The Emperor of Ice Cream

Perhaps the most important American bard of "aesthetic bliss" was Wallace Stevens. Twenty years Nabokov's senior, Stevens was, like Nabokov, a literary genius whose works are at once difficult and engaging, with a strangely seductive music that has the capacity to haunt one long after a poem has been read, dissected, and forgotten.

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.


Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

("The Emperor of Ice Cream," from Harmonium).

Throughout his remarkable body of work, Stevens wrestled with a dialectic he posed as "imagination" versus "reality." This poem illustrates an early expression of that tension as the poet juxtaposes the death of an old woman with the festivities being prepared to commemorate the occasion. The intense aestheticism of the poet's apprehension does not lose sight of the shadows of mortality; yet, it cannot help but revel in the oddly comic gloss that the funeral preparations lend to the moment at hand. One may find relief from the oppressive facts of the human condition, if only in the ridiculous--or near ridiculous. For the poet does not obviously ridicule the proceedings; he remarks upon them, albeit with the "sly smile" of the refrain.

Like Nabokov, Stevens had arrived at the place "where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm": the place where "the two seas meet."

(Qur'an 18:60).

Nabokov Interviewed

Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 40, Vladimir Nabokov

Aesthetic Bliss

For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, somewhere, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm.

--Vladimir Nabokov, On A Book Entitled Lolita.

Nabokov made it to the place where the "two seas" (the sea of lectio divina and the sea of lectio humana) meet.

Faced with the Choice between Philosophy and Candor, Richard Rorty Chose Candor

Max Ehrmann

I suppose it was an early '70's thing, but Max Ehrmann's Desiderata graced my bedroom wall from the time I was in Middle School until I went off to college.

Ehrmann was a lawyer-turned-writer from Terre Haute, Indiana. Nothing he wrote ever caught fire during his lifetime but, after his death, this particular set of admonitions took on a life of its own.

Desiderata is simple, folksy, American wisdom literature with universal appeal. Solid and unpretentious, like its author. Indeed, that is its greatest drawback: for who wants to believe that the secret to living a good and decent life could have been penned in the 20th century by a relatively obscure son of German immigrants to the United States? Where is the drama in that? And where is the tragedy?

If there is tragedy to be associated with these lines, it is not in their production but in their reception. It is tragic that such sound advice could be deemed trite. Plain-spoken common sense, in short supply these days, was, at one time, a peculiarly American virtue. When Americans became too "smart" or "worldly" for such trifles, we abandoned the only genius we had to offer history.

Coleman Barks

Interprets Mevlana.

Omar Ibn Said

Organic intellectual in the slave-holding south.

...Thereof one must be silent.

I am not certain who designed this diagram, but I encountered it here. It almost illustrates the radical constructivist epistemology (or its pre-modern and early modern anticipations) as found in the metaphysical speculations of Ibn 'Arabi and his school. If one were to move the "virtuality" circle inside the "reality" circle, I think the diagram would work well as a heuristic device.

Whereof one cannot speak...

Beata Tranquillitas

"One of the most famous and best loved pictures by the great Renaissance artist Albrecht Durer is his engraving of 'St. Jerome in His [Study].' Jerome, the perfect example of the Christian scholar and thinker, is seated undisturbed at his desk in the peaceful seclusion of his well-ordered study. The scene idealizes the vita contemplativa, life in the service of God, and the learned tradition, for Jerome, who once dreamt that he heard a voice declare him more a Ciceronian than a Christian, has his books near at hand and is writing another. The room may very well have been the study room of the Nuremberg humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, Durer's closest friend, or the library room of the sanctuary which Conrad Mutian named his beata tranquillitas..."

Lewis W. Spitz, The Religious Renaissance of the German Humanists, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (1963), 1.

The Missing Music

in contemporary poetry.

Toshihiko Izutsu (1914-1993)

Izutsu's Sufism and Taoism: A Comparative Study of Key Philosophical Concepts is a marvelous work of exegetical scholarship. He wrote it while a professor of Islamic philosophy at McGill University at a time when he was entering a "new phase" of his intellectual life, one in which he found himself "groping" towards "a new type of Oriental philosophy based on a series of rigorously philological, comparative studies of the key terms of various philosophical traditions in the Near, Middle, and Far East."

