NDIAS Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, Winter 2015

Vol.3

No.2

quarterly

WINTER 2015

this issue q INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY 3 q ETHICAL VALUE OF AESTHETICS 19 q PRINCIPE’S SECRETS OF ALCHEMY 38

transcending disciplinary boundaries

q REMEMBERING FATHER TED 39

Margaret Garvey Explores the Dramatic Side of Thomism

Joseph Wawrykow Examines Aquinas on Human Flourishing

Cyril O’Regan Concentrates on Dante Mark Roche Connects the Ugly and Christianity Mary Kinzie on Dimension & Gladness in Literary Art

Faces and Masks of Maxim Kantor

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contents

regular From Our Interim Director 03 Quarterly Interview 28 Call for Fellows 35 Alumni Fellow News 36 Publication Showcase 38 Class of Fellows 40

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PHOTO creditS Dylan Belton Star Black Matt Cashore Hollie Chastain Barbara Johnston Maxim Kantor Nick Ochoa Notre Dame Archives Grant Osborn Joseph Wawrykow Special thanks to Dylan Belton and Carolyn Sherman for their assistance in proofing this issue.

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featured 06 The Ugly and Christianity 09 Aquinas on Human Flourishing 12 Theatre History’s Blind-spot: The Dramatic Side of Thomism 14 Premodern Ratio: Dante...

19 The Ethical Value of Aesthetics 20 “The Air of These”

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COLOPHON

from our interim director Rev. Robert E. Sullivan

intellectual humility: an ethical precondition for interdisciplinarity

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he editor of the NDIAS Quarterly informs me that this issue will feature articles on beauty and Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas offered no coherent theory of art, though thinkers ranging from Jacques Maritain to Umberto Eco have tried to derive a Thomist aesthetic from Aquinas’s random comments on beauty. Please allow me to invoke this gap to evade trying to forecast these pieces and instead paraphrase one such comment of Aquinas: beauty delights the understanding.

In interdisciplinary conversations intellectual humility is the ethical precondition of enabling such delight.

If every virtue does stand in the middle between too much and too little, intellectual humility strives to navigate between the excess of self-confidence and the deficit of timidity. Most of us have cringed at the excess in action. Every largish campus hosts a handful of intellectual bullies. Some are extroverted, behaving aggressively. Knowing much but

Editor & DESIGNER Grant Osborn CONTRIBUTORS Elise Berman Paolo L. Bernardini Justin Biddle Brandon Gallaher Margaret Garvey Vittorio Hösle Maxim Kantor Mary Kinzie Ulrich L. Lehner Jonathan Marks Richard Oosterhoff Cyril O’Regan Grant Osborn Mark Roche Robert E. Sullivan Stefan Voigt Joseph Wawrykow

NDIAS DIRECTOR Brad S. Gregory habitually overestimating themselves, they act as if they almost know it all and have little to learn. Others who suffer from excessive self-confidence are introverted, incorrigibly self-referential. Perpetually the brightest kids in the room, they are eager to pronounce on what they know but allergic to hearing others.

Intellectual timidity is more complex. One manifestation is painful. A little self-doubt can offer protection against rashness. Excessive self-doubt is paralyzing. It fosters nagging fear, both that one can contribute nothing to the conversation and that one probably can’t grasp what others whose knowledge and ignorance differ from one’s own contribute. A more familiar manifestation is an incuriosity fostered by intensive professionalization.

Knowing their own specialization, such intensely educated people often hold back from venturing far afield.

As a result, many efforts to shape interdisciplinary conversations try to ignore or even overcome disciplinary knowledge. continued...

Interim DIRECTOR Robert E. Sullivan Associate DIRECTOR Donald Stelluto Events & Fellowships Program MANAGER Carolyn Sherman Communications Program Manager Grant Osborn Research ASST. Dylan Belton

CONTACT Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study 1124 Flanner Hall Notre Dame, IN USA 46556 Phone: (574) 631-1305 Facsimile: (574) 631-8997 Email: ndias@nd.edu Web: ndias.nd.edu Twitter: @NotreDameIAS

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‘‘Participants in interdisciplinary conversations must be . . . humble enough to know both what they know and what they don’t . . .’’

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when graduate schools were “something of a novelty, and higher diplomas something of a rarity,” William James, an endowed chairholder in psychology before he became an eminent philosopher, famously castigated “the increasing hold of the Ph.D. Octopus upon American life.” James was an M.D. who never graduated from high school or college, and his critique is more subtle than the pejorative he coined to describe doctoral studies suggests.

The most famous attempt to loosen the grip of the “Octopus” is the Harvard Society of Fellows, created by A. Lawrence Lowell. He was trained in the law, not in graduate school, before becoming first a professor of government and then president of Harvard. It was a noble attempt to invent an alternative education for academics that morphed into an illustrious post-doctoral program. Graduate students on the verge of finishing their dissertations are occasionally elected junior fellows, as was the case with the NDIAS’s own Brad Gregory, but all of the present cohort hold doctorates in a range of well-defined fields.

Academic disciplines have histories and are thus subject to mutation and even oblivion.

Albert “the Great,” Aquinas’s teacher and the Catholic Church’s patron saint of natural scientists, confidently taught astrology.

Eventually, astronomy distinguished itself as a discipline and in the process buried its origins.

The occasional attempt to rehabilitate astrology

in Western universities provokes mirth or wrath. In 2001 a celebrity French astrologer successfully defended a huge doctoral dissertation in sociology at the University of Paris V, “Epistemological Situation of Astrology across the Ambivalence Fascination/Rejection in Post-modern Societies.” Despite it all, disciplinary knowledge, not least astronomy, remains secure.

Participants in interdisciplinary conversations must be well-educated specialists, humble enough to know both what they know and what they don’t and curious enough to want both to learn about what they don’t know and teach similarly-disposed interlocutors from other disciplines. A particularly effective tool for learning and teaching is for a non-specialist to stand back from the details of a specialist’s presentation and ask for an explanation that defines the big issues underlying the sundry details and the larger implications for the specialist’s own discipline. The benefit for the questioner is the possibility of learning something about the scope, limits, and goals of another field. The benefit for the questioned is the possibility of achieving an idea of the whole by rising above a mass of particulars.

Robert E. Sullivan Professor of History Associate Vice President, Office of Academic Mission Support Interim Director, Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study

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the ugly and christianity

by Mark W. Roche

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defining aspect of modern art is immersion in the ugly: works that portray physical or moral ugliness, whose form is distorted, or whose parts seem to be at odds with one another. Many would thereby lament how far we have come from the tradition of great Christian art. But such a contrast would be mistaken.

Immersion in the ugly is hardly unique to modernity. The ugly surfaces in a prominent and sustained way for the first time in the Roman era, specifically in the imperial age. Ovid and Seneca, even more so Lucan and Juvenal present us with the ugliness of reality. We see not only an inadvertent focus on the ugly as part of a turn to realism, but also a conscious disgust with the world. Senselessness and absurdity define the tone of Lucan’s engagement with the civil war between Caesar and Pompey. In Roman satire, moral ugliness emerges for the first time as the focus of a literary genre.

Christianity represents a second revolution in aesthetic engagement with the ugly. We see this in at least two different ways.

Although Christ was depicted early on as crowned ruler and judge, victor over the cross, his image changes with the humanism of the 11th century and beyond. Christ, no longer the distant creator and judge, suffers torment. The head of the crucified Christ is shown to the side, the arms are pulled away from the now twisted body, the legs are crossed, with one nail replacing the previous tradition of two (and even earlier no nails), the face expresses agony, blood flows from the wounds, and the crown of thorns is

Isenheimer Altar, Kreuzigung Christi, 1515. Matthias Grünewald (c. 1470-1528). Musée d’Unterlinden.

introduced. We also begin to see the stigmata.

Such works offered more connection than veneration for a population suffering from wars and plague.

