Augustine's Ciceronian Response to the Ciceronian Patriot

This article argues that in the City of God Augustine takes up Cicero's project of cultivating good citizens through philosophy and rhetoric. He addresses the same audience, the dedicated citizen, with a new teaching, echoing the Ciceronian concern with Rome's moral decline and affirming the Ciceronian longing for justice, peace and true community. Yet, in teaching why neither Rome nor the Roman is better off when the citizen devotes himself completely to his earthly patria, Augustine challenges Cicero's construal of good citizenship. In this way, he offers dedicated citizens a new paradigm that remains true to Ciceronian concerns while surpassing the Ciceronian framework.     

Derrida and fidelity to history

In the first part of this paper Hugh Rayment-Pickard challenges Mark Bevir's assumption that Derrida does not care about historical or other kinds of truth. A consideration of Derrida's early work on Husserl shows deconstruction to be a kind of skepsis or epoche launched in search of the truth. Yet deconstruction reveals the truth as ‘undecidable’, which means that Derrida's commitment to the truth must take the form of ‘faith’. The second part of the paper considers an example of definite intentional meaning given in Mark Bevir's Logic: Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux. On examination, Petrach's motivation can be seen to be radically divided between secular and religious concerns, a split vividly illustrated in his imaginary dialogue with St Augustine: The Secret. Finally, Rayment-Pickard looks briefly at Derrida's own dialogue with St Augustine, ‘Circumfession’, which also argues that human intentions are irreducibly complex and plural.     

THE LETTER KILLS: ON SOME IMPLICATIONS OF 2 CORINTHIANS 3:62

The paper focuses on an argument put forward by Augustine in his De doctrina Christiana: there are passages in the Bible that need to be read in a literal, contextual, and ultimately rhetorical perspective. This approach to the Bible (usually overshadowed by Augustine's own parallel emphasis on the importance of allegory) was needed to deal with customs—for instance the patriarchs' polygamy—that had to be evaluated, Augustine argued, according to standards different from those prevailing in the present day. This need inspired Augustine to utter some sharp remarks on the need to avoid (as we would say today) ethnocentric, anachronistic projections into the Biblical text. The long‐term impact of Augustine's argument was profound. The emphasis on the letter played a significant role in the exchanges between Christian and Jewish medieval readings of the Bible, which affected Nicholas of Lyra's influential commentary (Postilla). The same tradition may have contributed to Valla's and Karlstadt's audacious hermeneutic remarks on the Biblical canon, which covertly or openly focused on contradictions in the Biblical text, questioning the role of Moses as author of Deuteronomy. Traces of those discussions can be detected in Spinoza's Tractatus theologico‐politicus. The paper suggests that the emphasis on a literal, contextual reading of the Bible provided a model for secular reading in general. The possible role of this model in the aggressive encounter between Europe and alien cultures is a matter of speculation.     

Augustine on Justice: A Reconsideration of City of God,Book 19

I argue that Augustine’s message in City of God, Book 19, has been consistently misinterpreted and hence a vital part of his argument in City of God has been misunderstood. The received reading of Book 19, as found in the work of Mary Clark, Rowan Williams, John Milbank, Oliver O’Donovan and Robert Dodaro, is that in Book 19 Augustine rejected the possibility of finding social and political justice among pagans. I argue that Augustine reached no such conclusion in Book 19. On the contrary, I find that the only justice that Augustine denied to pagans in Book 19 was justice as righteousness, that is, the justice of worshipping and serving the true God. He found that pagans claimed justice as righteousness for themselves and on this basis claimed that Rome had been a republic. Augustine denied that pagans could ever possess justice as righteousness, and hence denied that pagan Rome had ever been a republic.     

Derrida and fidelity to history

In the first part of this paper Hugh Rayment-Pickard challenges Mark Bevir's assumption that Derrida does not care about historical or other kinds of truth. A consideration of Derrida's early work on Husserl shows deconstruction to be a kind of skepsis or epoche launched in search of the truth. Yet deconstruction reveals the truth as ‘undecidable’, which means that Derrida's commitment to the truth must take the form of ‘faith’. The second part of the paper considers an example of definite intentional meaning given in Mark Bevir's Logic: Petrarch's ascent of Mont Ventoux. On examination, Petrach's motivation can be seen to be radically divided between secular and religious concerns, a split vividly illustrated in his imaginary dialogue with St Augustine: The Secret. Finally, Rayment-Pickard looks briefly at Derrida's own dialogue with St Augustine, ‘Circumfession’, which also argues that human intentions are irreducibly complex and plural.     

