight reaches the sea floor,
you cannot reach it in the open sea;
yet it is there, but hidden by the deep.Only the light that shines from the clear heaven
can never be obscured - all else is darkness
or shadow of the flesh or fleshly poison.Now is the hiding place of living Justice
laid open to you - where it had been hidden
while you addressed it with insistent questions.For you would say: ‘A man is born along
the shoreline of the Indus river; none
is there to speak or teach or write of Christ.And he, as far as human reason sees,
in all he seeks and all he does is good:
there is no sin within his life or speech.And that man dies unbaptized, without faith.
Where is this justice then that would condemn him?
Where is his sin if he does not believe?’Now who are you to sit upon the bench,
to judge events a thousand miles away,
when your own vision spans so brief a space?of course, for him who would be subtle with me,
were there no Scriptures to instruct you, then
there would be place for an array of questions.O earthly animals, o minds obtuse!
The Primal Will, which of Itself is good,
from the Supreme Good - Its Self - never moved.So much is just as does accord with It;
and so, created good can draw It to
itself - but It, rayed forth, causes such goods.[8]
Given that all of this is taking place within the thought world of a synthesis between biblical and classical worlds, it is amazing to behold the artistry with which Dante the Christian has constructed what Pertile called “an eschatology to which history itself is subservient.” Dante’s world, the world of a Christian poet deeply familiar with Holy Scripture and expositing its themes with immensely creative use of the culture at hand, is a world whose final end and all the means which get it there are set forth by the sovereign, inscrutable, yet graciously loving, hand of the Triune God. Dante’s eschatology is one which vividly shows the unmerited grace and love of God totally defeating and redemptively transforming classical historical determinism.
- “Introduction to Inferno,” in The Cambridge Companion to Dante, second edition [Cambridge University Press, 2007], pg. 80. ↩
- See various posts of mine under the “St. Augustine” category. ↩
- Namely, the classical or “Cardinal” virtues: Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude. ↩
- Lucifer: high treason against his Benefactor. ↩
- Trans. Allen Mandelbaum [New York: Bantam Dell reissue, 2004], pp. 62-63. ↩
- Trans. Allen Mandelbaum [New York: Bantam Dell reissue, 2004], pp.148-149. ↩
- Interestingly, in Mandelbaum’s translation this section begins at Line 67 and ends at Line 96, just like the Inferno passage previously cited. Coincidence? Probably not. ↩
- Trans. Allen Mandelbaum [New York: Bantam Dell reissue, 2004], pp. 170-171. ↩
In recent weeks I’ve cited Calvin from Institutes Book II, Chapter 2, Section 15 several times on the goodness - and perhaps the necessity - of studying works outside of the Bible. Today I ran into this fantastic quote from Theodore Beza on the same subject:
Since God has endowed us, as members of the human race, with intelligence, we aer in duty bound to use this gift. We are intended to think things out, and to make orderly sense of what we see, and to understand that everything can be accomodated within a single comprehensive philosophy. But we cannot do this properly without training and hard work. In our respublica scholastica [scholastic republic], where doctors and students work together, it will be possible to acquire an education in good letters and in rational disciplines so that, as they used to say in antiquity, men of reason and intelligence will be metamorphosed out of wild and savage beasts. Wisdom came down to us from Moses, but also from the Egyptians, passing from them to the Greeks. Solomon and Daniel were learned in all those arts wrongly referred to by some people as “profane”, but which have the backing of Almighty God himself, and in which nothing appears which is not holy and right. In the same way, wisdom beyond that of ordinary men was imparted to the Prophets, wisdom which is also needed for the study of religion. Among the profana gentes [profane nations], especially among the Greeks, there was, by the grace of God, light in the darkness. Even in the Dark Ages the flame was kept alight, by Charlemagne and other Emperors, who founded in Europe academies which still flourish. These are the examples which have been heeded by the Senate of this city.[1]
Keep in mind that this is from Beza’s speech inaugurating the Academy in Geneva - a school for teaching ministers of the Gospel. You have to wonder what’s changed about “Calvinism” and “Calvinist” theology since Calvin’s and Beza’s day, and whether they would recognize certain forms of polemic against extrabiblical sources as legitimate “Calvinism” at all.