In 1515 Matthias Grünewald painted the Crucifixion scene of his Isenheim Altarpiece for the hospital church at Isenheim in Alsace.

The work, which gives Christ some of the symptoms of plague-like illness, allowed for those who were suffering to identify with the work. The horrors of this suffering, the distortion of Christ’s body, the widespread wounds render vivid the claim that Christ’s passion involved the ugly and undignified.

Christ laid aside his pure divinity and majesty and humbled himself, suffering and dying as a human. He was “made like his brethren in every respect” so that he could identify with us in our suffering and “sympathize with our weaknesses” (Heb. 2:17-18; 4:15). On the cross Christ was despised and humiliated, treated with contempt. The ugly, the deformed, the low were linked with Christ and with Christianity, but they were ennobled. The abject could carry the seeds of the divine.

Beyond the focus on Christ’s suffering we recognize an increased attentiveness to evil, including human vice, the devil and his various temptations, the seven deadly sins, macabre images of death, which remind us of our vanity and ephemerality, and the last judgment that

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The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1490-1510. Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450-1516). Museo del Prado.

awaits us, including of course depictions of hell.

It is telling that the greatest Christian writer of all time should be known above all for his depictions of hell. The Inferno has always been the most read of the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Dante offers us tortures and torments of all kinds–from the most expected to the most imaginative. The devil himself, along with his seductive temptations and brutal torments, represents a new subject for art.

A gruesome image of decay is The Dead Lovers (ca. 1470), with two emaciated humans, their skin wilting and rotting, infested by flies, snakes, and toads. In Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (14901510), the right panel depicts the ugliness of damnation and hell: explosions and a river of blood along with images of torture and cruelty, monstrous creatures of various kinds, bizarre distortions, vomiting, and excrement.

The Christian world was able to tolerate such ugliness well before the ugly became a more widely accepted aesthetic category. Why? I would like to suggest three reasons.

First, for Christianity the lowliest, most wretched person, however ugly in word or deed, has an innate dignity. The lowliest of humans are the servants of God with whom Christ most identifies: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the

strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world” (1 Cor. 1:27-30).

God is not simply otherworldly, but one with us in our suffering and sins.

Christ expresses thereby solidarity with the despised and forsaken, the poor and miserable. Even today, one tends to see more wretched images of the crucified Christ in developing countries and more refined images in wealthier countries.

In his magisterial book Mimesis, Eric Auerbach has shown how the Christian worldview altered our aesthetic sensibilities. Much as the noble Christ could be portrayed as ugly, in the humility of his crucifixion, so could the lowly servant Peter be lifted out of comedy and into tragedy, with his betrayal of Christ. A fisherman who has no political role, a servant who thinks he knows more than his master and doesn’t–such a person belongs in comedy. The style with which Peter’s lies are narrated is a lower style, not elevated, the style of comedy. And yet the Gospel account of Mark ennobles St. Peter, a simple person, to tragic stature. When Peter denies Christ three times and weeps, we weep with him.

The idea of the all-loving god, an idea embedded in the incarnation, makes possible the idea that all persons have dignity, all persons deserve our sympathy, and so it breaks apart genre expectations. The finite and lowly is capable of revealing and embodying a higher truth; the lowly human is evocative of transcendence. Caravaggio beautifully captures this concept of

‘‘The ugly, the deformed, the low were linked with Christ and with Christianity, but they were ennobled. The abject could carry the seeds of the divine.’’

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LEFT: Madonna of the Rosary, 1606; Kunsthistorisches Museum. Right: Madonna of Loreto, 1603-04; Sant’Agostino. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610).

Christian humility, the intertwining of the undignified and the transcendent, with the dirty feet and soiled cap of the worshipers in Madonna of Loreto (1603-04). Also the Madonna of the Rosary (1606) elevates poverty and simplicity over the normal rituals of piety.

Second, Christianity’s fascination with the ugly stems from a new recognition of the human capacity for evil. Plato argued that if one knows the good, one necessarily does the good. Knowledge is virtue. Christianity offers a different worldview. The Christian emphasis on the will as a link or barrier between knowledge and action led to a much greater perception of the human capacity for evil. Moreover, in the Christian worldview, knowledge need not lead to goodness. The devil can be knowledgeable, indeed may have abundant insight and formal intelligence. In Shakespeare’s dramas, evil persons, such as Iago, often enjoy their intellectual superiority.

In Goethe’s Faust Mephisto has the most captivating and rhetorically fascinating role.

The Christian world recognizes sin as a central element of the human condition, one related to both the fall and the need for a savior. In other words Christ would not be necessary if we were not so bad, the world not so corrupt. This is a general Christian insight, one that has been emphasized more or less at various times, just as different Christian thinkers have come forward with different views on the possible salvation of all. The two are related, for when the deep capacity for sin is coupled with the fear of eternal damnation, ugliness confronts one both in this world and beyond. Whereas the ancient world had systematized the virtues, recognizing the four cardinal virtues and their interrelation, it had not done the same for vice. The Christian world, however, evolved the concept of the seven deadly sins. A writer such as Dante and an artist such as Bosch would be unimaginable in the Greek world.

Third, the ugly and repugnant were implicitly recognized as transitory and part of a larger tale of promise and redemption. The Christian fascination with ugliness is part of a larger redemption narrative. It is easier to focus on negativity, if you have the expectation of eventual harmony. Within that horizon, the human mind finds it more palatable to descend into the depths. Christianity sees suffering as part of a divine plan and so takes us beyond the dying God. Grünewald painted the crucifixion with salvation in mind; his Resurrection belongs to the same altarpiece.

Still, not all Christian art immerses itself in the ugly. But a Christian art, as in Grünewald and Caravaggio, that is realistic and not otherworldly or triumphalist, is able to do justice to the gruesome aspects of reality without losing itself in them, as becomes common in modernity. And here one is right to contrast much of Christian and modern art.

Mark Roche Rev. Edmund Joyce, C.S.C., Chair Professor in German Language and Literature 2012-2013 NDIAS Fellow

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aquinas on human flourishing

by Joseph Wawrykow

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he question of human flourishing is central to the intellectual enterprise of the great 13th-century Catholic theologian, Thomas Aquinas. What does it mean to be human and in what does human fulfillment lie? Much of Aquinas’s magnum opus, the Summa theologiae (ST), can be said to be concerned with human flourishing. As students of Aquinas’s moral theology are keenly aware, human flourishing is front and center in the ST’s Second Part, on the movement of the rational creature to God as beatifying end.

But, a hearty discussion of being human and appropriate human action that is authentic and truly fulfilling threads as well through the Christology of the first fifty-nine questions of the Summa’s Third (III) and final part. The theme as developed in the Summa III is much less frequently remarked in the literature. That is unfortunate. In discussing Christ and his human acting, Aquinas has put the finishing touches on his theological anthropology.

The Second Part of the Summa is indeed a magnificent accomplishment, well worth the study. The Second Part is itself divided into two parts: the first (I-II) looks at the movement of the rational creature to God as beatifying end in general; the second (II-II) treats one by one the main virtues (the three theological virtues; the cardinal virtues) that figure in that movement to God by which humans are fulfilled. In the Second Part, Aquinas expresses his most fundamental ideas about what it

means to be human, the actions that are crucial for development and growth towards God as end, and the conditions for such action. Flourishing, and the movement towards full flourishing, involves the whole person, body and soul. Thus, while he certainly pays close attention to volition and intellection, outlining the acts of knowing and willing that are proper to being human, Aquinas also attends to body and the passions, which can be conducive to spiritual thriving, or detract from that.

