Gregory the Great depicts himself as a contemplative who, as bishop of Rome, was compelled to become an administrator and pastor. His theological response to this existential tension illuminates the vexed questions of his relationships to predecessors and of his legacy. Gregory develops Augustine’s thought in such a way as to satisfy John Cassian’s position that contemplative vision is grounded in the soul’s likeness to the unity of Father and Son. For Augustine, “mercy” lovingly lifts the neighbor (...) toward life in God. Imitating God’s own love for humankind, this mercy likens the Christian to God’s essential goodness and, by this likeness, prepares him or her for the vision of God, which Augustine expects not now but only in the next life. For Augustine, the exercise of mercy can—when useful—involve a shared affection or understanding. Gregory makes this shared affection essential to the neighborly love that he calls “compassion.” In this affective fellowship, Gregory finds a human translation of the passionless unity of Father and Son—so that, for Gregory, compassion becomes the immediate basis for and consequence of seeing God—even in this life. Compassion does not degrade; rather, it retrenches the perfection of contemplation. Reconciling compassionate activity and contemplative vision, this creative renegotiation of Augustine and Cassian both answered Gregory’s own aspirations and gave to the tumultuous post-Imperial West a needed account of worldly affairs as spiritual affairs. (shrink)

I defend a solution to the puzzle of petitionary prayer based on some ideas of Aquinas, Gregory the Great, and contemporary desert theorists. I then address a series of objections. Along the way broader issues about the nature of desert, what is required for an action to have a point, and what is required for a puzzle to have a solution are discussed.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS The Growth of Mysticism: Gregory the Great through the 12th Century, volume two of The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism. By BERNARD MCGINN. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Pp. xv + 630. $49.50. This second volume of the History of Western Mysticism covers the period from the sixth through the twelfth century, from Gregory the Great to the Victorines. It (...) fully lives up to the high expectations raised by the first part and displays the same skill in presenting the fruit of enormous learning in a clear, comprehensible manner. The compact section of notes, occupying onethird of the volume, shows how well the author has succeeded in mastering the abundance of sources, primary and secondary, the current Renaissance of medieval studies has rendered available. Undaunted by the mass of recent literature McGinn's established and constantly renewed acquaintance with the original texts enables him judiciously and critically to compare interpretations and judgments. Method and balance mark this work as much as learning and erudition. Its unadorned but easy style, the language of the lectern, renders his work accessible to a wider public, even if the casual tone does not always reflect the intensity of its subject. The author has structured his study around four major figures: Gregory the Great (sixth century), Scottus Eriugena (ninth), Bernard and William of Saint-Thierry (twelfth). They form the centers of three spiritual epochs of the early Middle Ages. Each one of these periods is introduced by informative chapters on the general conditions of spiritual life. The study concludes with a chapter on visionaries who belong to none of the schools represented by the key figures and a chapter on Victorine writers that already prepares for the next volume on the high season of Christian mysticism. The simple structure allows each of the great ones to be given a full chapter. Rather than drowning his survey in an abundance of forgettable names as encyclopedic histories tend to do, McGinn has accommodated the minor figures in his transition chapters where general headings dominate individual characteristics. By devoting so much space to the great ones, the author has transformed much of what could have remained a mere survey into a series of monographs. It enabled him to highlight the unique significance of at least two previously neglected figures in the rather arid span of time that separates the patristic period from the flowering of the twelfth century: Scottus Eriugena and William of Saint-Thierry. Eriugena's intellectual importance has been established for some time, yet mainly with historians of philosophy and Neoplatonist thinkers. Here he appears as the key thinker who transmits 475 476 BOOK REVIEWS Dionysius's negative theology to the Latin West and who prepares the new mysticism of the divine image that was to culminate in Eckhart and Ruusbroec. Was Eriugena a mystic? The question returns us to the provisional definition given in the general Introduction and consistently maintained throughout volume one and most of volume two. There we learned that "mystical" refers to any belief, system, or practice conducive to the experience of God's presence (vol. I, p. xvii). This definition happily replaces the one adopted through much of the modem period of exclusively private, mostly exceptional, experiences and the unusual expressions (visions, raptures, etc.) that often accompany them. Professor McGinn presents a more objective and more controllable criterion. He extends the mystical to a more or less direct consciousness of the divine presence as evident in texts that witness of, or are conducive to, such a consciousness. This sensible change enables him to include a great many theological texts of the first millennium without having to worry about the degree of their authors' subjective awareness of God's presence and to avoid the predicament to which all attempts to ascertain another person's private experience lead. Before the twelfth century almost no reports of private experiences exist and the ones that do exist, such as Augustine's "vision" of Ostia, so closely follow an established Neoplatonic pattern that they leave us wondering about their private nature. His more objective approach also dispensed the author from having to be overly concerned about the fine, in the early... (shrink)

