"The Stoics say that the planets are established again into the same sign [as] when the world was first formed, and at set revolutions of time they bring about the conflagration and destruction of all things and again they establish the world anew in the same state, and, as the stars travel once again in… Continue reading “Socrates and Plato will exist again”
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Public lecture in Jerusalem: Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature
I'll be giving a public lecture on the topic of my next book, Nemesius of Emesa on Human Nature (Oxford, 2021), this Sunday in Jerusalem.
Taubes on Origen & Plotinus
"Like Paul, [anti-Christian] Porphyry defines belief, truth, love & hope as the four elements of godliness. Origen is to the Christian Church what Plotinus is to the pagan church. [Remember:] Origen & Plotinus were [both] students of Ammonius Saccas..." - Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology (Stanford, 2009), p. 79 - written when Taubes was twenty-three, &… Continue reading Taubes on Origen & Plotinus
“The flowers of religious history are strange flowers”
Beginning to read Guy Stroumsa's magnificent new opus, The Idea of Semitic Monotheism: The Rise & Fall of a Scholarly Myth (Oxford 2021), during my Jerusalem quarantine: on "Orientalism" & the history of religion as a culture-shaping, 19th-century concerns. "The flowers of religious history are strange flowers", says Ernest Renan in one of the book's… Continue reading “The flowers of religious history are strange flowers”
“To fill the central emptiness …”
"Unless I read the evidence wrongly, the political and philosophic history of the West during the past 150 years can be understood as a series of attempts - more or less conscious, more or less systematic, more or less violent - to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology." - George Steiner,… Continue reading “To fill the central emptiness …”
World-class self-deprecation
World-class self-deprecation: "I was, alas, am an excellent mediocrity." - Jean d'Ormesson
“Technologically barren”
"Metaphysical questions & beliefs are technologically barren." - Leszek Kolakowski, Warsaw 1966
Unbeatable first line
Unbeatable first line: "This little book is a concise summary of a nonexistent treatise." - Leszek Kolawowski, The Presence of Myth (Chicago, 1989), p. ix
“Legitimately classed as philosophers”
In case we've forgotten: "There is no doubt that Christian writers prior to the fourth century can be legitimately classed as philosophers... Thinkers such as Justin Martyr & Origen... operated as independent teachers & may... plausibly be compared to contemporaneous philosophers." Johannes Zachhuber, The Rise of Christian Theology & the End of Ancient Metaphysics (Oxford,… Continue reading “Legitimately classed as philosophers”
Julia Kristeva: “The most shameful of chastisements”
Julia Kristeva holds that the fact that Jesus was “condemned as a rebel, even as a criminal, subjected to crucifixion, the most shameful of chastisements”, is the root of so many European ethical intuitions and cultural forms that “we no longer even think of referring [them] back to Jesus”. - - J. Kristeva, This Incredible… Continue reading Julia Kristeva: “The most shameful of chastisements”