The account of fulfillment is resolutely positive. To be fulfilled is to know and to love what is most worthy of knowing and loving, which is God; final knowing and loving will come in the next life, in the immediate presence of God; what one does now, what one knows and loves now, should prepare one for that full flourishing, readying the person for entry in the next life into the direct presence of God. Acting, however, presupposes capacity, and acting well out of that capacity. Aquinas knows of several impediments to flourishing. The God who beatifies transcends the natural powers of soul; and people live in a fallen world and know sin in themselves and others as well as the consequences that follow on sin. In the moral theology of the Summa’s Second Part, God meets such need. The God who creates humans and orients them to the end that is God, also provides them with the means to attain their beatifying end. God directs by law; God offers new capacity to the person, to elevate to the supernatural level, and to heal of the problems of sin. ‘Habit’ runs through the talk of capacity and the correct acting out of that capacity. Grace itself is habitual, perfecting the essence of the soul;

Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, 1366. Andrea di Bonaiuto. Basilica of Santa Maria Novella.

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the virtues infused with grace—the theological virtues, infused moral virtues—are by definition ‘habits’ (a virtue is a ‘good habit’ that disposes one to acts of a kind); the gifts of the Holy Spirit by which the possessor is made more prone to the promptings of God’s grace to virtuous action conducive to attaining God are habits as well. Talk of ‘habit’ that is infused serves a double function. A habit is rooted in a human being; the grace, infused virtue, and gifts belong to that person who has received them, and it is by the added capacity established by those habits that the person can know and love in a way pleasing to God. But, these habits are gifts, not one’s own accomplishment; the attaining of the beatifiying God is very much a gift of God, who remains present in this giving. Human flourishing involves God’s sharing; it is on that basis that humans form community with God, in this world and in the next.

The journey as portrayed by Aquinas is of the individual, and the habitual enhancement of capacity is of an individual. And, this journey reaches its term not in this life, but in the next. However, there is very much a social dimension to the Summa’s comments on the virtuous life, and virtue’s expression will indeed matter to this world. To reflect on two of the virtues, each architectonic in their way: Justice means to render what is owed to another, to God in the first place, but to others as well. And, with charity, one can recall here the double love command of scripture, to love God above all things and to love others as they relate to God as to their beginning and end.

And so life in this world does have a value, and not simply as a preparation for the next world (although it is that). One is flourishing, and on the way to final flourishing, by loving God and others in God, now; in working for justice, in giving others their due, now; by building now the loving and just community with others in God that God seeks of humans.

‘‘Human flourishing involves God’s sharing; it is on that basis that humans form community with God, in this world and in the next.’’

Thomas’s accomplishment in ST III is equally remarkable. The Christology discloses a profound encounter with the scriptural witness to Christ, and with the post-scriptural Christian tradition that comes to especial expression in the early ecumenical councils. The Christology is incarnational, affirming hypostatic union. The person of Jesus is the second divine person, who from eternity is a distinct person in God and one and the same God as the Father, as the Holy Spirit. Without loss to itself as fully divine Word of God, the Word has taken up a second nature—human nature—and instantiated that nature. The incarnate Word is truly human; and the actings and sufferings of the truly human Word (as incarnate) are of momentous significance for other people. It is through Christ that God works out human salvation, meets the challenges of human existence, provides the capacity required for appropriate action that is conducive to human flourishing. As Aquinas puts it succinctly, near the beginning of the Summa when he explains that structure of the work (ST I.2 prologue), Christ as human is the way to God as end.

In this incarnational Christology, it does matter that the Word is God, and

that the Word is that divine person, with the characteristics of that person (distinct from those of the Father or of the Spirit). And it definitely does matter that the Word was made flesh, is as incarnate truly human. One sign of Aquinas’s skill as a theologian is his ability to give each aspect of Christ—the divinity; the divine personhood; the full humanity—its due, playing up what is most relevant at given points of his Christological analysis. And thus, when it comes to Christ’s personal holiness, to his good willing and acting, and suffering, Aquinas focuses on the genuine humanness of the incarnate Word. He is God; but it is not because he is God that Jesus is holy, acts well, and acts unfailingly well. Rather, his success as moral agent is due to the grace that he has received, to the infused virtues, including charity and justice, to the gifts of the Holy Spirit that make him fully responsive to the promptings of grace. Compared to other humans, there is a difference in degree: his grace and virtue and gift are to the full, in keeping with his salvific mission. But, what holds of others—flourishing as predicated on proper relation to and reception from God—holds of him.

And so in the Christology of ST III, Aquinas can play up the exemplarity of Jesus, both ontological and, not incidentally, moral. He is truly and fully human, and in his acting and suffering, he can thus show what it means to act in a way that is appropriate to a being who stands in correct relation to God and acts in a way that is in keeping with the will of God for beings of this sort, and thus flourish. In comparison with the account in the Summa’s Second Part, the move is to the specific, to the concrete expression of the human life welllived, out of grace, virtue, and gift.

Aquinas’s account of human flourishing, put in a Christological key, may well be of interest to a broad range of readers. There is a certain beauty in the portrayal of this human in ST III, and Aquinas’s presentation of Jesus, who stands in this relation to God and exemplifies the virtues that Aquinas plays up, may end up appealing to many readers (at least those who strive to eschew reductionist accounts of the human; who continue to take seriously will and intellect and the whole person, body and soul; and who are not averse to considering how others may figure in the flourishing of an individual). That presentation can also prove challenging, in a good way. Aquinas is not alone in describing

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St. Thomas Aquinas, 2013. Maxim Kantor (1957- ). Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Vatican.

human flourishing or urging its pursuit. His account of human flourishing, including the virtues conducive to that, will differ in small or significant ways from that proposed by others, Christian and non-Christian. Aquinas’s Jesus, the true human, is not Aristotle’s contemplative sage; and other Christians, wed as is Aquinas to the scriptures, may put the stress elsewhere

in accounting for human fulfillment. Comparative work, bringing this Aquinas into dialogue with other versions, is thus in order, in the search for ever more adequate accounts of what it means to be human and to thrive as human.

Joseph Wawrykow Associate Professor of Theology Fall 2011 NDIAS Fellow

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theatre history’s blind-spot: the dramatic side of thomism

by Margaret Garvey

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n the contemporary academy one rarely associates a positive attitude toward theatre with Christianity. Even less would anyone suspect that the father of Roman Catholic orthodoxy was in any way involved in the early twentieth century movement—referred to in the theatre world as “physical theatre”—that transformed acting world wide. But such is the case. It was St. Thomas Aquinas’s version of Aristotelian body-soul unity (his “third way”) that inspired the founder of physical theatre, Jacques Copeau, in his quest for a more scientifically grounded educational program for actors and a more authentic theatre aesthetic.

The amazing revelation inherent in this unknown fact is that the most prestigious contemporary drama schools are, by historically verifiable fact, Thomist in origin: Juilliard Drama Division, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, the Lecoq schools in France, to name only of few of the most well-known. Grant it, the prevailing theatre culture and some of Copeau’s disciples who founded these institutions compromised some of the significant Thomist principles at the heart of Copeau’s version of physical theatre. But the truth remains that these schools would not exist today or have the relative success they have had in shaping the best directors and actors of our times (Laurence Olivier, Peter Hall and many others) if it weren’t for Copeau’s Thomism.

In his attempt to radically transform French theatre, Copeau founded the first school for young, aspiring actors (beginning with ages 11 – 13), the Vieux Colombier, in Paris, first in 1913 and later after the war, in 1919.

Its educational approach supplanted the mechanistic apprenticeship that had led the actor to perform one stock character at most for life. Its name became a by-word for optimal, holistic actor training. There, Copeau, guided by Maria Montessori’s psychological principles, experimented with a curriculum designed specifically for artists and found the essence of a spellbinding, seemingly spontaneous theatre performance. The embodied,

ABOVE: Overcome, Hollie Chastain. Right: Jacques Copeau, from The Bellman, Vol. 23, 1917.

hands-on, sense-integrating yet demandingly intellectual education of his pupils became the “incarnational” acting that eventually displaced the rhetorical acting of the period and revolutionized the theatre world forever.