It was an interesting project and, if nothing else, produced a modern study of Ibn 'Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam (in clear and often elegant English, no less) that, to my mind, makes a strong case for regarding Ibn 'Arabi and his "school" as the culmination of the pre-modern Muslim intellectual tradition.

The Tao of Humanism

At the tender age of nineteen, after a long conversation about I-don't-know-what, a friend of mine (who happened to be an Episcopal priest--a quite unusual Episcopal priest), got up from his armchair and walked over to his bookshelves and pulled out a copy of the Tao te Ching (translated or, perhaps better, interpreted) by Witter Bynner. "A gift," he said, and the conversation meandered from there in another direction.

When, at my leisure, I began to peruse the pages of that book, my mind reeled: I found myself shaken to the core. The profundity of the poetry shattered the smug presumption of Western religious and philosophical superiority which, in my youth, had seemed self-evident. At that moment, Lao Tzu became an important milestone in my cosmopolitan awakening. The doors of perception had been cleansed. We should all be so privileged to have such friends contributing to our intellectual maturity.

The Passing of Doris Lessing

Doris learning that she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007.

Honoring Edward Said

At Columbia University.

Adonis

On the will-to-power over poetry that critics often attempt to impose:

"Legislation and codification go against the nature of poetic language, for this language, since it is man's expression of his explosive moods, his impetuousness, his difference, is incandescent, constantly renewing itself, heterogeneous, kinetic and explosive, always a disrupter of codes and systems. It is the search for the self, and the return to the self, but by means of a perpetual exodus away from the self [i.e., ecstasy]."

An Introduction to Arab Poetics, 34.

The Humanistic Vision of C.P. Cavafy

Two views: one from The Poetry Foundation and another from Kevin McMahon.

Cavafy's poem "Thermopylae."

Why Hegel Matters

"To apprehend what is is the task of philosophy because what is is reason. As for the individual, every one is a son of his time; so philosophy also is its time apprehended in thoughts...To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and to find delight in it, is a rational insight which implies reconciliation with reality. This reconciliation philosophy grants to those who have felt the inward demand to conceive clearly, to perceive subjective freedom while present in substantive reality, and yet though possessing this freedom to stand not upon this particular and contingent, but upon what is self-originated and self-completed."

So wrote Hegel in 1820. It is important to understand that, by reason, Hegel sometimes meant (or at least seemed to mean) more than "rationality" or "logic"--words that, in English (since at least Bacon and Mill), have become somewhat shrunken or dessicated. For Hegel, it appears that reason was logos and logos is--despite Hegel's criticism of Kant on this point--the "thing in itself" (whatever that might be). "What is." To apprehend "what is" may indeed be the task of philosophy, but first we must define our terms. Once we have accomplished that prerequisite (answered the threshold question) we have delimited the undelimitable logos and betrayed our very quest.




Unconsciously (or perhaps consciously) echoing Hegel, Norman O. Brown declared that "Nature, Natura naturans, is not an orderly Spinozistic or Dantesque cosmos; Nature is Heraclitean fire. And the fire and the rose are one. And so, in spite of Dante, Heaven and Hell are the same place...Modern, or is it postmodern, thought begins with Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell" (NOB, "Revisioning Historical Identities").

Only to end, perhaps, in Henry Miller's Rosy Crucifixion. As Hegel understood only too well, philosophy, "as the thought of the world, does not appear until reality has completed its formative process, and made itself ready. History thus corroborates the teaching of the conception that only in the maturity of reality does the ideal appear as counterpart to the real, apprehends the real world in its substance, and shapes it into an intellectual kingdom. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, one form of life has become old, and by means of grey it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known. The owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."

Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.







And so, thanks to Hegel, we may conclude that our masterpiece is the private life...

And then along comes Feuerbach and turns Hegel on his head: God is an objectification, an alienation of our subjectivities. Feuerbach is followed by Thomas Wolfe, the great Hegelian poet of "Immortal love, alone and aching in the wilderness..." The poet "...of wandering forever and the earth again." The poet Of Time and the River.