KOSELLECK,ARENDT, AND THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF HISTORICAL EXPERIENCE

This essay is the first attempt to compare Reinhart Koselleck's Historik with Hannah Arendt's political anthropology and her critique of the modern concept of history. Koselleck is well‐known for his work on conceptual history as well as for his theory of historical time(s). It is my contention that these different projects are bound together by Koselleck's Historik, that is, his theory of possible histories. This can be shown through an examination of his writings from Critique and Crisis to his final essays on historical anthropology, most of which have not yet been translated into English. Conversely, Arendt's political theory has in recent years been the subject of numerous interpretations that do not take into account her views about history. By comparing the anthropological categories found in Koselleck's Historik with Arendt's political anthropology, I identify similar intellectual lineages in them (Heidegger, Löwith, Schmitt) as well as shared political sentiments, in particular the anti‐totalitarian impulse of the postwar era. More importantly, Koselleck's theory of the preconditions of possible histories and Arendt's theory of the preconditions of the political, I argue, transcend these lineages and sentiments by providing essential categories for the analysis of historical experience.     

Silas Marner,Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine: George Eliot's Ethics of Care

‘Silas Marner, Catalepsy, and Mid-Victorian Medicine’ reads Eliot's novel Silas Marner through the history of medicine, and particularly in the context of Marner's strange cataleptic trances which embody his alienation and suffering. Eliot, I argue, employs catalepsy in order to investigate ideas of illness and care, especially as that relates to professional medicine and to ideas of community. Focusing on cataleptic case histories and on Eliot's personal health concerns I show how issues of care become philosophical questions about ethical responsibility. It is through Silas Marner and his catalepsy, I conclude, that Victorian scholars can come to understand more about what that means within Eliot's canon and, more widely, in the mid-Victorian period. Overall, the article provides a unique reading of Silas Marner, drawing on significant new archival research on catalepsy and in Eliot's writing of illness narratives.     

Plurality and the Rule of Love

Abstract

This article constructs a positive theological case for liberal multiculturalism through a close interrogation of the exegetical methods of Augustine of Hippo (354–430). Drawing out the political implications of the charitable hermeneutics of De doctrina christiana, I suggest that Augustine authorizes political theology to respond generously to multicultural practices of social co-existence and notions of “deep diversity.” In this guise, the Augustinian method of Scriptural reading provides a means of cherishing diverse cultural forms. Yet, alongside these inclusive affirmations, Augustine’s Scriptural politics suggests that liberal multiculturalism should not be an uncontested project for the Church. In place of a politics of separatist autonomy or passive tolerance, Augustine points us towards a radical politics of difference rooted in a fusion of truthfulness and love     

Circean transformation and the poetics of Milton’s Masque

ABSTRACT

Circe’s presence in A Masque Presented at Ludlow Castle (Comus) invites readers to read both Milton’s Circe and Milton’s own poetic activity through long and intertwined traditions of theology and literary commentary. Stretching from Augustine and Aquinas to the commentaries and translations of Homer and Ovid by Sponde, Sandys, and Chapman, these traditions use Circe to explore and conflate the possibility, the permanence, and the experience of both human and literary transformation. Taken up by Townshend and Jones in their Caroline court masque Tempe Restored, they become essential intertexts for Milton’s Masque. Milton embeds this discourse in his masque – a genre that places metamorphosis at the heart of its poetics – to examine the nature of Renaissance intertextuality and the authorial self and interrogate his own use of Renaissance practices of imitatio and aemulatio. In Comus’ wood, Circean transformation becomes a touchstone for the virtuous soul and the virtuous poet alike.     

Cernuda,poeta de un sur imposible

This article examines the poetics that Luis Cernuda developed throughout his life in connection with its sublime illusion of a genuine Spanish south through the romantic recreation he made of his native Seville, in several texts written from exile: they are various poems of The Reality and Desire and the essays Digressions on Romantic Andalusia and History of a Book, and, above all, the autobiographical prints from Ocnos, in which Albanio's sensitive experiences reflect both the meditative elegance of Cernuda's childhood and adolescence and the utopian promise of a true relationship with the world beyond the social hypocrisy of bourgeois capitalism and the coercion of Franco's dictatorship. My intention in this article is to weave innovatively, in a consistent and documented way, the biographical events with the artistic intentions of the poet, to reveal original interpretive links between desolate reality and the desire for transcendence in his strange lyrics.     

