“For Thomas [(as distinguished from Richard of St. Victor, Bonaventure, etc.)], innascibility, being strictly negative, is a secondary property [(proprietas)]; it comes in solely to qualify the paternity of God[, which is primary]. Indeed, negation can express the dignitas characteristic of a property only in virtue of the affirmation on which it is founded. It is thus that innascibility presupposes paternity. To be sure, innascibility can seem more perfect than paternity, inasmuch as innascibility is utterly incommunicable, whereas paternity is in fact communicated to creatures. But if one attends to it, innascibility manifests in reality the incommunicable character of the divine paternity itself: the divine paternity is utterly unique and transcendent; only God the Father is therefore totally and uniquely Father, without having ever been [a] son--as Hilary, following Athanasius, had stressed so eloquently. Innascibility expresses with great simplicity the incommunicability of the divine paternity.
“In its strictly negative sense, innascibility exercises, therefore, a corrective function with respect to all erroneous projection of human paternity onto God.”
Fr. Emmanuel Durand, O.P., “Le Père en sa relation constitutive au Fils selon saint Thomas d’Aquin.” Revue thomiste 107, no. 1 (2007): 69 (47-72). A difficult article, which I can't yet say I've mastered. Cf. http://liberlocorumcommunium.blogspot.com/2009/11/calling-fathers-father.html.
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Grafton on the Liber locorum communium
"How better to put the case against the humanist practice of compiling commonplace books full of decontextualized quotations than to say that
like a good sausage machine, it rendered all texts, however dissimilar in origin or style, into a uniform body of spicy links that could add flavor to any meal--and whose origins did not always bear thinking about when one consumed them."
Keith Thomas, reviewing Anthony Grafton's What was history? The art of history in early modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007), in "Fighting over history," The New York review of books 56, no. 19 (December 3, 2009): 66.
Thomas on Grafton on the artes historicae
"then as now, it is doubtful whether the writers of historical theory influenced many of the leading historians of their own day. The greatest histories written in the period, like Paolo Sarpi's History of the Council of Trent (1619) or Edward, Earl of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1702-1704) owed nothing to the artes historicae.
"In the preface to his Histoire d'Angleterre (1724), the French Huguenot historian Paul de Rapin-Thoyras dismissed the prescriptions of the theorists as too vague and too contradictory to be of any practical use. The only rules followed by the best historians were those of reason and common sense. (In the same spirit Rapin's modern counterparts ignore the epistemological problems raised by such postmodernist writers as Jacques Derrida as irrelevant to the actual writing of history.)"
Keith Thomas, reviewing Anthony Grafton's What was history? The art of history in early modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007), in "Fighting over history," New York review of books 56, no. 19 (December 3, 2009): 66. "Grafton, however, maintains that the artes historicae deserve . . . 'another history,' one that places the emphasis on their connection with 'the practice of cutting-edge scholarship'", and stresses again "that the radical methodological innovations pioneered by Patrizi, Baudouin, Bodin, et al., 'intellectual earthquakes,' as he calls them, bore a close resemblance to the tenets of the new critical history propounded by Le Clerc and Perizonius at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and subsequently enshrined in the University of Göttingen's school of history, which, under the leadership of Johann Christian Gatterer, laid the foundations for the great nineteenth-century German tradition of disciplined historical research exemplified by giants like Leopold von Ranke and Theodor Mommsen. 'Bodin by himself,' Grafton claims, [following 'several of [his] predecessors',] 'adumbrated almost every element of Gatterer's new method'" (68).
"In the preface to his Histoire d'Angleterre (1724), the French Huguenot historian Paul de Rapin-Thoyras dismissed the prescriptions of the theorists as too vague and too contradictory to be of any practical use. The only rules followed by the best historians were those of reason and common sense. (In the same spirit Rapin's modern counterparts ignore the epistemological problems raised by such postmodernist writers as Jacques Derrida as irrelevant to the actual writing of history.)"
Keith Thomas, reviewing Anthony Grafton's What was history? The art of history in early modern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2007), in "Fighting over history," New York review of books 56, no. 19 (December 3, 2009): 66. "Grafton, however, maintains that the artes historicae deserve . . . 'another history,' one that places the emphasis on their connection with 'the practice of cutting-edge scholarship'", and stresses again "that the radical methodological innovations pioneered by Patrizi, Baudouin, Bodin, et al., 'intellectual earthquakes,' as he calls them, bore a close resemblance to the tenets of the new critical history propounded by Le Clerc and Perizonius at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and subsequently enshrined in the University of Göttingen's school of history, which, under the leadership of Johann Christian Gatterer, laid the foundations for the great nineteenth-century German tradition of disciplined historical research exemplified by giants like Leopold von Ranke and Theodor Mommsen. 'Bodin by himself,' Grafton claims, [following 'several of [his] predecessors',] 'adumbrated almost every element of Gatterer's new method'" (68).