As the author of Love's Body admonished us all: "There is only poetry." Hegel probably did not intend to teach us that but, as his most perspicacious readers have understood, he left us no other conclusion.

Horace Williams (1858-1940)

Gadfly of Chapel Hill.

Thomas Wolfe

Among the fraternity of word-drunk Hegelians we must not forget Thomas Wolfe: "At the University of North Carolina he studied under Horace Williams, a philosophy professor whom he represented as Vergil Weldon and whom he called 'Hegel in the Cotton Belt.' Williams, who was a mystic, taught him a rather loose form of the Hegelian dialectic, in which a concept, or thesis, inevitably generates its opposite, or antithesis, and the interaction of the two produces a new concept, or synthesis" [C. Hugh Holman, The Loneliness at the Core: Studies in Thomas Wolfe, Baton Rouge: LSU Press (1975), 6].

Hegel Revisited

Only someone completely drunk on the logos could write the Phenomenology of Spirit. And only those who have tasted the logos for themselves and read the Phenomenology with care--taking note of the author's mania, the signs of his affliction--can rise against it and through it to the pinnacle of their own genius.

But this is only as it should be: for the Hegelian thesis demands antithesis. The ensuing conflict is the source of profound creativity and productivity. And no one understood this--nor could have understood this--better than sly Hegel himself.

Without Hegel, Kierkegaard would not have been Kierkegaard, nor Feuerbach Feuerbach, Marx Marx, Dewey Dewey, Sartre Sartre, etc.

If we do not bother to revisit Hegel from time to time, we cheat our intellects; he was a volcanic force of nature, withering in its intensity but, for all of that, indispensable.

Feuerbach

Feuerbach's thought is an objective measure of scholarly candor: the degree to which we continue to resist Feuerbach in the academic study of religion is the degree to which we continue to function as crypto-theologians.

Feuerbach's Doctrine of Food

"The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind-stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats" [see Hayden White's article "Feuerbach" in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. by Paul Edwards, vol. 3-4, 192].

John Dewey's Naturalistic Humanism

"Ultimately there are but two philosophies. One of them accepts life and experience in all its uncertainty, mystery, doubt, and half-knowledge and turns that experience upon itself to deepen and intensify its own qualities--to imagination and art. This is the philosophy of Shakespeare and Keats." Art As Experience, 35.

The Intellectual

Defined.

Wittgenstein's Last Words

"Tell them I've had a wonderful life!"

The beauty of these words lies in the fact that they were uttered without irony.

Heroes of Humanism: Abu Yusuf al-Kindi (d. 873 CE)

A distinguishing characteristic of all humanists is their cosmopolitan acceptance of sources of inspiration and authority outside of the traditions they inherited as a consequence of the accidents of their birth. In this regard, al-Kindi was exemplary:

We should not be ashamed of recognizing truth and assimilating it from whatever source it may reach us, even though it might come from earlier generations and foreign peoples. For him who seeks truth there is nothing of more value than truth itself. It never cheapens or abases him who searches for it, but ennobles and honors him.

--al-Kindi, On First Philosophy.

Cosmopolitical Thinking

"...when Alexander the Great broadened the Greek horizon beyond its former preoccupation with single cities, we find Stoic philosophers fusing the 'natural' and 'social' orders into a single unit. Everything in the world (they argued) manifests in varied ways an 'order' which expresses the Reason that binds all things together. Social and natural regularities alike are aspects of the same overall cosmos + polis--i.e. cosmopolis. The practical idea that human affairs are influenced by, and proceed in step with heavenly affairs, changes into the philosophical idea, that the structure of Nature reinforces a rational Social Order." --Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis, 68.

The Road to Cosmopolis

The founding fathers of Cosmopolis are (1) the Hellenistic sages: the Cynics, Epicurus, Lucretius, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Sextus Empiricus; (2) the Muslim humanists: al-Kindi, the "school of Farabi" (from al-Farabi to Ibn Miskawayh), Ghazali, Saadi, and Nasr Abu Zayd; and (3) Montaigne.

The citizens cultivate an urbane, literate, skeptical cosmopolitanism that is perfectly at home with the natural piety of a Spinoza, Thoreau, Tolstoy, or Santayana. Theirs is a humanism of the disenchanted sublime.