- Cited by Gillian Lewis, “The Geneva Academy,” in Calvinism in Europe 1540-1620, eds. Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis [Cambridge University Press, 1994], pg. 39. ↩
May
13
Ockham and the “Egocentric Predicament”
Filed Under 13th Century, 14th Century, Faith and Reason, Nominalism and Realism
The following is a quote from a review handout authored by my Medieval Philosophy professor, William Frank, at the University of Dallas. This is quite possibly the most intriguing thing I’ve ever read about William of Ockham. I’ve bold faced the relevant parts.
…There is a lot of anxiety aroused by the detachment of truth and knowledge from existence. What I mean is this. The default philosophical position is that knowledge represents reality and that mind is fundamentally receptive of reality. The conceit here is that knowledge require a commonality between thing and thought. The commonality is naively understood in terms of representation, something like a “picture.” One and the same intelligible structure is thought to be in both thing and in the mind. The idealist has the thing represent the idea; the realist has the idea represent the thing. Either way, some existent is common to knowing and being.
The terms of knowledge are universals; they involve both generality and predicability. How can they be true, even universally and necessarily true, if what exists primarily are singular individuals and especially if what is singular and individual is material, mutable, and only accessible through sense perception. If “to know” is to “have” what is real, then universals must be real. Philosophy assumes the task of accounting for that reality.
Ockham, who was anticipated by Abelard, thinks of the knowing mind differently. The units of knowledge, concepts, propositions, and the words and grammar in which they are expressed and communicated, are acts or works of the mind that are not images or representations but rather signs. Mind-at-work in language, with its words and grammar and with its concepts and logic, does not “have” or “possess” or “contain” things and their intelligibilities: it signifies them.
The inherited historical problem of nominalism arises subsequently in what later theologians and philosophers do with Ockham’s developments. Nominalism gets its “stink” or its “revolutionary luster,” depending on one’s conservative or liberal point of view,” when the natural basis of Ockham’s simple signification and supposition theory is dismissed. Ockham’s semantic theory is an account of human intellect as actual engagement with the world, wherein the sign (concept or word) cannot be detached from the signified (individuals and groups in their similarities and dissimilarities) withotu ceasing to be what it is, namely, a meaning or sign. But what happens is that the mind, outfitted with its sign-system, becomes its own kind of thing. Indeed, it becomes “the self” or “consciousness.” The philosophers and theologians begin to imagine that they think thoughts or concepts. In other words, mental entities become thought’s objects. These thought-objects are experienced as signs, but since they “exist in” the mind or are experienced “within consciousness,” one of the great problems that preoccupies modern philosophy is how to get outside the mind. How to account for any representative truthfulness of the mind’s picture of the world?…
Remember that Ockham is often described as totally destroying metaphysics and opening the door to unrestricted nominalistic skepticism in the sense that only individual things as individual things are knowable. If Dr. Frank is right in his take on Ockham, the man was actually pretty conservative himself but it was later thinkers who twisted him in the direction of nominalistic skepticism. At any rate, if I may use a philosophical pun here, the “clear and distinct ideas” about the downgrade from Ockham to the Cartesian difficulty of knowers being trapped inside their own heads, each taking his own take on things to be infallible Truth, is to me provocative and deserves some serious follow-up
I happened across these three articles by a Protestant, James Tonkowich, on aspects of Dante’s Divine Comedy:
A Taste To Acquire: Dante’s Paradise
Love and Suffering in Dante’s Purgatory
To Hell, With Dante
One of the most interesting points I got is from the article on Purgatory. Tonkowich points out that while we usually think that the center of Medieval man’s universe was man himself, it was actually Satan. There are some interesting theological implications here with respect to Dante’s Aristotelian cosmology, in which heavier things always fall to the center and lighter things are free to rise.
