I have an essay in this week's TLS on the Passion poems of George & Zbigniew Herbert. "In 1984, the Manhattan Review published a translation of Zbigniew Herbert’s poem, 'In the Margin of a Trial'. The trial in question was Jesus’s, and what Herbert sketched in its margin was a muted condemnation of the late-Soviet machinery of justice.… Continue reading “Unfortunate Galilean” in the TLS
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“The scholar disappears” – Heidegger
His politics were abhorrent, but this is prescient: "The scholar disappears. He is succeeded by the research man who is engaged in research projects ... The research man no longer needs a library at home. Moreover, he is constantly on the move. He negotiates at meetings and collects information at congresses ... The research worker… Continue reading “The scholar disappears” – Heidegger
The African origins of secularity
Cyprian of Carthage, Tyconius of Carthage, Augustine of Hippo ("the bread of Africa", panem Afer), and Pope Gelasius I ("African by birth", natione Afer): I am beginning to think that the strong distinction between sacred authority & secular power is a thoroughly African affair in the beginning ...
Jesus – Epictetus
Epictetus, Discourses I 28.19: "Seek and you will find" (zetei kai heuresis). Jesus, Luke 11.9: "Seek and you will find" (zeteite kai heuresete). Note - as Thorsteinsson does not - that Jesus died roughly thirty years before Epictetus was born: R. M. Thorsteinsson, Jesus as Philosopher (Oxford, 2018), 159.
“The World City” – a forthcoming article on Nemesius of Emesa
Stoic philosophers in antiquity held that ‘the world … is like a city and a polity’, and that the nature of humankind is like ‘a code of civil law’ (Cicero, De Finibus III 62–67). In his late-antique text, De Natura Hominis (ca. 390 A.D.), Nemesius of Emesa rejects a number of Stoic tenets. His world… Continue reading “The World City” – a forthcoming article on Nemesius of Emesa
History of ideas Baltimore
Delighted to be giving a lecture this evening at Loyola University Maryland - on Sherlock Holmes & the cult of data, Sigmund Freud & "the rubbish-heap of observations", Winwood Reade & Victorian trans-humanism - & how it all relates to machine intelligence & the dawn of "ubiquitous capture" in 21st-century cities. Note – due to… Continue reading History of ideas Baltimore
Bloom on truth
“I am aware that these truths are scarcely welcome, but what truth is?” - Harold Bloom, Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine (New York, 2005), p. 112
Modernity is the real antiquity
Francis Bacon reminds us that modernity is the real antiquity: "True", Bacon says, 'antiquity' is "ancient and older in relation to us, but with respect to the world itself, it was newer & younger. ... Our age is the older of the world, enriched & stocked with countless experiences & observations." - The New Organon,… Continue reading Modernity is the real antiquity
“contra Academicos”
and only we against whom the Church Fathers would have written pamphlets contra academicos only we will meet with a terrible fate flames and lamentation for having received a baptism of earth we were too valiant in our uncertainty - Zbigniew Herbert, "Baptism", 1957 Z. Herbert, The Collected Poems: 1956-1998, ed. and tr. A. Valles… Continue reading “contra Academicos”
Imperial wit
"How I wish", said the Emperor Domitian, "that I were as fine-looking as Maecius thinks he is." - Suetonius, Domitian 20
