CULT OF ANTIQUARIANS

THE PRESERVATION MOVEMENT AND THE CULTURE WAR

by Jack D. Elliott, Jr.

The Forms of the Tradition have lost the background against which they could be understood and now give the impression of something in a museum, guarded by antiquarians and unthinkingly photographed by tourists. — Hans Urs von Balthasar

I

Today we are bombarded with allusions to the "culture war," the conflict over the basic values that govern public life in the West. However, because the media tend to publicize more sensational aspects of the conflict, such as abortion and church-state relations, those aspects that cannot easily be reduced to sound bites, including the deeper roots of conflict, tend to fall outside the realm of public awareness. The potential depths of these roots are implied in the term culture, in that it refers to a complex framework of meaning that locates everyday life within a comprehending understanding of reality and the good.

The culture war therefore by its very nature implies tensions between basic assumptions about reality that often remain unspoken and subliminal. Today these tensions are in part represented by a clash between the traditional West with its roots in the Christian heritage and a growing disillusionment with truth and meaning itself arising from a worldview that sees reality as matter driven by random forces. [1] However, few recognize the full dimensions of the conflict primarily because of a superficial understanding of cultural heritage, an understanding that stems from an educational emphasis on the material aspects of life.

GUARDED BY MYSTERY -- Part 12

Meaning in a Postmodern Age

by David Walsh

Chapter 6 The Politics of Liberty (concluded)

[Editors' note: Professor Walsh and his publisher have given us permission to reproduce the entire meditation. We will keep available the two most recent preceding parts in addition to the current part. The book may be obtained directly from the Publisher.]

Even if the patient has al­ready decided that his or her quality of life has slipped below an acceptable level, we cannot avoid entering into the same judg­ment if we are to facilitate their wishes. What criteria will we use? We can think of none that do not involve a process of measuring and weighing the value of human life. We will inevitably be in­volved in the process of defining what a person is worth. What pain or inconvenience costs too much? We can no longer use the standard of every person as an end-in-himself or herself, since they must now be assessed in terms of their aggregate contribu­tion to themselves or others. The euthanasia situation compels such a finite reduction of the value of human life.

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita

by Brendan Purcell

Part Three of Three Parts

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin. This essay is taken from  the book, Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond, in Honor of Professor James McEvoy, Edited by Thomas A. F. Kelly & Philipp W. Rosemann (Leuven: Peeters, 2004).  This is reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Chapter Eleven unveils the vision of all things in Krishna. Just as Chapter 6 was the culmination of the first section, on Listening, so this chapter is the culmination of the section on the Singer. It's probably our own experience too that love is a light, that we come to understand the mystery of another's being only after we love them. Perhaps these remarks of Lévinas on the priority of what he calls desire over knowledge may be useful in this context:

In Descartes, the idea of infinity remains a theoretical idea, a contemplation, a knowing. I think, rather, that the relation to the Infinite is not a knowing, but a Desire. I have tried to describe the difference between Desire and need by pointing out that Desire cannot be satisfied, that in some way Desire is nourished by its own hunger and increases with its own satisfaction, that Desire is like a thought that thinks more than it thinks or more than what thinks. A paradoxical structure, without a doubt, but no more paradoxical than the presence of the Infinite in a finite act.[46]

We can articulate this chapter as expressing both Arjuna's desire to see Krishna, and Krishna's response to that desire.

GUARDED BY MYSTERY -- Part 11

Meaning in a Postmodern Age

by David Walsh

Chapter 6 The Politics of Liberty (second part)

[Editors' note: Professor Walsh and his publisher have given us permission to reproduce the entire meditation. We will keep available the two most recent preceding parts in addition to the current part. The book may be obtained directly from the Publisher.]

The summary essence of a liberal political order, which has re­mained fairly stable up to the present, sounds astonishingly spare. Generations of liberal thinkers have themselves wondered if their construction contained enough in the way of a substantive core to hold it all together. Was it, for example, merely an arrangement of convenience destined to come asunder as soon as individuals no longer found their interests served by it? How was it possible for governments to promote even the minimum virtues required to sustain their order, if they could no longer play a formative role in moral and spiritual affairs? How could we be sure that individ­uals would not misuse the power, especially the power of the ma­jority, to extort and burden members of minority factions? If they entered into a contract to create society, what was to prevent them from contracting to commit injustice?