Compelling voices charge that the theological notion of “sacrifice” valorizes suffering and fosters a culture of violence by the claim that Christ’s death on the Cross paid for human sins. Beneath the ‘sacred’ violence of sacrifice, René Girard discerns a concealed scapegoat-murder driven by a distortion of human desire that itself must lead to human self-annihilation. I here ask: can one speak safely of sacrifice; and can human beings somehow cease to practice the sacrifice that must otherwise destroy them? Drawing (...) on Gregory the Great (ca. 540–604), I propose an understanding of sacrifice that both distinguishes Christian sacrifice from sacred violence and accounts for how to overcome the roots of the sacred violence identified by Girard. I make four claims: First, Girard recognizes two kinds of sacrifice—one, the scapegoat murder, overcomes community rivalries by unanimous imitation of an accuser, shifting blame onto a third party who is collectively murdered; the other sort of sacrifice practices renunciation and forgiveness in imitation of God. These I respectively designate the “Satanic” (Girard’s term) and the “theomimetic” (mine). Second, I analyze the intrinsic instability that keeps the Satanic from sustaining the societal order and unity that it promises. Third, by a constructive reading of Gregory the Great, I posit that satanic sacrifice overlooks and indeed exacerbates the root of human covetousness—a failure to love. Fourth, Gregory’s teaching on the imitation of Christ enables us to expand on Girard’s account of the theo¬mimetic sacrifice of renunciation, to clarify how this latter might not only oppose but also systematically subvert the Satanic by healing the disorder out of which mimetic rivalry and scapegoating first take their rise. (shrink)

I defend the view that charity in interpretation is both an epistemic and a moral virtue. In the first part, I examine Donald Davidson’s version of his principle of charity and question his ascription of beliefs by raising a phenomenological objection: beliefs themselves, before being ascribed, need to be interpreted when interpreters and the subjects they try to understand do not share the same cultural and historical background. In the second section, I examine the notion of epistemic virtue as discussed (...) in virtue epistemology and question whether an epistemic virtue can be completely separated from a moral virtue. In the third section, I show how Gregory the Great, Father of the Church and Pope in the 6th century, understands the virtue of charity in interpretation not as a motivation but as an attraction to the good so that the interpreter is not only a technician producing an interpretation but a moral agent acting in a community. (shrink)

Diuina Eloquia cum Legente Crescunt Does Gregory the Great Mean a Subjective or an Objective Growth? - ABSTRACT: The article offers a new account of the famous statement by Gregory the Great that the text of the Bible grows with the reader. While most commentators understand this as a subjective growth of the reader enriched through reading, few give an account of the objective growth, namely, that the text itself grows. By focusing on the Homilies on (...) Ezekiel and using at times the Morals on the Book of Job, I link the statement diuina eloquia cum legente crescunt to Gregory’s use of the different senses of the Bible and show that the statement means not only a subjective growth of the reader, but also an objective growth of the text. Such a mutual growth takes the form of a cooperation between text and reader. It is from within such cooperation that the senses of the biblical text have to be found and understood. The literal meaning is thus foundational, as the basis for the other senses, but only within the cooperation, since readers must know in advance of what the literal meaning is the foundation. Seen from the perspective of the cooperation, however, the literal meaning is rather what the allegorical understanding takes as its foundation, in which perspective the allegorical understanding comes first. (shrink)

