A funny thing happened when Michael Novak brought Herbert Marcuse to lecture to his students. It was the early-1970s when campus rebellion had entered its darker phase, and Marcuse was an idol of the Movement. His theory of “repressive tolerance” served as an essential touchstone for protest, and his volatile mix of Marx and Freud seemed an edgy, relevant style of intellectualized activism. Continue Reading »
Classics is no longer seen as a cutting-edge discipline, but two centuries ago German scholars devoted to the “cult of the Greeks” created the modern university when they developed new methods in philology and installed Altertumswissenschaft, the science of antiquity, at the center of the curriculum Continue Reading »
Did Herodotus lie about the Egyptian origins of Greek religion? Continue Reading »
Greek and Roman Animal Sacrifice, edited by Christopher Faraone and F.S. Naiden, is divided into four sections: modern treatments of sacrifice, Greek and Roman sacrificial practice, representations in visual arts, and sacrifice in Greek comedy and tragedy.Bruce Lincoln opens with an informative . . . . Continue Reading »
Pliny the Elder is, James Mumford says, indignant and offended at babies, perhaps especially at the thought that he once was one ( Ethics at the Beginning of Life: A phenomenological critique , 111). In Natural History , he writes, “man alone on the day of his birth Nature casts away naked on . . . . Continue Reading »
Summarizing the thought of Epictetus, Wright ( Paul and the Faithfulness of God ) points to a passage that he describes as “one of the most remarkable and noble expressions of gratitude for divine favour to be found anywhere outside the Judaeo-Christian tradition”: “Why, if we had . . . . Continue Reading »
As summarized in NT Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God , Seneca can sound like Emerson in his awed response to the haunts of nature: “If ever you have come upon a grove that is full of ancient trees which have grown to an unusual height, shutting out a view of the sky by a veil . . . . Continue Reading »
In his sketch of Greco-Roman philosophy in Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God) , NT Wright quotes this wonderful passage from Diogenes Laertius that describes the Stoic method of collapsing the traditional gods into philosophical pantheism: “The deity, . . . . Continue Reading »
Agamben ( Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty ) concludes his book with a summary of the argument of Ernst Benz, who claimed that a metaphysics of will took the place of classic metaphysics of being first in Neoplatonism and then in Christian Trinitarian theology. For Neoplatonists, it is through will . . . . Continue Reading »
Habit (Gr. hexis ) is typically understood as a part of a theory of action, or a concept in ethics, but Agamben claims ( Opus Dei: An Archaeology of Duty ) that we cannot understand how the concept works in Aristotle unless we recognize that it’s fundamentally a metaphysical concept: . . . . Continue Reading »
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