Aldous Huxley

"...the ultimate Reality is not clearly and immediately apprehended, except by those who have made themselves loving, pure in heart and poor in spirit." The Perennial Philosophy, x.

Late and Soon...

The World Is Too Much With Us by William Wordsworth : The Poetry Foundation

Heroes of Humanism: Seneca (d. 65 CE)

Of all men they alone are at leisure who take time for wisdom, they alone are alive. For they are not content to be good guardians of their own lifetime only. They annex every age to their own; all the years that have gone before them are an addition to their store. Unless we are most ungrateful, all those men, glorious fashioners of holy thoughts, were born for us; for us they have prepared a way of life. By other men's labors we are led to the sight of things most beautiful that have been wrested from darkness and brought into light; from no age are we shut out, we have access to all ages, and if it is our wish, by greatness of mind, to pass beyond the narrow limits of human weakness, there is a great stretch of time through which we may roam. We may argue with Socrates, we may doubt with Carneades, find peace with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, exceed it with the Cynics. Since nature allows us to enter into fellowship with every age, why should we not turn from this paltry and fleeting span of time and surrender ourselves with all our soul to the past, which is boundless, which is eternal, which we share with our betters?

--Seneca, "On the Shortness of Life," tr. John W. Basore (slightly altered).

Heroes of Humanism: Khosro I Anushirvan (531-579 CE)

Famous for his justice, Shah Khosro I was a strong supporter of Mazdean Zoroastrianism and cultivated the study of literature and philosophy at his court. He suppressed the followers of the apocalyptic preacher Mazdak and introduced a variety of reforms to the bureaucracy of the Sasanid state. He had literature translated from Greek, Syriac, and Sanskrit into Middle Persian, kept up with the latest astronomical observations, and entertained at his court philosophers exiled from Athens. In 561, he negotiated a fifty year peace with his rivals in Byzantium, though the treaty was broken in 571 during an Armenian revolt.

The Peculiar Case of Boethius [6th Century C.E.]

The assumptions upon which Boethius' philosophical position rests, and the detailed arguments by which his position is expressed are, for the most part, not original [but]...derived from the classic works of Greek and Roman philosophy, most notably from Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero, and from the Neo-Platonists, and adapted during the Patristic period to the theology of Christian revelation. What is new in The Consolation, and the reason for its lasting influence and importance in the history of medieval philosophy, is the expert synthesis of these traditional ethical doctrines by an author who consciously limits his consideration to the powers of natural reason without direct recourse [to], or even mention of, Christian revelation.

--from R. Green's "Introduction" to his translation of the Consolatio (xv). Emphasis added.

Wilhelm Dilthey

Whoever studies history and society is everywhere confronted by abstract entities such as art, science, state, society, and religion. These are fog-banks that obstruct our view of reality, yet cannot themselves be grasped. Just as substantial forms, mystical forces, and essences once stood between the eye of the scientist and the laws governing atoms and molecules, so these entities veil the reality of socio-historical life, the interaction of psychophysical life-units as regulated by the conditions of nature and the natural genealogical articulation of human life. I would like to demonstrate how to see this reality--an art of seeing which needs to be practiced for a long time, like the art of perceiving spatial forms--and to drive away these fog-banks and phantoms.

Wilhelm Dilthey, Selected Works, Vol. 1, ed. Makreel and Rodi, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1989), 93.

Montaigne's "Jewishness"

We live in strange times. Too often, scholarship becomes the battle ground of our "culture wars" and identity politics. Even our dear Michel de Montaigne--who managed to safely navigate the cultural conflicts and civil strife of 16th century France--is, through insinuation, not argument, retrospectively recruited to score points on behalf of Catholic identity, or atheism, or Jewish identity. It is a sad state of affairs.