Since restoring this site a few months back, I have for several reasons decided not to allow comments on my posts. However, I have now created a new e-mail account for the site: questions-@-this-domain-name. If you would like to ask something about my posts or my work here, you may feel free to send it along to this address.
At this point, I only have one stipulation about the use of this e-mail address. I despise the rampant impersonality of the Internet, so do not hide behind an anonymous nickname. I will not violate your legitimate privacy concerns on the site, such as by giving out your e-mail address without your permission, but if you can’t at least tell me your real name and consent to letting me use it if I answer your question, I will not trouble to answer your question. I would like at a bare minimum to be able to respond to questions with something like, “John in Delaware wonders…,” but “John Smith in Delaware” would be even better. Other than that very general identification, your personal information is rightly your own and I will neither ask for it nor put it out in public without your express permission.
Please do keep in mind that I have a family and am a full-time student, so my time for actual discussions online is limited. Keep your question as brief as you can, and please don’t be offended if it either takes a while for me to get to it, or I don’t get to it all. Thank you!
Evangelical philosopher Winfried Corduan [”Philosophical Presuppositions Affecting Biblical Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics, Inerrancy, and the Bible: Papers from ICBI Summit II (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan Publishing House, 1984), pp. 495-513] interestingly uses a transcendental argument to justify biblical hermeneutics.
Starting with the widespread contemporary position that propositions have meaning only within larger contexts (whole complexes of beliefs), Corduan wants to know how someone can truly understand something if he is not situated within that thing’s larger context. A common answer to the question is that the interpreter is to use various means (e.g., grammatical-historical exegesis) to place himself in the larger context of the thing being interpreted. An equally common rejoinder to this is that it is impossible to do so because no one can literally get outside of their own head and get inside someone else’s. Complicated questions about the
existence of other minds, the legitimacy of private experience, and the very basis of language itself have to be faced (pg. 500).
Against the trend to subjectivize all “language games” in this way, which means that no one can ever truly understand anyone else, Corduan proposes that the solution is to ground language in ontology. By this he means that even when language refers to non-existent or false things, it still refers (at least in intention) to being, and thus has an objective grounding. At the very least, he argues, the proposition “I exist” not only refers to being (my own) but is actually undeniable (since I must exist in order to affirm that I exist). While explicitly steering clear of the Cartesian cogito at this point, Corduan nevertheless uses this example as proof that on at least one thing language has an undeniable, objective (extra-mental) grounding in ontology (pg. 502).
From there he argues that “intersubjectivity,” or the relations between my mind and the really existing minds of others, is also ontologically grounded. For “entailed in my existence is a facet of communality with the rest of humanity…intersubjectivity is a given within my subjectivity” (pg. 504). Furthermore, there is no such thing as a truly private language, for all language presupposes a communal relationship. He does not spell this point out, but it seems to me that he may mean that language, at least assuming that one is not merely talking to oneself, is necessarily directed at someone else for the purpose of communication. Certainly within a Christian framework, human persons are made to be in community by a God who is himself the ultimate personal community. It is not clear to me how Corduan would defend this outside of the Christian framework (probably because I don’t understand his very brief, but conceptually dense, discussion of Husserl and Schutz), but the basic point seems undeniable, at least, within a Christian ontology.
Having touched on the objective side of the hermeneutical task, Corduan moves to the subjective side, namely, the historically-conditioned nature of the materials to which hermeneutical tools are applied in order to gain understanding. While an intersubjective nexus (relations with other minds, forming a complex, and very personal, context for knowledge) is essential to understanding a given proposition, it is not always sufficient by itself. For instance, in the case of historical knowledge, we must further assume that historical events have the same kind of ontological status as contemporary ones. That is, if historical events do not have the same “status of being” as events in our own time, nothing prevents total skepticism about reports from the past. Corduan believes that “historical opacity” is basically foreign to human experience, and that therefore the assertion that historical events have the same ontological status as current ones is “almost impossible to defend” (pg. 507).
