Heroes of Humanism: Petrarch

Petrarch's "philosophical education" bore the stamp of Augustine's writngs, having been introduced to the North African saint at an early age. When he reached maturity, he read the Confessions. "From the moment he devoured Augustine's spiritual autobiography he was under the Father's guidance and became as much of an Augustinian as was possible for a man of the fourteenth century. Augustine appears as his severe but helpful confessor when he writes his Dialogues on the Contempt of the World, in which he tells the great Saint all his inmost feelings and sorrows. His Augustinian thinking and his almost perfect imitation of Augustine's style are also manifest in his letter to the Augustinian hermit, Dionigi da Borgo San Sepolcro."

--Hans Nachod, The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, 27.

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The Sublime

Jesus, James, Joni, & Bruce

TIME Magazine Covers that Graced My Bedroom Wall in the 1970's:

Living With War Today

A project of Neil Young's.

Disillusioned Saints: From Camus to Rorty and Back

Albert Camus's figure of the "absurd man" is the literary incarnation of Richard Rorty's "liberal ironist" avant la lettre.

Both share an intense apprehension of the absolute contingency of human existence and both regard traditional theism as a failure of nerve in the face of the brute facts of the human condition.

Moreover, both recognize a form of ironic detachment as the appropriate moral response to the tragi-comic nature of that condition and, in addition, both pledge themselves to humanity in solidarity as fellow sufferers caught in the vortex of an absurd set of circumstances.

Where they tend to part company is on the issue of institutional religion and its cadres of clerics. Rorty was, until quite late in life (when he began to moderate his position slightly), a determined anti-clericalist. Camus, on the other hand, was tolerant of clericalism insofar as it proved capable of being enlisted in the cause of human solidarity. There are hints in his work that he held out hope for some clerics in this regard (think Fr. Paneloux of The Plague).

Both provide insights into the class of characters we occasionally encounter as "disillusioned saints" or "God's unruly friends."

A Man's Work

"... I know this, with sure and certain knowledge: a man's work is nothing but [a] slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened" [Albert Camus, Lyrical and Critical Essays, New York: Knopf (1968), 16-17].

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The Road to Falsafa

The young don't know that experience is a defeat and that we must lose everything in order to win a little knowledge. --Albert Camus, "Irony" (1937).

There are no wrong turnings on the road to Falsafa; every bend, every fork, and every step along the way counts. This is because suffering is the mother of thought--which is to say, feeling gives birth to thought. Recall that Heidegger located the roots of thinking in mood.

In youth, one may hear the call to Falsafa and set out on the road to that impossible city; but few arrive there young and, of the few who do, none last very long.

Falsafa, then, is a city of old men. It would be a joyous place if more women frequented the town, but such is the fate of its inhabitants that women rarely grace its streets.

It is difficult to account for this dearth of women; perhaps the most satisfying explanation is that the city is ruled by Thais, the famed Alexandrine courtesan. She is both temptation and consolation. She brooks no competition.

When all is said and done, it is a lonely destination, Falsafa. One lives and works there for the sake of its Courtesan Queen in the blinding light of a pitiless sun.

There Are Books, And Then There Are Thunderbolts

An author is typically an individual who has written a book. Nietzsche, on the other hand, was an individual who hurled thunderbolts into human consciousness.











Human, All Too Human (Robert Lenkiewicz)

Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1922-1968)

Marshall Hodgson was the greatest Islamicist that the United States has yet to produce and a pioneer in the emerging field of World History. As far as Islamic Studies are concerned, Norman O. Brown called Hodgson "our Copernicus." On page 158 of volume one of his magisterial three volume The Venture of Islam, Hodgson included an autobiographical footnote (n. 11) that illuminates both his scholarship and the academic study of religion as he practiced it. Hodgson wrote:

I am personally a convinced Christian, of the Quaker persuasion, but neither here nor earlier do my general formulations on the nature of religion represent Christianity as such. If they represent anything, it is the sort of considerations that have been developed in the modern discipline of religion studies in the works of such scholars as Rudolf Otto and Mircea Eliade; not without influence from the anthropological tradition (e.g., Bronislaw Malinowski, Paul Radin), the sociological (e.g., Emile Durkheim), certain psychologists (e.g., Carl Jung), and philosophers (e.g. Ernst Cassirer, Wm. James, Albert Camus).

The Camus reference has always pleased me and, to an extent, surprised me. The French author and playwright has been important to me since I first read portions of L'Etranger in tenth grade French; I have long been thankful that Hodgson listed him among his influences in religious studies. Camus belongs there as a sympathetic religious critic of the first order.

Once Upon A Time In America

Relics of the Leftist past.

SAMUEL BARBER - Adagio for Strings, Op. 11