Mankind and its Histories: William Robertson,Georg Forster,and a Late Eighteenth-Century German Debate

The Scottish historian William Robertson's works on European encounter with non-European civilizations (History of America, 1777; Historical Disquisition […] of India, 1791) received a great deal of attention in contemporary Germany. Through correspondence with Robertson, as well as by reviewing and translating his texts, Johann Reinhold Forster and his son Georg took an active part in this process. The younger Forster also became simultaneously involved in a debate which was unfolding on the German intellectual scene concerning the different or equal “value” (Wert) of the various “races of mankind” (Menschenrassen), engaging especially the relevant views advanced by the Göttingen historian Christoph Meiners and Immanuel Kant. The debate was firmly embedded in the context of an emerging ‘science of man’ in the German Enlightenment, to which Forster contributed an almost incomparable richness of empirical knowledge as well as theoretical sophistication. Forster's direct engagement with Robertson's work during the same period (mid-1780s to the early 1790s) creates a context through which the Wissenschaft vom Menschen in the Aufklärung and the Scottish version of the science of man – built on the neighbour disciplines to which Robertson's historiography was crucially indebted – is set in an interesting comparative light. This paper, part of a comprehensive project tracing the German reception of Robertson as an instance of inter-cultural exchange in the Enlightenment, will exploit the opportunities presented by one particular and documented case for a general comparison of enlightened ‘sciences of man’.     

HUME,HISTORY, AND THE USES OF SYMPATHY

This article focuses on the role of sympathy and antipathy in David Hume's History of England (1754–1762) in relation to the broader place of sympathy in Hume's moral philosophy. Hume, in his earlier philosophical work, argues that sympathy is a naturally occurring responsiveness to others’ feelings, similar to the resonance between musical strings. In his History, however, he carefully curates his readers’ emotional responses, inviting sympathy with figures of suffering—such as King Charles I and Mary Queen of Scots—while also, often almost simultaneously, stirring intense antipathy for those whose religious extremism he regards as socially dangerous and beyond comprehension. After first situating the emergence of Hume's theory of sympathy in its early eighteenth-century context, this article explores in detail the techniques of sentimental management that appear across the six volumes of the History of England. The elaborate deployment of emotions in Hume's historiography is shown to be in tension both with some aspects of his philosophy of natural human sympathy and with his brief reflections on the writing of history. Hume channeled his readers’ sympathies toward particular targets and against others. A careful analysis of this usefully sheds light on the management of sympathy in modern historiography, on which Hume has had an enduring influence.     

Hegemony,rebellion and history: Flodoard's Historia Remensis ecclesiae in Ottonian perspective

This article considers the growth of Ottonian hegemony through a close examination of Flodoard's Historia Remensis ecclesiae. Specifically, it scrutinises Flodoard's laconic account of a property dispute between the church of Rheims and Conrad the Red, Otto the Great's powerful duke of Lotharingia. Reading Flodoard's testimony alongside diplomatic evidence and Ottonian narratives, this study argues that the controversy was a factor in Conrad's rebellion against Otto in 953. Both the central role of Rheims' property in an Ottonian political conflict and Flodoard's silence on numerous aspects of the affair reveal that the church was deeply enmeshed in Ottonian politics. The Historia therefore offers an unrecognised angle on the expansion of Ottonian power, while further investigation of its content suggests that this emergent hegemony may indeed have been welcomed by Flodoard and his superiors at Rheims.     

Marina Lewycka,A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian

Abstract

Jim Wallis's The Call to Conversion features an apocalyptic theological imagination with an ecclesiological focus. The church is entrusted with the communal mission of making visible the intrusion of the reign of God in Jesus Christ. The thesis of this essay is that The Call to Conversion is a better resource for Christian political engagement than Wallis's more recent book, God's Politics, which is characterized by a turn toward a "public church" social ethic. The accent has shifted to the formation of a larger political movement seeking social change primarily through congressional lobbying. Wallis's error is the extent to which he has pinned his hopes on the institutions of American democracy. The Call to Conversion helps us recover an account of political engagement flowing from local ecclesial witness. Sheldon Wolin, Romand Coles, and other political theorists, provide support for approaches to political engagement that begin with local struggles for justice.     

