de diversione...

'Digression is Augustinism's natural method.' (Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St Augustine, 237).

With that in mind, will everybody please redirect their attention, their links, and/or their bookmarks to this address, whereat I will henceforth be posting?

Although the new site is disarmingly posted on Wordpress, and features a new look and a new name (in order to reflect those of my own), yet still you may expect more of the same: poorly conceived and more poorly executed posts, roughly bi-monthly, regarding primarily the proto-academic life.

de musica plotinii...

I thought that this was to have been 'the summer of Platonism'. It was, sort of. But the only substantive idea I've had regarding Plotinus in particular is that the titles of the Enneads are begging to be appropriated into a concept album.

The vision: six albums, nine tracks each. The titles of the tracks, and their arrangement, can be found in Porphyry's Life of Plotinus (at the end of the page, if you don't happen to have a copy at home).

Any musicians out there want to collaborate? If you're not able to write and record six entire albums, do feel free to leave esoteric fragments of poetry inspired by the following in the comments:

'Whether all souls are one'
'On sensation and memory'
'On love'
'On beauty'
'Against those who declare the creator of the world, and the world itself, to be evil'
'Whether the stars have causal operation'

and/or

'Why distant objects appear small'

Or, of course, any of the other Enneads whose titles you find especially evocative. This will be great. Sort of a community art project.

de monnica...

It's the feast day of Augustine's mother.

This makes me feel guilty that (a) I haven't written an article about Augustine's devotion to her being secretly an allegory for the Church, and (b) that I haven't called my mother very recently.

In other news, it seems nobody from Nottingham will be able to hear each other's papers in Rome.

de eo...

It is raining.

'It'?

Here we can see an unfortunate phenomenon: English has followed the non-romance languages in this neuter construction. Romance languages tend to have more personal pronouns here (il pleut, esté lloviendo...) where Germanic and Scandinavian [viz., barbarian] languages stick to the impersonal (es regnet, det er regn...).

(One counter example is Portugese, wherein the phrase [estiver chovendo] is, so far as I can tell on a cursory Google check, in the subjunctive: something like 'it may be raining'. I am willing from this scant piece of evidence to conclude that the Portugese are a tentative people).

So, what is raining? A cloud? The atmosphere? Today? Familiarity has eroded our capacity to find this a weird and dumb grammatical usage; if this sounds a stretch, try phrasing 'it is raining' less emphatically: 'It rains'. Doesn't that sound more ominous? Almost oracular?

Why not the altogether more charming 'they rain'? Can there be any doubt that here we find a residual monism in our language?

de consilio intelligenti...

St Augustine in the major media:

(The relevant part is at 5.15).

Well, yes and no. It's true that Augustine worries about Genesis' creation narrative being taken seriously by 'infidels' who can see by the lights of reason that certain interpretations of scripture jar against science (de genesi ad litteram 1.19); also true that he heard voices. These might well be the most oft quoted chunks of Augustine in the last forty years.

But to say that Augustine didn't view Scripture as science? Disingenuous anachronism at best. And then to try to co-opt Augustine for the Darwinian project? More disingenuity (although certain 20th century pedestrian readings of the seminales rationes doctrine of the same commentary on Genesis have done the same - Ken Miller can't really be faulted here, although Teilhard might be).

What's got to be remembered here is that Augustine isn't talking to Darwinists, he's talking to Platonists. The interpretation of Genesis that he goes on to give is on an entirely different level to either the intelligent design camp or the evolution camp: it deals with time and eternity, not species adaptation. After all, where a Darwinist would object to the seven days of creation literally understood as too short by billions of years, Augustine (and his critics) object to seven days literally understood as too long by about, oh, seven days. It might be as far away from evolution as one can get.

peri theories...

'Self-sufficiency, leisure, unwearied activity, and any other features ascribed to the blessed person, are evidently features of the student' (Nicomachean Ethics, 1177b).

Commence the summer of Platonism.

Om Begrebet Ironi...

(med stadigt Hensyn til Augustine)

The lack of posts here can be explained by the upcoming deadline for evaluation of my first year of doctoral studies. Evaluation in two senses - primarily the department checking in to see whether I've been doing anything of value this year, and derivatively my own self-evaluation: why keep studying Augustine?

Herewith, a preliminary reflection.

I was watching Extras again last night. Many of you are familiar; for those not, it's Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's follow-up to The Office, which studies the lives of 'supporting artists' in film and TV. Much of the humor of the program comes from the guest stars, who play outlandish caricatures of themselves (the best episode, I think, is Sir Ian McKellen, who grandiosely describes the art of acting to Gervais' character in the most obvious and mundane way possible: 'How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play').

This is irony stripped down to its most basic level: to play one's self.

But what the show does more subtly is point out the basic cultural insight of psychoanalysis: we are all doing this, all the time. (Ricky Gervais, no less than McKellen or Bowie or Winslet, is playing a version of himself; further, this version of himself is constantly 'playing' at being himself in social situations). So even if the mockumentarian introduction of ironic distance were erased, and someone just filmed me in straight documentary, without editing (Watch in awe as he puts down a third cappuccino! Observe the rate of his reading comprehension! Tremble at the amount of time between someone else's joke and his witty retort!) it would be no less self-parodic.

So what does this have to do with Augustine? On one register, Augustine seems to have an implicit account of self-parody, of the subject always at one remove from himself. This remove is, in the Confessions, existential - 'I have become a great question to myself' - and, in de trinitate, Trinitarian - the imago dei which is myself is obscured by the persona (both person and mask) that I project.

We see God, he argues in de trinitate, as in a mirror, but dimly - in enigmata. And here, incidentally, enters the other register that makes Augustine attractive to me: he is himself so brilliantly and unknowingly self-parodic. See here, here, here for times that this has struck me this year. And on the note of the enigma, I'll add one more across which I stumbled today - perhaps less funny, but it still struck me as so.

So he's trying to understand Paul's phrase 'through a mirror, in an enigma' - since 'mirror' denotes clarity, and 'enigma' is a Greek word that was apparently a bit esoteric to the Latin ear, but which in any event denotes lack of clarity. He tries to resolve the issue rhetorically - 'enigma' is a subset of the trope known as 'allegory,' but it's the kind of allegory that's not very straightforward. And it's the example of the un-straightforward allegory that he comes up with that I found a little funny: Proverbs 30.15, 'The blood-sucker had three daughters.'

This is what's great about Augustine - he very earnestly believes that there is an allegorical, ontological, moral truth behind the blood-sucker's tripartite offspring. I provisionally think that Augustine's relevance for our time is largely in this implicit doctrine: sincerity is the new irony.

de granditate rationis...

So what does the 're-hellenization of Christian faith' mean?

See Benedict on Denys, with reflections on scripture and metaphysics and interreligious dialogue.

(Only one perspective, of course, but one worthy of attention, if the question is still of interest).

My only comment for now is - it's surprising that the Pope doesn't make mention of Denys as a resource for Roman/Orthodox conversation.