It should be obvious that we must think of infinity here as other than an infinite succession or series. We must think of qualitative inexhaustibility rather than quantitative accumulation and summation. In a sense, such qualitative inexhaustibility is more than humans can think. And yet we can truthfully point to manifestations or images of such inexhaustibility in our human habitation of the middle. We divine it in the greatness of an unsurpassable artist, in the incalculable nobility of ethical heroism, in the measureless profundity of religious holiness. We praise its creative power when we celebrate being itself as agapeic.

-William Desmond, Being and the Between

William Desmond, “Religion and the Poverty of Philosophy,” in Philosophy and Religion in German Idealism (2004).

Like

Unlike

Cynthia posted the 7th essay in the Augustine Blog Conference yesterday, entitled “Quando Tu and The Nuptial Creation: St. Augustine’s Enduring Influence on Contemporary Ecclesiology”, written by Mary Moorman, to which I was asked to write a response that will be published on Wednesday, I believe. Please head on over to Per Caritatem and check out the proceedings of this excellent collaborative event.

UPDATE: you can read my commentary here.

Like

Unlike

From Josef Pieper, Scholasticism

The most important of Boethius’ books, the one that indubitably belongs to the world of literature, was one that never planned to write. This work, the only which has been generally mentioned and remembered in connection with the name of its author, is likewise one which is in now way linked with anything in his previous writings. For the book was forced upon Boethius in terrible fashion….

It was as a prisoner awaiting death that he wrote his book, The Consolation of Philosophy. This book revealed a wholly new Boethius– so unlike the Boethius of the theological tracts that for a long time me could scarcely believe that these were written by the same Boethius. (We have spoken of the double role which Boethius must have seemed to play in the eyes of his contemporaries: his personality must have seemed an ambiguous one. This fact had strange reverberations: on the one had it has been asserted down to the most recent times that Boethius was not a Christian at all; and on the other hand he has enjoyed the reputation of being a virtual martyr who suffered death for his faith. Both these hypotheses have been proved false; but it seems highly significant that they ever could have been reasonably entertained.)

The Consolation can be read in many different ways. The reader can view it in its purely literary aspect, as a latter-day Platonic dialogue, the imitation of an early work of Aristotle. Or else he can “recognize” in it the model of Dante’s Vita Nuova and see in its content the doctrines of the Neo-Platonists or the intellectual legacy of the Stoa. The historically trained reader is only too pronoe to this kind of reading, and he is constantly being encouraged from all quarters to practice it… The danger is that it will also prevent the reader from hearing the true voice of Boethius himself, the vox humana in the book… that here we have a man who has had all the richness of his life’s possessions knocked from his hand without warning, and is now trying to answer the questionof what is left to him. Face to face with death, this man undertakes to secure his last cash in hand… He is concerned with the horribly concrete, life and death question of whether the world and existence have now become meaningless to him- yes or no? It is an eternal question of humanity which can enter everyone’s life any day. And the answers to it given by Plato or Stoics are not dismissed as something “historical,” for all that the Christian may be able to provide a new, superior, or even final answer….

And this is the greatness of the Consolatio: that the tension of this monologue is here in all its strength, is here without any final resolution….

Like

Unlike

“Self, self, self”–says Dicken’s Chuzzlewit. But oh what slipperiness there is in such a reiterated self! Ethically we come to know belatedly that others have been participant in our selving all along. We thought we were at home with ourselves, just through ourselves, but dwelling with this, we are surprised by the other–a second time. We remember others already enabling us to be so, and we see through this odd illusion of being through oneself alone. Odd, since it is one granted by the gift of the other, one that the generous other seems willing to let be. We become more mature as ourselves, and we realize that this being for self is an immaturity. There are debts deeper than ever one could say or pay. And then an other giving may be known and loved differently, an other giving that enables one’s release to be oneself.

Systematically, we might seem to ascend towards the light; but like Plato’s philosophers, existentially, we must descend again into the cave, down again into the chiaroscuro of the equivocal ethos. And if indeed the specter of nihilism still haunts us, this is even more urgent. Can we speak of the milieu of being as the elemental field of value? Is there given a primal sense of “It is good to be”? What is the “yes” that is here needed? Is there this field of the overdetermined good of the “to be” that cannot be identified with this good or that? Is there a primitive “It is good” in excess of all of our determinations of it? Do we already live in the elemental field of value in this wise: our very being lives the ontological affirmation “to be is good”? We are in the middle, but does not this inchoate rapport with the good of being define our own being? Is this rapport our inarticulate community with the good as overdetermined? A rapport that also is a love?

William Desmond, Ethics and the Between, 5-6

Like

Unlike

Cynthia has posted the last installment in my Boethius series if you care to read it in all it’s irresponsible-scholarly-grandeur!

Dan

Like

Unlike

…the enchantment of her song left me spellbound. I was absorbed and wanted to go on listening. After a moment I spoke to her.‘You are the greatest comfort for exhausted spirits. By the weight of your tenets and the delightfulness of your singing you have so refreshed me that I now think myself capable of facing the blows of Fortune. You were talking of cures that were rather sharp. The thought of them no longer makes me shudder; in fact I’m so eager to hear more, I fervently beg you for them.’

‘I knew it,’ she replied.

Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, III.1.1-10

She can be a real tart… sometimes.

Like

Unlike

F. Nietzsche:
born Oct. 15, 1844, Röcken, Saxony, Prussia

M. Foucault:
born October 15, 1926 , Poitiers, France

Like

Unlike