The facts are well known. Montaigne's mother was descended from Spanish Jews and a convert to Protestantism; Michel himself was raised as a Roman Catholic. His "scriptures," however, if by that term we mean the texts upon which he meditated constantly and that informed his thinking about the world, were composed by pagan intellectuals from classical Greece and Rome. Montaigne was an early modern humanist. He expressed personal loyalty to the faith of his baptism (Catholicism) but regarded his Catholic identity an accident of birth. He never felt moved to change his accidental confessional affiliation because, to put it bluntly, his broadly skeptical epistemology made him, for the most part, religiously apathetic. Besides, in his own time, confessional changes were political statements. To change one's confessional identity from Catholic to Protestant was revolutionary; to convert from Catholicism to Judaism would have been reckless; to declare oneself an atheist was just as dangerous as conversion to Judaism (if not moreso); converting to Islam would have been bizarre, and possibly suicidal; conversion to Hinduism, Buddhism or even Eastern Orthodoxy, simply unthinkable. His religious choices were really quite limited and, as far as he was concerned, the differences among the choices realistically available to him (Protestant or Catholic) were not differences worth losing one's life over.

The fact that he had "Jewish blood" as it has been termed by some commentators did not make him a humanist or a skeptic. It is reasonable to infer that the persecution his mother's family had faced made him sensitive to the problem of religious persecution more generally, but he lived in an age when religious persecution was pandemic--he did not require exposure to anti-semitism to be sensitive to the depth or scale of the problem.

"Jewish blood" (which is no different than any other type of human blood) did not determine Montaigne's thinking and, frankly, those who would make such a suggestion out of sympathy or bigotry have abandoned scholarship for the low road of cultural politics, if not racism.

Auerbach In Istanbul

Finding humanism's haven in Istanbul Israel News | Haaretz

Tolstoy's Library

"In the stationmaster's house at Astapovo, Tolstoy reportedly had two books by his bedside: The Brothers Karamazov and the Essais of Montaigne. It would appear that he had chosen to die in the presence of his great antagonist and of a kindred spirit. In the latter instance he chose aptly, Montaigne being a poet of life and of the wholeness of it rather in the sense in which Tolstoy himself had understood that mystery. Had he turned to the celebrated twelfth chapter of Book II of the Essais while composing his fierce genius to tranquility, Tolstoy would have found a judgment equally appropriate to himself and to Dostoevsky: C'est un grand ouvrier de miracles que l'esprit humain..." --George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky, 348.

In addition, one of Tolstoy's daughters is reported to have found a copy of Allamah Sir Abdullah al-Mamun al-Suhrawardy's The Saying of Muhammad in her father's overcoat after he died [see Hassan Suhrawardy's 1941 "Preface" in current reprints].

From Montaigne to Ghazali and Back

Reading Montaigne in 1989 confirmed my intuition that, far from destroying faith, skepsis or honest doubt purifies faith by scrubbing it clean of credulity. I wanted to read more "religious thinkers" like Montaigne but discovered that he is rarely considered a religious thinker. This is partially due to the fact that Montaignean Christianity never really caught on.




Ironically, it was in Paris, in 1995, that I first read William Montgomery Watt's translation of al-Ghazali's Munqidh Min al-Dalal ("that which delivers from error") and, there, in what was ostensibly "Montaigne country," I encountered a religious thinker who, 500 years before Montaigne, had articulated what would become a Montaignean approach to religion. To my astonishment, I discovered, as well, that (unlike Montaigne's relation to Christianity) al-Ghazali is central to the Islamic tradition: he is, in fact, comparable to a St. Augustine or St. Thomas Aquinas in the history of Islamic thought.

Reading Montaigne prepared me to read al-Ghazali. Re-reading al-Ghazali has prompted my return to Montaigne. Placing the two in "conversation" is rich, very rich.

What We Accomplish When We Search for the Sublime in the Bottomless Self

In Search of the Sublime-Fourth Installment

Now, the view from Montaigne's tower:

I began to read the Essais of Montaigne in the late 1980's. I was in law school at the time, and hungry for anything that could re-humanize me. For although the law contains within itself great humanizing potential, it rarely lives up to it.

In his late thirties, Montaigne left his own legal practice to take refuge in his tower and, there, rediscover his own humanity. He, too, went in search of the sublime, but wanted what we might call a homely sublime--for he knew that the sublimity which unhouses us is unsustainable over the long term.