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita

by Brendan Purcell

Part Two of Three Parts

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin. This essay is taken from  the book, Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond, in Honor of Professor James McEvoy, Edited by Thomas A. F. Kelly & Philipp W. Rosemann (Leuven: Peeters, 2004).  This is reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

Allowing for the level of personal differentiation in the West, the Gita describes a process of liberation (moksha) from the merely incidental, the merely temporal, and the very brute facticity that provoked Roquentin's nausea at mere absurdity in Sartre's novel of that name. Despite its being rooted in the cosmological experience, there's a refreshing openness in the Gita that leads beyond such willed immanence. Because what's proposed is both a living within, a genuine interiority, and a living outside, a genuine exteriority. This equilibrium, recalling us to the depths within ourselves and the depths beyond ourselves, a living for, from within, is what is developed here:

The immature think that knowledge and action are different, but the wise see them as the same. He who is established in one path will attain the rewards of both. The goal of knowledge and the goal of service are the same. (5: 4-5)

Read more...

Chesterton (and the rest)

Toronto for Beginners Part I

by Max Arnott

Part 2 of Toronto for Beginners, covering Toronto's bookstores and bars appears June 10th.

The approach of our annual meeting and friendly suggestion leads me to a few words on Metropolitan Toronto, pronounced "To-rawn-to", also, T'rawna, and "T.O."

This will be a two-parter. This week, briefly, the city lay-out, and a few of the major "Official" attractions.

First, the essence. What we have is a Scots-English-Irish core, formerly relying on mixed industry and a Great Lakes port, now a finance and tourism centre, over which has been laid, since the sixties, a massive influx of third world immigration. Toronto used to be the second city of the Canada—our New York was Montreal— but it is now the centre ring.

Amor amicitiae in the Bhagavad Gita

by Brendan Purcell

Part One of Three Parts

Fr. Brendan Purcell is Senior Lecturer at University College, Dublin. This essay is taken from  the book, Amor Amicitiae: On the Love that is Friendship. Essays in Medieval Thought and Beyond, in Honor of Professor James McEvoy, Edited by Thomas A. F. Kelly & Philipp W. Rosemann (Leuven: Peeters, 2004).  This is reprinted with the permission of the publisher.

The Bhagavad Gita means "The Lord's [or Giver's] Song," a song which requires and repays an effort from a Western reader who's prepared to try to listen to it adequately. Since its core topic is that of the relationship of devotion or love between "man" and "God" (although neither man nor God in the Gita has the fully differentiated meaning of Greek philosophy or Judaeo-Christian revelation), I believe a meditation on the Gita can complement the other essays on friendship in this Festschrift.

What we'll try to develop here is a philosophical reading of the Bhagavad Gita, drawing on Eric Voegelin's philosophy of humanity in history as heuristic context for such an interpretation.

Eros, Wisdom, and Silence in Plato

by James M. Rhodes

Eros and Wisdom Part 4 of 4 parts

This excerpt from Professor Rhodes's Eros, Wisdom and Silence: Plato's Erotic Dialogues is offered here with permission of Professor Rhodes and his publisher, the University of Missouri Press, from whom more information about the book may be obtained. This excerpt concludes Chapter One. We hope to present Chapter Two in the near future.

First, in his Alexander, Plutarch says of Aristotle's education of the young prince: "It seems that Alexander received not only the ethical and polit­ical argument, but also shared in those forbidden and deeper teachings which the men call by the private terms 'acroamatic' and 'epoptic' and which they do not impart to many." ²⁶ Plutarch continues by informing us that the conqueror later rebuked Aristotle for publishing his acroamatic teachings. The master answered that his arguments were "both given out and not given out." Plutarch embellishes Aristotle's reply by maintaining that "truly his study of metaphysics is useless for those who would either teach or learn but is written as an example for those who have already been taught" (7.3.5). Of course, Plato is believed to be one of the men to whom Plutarch refers.