Books

Confession: Why This is Not an Apologetics Website (Part Four)

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This post carries forward from Part 1, which outlined my main reasons for rejecting apologetics because at best it merely uses (rather than fosters) what is public for factional ends, shuts down conversations, absorbs political modes of engagement that are inherently divisive and immune to inquiry, adopts psychological stances that are poisonous, and absorbs metaphysical elements from the 20th century that ought to be rejected. It also carries forward from Part 2, which adds some autobiographical notes to the themes brought out in Part 1.

In some ways, it takes up some few themes of Part 3, which was a rather long reminiscence about several things that a professor I had –a former St. John’s student– told me about what the person of Christ meant, with some final remarks from me about the need for public language of value and worth, within which we articulate the merits of any and all of our commitments — religious or non-religious, Christian or otherwise.

Here, I recall a conference I attended in the John G. Rangos Family Building (photo in the banner, above) at St. Vladimir’s Seminary in NY that brainstormed, quite often, about creating an Orthodox Great Books College, and note the important objections to such a project that were raised at the conference, concerns relevant to my rejection of, and grave concerns about, the whole enterprise of apologetics. I also examine the approach taken by the Dean of that Seminary to theology, and compare it unfavorably with my apprehensions about apologetics from the first post. 

I should say at the outset that I value the mission and work that St. Vladimir’s does in producing good priests and in raising the bar of scholarship in the English-speaking Orthodox world. I’d never have heard the concerns about religious education if I’d not attended the conference that St. Vladimir’s hosted. I should also say that I like Fr. John Behr as a person very much, and respect much of the work that he does, administratively and academically. I do, however, think that Fr. John is wrong on his position about what theology is (and I take this to be central to his project); this ties into why I have no interest in apologetics, why I have chosen to focus on what is held in common, and how neglect of what is held in common leads down some awful roads. 

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Poetry, Power, and the Arrest of Thought (Part One)

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We must always be seeking better rituals and conventions; but we moderns tend to gag at these as stifling to freedom. So we Romantic moderns, especially we Americans, tend to see the issue as simple: rituals and conventions are likely bad, as they are almost certainly not good. Cowboys like things to be so simple. At some level of our common cultural judgments, inherited from our dual heritage stemming from both Puritanism and the Enlightenment, we see ritual and convention as oppressive Catholic priestcraft, or else as either Monarchical or Aristocratic elitist oppression. It is simply in the water here — even if one were to be an American Catholic Monarchist.

Plato was also quite wary of rituals and conventions of a sort that he called “poetry” (ποίησις, from ποιέω “to make, to show, to put/place”), although he practiced a form of it. Although his concerns about convention and “poetry” come from a different place than our concerns about convention and ritual, there are important lessons for us both where his concerns overlap with ours and where they do not overlap.

We are not ourselves terribly troubled by what we call poetry — which we see as perhaps an expensive or eccentric taste at worst, and as a liberating possibility for the human spirit at best. For us, it is decidedly not conventional, or ritual. For Plato, however, Poetry was something very different; when we translate the word ποίησις as “poetry” we collude with an infelicitous conflation of two very different enterprises. We consider “poetry” as part of the “arts”, but the ancient Greeks didn’t have a word to designate the group of disciplines and activities that we would call “art”. Instead, they had the word “τέχνη” (“skill”), which would cover the range of “τέχναι” from medicine to ship-building to masonry to cooking to farming to dancing to making love to poetry, &c. [1] Disambiguation is helpful. Were we to first trace some of the historical backdrop that occasioned Plato’s concern, we might be in a better place to understand Plato’s Socrates, only then later to see an overwhelming number of analogues in our own world.

Before we look at Plato, then, let us sketch a few outlines of the nature of “poetry” prior to him.
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Excerpt #6 — Thomas de Zengotita on the Word “Like”: One Effect of Media Penetration on the Moulding of Speech

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I wish I could so recommend Thomas de Zengotita’s book Mediated highly enough to make you all go out and buy it this instant. Sadly, it’s unlikely I could pull this off. Continue reading →

The Origins of Political Authority in Augustine of Hippo, City of God 19 (Part 3)

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Part 1 here; this post continues part 2. Here, we cover the second half of 19.4. Continue reading →

The Origins of Political Authority in Augustine of Hippo, City of God 19 (Part 2)

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Continued from part one, which both introduced one or two themes from The City of God  and summarized the synopsis of classical thought with which Augustine opens Book 19.1-3 of the same. Here, we cover the first half of 19.4.

Having listed Varro’s summary of all possible philosophies, Augustine concurs with him that any possible philosophy ultimately reduces to one of  three positions. Happiness, the ultimate good of the human being (which is a body-soul unity), is had (A) for the sake of trained virtue, or (B) trained virtue is had for the sake of certain natural goods (vi&., the health of mind and body), or (C) both virtue and natural goods (i.e., health of mind and body) are desired together. Like Varro, Augustine opts for (C), conceding that the soul and its pleasures are greater than those of the body, but granting that both virtue and natural goods are desirable for their own sake. Varro also opines that the life of virtue should be pursued both for one’s own sake and that of others, that his positions are certain (against the Sceptics of the New Academy), and that the path to the final good entails both the active and the contemplative life. (Varro is indecisive on the matter of whether one should adopt the manners and lifestyle of the surrounding culture, of that of the Cynics.)

Augustine now gives “what response the City of God makes when questioned on each of” the points of Varro’s summary of classical thought. [XIX.4, Dyson, 918]  Continue reading →