Montessori, a contemporary of Copeau and also a true disciple of Aquinas, bequeathed to Copeau her sense of “gradual incarnation.”

This educational principle stipulates that body-mind integration is only possible through free, instinctive yet intelligent physical movement and adaptation to the physical and interpersonal world. Simultaneously, the psyche becomes more fully itself the more it absorbs the real world through its senses.1 Copeau’s actors “incarnated” characters; they did not mimic them, or merely perform rhetorical speeches. They could do so because their own education had been “incarnational.” They discovered their fictive character in the same way that they had discovered the world. Their intellectual capacity was fired by their creative instinct and vice-versa. As Dan McInerny put it in his essay, “A Humble and Trembling Movement: Creative Intuition and Maritain’s Philosophy of Education,”2 the “preconscious” for the Thomist Jacques Maritain, and reflected in Montessorian education, is the “well-spring of knowledge and poetry, of love and truly

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human desires;” hence, creative intuition and “poetic impulses” are inextricably bound together.

Further, the educational ethos of Copeau’s actors also strengthened their own sense of self. Actors, as Copeau would put it, “risk their soul”3 when they act. Without a scientifically informed acting process they could lose their “selves.” An actor’s education then, had to combine growth in the sense of her “deep” self with training in an acting technique that fostered total identification with the fictive self.

The actor had to constantly distinguish and identify, in a sense “become” a metaphor. The actors of the Vieux Colombier led a communal life that strove to abide by moral principles that could ensure this personal growth.

Wonder, love, the joy of discovery, sincerity, and service: all of these were transposed from ordinary life into their theatre-making. Quality ensemble acting of the type they produced was essentially a communal art demanding selflessness, joy and the “sincere” portrayal of one’s character.

The most striking element in theatre history’s blind spot toward dramatic Thomism is its neglect of the connection between Jacques Maritain and Copeau. Though Copeau used Maritain’s L’Art et Scholastique as a textbook in his theatre theory classes at his school, more attention is given to the random phrases of Nietzsche that Copeau quotes periodically than

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to Maritain. The history of religion has remedied the ignorance of Maritain’s “mystic modernism” recently in Stephen Schloesser’s book, Jazz Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933. But the remedial effects do not extend to Maritain’s Thomist influence on modernist theatre.

Besides using Maritain’s first book on art as a text, Copeau uses language throughout his theoretical writings that reflects Maritain’s Thomism. Of special interest is Copeau’s adoption of Maritain’s interpretation of art’s “imitation” of nature. True art should not imitate in a mirror-like way, copying nature’s superficial aspects but should vivify and unify its “matter” as philosophical “form” (in its function as entelechy) vivifies matter in hylomorphic union. Art, for both Copeau and Maritain, was “pure” when it organically expressed the deep form or “spiritual radiation present”4 in material reality even if this artistic expression involved a deformation of the surface reality.

Copeau spent his life searching for ways in which theatre could possess this purity by means of thoroughly trained and educated persons who formed an acting ensemble. He named his aesthetic “poetic realism,” a realism animated by the poetry of Thomist hylomorphism. The actor, already a “metaphorical” reality as body-expressing-soul or embodied mind, becomes a metaphor-maker by becoming one with and expressing a fictive character, allowing herself to be vivified by its “form,” thus becoming a person-expressing-character.

Schloesser’s “mystic modernism” did indeed exist in the theatre of Paris in the 1900s. It continues to do so today in vestigial form in some of the most famous and exciting contemporary theatre. Jacques Lecoq’s schools and the Théâtre du Soleil in Paris retain remnants of Thomism’s understanding of human physicality as the physicality of persons and embodied souls. A less well know but more faithfully Thomist theatre art is presently being performed and promoted by the Théâtre de l’Arc-en-Ciel in France and its educational arm, the Académie de Théâtre pour les Enfants.

As ambassadors of Thomist theatrical art, these latter are spectacular witnesses to Thomas’s “third way” using it as the foundation of an aesthetic as well as an educational philosophy. Their work puts mystic modernism on the stage and in the arts education classroom because of its fidelity to Copeau’s Thomism and its radically personalist approach. The original “physical theatre” of Copeau is alive and well and remains a theatre inspired by the embodied-soul and integrated personhood of the artist-actor.

Margaret Garvey Adjunct Professor of World Literature and English, Holy Cross College at Notre Dame Spring 2014 NDIAS Graduate Student Fellow

Notes

1.

Anton Pegis, A. Pegis, “St. Thomas and the Unity of Man” in Progress in Philosophy, ed. J. McWilliams, (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1955).

2.

Dan McInerny, “A Humble and Trembling Movement: Creative Intuition and Maritain’s Philosophy of Education,” in The Common Things: Essays on Thomism and Education (Washington, D.C.: American Maritain Association, 1999), 188 – 199.

3.

Jacques Copeau, Notes sur le métier du comédien, ed. Michel Brient (Paris: Michel Brient, 1955).

4.

Jacques Maritain.

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premodern ratio:

by Cyril O’Regan

dante as a point of concentration

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n order to understand the point at which we arrive, our contemporary situation, and to appreciate fully the complications and biases of a situation in which we are asked to bring the arts and theology together and figure theology’s relation to beauty and beauty’s relation to theology, we have to regress to the premodern episteme in which matters are somewhat less complicated. The obvious problem with this regress is deferral, because how are we to talk economically of the relation of Christianity to the arts and the interrelation of theology and the thematics of beauty over a period of almost two thousand years? At the minimum one would have to tell the story of theology’s oscillation between cultural withdrawal and cultural and specifically aesthetic assimilation, and outline the theological and nontheological reasons for both, as well as tell the story of the various ways in which theology borrowed and adapted a Neoplatonic metaphysics of beauty and came to understand that beauty was not only a transcendental, but also found its definition and center of operation in the triune God as the God of Christian faith. These stories admit of being told, but not briefly, or at least not sufficiently briefly. I propose instead to speak to what might be regarded as a crystallizing moment of this double set of relations, Dante’s La Divina Commedia. I speak to the text very much as a nonexpert, but even more importantly, I am focused solely on the way in which Dante’s great poem concentrates and/or recapitulates the entire premodern Christian episteme. I will deal very little if at all with the content of the poem.

I intend to focus mainly on the conjugation of beauty in Dante, but something should be said concerning the way in which La Divina Commedia represents an example of the mandate for Christian appropriation of cultural production that receives its authoritative justification in Augustine’s De doctrina christiana.1 While there may be some elements of cultural production that cannot be appropriated for Christian purposes, Augustine’s advice is that much can. If the sensibility that Augustine demonstrates here is that of the Alexandrians Clement and Origen, who see something valuable in the literature and philosophy of the classical period, then Augustine’s own reflections are fairly second-level in that he is concerned with disciplines or modes of thought, especially rhetoric, and their capacity to be enlisted for theological purposes. The medieval counterpart of, but also realization of, the enlisting of modes of thought which are not religiously specified is illustrated in Bonaventure’s De reductione, in which the appropriating power of theology is illustrated by its being the summation of an educational curriculum.2 One way to look at Dante is that his work both enacts and endorses the critical appropriation of the content and the disciplinary practices of the classical tradition. In La Divina Commedia, classical rhetoric,

‘‘In terms of its conjugation of beauty, La Divina Commedia . . . directly reflects on and justifies an essentially Neoplatonic aesthetic, with its two main patristic sources and its specifically medieval inflections.”

philosophy, and virtue find sanction, but Dante also makes it clear throughout his epic poem that these gifts are held hostage to the supernatural wisdom of Christianity, just as Virgil can be only the psychopomp for Dante the self-consciously Christian poet speaking to the specifically Christian topic of “last things.”

