The Calvinist International
A touching and illuminating epistolary tribute from Charles Barzun to his grandfather Jacques, the formidable and prolific intellectual and cultural historian who died late in 2012. There is all kinds of material of interest in there, so I reproduce here only a few choice selections. First, on what was lacking in other tributes to his […]
Now, for the cautions and criticisms previously alluded to: Still, this close relation between religion and morality may not lead to a denial of the distinction between the two. Although both are regulated in the same moral law, that law itself is divided into two tables. Religion is always a relation to God; morality a […]
Herman Bavinck was no friend of the religion-as-morality school (e.g., Kant, Fichte, Schelling). But, irenic and judicious as he was, he was able to draw out something beneficial from their thought, while at the same time offering sober and level-headed criticism of where they go astray. His cautions and criticisms will follow in a later […]
Now we turn back the clock by a couple of centuries to include a very interesting passage from Tertullian’s De corona militis, written around the turn of the third century. Tertullian emphasizes strongly here that there is a natural order that is naturally perceptible to us even now, in spite of the Devil’s marring of […]
Classicist Ruth Scodel on the mysterious interplay between involvement and detachment in the reading or viewing of imaginary worlds: Tragedy for the Athenians was essentially what theater is for us in the West: make-believe. Everybody knew that a poet had made up the words and that the actors had memorized them, and sustaining the make-believe […]
Our next example comes from Pelagius’s commentary on Romans. Like that of the commentaries of Ambrosiaster, the textual tradition of Pelagius’s commentaries is a mess. A revised version of Pelagius’s commentaries circulated for a long time under the name of Jerome, “with no essential modification of the doctrinal standpoint,” a phenomenon that is perhaps unintentionally […]
Timaeus explains why, on his view, man is the sort of being he is by nature. He tells of the creative activity of the Demiurge: Ταῦτ΄ εἶπε͵ καὶ πάλιν ἐπὶ τὸν πρότερον κρατῆρα͵ ἐν ᾧ τὴν τοῦ παντὸς ψυχὴν κεραννὺς ἔμισγεν͵ τὰ τῶν πρόσθεν ὑπόλοιπα κατεχεῖτο μίσγων τρόπον μέν τινα τὸν αὐτόν͵ ἀκήρατα δὲ οὐκέτι […]
David Rieff has a punchy and provocative article up at Foreign Policy right now. A couple of teasers, the first because it includes a nice bit from Cicero’s De divinatione (“On divination”) 2 (though it’s not Cicero’s observation, but Cicero’s reporting of Cato’s observation) : But financial manias pale (at least for those who have […]
Athanasius on the crucifixion and resurrection: And besides, the Saviour came to accomplish not His own death, but the death of men; whence He did not lay aside His body by a death of His own – for He was Life and had none – but received that death which came from men, in order […]
An excerpt from one of the choral odes of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, in Richmond Lattimore’s beautiful translation: But Pride aging is made in men’s dark actions ripe with the young pride late or soon when the dawn of destiny comes and birth is given to the spirit none may fight nor beat down, sinful Daring; and […]