A symbol of the unknown
"Take the Mass out of Christmas. That will leave only a symbol of the unknown."Ralph McInerny, "Sealed with an X," The Catholic Thing, 17 November 2009. (Those who rail against the use of Xmas forget what the X- (and the -mas) meant as early as 1551 in English.)
Saturday, December 19, 2009
Get ready, Israel, for the arrival of the Lord, because he is coming
Paratus esto, Israel, in occursum Domini, quoniam venit.
Third antiphon for Lauds and Vespers, Saturday between 17 and 23 December, inclusive. An occursus was a meeting ("for a meeting of the Lord," i.e. "to meet the Lord"), but Blaise's Lexicon latinitatis medii aevi gives also arrivée (arrival, coming).
Third antiphon for Lauds and Vespers, Saturday between 17 and 23 December, inclusive. An occursus was a meeting ("for a meeting of the Lord," i.e. "to meet the Lord"), but Blaise's Lexicon latinitatis medii aevi gives also arrivée (arrival, coming).
Monday, December 14, 2009
Out of sight, out of mind
"Two major events in the ensuing reign of Constantine set the Near East on the course we have been pursuing through the mosaics. The first event was the emperor's conversion to Christianity and the subsequent establishment of Christianity as the state religion of the empire. The second was the removal of the central administration from Rome to the newly named Constantinople at Byzantium. The city on the Bosporus was soon to be recognized as a second Rome, or, in the words of the Cappadocian father Gregory of Nyssa, the 'newborn Rome.' By the early fifth century the city could simply be called Rome without further specification, and by the sixth century it is likely that, in the Near East at least, those who were not scholars or theologians did not even know what or where old Rome actually was."
G. W. Bowersock, Mosaics as history: the Near East from late antiquity to Islam, Revealing antiquity 16, ed. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 116, italics mine.
G. W. Bowersock, Mosaics as history: the Near East from late antiquity to Islam, Revealing antiquity 16, ed. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 116, italics mine.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Between Jacob and Choricius
"The unifying power of the mimes and their mythological stories provoked the wrath of Jacob of Sarug and others, but his mellifluous Syriac verses tell us what pleasure these entertainments gave ordinary citizens. 'Do you agree to cherish gods who love adultery?' he asks. 'Is your ear willing to have the report of the house of Zeus the adulterer fall upon it? Is it good for you to see the depravity of female idols? Can you endure, being the servant of Jesus, to take delight in Apollo? Do you believe the mimings concerning the hero Heracles?' And the response he imagines his enraptured listeners offering up to him in justification is this: 'The dancing of that place cheers me up. . . . I do not go to believe. I go to laugh. And what do I lose if I laugh and do not believe?'
"This is the laughter and the cheer of the mosaics we see today. The response of the Christian patron of the mimes, as imagined by Jacob of Serug, is precisely the justification offered by the Christian apologist Choricius[, who]. . . .
"provides [a perfect parallel] with Jacob's Christian enthusiast. The eminent orator of Gaza took up the objection, echoed in Jacob, that watching adultery on the stage was naturally corrupting. But he went on to argue: 'Since the whole affair is a kind of playfulness, its objective is song and laughter. Everything is contrived for spiritual refreshment and relaxation. It seems to me that Dionysus, who is, after all, a laughter-loving God [φιλογέλως γὰρ ὁ θεός], has taken pity on our nature. Different cares disquiet different people--the loss of children, grieving over parents, the death of siblings, the demise of a good woman. Poverty gnaws at many, and dishonor brings grief to many others. It seems to me that Dionysus takes pity on mankind and provides an opportunity for diversion in order to console those who are dispirited. . . . The god is generous and well disposed to humanity, so as to provoke laughter of every kind.'"
G. W. Bowersock, Mosaics as history: the Near East from late antiquity to Islam, Revealing antiquity 16, ed. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 61-63.
"This is the laughter and the cheer of the mosaics we see today. The response of the Christian patron of the mimes, as imagined by Jacob of Serug, is precisely the justification offered by the Christian apologist Choricius[, who]. . . .
"provides [a perfect parallel] with Jacob's Christian enthusiast. The eminent orator of Gaza took up the objection, echoed in Jacob, that watching adultery on the stage was naturally corrupting. But he went on to argue: 'Since the whole affair is a kind of playfulness, its objective is song and laughter. Everything is contrived for spiritual refreshment and relaxation. It seems to me that Dionysus, who is, after all, a laughter-loving God [φιλογέλως γὰρ ὁ θεός], has taken pity on our nature. Different cares disquiet different people--the loss of children, grieving over parents, the death of siblings, the demise of a good woman. Poverty gnaws at many, and dishonor brings grief to many others. It seems to me that Dionysus takes pity on mankind and provides an opportunity for diversion in order to console those who are dispirited. . . . The god is generous and well disposed to humanity, so as to provoke laughter of every kind.'"
G. W. Bowersock, Mosaics as history: the Near East from late antiquity to Islam, Revealing antiquity 16, ed. G. W. Bowersock (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 61-63.
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