Like the Alexandrians, Dante thinks of classical culture in terms of the model of promise and fulfillment, shadow and clarity, and like the Alexandrians he goes down a fine line in recognizing the validity of classical thought and virtue without ever blurring the fact that only Christianity has absolute validity and represents the proper horizon of salvation. It would not be going too far to suggest that La Divina Commedia represents the exemplar for reflective Christianity of what the coincidence of charity toward non-Christian discourse and performance and the preservation of Christian uniqueness would look like.

But even if this premise were accepted, it would have to deal with the following objection.

Even if one agreed that Dante’s poem is theological through and through—and not everyone does—there is still the difficulty that La Divina Commedia is not a theological treatise but a poem, which places itself in a tradition of poetry or, better, in traditions of poetry. So the question emerges: are we dealing with the displacement of the authority of theology that we don’t see fully in action until the modern period? A Romanticist critic such as Harold Bloom would say yes:3 at the very least one finds in Dante the adumbration of release from theological dogmatism that is the hallmark of Romanticism.4 Certainly, Dante cannot be accused of being shy with regard to his own estimation of his talent, and structurally in La Divina Commedia we have his outbidding of Virgil, the guide whom he must leave behind

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when he comes to the celestial paradise in the Purgatorio (canto 30). Here only Christians have prerogatives, or at least Christians who are divinely inspired. Even more it is only within the perspective shaped by Christian faith that discourse is apt to sing the beatific vision with respect to which Augustine provides in De trinitate (bk. 15), the consummate Western expression. A Bloomian position then has its evidence, and the following could be a summary: La Divina Commedia succeeds as a work of poetry despite rather than because of the compendious orthodox theology. It is obvious that a number of Bloom’s targets are literary figures such as T. S. Eliot and Dorothy Sayers, who think that the communication of theological substance is crucial to the greatness of the poem.5 Bloom, however, is

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crude in a way that none of these admirers of Dante are in thinking that the relation between theology and poetry is something of a zero-sum game. Both of these writers appreciate in a way that Bloom does not that La Divina Commedia does not reproduce either the compact of the Catholic theological tradition or Aquinas’s Summa in a poetic medium, such that poetry is necessarily conceived as embellishment or decoration. La Divina Commedia exceeds magisterial theological production in a number of ways. I will mention only a few here.

First, through its descriptive powers and evocative metaphors, La Divina Commedia manages to find an objective correlative to what by definition does not allow one, and by doing so it offers a motive for transformation that no theological treatise could provide. Second, La Divina Commedia represents a form of double redress: redress, on the one hand, to the crude imaginings of the Christian tradition, especially with respect to hell, and, on the other, to the discourse of the disembodied soul, governed by essentially Platonic protocols.6 Third, La Divina Commedia represents nothing less than a supplement to scripture, which at the same time does not compete with it.7 If the Bible is not exactly silent on existence in the eschaton, it is fairly reticent. There is, of course, Matthew 25, and one can also include Revelation. But the real speculation on the afterlife in biblical material is found in the extra-canonic apocalyptic tradition, the Ezra and Enoch traditions in particular. Dante may or may not have had access to this material;8 but even if he did not, it had made its way into the popular religious imagination. It is the City of God (bks. 20 – 22), which represents a theological formatting of the biblical and traditional views of the eschata, that provides not only the approximate theological backdrop (Aquinas could do this) but gives eschatological inquiry its pertinence and exigence.

Augustine is a point along a line in which more is said about the eschata; Dante represents a terminus. Moreover, he represents a terminus that adds to scripture, while enlisting Augustine himself as a supplement.

In terms of its conjugation of beauty, La Divina Commedia is not simply the practical exemplification of medieval aesthetics, indeed, theological aesthetics. It also directly reflects on and justifies an essentially Neoplatonic aesthetic, with its two main patristic sources and its specifically medieval inflections. This inheritance is especially conspicuous in the Paradiso, where one can sort through the Augustinian and Dionysian elements (patristic) and see the resolution of the Thomistic and Bonaventuran traditions (medieval).

As a whole, La Divina Commedia is Augustinian in its basic commitment to an aesthetic of harmony, form, and light, and in its conviction that the source of harmony, form, and light is the triune God defined as love.9 Of course, this is going somewhat beyond an Augustine who, if he prepares for such

Top of page: Illustration of Dante’s Paradiso, canto X, first circle of the 12 teachers of wisdom led by Thomas Aquinas (c. 1442-1452). Giovanni di Paolo (c. 1403-1482). British Library.

Bottom LEft: Dante (c. 1552-1568). Cristofano dell’Altissimo (c. 1525-1605). Uffizi Gallery.

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a synthesis, does not enact it. The great aesthetic reflections of De musica and De ordine, which come shortly after Augustine’s conversion, articulate an essentially Neoplatonic and/or Neopythagorean metaphysics in which immaterial beauty is exhibited in the physical order. Assimilable in principle, these aesthetic convictions—which are never gainsaid by Augustine—are not yet assimilated in fact to a theological frame in which they are subject to modification by a Christian narrative scheme in which the revelation of God’s mercy is what defines goodness and truth and in which the triune God is the origin and end of all material and spiritual reality. And when, subsequent to his conversion, Augustine does offer examples of the way in which Christian theology critically assimilates Neoplatonic thought, for instance, in the Confessiones and De trinitate, while Neoplatonic reflections on the taxonomy of being and goodness are in play, as well as something like a Neoplatonic psychology, the same cannot fully be said of beauty. Augustine can address God under the mantle of beauty in the Confessiones to suggest something like the capacity for the Christian not only to think contrastively of God as superior to the world of the senses, which seduce, but perhaps also to personalize a beauty that in classical Neoplatonism always remains impersonal.10 There are gestures in a direction in which beauty can be theologically appropriated, but the appropriation remains incomplete, a kind of “unfulfilled intention,” to avail ourselves of the classical language of phenomenology.

‘‘If the general aesthetic values form, harmony, and light, the specific theological aesthetic situates supernal beauty in the Trinity as both Aquinas and Bonaventure, following Pseudo-Dionysius, had done.’’

Matters are somewhat different in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius. The corpus is smaller; the work is always already Christian and Neoplatonic.

If—with the help of some theological spectacles—texts such as The Divine Names and Mystical Theology provide cause for the worry that Neoplatonic metaphysics comes dangerously close to swamping Christian fundamentals such as Christ as the pivot of theophany because the pivot of redemption, and to compromising the status of the triune God as the ultimate ground, the place of beauty gets assured in this theological matrix in an unparalleled way. The theology of Pseudo-Dionysius is aesthetic all the way down as well as all the way up in that the absolutely transcendent Godhead or Trinity is not only absolute or superessential being and goodness, but superessential beauty as well. The following passage from The Divine Names is foundational with respect to medieval aesthetics: “But the Superessential Beautiful is called ‘Beauty’ because of that quality which It imparts to all things severally according to their nature, and because it is the Cause of the harmony and splendor of all things, flashing forth upon them all, like light, the beautifying communication of Its originating ray.”11 In a way not fully realized in Augustine, beauty is a transcendental and is intimately associated with the God of Christian worship. If Augustine’s aesthetics of form, harmony, and light are operative throughout La Divina Commedia and essentially regulate it, then the closer the poet Dante comes

to the end of his journey, which highlights the mystical/ eschatological experience of the triune God (Paradiso canto 33),12 the more Dionysian the aesthetic. And, of course, it is the Dionysian theological aesthetic frame in which one finds a hyperbolization of eros.13 Eros or desire is very much present in Augustine, but in the work of Pseudo-Dionysius eros is magnified: it is the raison d’être of all being, but human existence in particular is desire.