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Leave it to the boob tube to explain the meaning of existence. Let Gilligan's Island teach you about situational ethics. Learn about epistemology from The Brady Bunch. Explore Aristotle's Poetics by watching 24. Television has grappled with a wide range of philosophical conundrums. According to the networks, it's the ultimate source of all knowledge in the universe. So why not look at the small screen for answers to all of humanity's dilemmas? There's not a single issue discussed by the (...) class='Hi'>great thinkers of the past that hasn't been hashed out between commercials in shows like Mad Men and Leave It To Beaver..."--P. [4] of cover. (shrink)

The present paper tries to trace the particular contours that the problem of theodicy assumes in the Chinese Buddhist text the Awakening of Faith in the Great Vehicle. It analyses the beginning section of the main body of text – the section, that is, that outlines the major theoretical structure of the work – in terms of a problem that has been of particular concern in western theology. I believe that taking such a tack is especially valuable for highlighting (...) the central Problematik around which the text is organized. The paper will thus use the problem of theodicy as a means of exploring some of the philosophical implications of the Awakening of Faith. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE TRINITY AND FEMINISM * GREGORY RoccA, O.P. Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology Berkeley, California SPEAKING THE CHRISTIAN GOD is a substantial and fundamental theological response to the basic assumptions and conclusions of the burgeoning feminist movement within Christian theology. Its opponent is clearly theological feminism, not that egalitarian feminism which seeks justice for women within church and society. Noting the " paucity of critical response from (...) the theologians of the church " to the challenge of feminism, the editor states the book attempts " to substantively and critically engage specific feminist thinkers " about the doctrine of God and God-talk, and " to offer constructive discussion and analysis of the crucial and often very complex theological issues." With only a couple of exceptions, the individual articles succeed admirably in the second aim, though only about half offer a substantive engagement with specific feminist thinkers (the most frequent debate partners are Sallie McFague and Rose~ mary Radford Ruether, and the single most cited line is Mary Daly's " If God is male, then the male is God "). The editor also warns us that polemic has often not been avoided, for " when the gospel of Jesus Christ is at stake, passion also must enter into theology." However, again with only a couple of exceptions, I found the individual essays to be models of rational criticism and controversy which avoid the kind of emotional attack that delights in sarcasm, personal vituperation, and ad feminam arguments. *Speaking the Christian God: The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism. Edited by Alvin F. Kimel, Jr. Grand Rapids, Michigan/Leominster, England: Eerdmans/Gracewing, 1992. Pp. x + 337. 509 510 GREGORY ROCCA, O.P. The book's eighteen contributors (thirteen men and five women) share the fundamentals of Christian belief and span the various Christian confessions, though the great majority are from the Protestant traditions. This collection does not entirely escape the anthological bane of uneven quality (though almost all the essays are excellent), repetition, and lack of focal unity (the common target is feminism but the responses to it are varied). As an aid in discerning the focal unity behind these diverse rejoinders to feminism, I will synthesize the essays under four basic questions : How do we speak the Christian God? Why do we speak the Christian God as Father? What does speaking the Christian God as Father teach us about God and ourselves? Why does theological feminism have trouble with speaking the Christian God as Father? First Question: How do we speak the Christian God? According to different essayists-by simile, metaphor, analogy qualified by negative theology, and personal name. Some point out the differences between these various ways of speaking God and then try to show how, in at least one of the ways, Father is God's ineradicable and eternal name. Thus, they defend Father as the Trinity's nomen primum and critique the feminists for conflating the distinct ways by which we speak God. Roland Frye, Garrett Green, Colin Gunton and Janet Martin Soskice all focus on Father as a metaphorical name for God. Frye maintains there is an essential difference between simile and metaphor, and that Father is God's most fitting metaphorical name. While God is a few times compared to a mother by illustrative simile (mainly in Second and Third Isaiah), he is never named mother or addressed as mother; more positively, the appellative and predicative metaphor Father is said of God directly or vocatively about 250 times in the Old and New Testaments. One might wonder, however, whether the division between metaphor and simile is so airtight. Are not all metaphors immediately translatable back into similes? The answer is No, according to Garrett Green, who explains how contemporary thinkers see metaphor not as atomistic and substitutional (the classical view) but as contextualized and THE TRINITY AND FEMINISM 511 unique. Thus, Father is God's unique metaphorical name which transcends mere simile. Still, one might counter that metaphors are protean and plastic: if Father can be said uniquely of God, then why not also Mother? Gunton addresses himself to this objection in dialogue with Sallie McFague, contending that a realist theological epistemology shows that divine metaphor cannot be totally protean but... (shrink)