So, assuming that historical events have the same ontological status as current ones, it is possible for us to have real historical knowledge in much the same way as it is possible for us to carry on discourse with really existing other minds. However, “the meaning of historical propositions frequently goes beyond their literal signification.” We can see this when the proposition “The Greeks defeated the Persians at Salamis” is paired with a much larger significance than merely the isolated military battle: “Hellenic civilization assured its persistence at Salamis.” That is, had the Greeks not beaten Xerxes at Salamis, their existence as a civilization might very well have terminated, and all of subsequent history would have been different. The proposition about the battle could stand alone, bearing a definite and quite knowable meaning, but when viewed (as at least for us, historically downstream, it must be) as part of a larger framework, its meaning clearly is not limited to the bare factual references it contains. The second proposition is not logically entailed in the first, but it is nevertheless a fully legitimate additional meaning that arises from placing the first in a larger contextual system (pg. 508).
Corduan believes that his previous grounding of intersubjectivity in shared ontology eliminates the “conventionalist” argument that the above type of example shows that all knowledge is system-dependent and that no one can gain access to another’s system to truly understand it. Although “there are different systems of historical interpretation, we do have bridges and bedrock data which allow us to remove the arbitrariness from many historical meaning judgments” (pp. 508-509). For Corduan, “ontology transcends any particular system and provides a solid background against which any system can be judged or understood to a certain extent” (pg. 509).
Applying all of this to biblical hermeneutics, Corduan argues that the Bible cannot be understood apart from entering into its presupposed theistic worldview. One does not have to believe that theistic worldview, but one must accept it as a given of the Bible in order to truly understand the Bible. Because the most basic precondition for understanding the Bible is at least a conceptual grasp of its theistic assumptions (obviously a believer would have more than a mere conceptual grasp), philosophical systems per se are not necessary to understanding the Bible: “One need not be a Wittgensteinian or Quinean, perhaps not even a Thomist, to understand the Bible.” What such systems, or at least awareness of them, can do is to “clarify our implicitly present principles at this point.” That is, having some grasp of the philosophical and theological systems by which we all modify in some way or another the basic theistic worldview can serve to help us understand better not just our own community’s interpretation of the Bible, but that of other communities as well.
Corduan closes with an application to the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture. This doctrine does not mean that people can have exhaustive understanding of Scripture: “There are differences based on expertise, background, and divine illumination,” and so “There will always be some opacity” (pp. 510-511). By grounding language in ontology, the rather obvious gaps between communities can be bridged sufficiently to allow mutual understanding while yet still acknowledging the very real differences between them based on the aforementioned factors. Understanding is relativized in the sense that “the understanding of any particular community is governed by its own concepts and language games,” but this does not result in skepticism because language and understanding have already been placed within three related ontological contexts that all parties share: “an intersubjective nexus, an ontology of historical events, and the presence of an existent God” (pg. 511).
Just one more thing I don’t have time to follow up on right now (I have exams this coming week)….
If you’re tired of the “creation wars” that are presently ripping some quarters of Protestantism to shreds, there is a whole lot of interpretive wisdom to be found in Augustine’s Confessions, Book 12. Pay particular attention to Chapters 9-13 (on the relation of temporal reckoning to Genesis 1:1), 17-19 (on interpretive charity toward other lovers of Scripture), and chapters 23-25 (on attempts to dogmatically state what Moses himself understood, as opposed to the truths which he correctly reported).
This is great stuff, friends. I commend it to all of you, but most especially to those of you who get all wrapped up in the “creation wars” and think that the issues at work in these heated battles are literally ones on which the integrity of the whole Christian Faith stands. As a side note, I was reading in City of God (Book 12.10-11) the other day and found a lengthy section expositing biblical chronology from the time of Adam, and since this section affirmed that Scripture records 6,000 years of time it just might be of interest to compare this with Augustine’s views in the above cited chapters from the Confessions.