Immediately after the passage from The Divine Names (4.7) quoted above, Pseudo-Dionysius describes Beauty as attracting things together in mutual interpenetration. This attraction is ineliminable. Moreover, one can see, even more clearly in his case than in Augustine’s, the doubleness of desire: it is simultaneously positive and negative, the movement toward perfection (poros) concomitant with the overcoming of lack (penia).14 The Augustinian and Dionysian versions of theological aesthetics are mediated in the medieval period, of course, by specifically medieval varieties of thought, and by Aquinas and Bonaventure in particular. Aquinas and Bonaventure inherit both theological aesthetic strands and inflect them in unique ways. If Aquinas’s theological aesthetics is broadly Augustinian in its commitment to form, harmony, and light, it also does not fail to emphasize, along with Pseudo-Dionysius, that beauty has its ground in the Trinity and that beauty is what engenders delight and a transcending movement.15 Correlatively, if Bonaventure’s genius is Dionysian in its emphases on the trinitarian context of beauty, its gift character, and the way in which it excites, indeed constitutes response, yet he by no means repeals the formal aesthetic properties of form, harmony, and radiance.16 La Divina Commedia does not need to choose between these different aesthetic inflections. One might say that, just as in general in his great poem and in the Paradiso in particular, with its depiction of what is in store for us in the blessed state, Dante attempts to reconcile the Dominicans and the Franciscans,17 so also he reconciles the Thomistic and Bonaventuran inflections of the two great expressions of theological aesthetics of the patristic period. If the general aesthetic values form, harmony, and light, the specific theological aesthetic situates supernal beauty in the Trinity as both Aquinas and Bonaventure, following Pseudo-Dionysius, had done. The

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Dionysian element is obviously to the fore in the charged erotics with respect to the Trinity as the love that moves the sun and other stars (l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle) (Par. 33.145), and which at once provides satiation and undoes it in the sense that the self-communication of the triune God cannot be borne (33.99).18 In his depiction of the love that moves the stars, and thus all human souls, Dante tends to give the credit to the whole Trinity and not single out a particular person (Par. 33.115 – 26).19 To the extent to which a particular person is pivotal, as is the case in Aquinas and Bonaventure, it is most nearly the Son. One might even say that the zenith of vision is more nearly Bonaventuran in that at the center of the circle of the Trinity is a Man (33.131). Here as elsewhere there is consummate theological balance. In canto 31, Mary is an object of love and praise who points beyond herself, and who is preceded by Beatrice, who cedes to her. In the Paradiso, Mary is the link between profane and sacred love, profane and sacred beauty, the transit site from one to the other. She is the art of transmutation. The role of the Spirit is not particularly developed in La Divina Commedia.

Nonetheless, La Divina Commedia complicates the issue of ultimate attribution of beauty, since there is the suggestion at least that the Spirit is beauty. Even if the role of the Spirit in the creation of the poem is not as obvious as it is in the proems to bks. 1 and 7 of Paradise Lost, nonetheless, it is the Spirit who to a significant extent enables Dante to write the poem that catalogs the various states in the afterlife, provides a point of view on all of history, unveils the darkness and the erasure of love in which praise is impossible, but also reveals light, the eternal light (la luce eterna), which is love and draws forth praise and love.

Cyril O’Regan Catherine F. Huisking Chair and Professor in Theology, Presenter at 2010 NDIAS Conference on Beauty Former NDIAS Steering Committee Member

This article is an excerpt from The Many Faces of Beauty (UND Press), edited by Vittorio Hösle that culminated from the NDIAS Beauty Conference.

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La Divina Commedia di Dante, 1465. Domenico di Michelino (1417-1491). Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore.

Notes

1.

See Augustine: De doctrina christiana, trans. R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Although this text primarily presents a biblical hermeneutics, I am still persuaded that Henri Irénée Marrou is substantially correct in speaking of it as establishing a “culture chrétienne,” that is, establishing the rules for cultural engagement and cultural transformation. See Saint Augustin et la fin de la culture antique, 4th ed. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1958), 331 ff.

2.

For a convenient English translation of De reductione artium ad theologiam, see On the Reduction of the Arts to Theology, trans. with introduction and commentary by Zachary Hayes, O. F. M. (New York: Franciscan Institute, 1997). As Bonaventure admits, he is only following in the tradition of Hugh of Saint Victor (who in turn is following in the tradition of Augustine).

3.

See, for example, Bloom’s essay on Dante in his The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Harcourt & Brace, 1994), 76 –104. See also Bloom’s briefer reflection on Dante in his Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds (New York: Warner, 2002), 90 –101.

4.

See especially Bloom, The Western Canon, 80, 84, 90, 98.

5.

See ibid., 77, where Bloom makes absolutely clear his distaste for a neoChristian interpretation of Dante as held not only by Sayers and Eliot but also by C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and W. H. Auden. Charles Williams comes in for special opprobrium.

The claim being made by Eliot and Sayers is not the strong one that the merit of the poem depends on the merit of the theological substance behind it, but rather that Dante is able to transform theological substance into verse, idea into image, and does so without anxiety or the experience of reaching that mars the Romantic idiom, which is fated to do without such substance or generate it itself. Of course, Dorothy L. Sayers is a distinguished translator of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, still in print by Penguin Books. In addition, she lectured widely on Dante. These lectures are gathered together in two volumes, specifically in her Introductory Papers on Dante (London: Methuen, 1954) and Further Papers on Dante (London: Methuen, 1957). For a complete account of Sayers’s work on and influence by Dante, see Barbara Reynolds, The Passionate Intellect: Dorothy L. Sayers’ Encounter with Dante (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989). T. S. Eliot not only wrote a famous essay “What Dante Means to Me,” in which he praised Dante for his vernacular ease and total control in language, but also, in his literary criticism, considered Dante to be the benchmark by which modern poetry and particularly Romantic poetry should be judged. Needless to say, most modern poets and nearly all of the Romantics fall far short of Dante’s level of poetic achievement. The main reason is that they feel obliged to create a world of assumption rather than relying on such a world, as Dante does. Of course, Eliot understands—but does not quite forgive—the fact that such reliance is extraordinarily difficult in the modern period. For an account not only of the critical function of Dante but also of the influence of Dante on Eliot’s poetry, see Dominic Manganiello, T. S. Eliot and Dante (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989).

6.

The fact that the beings whom Dante meets on his journey through the three

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dimensions of eschatological existence, and especially in the Paradiso, are not actually embodied does not give the lie to his anti-Platonism, which, in any event, is loud in the place that Dante gives to Beatrice. Being disembodied is not the normative status of postmortem existence, but in Dante’s Augustinian-Thomistic theology it represents an interim state between particular and general judgment that is coeval with a general resurrection.

7.

Bloom rightly sees that Dante is supplementing scripture, but he is unable to think of such supplementation as anything other than competitive. His view here is completely in line with his post-Freudian agonistic view of the literary tradition. The most accessible version of this general view—one for which Dante is an important piece of evidence—is Harold Bloom, Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism (London: Oxford University Press, 1975).

8.

For an interesting discussion of the apocalyptic source material available to Dante, see James C. Nohrnberg, “The First Fruits of the Last Judgment: The Commedia as a Thirteenth-Century Apocalypse,” in Last Things: Apocalypse, Judgment and Millennium in the Middle Ages, ed. Susan Ridyard (Sewanee, TN: University of the South, 2002), 111– 59.

9.

Needless to say, the aesthetics of harmony, form, and light are rendered more transparent in the Paradiso, when divine beauty is the object of sight and praise. At the same time that there is this correspondence, there is much demurral by the traveler in heaven concerning the competence of language to grasp that which in principle eludes its grasp. The obvious question to ask is whether this Neoplatonic aesthetic is in operation in the description of the states of souls in hell. The short answer is that it is by antithesis.

Dante’s commitment to this aesthetic shows in the determinacy, clarity, and balanced treatment of states of reality that are by definition the refusal of form, of light, and concordance.

10.

In the Confessiones, there are a number of Platonic-sounding reflections on beauty. It is evident that Plotinus is an influence, and Augustine’s view of beauty to a certain extent plays a similar role in countering a system of thought that has a very negative view of the physical world, in his case Manichaeism, in Plotinus’s case, Gnosticism.