ArgumentHijōji was an important keyword in the militarist Japan of the 1930s. Previous scholarship has assumed that such language sprung from the global financial crisis of 1929, and subsequent diplomatic events. Our article demonstrates, however, that a full-bodied language of emergency was crafted well before the collapse of the global economy, and against the backdrop of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which destroyed the Japanese capital. While previous “great earthquakes” had been opportunities to strengthen Japanese participation in (...) the global project of science, this one led more dramatically to a crisis of reason, and indirectly contributed to the spiritual, anti-western, and anti-rational rhetoric of what became the “Showa Restoration.” This and other post-disaster landscapes, we argue, should be examined as compelling sites for the crafting of political language – sites of opportunity and meaning as well as trial. While the phrase “state of emergency” was coined under very different circumstances in post-war Britain, it gained power and charisma in Japan, and likely other places around the world, by its association with natural catastrophe. Thus did modern politics establish a new connection with the traditional realm of the sublime, and in the case of Japan, the supernatural. Emergency's ability to associate politics with nature would never disappear, and has perhaps even strengthened in the early twenty-first century. (shrink)

In the early 1890s the theory of evolution gained an unexpected ally: the Edison phonograph. An amateur scientist used the new machine—one of the technological wonders of the age—to record monkey calls, play them back to the monkeys, and watch their reactions. From these soon-famous experiments he judged that he had discovered “the simian tongue,” made up of words he was beginning to translate, and containing the rudiments from which human language evolved. Yet for most of the next century, the (...) simian tongue and the means for its study existed at the scientific periphery. Both returned to great acclaim only in the early 1980s, after a team of ethologists announced that experimental playback showed certain African monkeys to have rudimentarily meaningful calls. -/- Drawing on newly discovered archival sources and interviews with key scientists, Gregory Radick here reconstructs the remarkable trajectory of a technique invented and reinvented to listen in on primate communication. Richly documented and powerfully argued, The Simian Tongue charts the scientific controversies over the evolution of language from Darwin’s day to our own, resurrecting the forgotten debts of psychology, anthropology, and other behavioral sciences to the Victorian debate about the animal roots of human language. (shrink)

A half-billion years ago, a few species of single-celled protozoa stumbled irreversibly from loose social interaction into a tight, specialized interdependence. They became multi-celled metazoa, and human beings are one sort. Metazoa greatly transcend their constituent cells in lifetime, abilities, experiences and even materials (like bone). New kind of beings emerged out of the interactions of the old.

On a standard Aristotelian account, the moral virtues and vices stand in an asymmetric relationship to one another. To help explain this asymmetry, I argue that the vices share significantly less common structure than many think. That there are many ways for agents to get it wrong gives us prima facie reason to think that the vices lack a robust common structure. Further, the most promising candidates for a common structure of the vices fall short. These are that (a) the (...) vices have the common structure of being excesses and deficiencies, (b) the vices result from agents' unreflectively taking their inclinations as their ends, and, relatedly, (c) the vices result from rational corruption. Argument (b), which Terence Irwin and others endorse, is the most promising one, so I focus on it. But it, too, faces weighty objections. I conclude that none of these important arguments establishes the existence of a robust common structure of the moral vices. The great variety of moral vices is a puzzling phenomenon that continues to stand in need of explanation. (shrink)