Alan Levine, one of the most perceptive readers of Montaigne in a generation, put it this way: by means of his solitary inventories of himself, Montaigne discovered that the self is "bottomless." Instead of occasioning despair, this realization prompted him to advocate self-exploration as a pleasurable end in itself. Of course, he understood the dangers that such activity entails--but they are not what one may think. Navel-gazing is not the problem. The problem is that human beings, finding no unitary "there" there, become desperate to latch on to one particular dimension of themselves to the exclusion of all others. This one particular dimension then becomes the self, but that is an illusion. Levine observes that "Montaigne is not against this on a temporary basis, for one must act on one's desires and wills in order to explore them, but one must never lose sight of the rest of oneself, to rob oneself of one's possibilities" (Levine, Sensual Philosophy, p. 7). A false "finding" of the self is, paradoxically, a flight from one's "authentic" self (the empty room of the self): something like what Sartre would later term "bad faith."

So we have here two kinds of sublimity: that which transports us out of our grooved ruts, our accustomed selves, and breaks the spell of the myth of the unitary self and that which we discover in the process--the "homely sublime" that subsists within every human psyche. It is the limitations of the false or illusory self that we must flee--limitations that we impose upon ourselves but that others also impose upon us as well (indeed, we may learn to engage in self-limitation at the prompting of others--one of the casualties of living in society and becoming attached to communities, institutions, and social networks).

In Search of the Sublime-Third Installment

According to James Boswell, Dr. Johnson confided to Sir Joshua Reynolds that "the great business of his life was to escape from himself." (The Life of Samuel Johnson, Modern Library edition, p. 81).

In Search of the Sublime-Second Installment

The sublime is something that catches us off guard and "transports" us "beyond" ourselves, removing us--our senses or perceptions, even momentarily, from what Blake termed "the same dull round" [There Is NO Natural Religion (b) "Conclusion. If it were not for the Poetic or Prophetic character, the Philosophic & Experimental would soon be at the ratio of all things & stand still, unable to do other than repeat the same dull round over again

Application. He who sees the Infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the Ratio only sees himself only. Therefore God becomes as we are, that we may be as he is"].

That we may "step outside" ourselves [Gk.: ekstasin]; make contact--direct contact--with that which is not ourselves. That we may escape the narrow confines of the self and, thereby, experience freedom.

Talking of constitutional melancholy, [Dr. Samuel Johnson] observed, "A man so afflicted, Sir, must divert distressing thoughts, and not combat with them." Boswell: "May not he think them down, Sir?" Johnson: "No, Sir. To attempt to think them down is madness. He should have a lamp constantly burning in his bed chamber during the night, and if wakefully disturbed, take a book, and read, and compose himself to rest. To have the management of the mind is a great art, and it may be attained in a considerable degree by experience and habitual exercise..." Boswell: "Should not he provide amusements for himself? Would it not, for instance, be right for him to take a course of chymistry?" Johnson: "Let him take a course of chymistry, or a course of rope-dancing, or a course of any thing to which he is inclined at the time. Let him contrive to have as many retreats for his mind as he can, as many things to which it can fly from itself."
Boswell's Life of Johnson.

In Search of the Sublime-First Installment

An essay by Mae-Wan Ho.

Religious Transformations of Late Antiquity

As Guy Stroumsa has argued perceptively, Late Antiquity (roughly 250-750 C.E.) represents a second "Axial Age," when what we call "religion" asserts itself in ways that revolutionize human societies. In his superb series of lectures published as The End of Sacrifice, Stroumsa also argues that "along with these [religious] transformations came forms of religious and cultural heritage--not from 'Europe' (an over-used term that too often still means Western Europe of Catholic and Protestant tradition), but from the three civilizations of which we are all the heirs: alongside Latin Europe, that of Byzantium, from Constantinople to Moscow ('the third Jerusalem'), and that of Islam, from Baghdad to Cordoba. Byzantium and Islam ended up transmitting to neo-Latin Europe, with a long delay, a portion of their ancient heritages. These are commonplaces, of course, but are nevertheless often forgotten" (p. 129)--or, in the U.S., suppressed or denied.