See Confessiones 10.9, 10.15, 10.53. But Augustine does not simply recall Neoplatonism; he modifies it. The God who is addressed by and in the Psalms is personally addressed

by Augustine as the supreme Beauty in at least two places. The first is Confessiones 1.7; the second, the famous passage in 10.38: “Late have I loved thee, Beauty so ancient and so new.” In the first case, Plotinus’s reflection on beauty in Enneads 1.6.6 is recalled. Quite often, the appeal to Plotinus is taken as sufficient to define Augustine’s commitments. This, for example, typifies Henry Chadwick’s reading of 1.7. See his translation of the Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 10. In his introduction he seems to support the view that Augustine is reducible in fundamental respects to his Platonic influences. See Confessions, ix – xxvi, esp. xxi – xxiii.

11.

See The Divine Names, trans. C. E. Holt (London: SPCK, 1920), chap. 4. sect. 7, 95 – 96. Umberto Eco underscores the importance of this passage for medieval thought and especially for Bonaventure and Aquinas. See his Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans.

Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 18 – 26. Eco underscores the union in The Divine Names between the good and the beautiful, such that one maps the other.

This is essentially the meaning of the kalokagathia (13). Eco also underscores Aquinas’s debt to this passage from Pseudo-Dionysius in his wide-ranging The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, trans. Hugh Bredin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). Eco does not leave it at that, however, and proceeds to track in Aquinas’s work his clarifications of the distinctions between the transcendentals in terms of their distinct rationes (31– 48).

Eco acknowledges, as do most scholars interested in how aesthetic theory functioned in the medieval period, the pioneering work of Edgar de Bruyne and especially his Études d’esthétique médiévale, 3 vols. (Bruges: De Tempel, 1946).

12.

This develops on a point made by Diego Sbacchi in his La presenza di Dionigi Areopagita nel Paradiso di Dante (Florence: L. S. Olschki, 2006). The further Dante progresses toward the ultimate aim of all desire, the more the incapacity of language is disclosed. This is the constitutive feature of the texts of Pseudo-Dionysius, most especially The Mystical Theology.

13.

Something of this sort is suggested by Antonio Rossini in his Dante sapienziale: Dionigi e la belleza di Beatrice (Pisa: F. Serra, 2009). As with most Dante scholars, Rossini does not neglect to speak of the influence of the erotic mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux.

14.

Here I recall the classical definition of eros of the Symposium.

15.

Eco acknowledges the Dionysian influence. Still, it is fair to say that Eco is more interested in the formal criteria of beauty, which, arguably, have more in common with Augustine’s aesthetic reflections. See Eco, The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 64 –121.

Particularly in his analysis of the locus classicus of Aquinas’s reflection on “integrity” (integritas), “proportion” (proportio), and “clarity” (claritas), that is, Summa Theologiae 1, q. 39, a. 8c, Eco underscores how Aquinas operates with much greater analytic precision than his contemporaries or those who preceded him. See 65 – 66, also 91– 92, 114 –15.

16.

Needless to say, light or splendor is essential to Bonaventure’s aesthetics. See Eco, Art and Beauty, 49 – 51; The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas, 110 –11.

Bonaventure, however, did not neglect the notion of harmony. See Art and Beauty, 37. When it comes to Bonaventure, Eco’s terse but accurate treatment can be supplemented by Jane Marie Spargo’s still useful The Category of the Aesthetic in the Philosophy of Saint Bonaventure (Saint Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 1953). Spargo speaks not only to the debt that Bonaventure owes Augustine (57 ff.) and PseudoDionysius regarding beauty (37), but also to how Bonaventure develops their ideas and presents different emphases compared to Aquinas. Put simply, the key for Bonaventure is affective; for Aquinas, intellectual (15).

The main contribution of Spargo’s text, however, is to suggest that Bonaventure’s reflections on beauty are almost always theological in the strict sense, that is, they tend to refer either directly or indirectly to Christ or to the Trinity, especially the second person of the Trinity.

17.

As is well known, in the Paradiso Dante enacts a reconciliation of the Dominicans and the Franciscans by having Thomas Aquinas recount the life of Francis of Assisi in canto 11 and Bonaventure recount the life of Dominic in canto 12.

18.

In Par. 33.97– 99 the vision of the Trinity is a vision of light that suspends the discursive power of the mind while ever increasing the desire to see: “Così la mente mia, tutta sospesa, / mirava fissa, immobile e attenta, / e sempre di mirar facìesi accesa.” Citation is from La Divina Commedia (Milan: Ulrico Hoepli, 1960), 920 – 21. Dante here represents an interesting synthesis of Eastern and Western Christian inflections on the afterlife.

The Eastern inflection on the blessed life has tended to be more dynamic in that it stressed that eschatologically, as well as pre-eschatologically, the divine excites desire and ever deeper participation. This idea, encapsulated in the term epekstasis, is central to the fourth-century Greek theologian Gregory of Nyssa. Although the idea of “eternal becoming” was not accepted in the West, which insisted that becoming and desire belonged to the pre-eschatological sphere, and that being and satiation of desire were proper to the eschatological, the situation is made complicated by Augustine. On the one hand, the works of Augustine uphold the metaphysical contrast between becoming and being and the existential contrast between seeking and rest. On the other hand, there are subtleties in Augustine’s figuration of the eschatological state that suggest dynamism. For example, in speaking of the eschatological state at the beginning of De trinitate bk. 15, Augustine suggests the paradox that the blessed rest of the eschatological state is at the same time a progressive deepening of participation, and thus a kind of seeking and desire, albeit one that operates on an altogether different level of reality.

19.

In addition to canto 33, canto 31 has a number of references to the Trinity. See esp. Par. 31.28.

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a note on the ethical value of aesthetics

by Paolo L. Bernardini

T

Professor of Early Modern European History, Insubria University, Cosmo, Italy Spring 2011 NDIAS Fellow

here is a very well-known proverb in Italian: “Non è bello ciò che è bello, ma è bello ciò che piace.” It can be translated idiomatically into English as more or less “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” This implies the highest degree of aesthetical relativism. This is also the key to differentiating the areas of competence, and judgment, of ethics from that of aesthetics.

While ethics deals with what is necessarily wrong and what is, on the contrary, absolutely right, by trying its best to identify the intermediary degrees, the “grey zones” and the borders between evil and right (the real object of ethics), aesthetics, confined in the uncertain terrain of “de gustibus non est disputandum,” is a subdiscipline of philosophy that can be questioned in its very essence (i.e., in its very belonging to the realm of philosophy itself). If I commit a crime such as murder or theft, I am violating ethical rules. However, nobody can question my behavior should I hang a supremely ugly picture in my office. Unless, that is, my violation of whatever aesthetical criterion fashions and the times impose (i.e., my deliberate violation of taste and buon gusto) implies that my potential attitude violates moral laws as well.

That’s the reason why a philosophy of beauty and taste emerged well before the same word Image at top of Page: Afterthought, Hollie Chastain.

“aesthetics” was forged in the German Enlightenment, by a scholar of Christian Wolff, Baumgarten, who did not have in mind any theory of taste and beauty but was, on the contrary, only concocting a theory of perception deeper than the one conceived by his master.