The emergence of de‐extinction is a study in technological optimism. What has already been accomplished in recovering ancient genomes, recreating them, and reproducing animals with engineered genomes is amazing but also has a long ways to go to achieve “de‐extinction” as most people would understand that term. Still, with some caveats in place, creating a functional replacement for an extinct species may sometimes be doable, and given the right goals, might sometimes make sense. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (...) guidelines for de‐extinction do a reasonable job of keeping the caveats in place and clarifying the goals. In fact, given the right caveats about what de‐extinction can accomplish, we should pay a lot of attention to the technology and should think carefully about the goals. Not only has the technology been advancing, but our environmental standards have been getting looser and more flexible, providing less guidance for implementing the technology. The guiding ideals for conservation are often explained as a choice between John Muir, founder of The Sierra Club, and Gifford Pinchot, who helped create the U.S. Forest Service. Muir argued for preserving some places in the world in their natural state because of their great value and beauty. Pinchot, by contrast, was bluntly utilitarian. He argued for trying to keep some natural places more or less undamaged so that we could use them later. There has long been dissatisfaction with this choice, and in the last couple of decades, a number of prominent voices have proposed a “gardening ethic” as a new standard that combines elements of Muir and Pinchot. A gardening ethic is supposed to both celebrate the land and declare that it must now be managed. But what would good gardening mean when it comes to de‐extinction? (shrink)

_Theurgy and the Soul_ is a study of Iamblichus of Syria, whose teachings set the final form of pagan spirituality prior to the Christianization of the Roman Empire. Gregory Shaw focuses on the theory and practice of theurgy, the most controversial and significant aspect of Iamblichus's Platonism. Theurgy literally means "divine action." Unlike previous Platonists who stressed the elevated status of the human soul, Iamblichus taught that the soul descended completely into the body and thereby required the performance of (...) theurgic rites—revealed by the gods—to unite the soul with the One. Iamblichus was once considered one of the great philosophers whose views on the soul and the importance of ritual profoundly influenced subsequent Platonists such as Proclus and Damascius. The Emperor Julian followed Iamblichus's teachings to guide the restoration of traditional pagan cults in his campaign against Christianity. Although Julian was unsuccessful, Iamblichus's ideas persisted well into the Middle Ages and beyond. His vision of a hierarchical cosmos united by divine ritual became the dominant world view for the entire medieval world and played an important role in the Renaissance Platonism of Marsilio Ficino. Even Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that he expected a reading of Iamblichus to cause a "revival in the churches." But modern scholars have dismissed him, seeing theurgy as ritual magic or "manipulation of the gods." Shaw, however, shows that theurgy was a subtle and intellectually sophisticated attempt to apply Platonic and Pythagorean teachings to the full expression of human existence in the material world. (shrink)

The nineteenth century was seemingly a period of great progress. Huge advancements and achievements were made in science, technology and industry that transformed life and work alike. But a growing pride in modernity and innovation was tainted by a sense of the loss of the past and the multiple threats which novelty posed. The Cambridge Companion to Nineteenth-Century Thought provides an impressive survey of the period's major ideas and trends. Leading scholars explore some of the most influential concepts and (...) debates within philosophy, history, political thought, economics, religion and the social sciences, as well as feminism and imperialism. Some of these debates continued into the following century and many still remain relevant in the present day. This Companion is an excellent tool for readers seeking to understand the genesis of modern discourse across a range of humanities and social science subjects. (shrink)