Thomas Traherne,Thomas Hobbes,and the Rhetoric of Realism

Abstract

Thomas Traherne has often been seen as a mystic detached from the turbulence of his period. Recent scholarship has attempted to place him more firmly in context. This article contributes to this trend in arguing that Traherne's late works, especially Commentaries of Heaven, were shaped by the pressure of responding to Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan. Though Traherne makes only one direct reference to Hobbes, his idiosyncrasies in thought, argument, and mode of expression are all fundamentally influenced by the need to counter Hobbes's account of ethics, metaphysics, and language. Traherne is particularly concerned to assert and display an ardent realism against Hobbes's nominalism. In doing so, he creates a complicated play of rhetorical figures, especially abusio or catachresis, as embodying theological commitments. This both places Traherne more clearly against the background of the intellectual history of the period in which he lived, and demonstrates his particularity as a writer.     

J.B. Priestley: Bradford and a provincial narrative of England, 1913–1933

J.B. Priestley's writing has been used to explore aspects of landscape and Englishness. Through an analysis of Priestley's early journalism in the Bradford Pioneer and the Yorkshire Observer, we argue that his critical disengagement to most of the landscapes of England was based on a connection to the landscapes of his youth in Bradford where he first developed his fictional and documentary narrative style. In his early journalism, Priestley articulated a sense of dwelling in Bradford that was rooted in the experience of two distinct local landscapes: the spaces of the city and the nature of the surrounding upland and moorland. Priestley's geographical ideal balanced the civility of the Edwardian city embedded in a landscape that offered escape to and commune with nature. The existential balance between the two was, we argue, central to the narrative geographies developed by Priestley in his fiction which is illustrated through an analysis of his two early novels: The Good Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930). We suggest that the ways in which Priestley's interwar writing expressed dwelling in local landscapes might be thought of as a critical provincialisation of London and England.     

John Marshall,McCulloch v. Maryland,and the Concept of Constitutional Sovereignty

Scholars have long debated John Marshall's intent in his famous opinion in the case of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819). Despite long-standing disagreement concerning the character of Marshall's nationalism and federalism, interpretations of the opinion typically rely on an incomplete picture of the case. This analysis revisits McCulloch to illustrate his support for national and state sovereignty as defined in the Constitution. It then moves beyond the opinion itself to examine Marshall's defense of McCulloch in a series of newspaper essays he authored in the aftermath of the case. Situated alongside the McCulloch opinion, these essays show that Marshall was as much concerned with defending the sovereignty of the Constitution as he was with adjudicating political authority between national and state governments.     

Machiavelli's scientific method: a common understanding of his novelty in the sixteenth century

This paper argues that Machiavelli's method, his inductive and comparative use of history and experience for political analysis, and his fashioning of historical-political analysis as ‘science’, played an important and still unrecognised role in his reception in the sixteenth century. It makes the case that Machiavelli's inductive reasoning and stress on historia and experientia offered a model for scientific method that open-minded sixteenth-century scholars, eager to understand, organise and augment human knowledge (scientia), could fit to their own epistemology. By focusing on the question of method—a crucial issue for sixteenth-century contemporaries—the paper offers more than a key to the understanding of Machiavelli's positive reception. It also helps in apprehending the crucial importance of Lucretius to Machiavelli's scholarship; the role of the late Renaissance fascination with historia in his reception; and the breadth of appropriation of his method exactly in the decades when anti-Machiavellianism became official politics all over Europe. These claims are sustained through the cases of Machiavelli's early translators and promulgators; the French legal humanists and historiographers; the Swiss, Italian and French scholars engaging with medicine, Paracelsism and astronomy; the authors of political maxims from all over Europe; and finally Francis Bacon.     

Reims,Bibliothèque Carnegie, 806: a little‐known manuscript of Benedict of Aniane's Concordia regularum

Benedict of Aniane is usually portrayed as the major instigator of a series of monastic reforms undertaken by Louis the Pious in the early years of his reign, which attempted to impose the Rule of Benedict of Nursia as the sole monastic standard across Francia. Based on information provided by Ardo, Benedict of Aniane's biographer, the Concordia regularum has been seen as Benedict's main instrument in his attempt to convince or compel others to accept the Rule as a superior norm. The Concordia itself is a sort of commentary on the Rule, where almost the whole of St Benedict's Rule is explained by texts drawn from other monastic rules. However, a number of fragments from a copy of the Concordia, apparently written a decade or more before the accession of Louis, contests Ardo's chronology, and challenges our traditional understanding of both Benedict of Aniane's role in monastic reform and of the Aachen reform councils. An edition of these fragments is included in an Appendix.