At any rate, there is one passage in particular that I wanted to highlight, because it excellently sums up what I myself think of all the time and energy that goes into refuting other people’s “heresies” about creation:
But this I will not have, this I do not love, when they assert that Moses did not think as I say but did think as they say. Even if they happened to be right, nevertheless their temerity in making the assertion comes from arrogance, not from knowledge; it is born not of vision but of swelling pride. And therefore, Lord, your judgments are terrible, because your truth is not my property nor the property of this man or that man; it belongs to all of us whom you publicly call into communion with it, warning us in most terrible terms that we must not hold it as private to ourselves lest we be deprived of it altogether. For whoever claims as his personal possession what you have given for the enjoyment of all, and wants to have as his own what belongs to everyone, is driven out from what is in common to what really is his own, that is, from a truth to a lie. (Confessions 12.25, Rex Warner translation).
Nothing really profound here; just an observation. In Book XI, Chapter 5 of his Confessions, it looks to me like without mentioning Plato or anything about Platonism Augustine is criticizing Plato’s creation account in the Timaeus. The phrases Augustine uses, the issues he highlights, could have been taken right out of Timaeus, as may be readily seen by comparing the two. This is significant for several reasons, not least of which because Augustine is famous for synthesizing Christianity and Platonism, and also because the Timaeus was hugely influential in the Middle Ages.
I don’t have time to expand this right now, but it’s interesting to me because it’s just one more example of a pre-Reformation “syncretist” being fully aware of the limitations of Greek philosophy when set next to Divine Revelation, and refusing to follow the former when it contradicts the latter. There’s no question in Augustine’s mind of making Revelation fit philosophical categories. When he can use philosophy as a tool to explicate Christianity, he does so enthusiastically and with great erudition and rhetorical force. But when he can’t use it as a tool to explicate Revelation because it is simply incompatible with Revelation, he dumps it.
I guess what I’m getting at here is that I just don’t get where the slurs on the Fathers and Medievals from certain modes of Reformed thinking come from. The bias against philosophy in theology gets really tiring sometimes, not to mention counterproductive.
On the difference between leisure and amusement, noted in another recent post, Aristotle says that leisure time cannot be filled with play, because “Play is a thing to be chiefly used in connexion with one side of life - the side of occupation. (…Occupation is the companion of work and exertion: the worker needs relaxation: play is intended to provide relaxation…The feelings which play produces in the mind are feelings of relief from exertion; and the pleasure it gives provides relaxation.” On the other hand, “Leisure is a different matter: we think of it as having in itself intrinsic pleasure, intrinsic happiness, intrinsic felicity.” Happiness of that order does not belong to those who are engaged in occupation: it belongs to those who have leisure” (Politics VIII.3.4-5, Barker translation).
A bit later he continues, “Men fall, it is true, into a way of making amusements the end of their life. The reason for their doing so is that the end of life would seem to involve a kind of pleasure. This kind of pleasure is not the ordinary, but in their search for it men are apt to mistake ordinary pleasure for it; and they do so because pleasure generally has some sort of likeness to the ultimate end of human activity. This end is desirable just for itself, and not for the sake of any future result; and the pleasures of amusement are similar - they are not desired for the sake of some result in the future, but rather because of something that happened in the past, that is to say, the exertion and pain which have already been undergone” (Politics VIII.5.13).
In other words, true leisure is not coming home from work, popping open a cold one, zapping a frozen dinner to eat with a plastic fork, and plopping down in the easy chair to watch three or five hours of TV before bed. Nor is true leisure what Americans want as they “work for the weekend.” True leisure is connected with seeking things that are good in and of themselves, not good in relation to something else (like recuperating from work). Leisure is neither entertainment nor play, and to confuse them is to confuse the condition which is necessary for building and maintaining culture with things which merely “kill time” and serve artificial, shallow, selfish ends.
Aristotle’s idea of leisure, whether right or wrong, provides us with yet another interesting way to evaluate the nature and quality of our own lives.
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