Plutarch

"In contrast to the Christian thinker, the Greco-Roman sage, either Stoic or Platonic, wants to learn to accept death. For him, it is neither a matter of accepting the laws of nature nor or revolting against them. For Plutarch--who is, let us not forget, both a priest of Apollo and a Greek-speaking Roman intellectual--the sage is someone who knows how to recognize his limits and consequently to live without hubris (excess), so as to succeed in integrating with nature...The unhappiness of men comes from their being distant from nature...Happiness, in effect, resides in the tranquility that we may find beyond our own strength. Not forcing one's nature is what allows one to reach the refuge of peace and indifference to the world, and in particular to others."

--Guy Stroumsa, The End of Sacrifice, tr. Susan Emanuel, University of Chicago Press (2009), 17.

Dubliners

"We walked through the flaring streets, jostled by drunken men and bargaining women, amid the curses of labourers, the shrill litanies of shop-boys who stood on guard by the barrels of pigs' cheeks, the nasal chanting of street-singers, who sang a come-all-you about O'Donovan Rossa, or a ballad about the troubles in our native land. These noises converged in a single sensation of life for me: I imagined that I bore my chalice safely through a throng of foes."

--James Joyce, "Araby."

Walter Kaufmann On Rembrandt's Eyes

Walter Kaufmann wrote that this painting ("Large Self-Portrait") "cast a spell" on him when he first saw it in the Vienna art museum, but it affected him even more in 1962 when he saw it again after visiting Poland and an afternoon spent at Auschwitz. He explained that Rembrandt had been 12 when the Thirty Years War began, and the painting was completed four years after the carnage of that war had ended. Kaufmann remarked that Rembrandt painted many self-portraits during his life, despite the fact that there was no market for them. But he painted them to provide a record of his evolution as an artist and as a human being. "Here was integrity incarnate," he said.

These thoughts and reminiscences are contained in Kaufmann's 1978 Preface to the Princeton paperback edition of his book Critique of Religion and Philosophy, a work that "certainly did not fail to impede my career," as he put it. He wrote the book (and its sequel, The Faith of a Heretic) because he felt that he had things to say--and was willing to say--that others did not and would not say.

His conclusion was that "humanists should be concerned less with the opinions of their peers and elders than with the challenge of Rembrandt's eyes."

The Faith of a Heretic

I purchased Walter Kaufmann's The Faith of a Heretic sometime around 1980 and for the next couple of decades dipped into it regularly, as one does with wisdom literature. Then I put the book away and did not look at it again until about a year or so ago when I consulted it to find a passage I had imperfectly recalled. In the last few weeks, I've picked it up again, determined to read it through carefully. Each page, each paragraph continues to speak to me with an honesty and vigor that must have molded my thinking on human religiosity far more than I ever credited in my twenties--for the arguments, the examples, the sources are all the arguments, examples, and sources that I appeal to even now in my writing and, especially, my classroom teaching.

Kaufmann's combination of intellectual honesty and moral commitment were exceptional during his lifetime and remain so to this day. If I have been unconsciously emulating him these many years, I doubt I could have picked a better model.

Longinus: On the Sublime

Further, writing for a man of such education as yourself, dear friend, I almost feel freed from the need of a lengthy preface showing how the sublime consists in a consummate excellence and distinction of language, and that this alone gave to the greatest poets and prose writers their preeminence and clothed them with immortal fame. For the effect of genius is not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves.

Baseball

When will the national pastime find its bard? Someone who can write about it with the same attention to detail, aesthetic eye, and ardor as Ernest Hemingway wrote about bull fighting?

Don't get me wrong, there has been some fine American writing about sports in general and baseball in particular--the musings of Hemingway's Santiago about Joe DiMaggio surely belongs to the genre. The Library of America's Baseball: A Literary Anthology contains a wide and generous selection and George Will's Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball deserves mention. In the spring of 2012, The Daily Beast published a list of 13 notable reads. But where, oh where, is baseball's Balzac?

One Of The Great Ones

Edmund Wilson.

The Unknown Prophet

Second Isaiah.

The Neglected Walter Kaufmann

And an essay Kaufmann published in Harper's in 1959 and later expanded into a book (that I read and re-read during my last two years as an undergraduate).