If I miss not the tenor of points and counterpoints, a recent discussion in this journal has been a novelly natural transaction in behalf of a great question at which many philosophers have labored—What is the place of Mind? R. S. Lillie, an eminent physiologist has been working toward a philosophical justification of certain biological key-facts, and H. Heath Bawden, a pioneer naturalist in philosophy and psychology, has been urging a physiological counter-statement. Both are logical men of science and (...) aim to rest on facts. Why do they define and value the “psychical” differently? (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Hannah Arendt and Theology by John KiessGregory WilliamsHannah Arendt and Theology John Kiess NEW YORK: BLOOMSBURY T&T CLARK, 2016. XI 1 249 PP. $21.99Of the great secular Jewish thinkers of the mid-twentieth century, none has occasioned quite so much recent attention among Christian theologians as Hannah Arendt. Arendt's popularity is due to a number of factors, not least of which is the ongoing revival of Augustine's thought (...) in political theology, and it is unlikely to subside any time soon. This is why John Kiess's most recent volume, Hannah Arendt and Theology, is of importance to the field of Christian ethics.After providing an intellectual biography of Arendt, the bulk of Kiess's text is devoted to the key loci that theological authors have highlighted in her work, [End Page 210] specifically her concepts of evil, citizenship, action, and thinking. In writing about each of these, Kiess articulates the ways in which theologians have underestimated Arendt. For example, in defending Arendt vis-à-vis Eric Gregory, Kiess argues that "Arendt points to a kind of love that Augustine appears to have overlooked, one which, if falling short of the love of God and neighbor, reaches higher than the love of self to the good of what is common to all" (121).At the same time, Kiess also points out the places where Arendt underestimates Christian theology. Possibly his biggest critique is that, in arguing that the evils of totalitarianism not only transcend but completely "break" traditional definitions of evil, Arendt assumes tradition to be a static article passed on intact from one generation to the next. Against this view, Kiess holds up Alasdair MacIntyre's definition of a tradition as an ongoing argument and shows how Arendt's efforts actually demonstrate the way traditions operate dynamically in contexts of ongoing crisis.Both of these examples also point to broader metaethical questions. In particular, Kiess's statement that Augustine "overlooked" the existence of a nonsalvific love that still rises above the level of the lust for domination that constitutes the telos of the earthly city, or even the love of human glory that gives rise to its greatest virtues, seems to elide the fact that neither Augustine nor his contemporary interpreters have simply forgotten about such a possibility; rather, a chief insight of Augustinian political thought is to deny it. This is precisely why Augustine, as Kiess notes, "longed for a more transformative founding" than Arendt does in her stress on human natality (178). Kiess, it seems, wants to have it both ways on this point. Either the loves of the earthly city can amount to something more than an ethics domination or glory, in which case Augustine's doubts about the founding of political entities based on those loves is overly pessimistic, or the loves and the goods of the earthly and heavenly cities are incommensurable, in which case Arendt's amor mundi, however noble its outcomes, is not immune to the degradations of the earthly city as a whole and must be regarded as one more penultimate earthly virtue.This brings us back to the question of tradition. For all his emphasis on how Arendt exemplifies the dynamism and responsiveness of traditions, Kiess never actually specifies to which tradition Arendt belonged. To put it bluntly, he does not treat it as relevant that Arendt was not a Christian. While she is an extensive and extremely helpful commentator on the Christian theological tradition, she wrote as a critic and an outsider. We can expect certain basic differences between Arendt and her Christian interlocutors to remain irresolvable because that is the nature of interreligious difference. That does not mean, however, that dialogue is not fruitful, and it is because of this that Kiess's text is, and is likely to remain, extremely generative. [End Page 211]Gregory WilliamsDuke UniversityCopyright © 2017 Society of Christian Ethics... (shrink)

Secularization in the Western world is not a contrived combination of disconnected phenomena. It is a complex, long-term, multi-faceted process in which the central place of Christianity has greatly diminished in all areas of life since the sixteenth century, and which derives from the enduring doctrinal disagreements and recurrent religio-political conflicts of the Reformation era. Because late medieval Christianity was embedded in and intended to influence all areas of human life, including buying and selling, the exercise of power, and higher (...) education, all areas of human life were powerfully affected by the Reformation’s rejection of Roman Catholicism. By problematizing religion, the disagreements and conflicts inspired new ideas and institutional means to address them, and thus inadvertently contributed to secularization. The two principal accounts of long-term Western secularization – Enlightenment-liberationist and Catholic-disembedding – diverge not in their descriptions of what happened, but rather in their overall assessments of the process as respectively positive or not. (shrink)