Thursday, June 8, 2023

"whether or not history repeats itself, historians repeat each other."

     David Hackett Fischer, Historians' fallacies:  toward a logic of historical thought (London:  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), 25, on "The fallacy of declarative questions":

In historical writing, declarative questions tend also to be mimetic questions. . . .  If historical research were as empirical as it can be, then we might hope to see very large heuristic hypotheses put to very small controlled tests. . . .  But many historians follow a different method.  In common practice, a general interpretation is fashioned by an essayist not as a heuristic hypothesis but as an affirmative proposition.  In the next twenty years or so, a legion of gradgrinds manufacture monographs which reify the essay, with a few nonconsequential changes.  Qualifications are inserted at the end of sentences, active verbs are changed to passive, pronouns of indefinite reference are converted to proper nouns, and footnotes are added at the bottom of the page.  This process continues until another essayist publishes another brilliant general interpretation, and another generation of gradgrinds are wound up like mechanical rabbits and set to running about in ever-smaller circles.  The result is a dialogue between essayists and monographers which resembles the exchange between Hamlet and Polonius [at Hamlet 3.2.406 ff.]".

According to Fischer, the saying is "variously attributed to Max Beerbohm and Herbert Asquith."  I am committing something like this same fallacy in not pausing at this point to track it to source myself.


Sunday, May 7, 2023

Earth as invited to become man

"Thou speakest to the earth and callest it to human nature, and the earth heareth Thee and by this its hearing man is made."

"Loqueris terrae et vocas eam ad humanam naturam, et audit te terra et hoc audire eius est fieri hominem."

You speak to the earth and call it to human nature, and it hears you, the earth, and by this its hearing man is made.

     Nicholas of Cusa, De visione Dei 10, trans. Salter =40 ll. 16-17 on p. 37 of vol. 6 (2000) of the critical Heidelberg edition (Nicholai de Cusa Opera omnia).  Gen 3:19 Vulgate, italics mine:  "donec revertaris in terram de qua sumptus es: quia pulvis es et in pulverem reverteris."
     And then there follows this (italics mine):  "Thou speakest to that which is nothing as though it were something, and Thou callest nothing to be something, and that which is nothing heareth Thee [(et audit te nihil, and it hears you, [that which was] nothing)] because that which was nothing becometh something."

Thursday, April 27, 2023

The resurrection of the flesh, a real human body composed of blood-filled veins, sinews, bones, and so forth

"If our flesh [(caro)] is not saved, then the Lord has not redeemed us with his blood, the eucharistic chalice does not make us sharers in his blood, and the bread we break does not make us sharers in his body. There can be no blood without veins, flesh and the rest of the human substance, and this the Word of God actually became: it was with his own blood that he redeemed us [(Sanguis enim non est nisi a venis et carnibus et a reliqua quae est secundum hominem substantia, quae vere factum Verbum Dei sanguine suo redemit nos)]. . . .
"How . . .  can it be said that flesh belonging to the Lord’s own body and nourished by his body and blood is incapable of receiving [(
δεκτικὴν μὴ εἶναι | negant capacem esse)] God’s gift of eternal life? Saint Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians that we are members of his body, of his flesh and bones. He is not speaking of some spiritual and incorporeal kind of man, for spirits do not have flesh and bones. He is speaking of a real human body composed of flesh, sinews and bones [(ἀλλὰ περὶ τῆς κατὰ τὸν ἀληθινὸν ἄνθρωπον οἰκονομίας, τῆς ἐκ σαρκὸς καὶ νεύρων καὶ ὀστέων συνεστώσης | sed de ea dispositione, quae est secundum verum hominem, quae ex carnibus et nervis et ossibus consistit)], nourished by the chalice of Christ’s blood and receiving growth from the bread which is his body."

     St. Irenaeus, Against the heresies 5.2.2, as translated in the Office of readings for the Thursday of the Third Week of Easter, Liturgy of the hours (vol. 2, pp. 727-728).  Greek and Latin from the 1857 edition ed. Harvey, vol. 2, pp. 318-321, not yet SC 153, pp. 30-38.

Wednesday, April 19, 2023

Tack us on at the end of your triumphal processions

Jesus, be the Paschal joy that remains in our hearts throughout the year, and attach us, reborn by grace, to your triumphs.

Esto perenne mentibus | Paschale, Iesu, gaudium | et nos renatos gratiae | tuis triumphis aggrega.

     Stanza 6 of the pre-11th-century (?) Laetare, caelum, desuper, translation (with italics) mine.  I have not done any research into this one, though the stanza does not occur in Hic est dies uerus Dei (in conjunction with which it occurs, also as stanza 6, in the Liturgia horarum throughout the Easter season) as reproduced on pp. 414-417 of Ambroise de Milan:  Hymnes, ed. Jacques Fontaine, Patrimoines christianisme (Paris:  Cerf, 2008).  For "triumphis" read "triumphal processions."  For why that is plural I wouldn't know, unless the triumphi in question are (and this would make a lot of sense) "perennially" liturgical in nature (as with, at Easter itself, the newly baptized in train).  This stanza as it appears in Universalis:

O Jesus, be the everlasting
Paschal joy of our souls,
And join us, reborn to grace,
To your triumph.


"where contemporary exegesis fails to accord with Christian doctrine, it tends instead to accord with something else".

      Markus Bockmuehl, paraphrasing R. R. Reno, in his review of the latter's The end of interpretation:  reclaiming the priority of ecclesial exegesis (Grand Rapids, MI:  Baker Academic, 2022), in First things no. 333 (May 2023):  56 (55-58).

Tuesday, April 18, 2023

"to have is with God to be, and to move is to stand, and to run is to rest".

"habere dei est esse eius et movere est stare et currere est quiescere et ita de reliquis attributis."

     Nicholas of Cusa, Visio Dei 3, trans. Salter.

Saturday, April 15, 2023

der Fluch ihrer Geschlechtlichkeit

"We never hear from the lips of Jesus a derogatory word concerning woman as such.  In holding out the prospect of sexless being like that of the angels in the consummated kingdom of God . . . , he indirectly lifts [also] from woman [above all] the curse of her sex[uality] and sets her at the side of man as equally a child of God."

     The Lutheran theologian Albrecht Oepke in 1933, as translated by Geoffrey W. Bromiley on p. 785 of vol. 1 of the Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, under γυνή κτλ.  Bromiley does not reproduce the "vor allem auch" italicized by Ruth Heß ("so nimmt er damit indirekt vor allem auch der Frau") in n. 9 on p. 295 of her "»Es ist noch nicht erschienen, was wir sein werden.«  Biblisch-(de)konstruktivistische Anstöße zu einer entdualisierten Eschatologie der Geschlechterdifferenz," on pp. 291-323 of Alles in allem:  Eschatologische Anstöße:  J. Christine Janowski zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Ruth Heß and Martin Leiner (Neukirchen-Vluyn:  Neukirchener Verlag, 2005), so I've re-inserted that in the brackets here.