This brought also a profound, long-lasting battle between aesthetics and ethics that Kant tried to reconcile in the Critique of Judgement, his last critical work of 1790; a battle well-fought in the mind of the philosophers of the Middle Ages. It comes as no surprise that Umberto Eco, one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, decided to write his “tesi di laurea” on the problem of beauty and aesthetics in general in Thomas Aquinas. If my perception of beauty is distorted, my perception of goodness might be distorted as well, and this argument, over the centuries, has brought a number of fascinating, and varied interpretations: culminating in Adorno’s mighty reversal of the classic “de gustibus non est disputandum” in his Minima moralia, a work conceived and written in the dire times of WWII, and, to my understanding, still of immense bearing in its criticism of contemporary society. At the same time, the contrast between ethics and aesthetics brought to several forms an annihilation of beauty—in its sensual meaning—while aesthetics, degenerated into “aestheticism,” became the arena of sins against nature itself. From D’Annunzio to Oscar Wilde, aestheticism paved the way for negative ethical, and, mostly, antisocial behaviors. Beauty and Goodness seem to be reconciled for once and forever only in the most sacred works of art, like Giotto’s frescoes in the Cappella degli Scrovegni in Padova. Sacred poetry and sacred art, sacred music and sacred literature realize a reconciliation between the Beautiful and Good that, however, does not solve the problem of their secular opposition.

Aesthetics are open to a realm of possibilities inconceivable for ethics, unless the most dangerous relativism is peacefully accepted.

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“the air of these”: dimension and gladness in literary art

by Mary Kinzie The poem that never reaches words feeds the night behind the day the night waiting behind each day

Whether it falls affects not those who see its grain on their pages beneath the light than sun don’t

don’t

brighter

don’t

through drops of water in air brighter than the long bow anchored in childhood its second foot onto the plain of the far present

reaching

even further from where it was than we are . . . Youth . . .

light . . . flecks of shade in a consistent film abrasive as emery along the arm damp as the clothes you slept in that by morning bend to your hipjoint elbow knee and keep the air of these like memory matted by life

I

**

would like to speak about a response more mental than emotional, and which I experience whenever, in a work of literature, language artfully evolves double meaning. It is gladness, from the root ghel-, to shine.

Cognate with glisten and glass and glint and gleam, also with the Old English word for ember, gled, and derived from roots meaning yellow and gold, the word glad (from Old English glæd) means shining and joyful. It helps to know that the next example in the American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots is glee (from an Old English word meaning sport or merriment).1 It is also caught in a nice tangle of transpositions whereby what is seen defers to the act of seeing. For example, although glimpse derives from the Middle High German glimsen (to gleam), Middle English replaces the action of objects Left: The Poet’s House, Hollie Chastain. Top Right: Mary Kinzie Photo by Star Black.

that glimsen or glimmer in the half-light, with the action of the observer who glimpses that gleaming.2 There is perverseness, cancellation, and considerable slippage in changes from word origins. It is as if the users of language carried their words around in echoing drums that muffled, by multiplying, their audible lineage.

Contributing to the din is the fact that words are shared by those who make art, and those who make treatises and instruction manuals and who engage in the many forms of gossip and taunt and low comedy that make up popular culture. The artist by intuitive design explores and enriches this polysemous template of flaws. This is one sense (the sense of similarity that dislodges one meaning for another amid a haze of static) in which words reverberate.

Yet another sense is modeled in the emanation of golden light from the word gladness, namely, the energy of etymology beneath a word that may have passed—or shrunk into—ordinary usage. It may need a visionary such as William Blake to glimpse the showers of light from the rising sun as Albion leaves the mine where he toiled with slaves, asserting his victory over the eternal night of the dense mineral earth. “The Dance of Albion,” Blake called his 1794 nude, or (his alternative title) “Glad Day.” The resplendent image of the young man in Blake’s painting, especially over its title, reminds us that glad means more than the smooth pleasantry emphasized by the Oxford English Dictionary (which gives great weight to the similar-sounding glat, meaning smooth, inserted from Old High German)—no, Blake’s glad decidedly means burnished with light.

And his image also brings us to acknowledge a drama of temporal change as the sun of liberated humankind breaks with the otherwise dark and stony horizon. As with the dawning experience of interwoven meaning in a literary work, a gradual change occurs with the slow rising of the sun and then, at once, there is

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the sudden pouring of light and radiant color back into the world. Mimicking the experience of dawn is the gradual and then the intensified—reflected and redoubled—stream of gladness that pours forward from and back to the word-web of a poem. From this subtle reciprocal stream we can acquire a sense of a work’s dimension. f I may use “poem” as the archetype and covering term for all artful literature, including works in artful prose, then it seems to me that every experience of dawning utterance that builds to dimension in a poem is defined by an emotion of gladness. I don’t know whether the term “archaic smile” summons an image for you, but the kouros figure from Anavysos and the angels on the portals of Amiens Cathedral have this barely smiling expression on their faces. Blake’s Albion even has it. My own face must, when I am experiencing aesthetic gladness, have this ghost of a smile. The body meanwhile is alert but composed, in a state of forgetful well-being. Awareness dawns in the mind and radiates everywhere, picking up and bearing forward the shining clues of words.

I thought it best to begin the present discussion with a piece of prose; from this I will move to a couple of short lyric poems that invite the experience of aesthetic joy. These are not the only works that provide this experience, nor for me have they been the formative ones, nor are they likely to remain the representative ones. But they illustrate certain breakthroughs and may predict certain aesthetic atmospheres that may in time come to be thought beautiful.

Then I will finish with the rest of my own poem that began this essay—which I hope prepared the ground for echoes with, and which I composed in homage to, the poems I shall discuss, and which I intend as an example of ‘gladdening-at’ in response to the growth of dimension in verbal art.

The first passage appears in the second chapter of Penelope Fitzgerald’s delightful short novel Offshore, about a group of people who live on river barges below Chelsea Embankment on the Thames. The perspective is that of a child who is both the object of the chapter and its subjective lens. Tilda James is six years old, saturated with nautical knowledge (when her older sister Martha asks her later about the tides, Tilda can give the exact times for high and low at the various bridges and even their length in hours), and yet she has a fanciful humor and a great gift for living in the present. She is perched on the mainmast of the Thames barge on which she lives with her sister and mother (the father is separated from the family). The name of their flat-bottomed barge is Grace, which is also the name that the other barge owners use to think about Nenna James and her daughters.

Tilda had been waiting for the tide to turn, and after it does, her daydream begins. Willis is a sixty-five-year-old marine artist who hopes to sell his barge Dreadnought before it sinks.

Willis had frequently told her that these old barges, in spite of their great sails, didn’t need a crew of more than two men, in fact a man and a boy could

I

The dance of Albion. William Blake (1757-1827). British Museum.

handle them easily. The sails had been tan-coloured, like the earth, and dressed with oil, which never quite dried out. There were none left now. But Grace wouldn’t need them to go out to sea on the ebbtide. She wouldn’t make sail until she reached Port of London. With her flat bottom, she would swim on the tide, all gear dropped, cunningly making use of the hidden drifts. The six-year-old boy knew every current and eddy of the river. Long had he studied the secrets of the Thames. None but he would have noticed the gleam of gold and diamonds–the ring on the dead man’s finger as his hand broke the surface.

Farewell! He recognized it as the hand of his father, missing now for countless years. The Grace, 180 tons fully loaded, nosed her way through the low arches by the Middlesex bank, where there was no room for other craft, passing, or surpassing, all the shipping there. At Tower Bridge if four foot diameter discs bearing black and white signal stripes are displayed fourteen foot to landward of the signals, this is an indication that the bridge cannot be raised from mechanical or other cause. Only Grace could pass, not Maurice, not even Dreadnought, a sight never to be forgotten. Men and women came out on the deck to watch as the great brown sails went up, with only a six-year-old boy at the winch, and the Grace, bound for Ushant, smelt the open sea.3

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As I have come to understand it, everything in a poem (and by extension in a novel, story, play, or lyric essay)—everything means at least twice. It means itself at the literal plane supported by the style as a whole, and it reaches toward comparisons through all the resources of the language, from the twisting cloth of the sentence, to the layering of etymologies beneath the surface of denotation, to the implication produced by tropes.

So what is the “style as a whole” within this subtle and changing paragraph? It begins with something told to her by the old painter Willis with the decrepit boat. Then we sense Tilda beguiled by the idea that she and someone like Willis, say, could sail the Grace to France, raising her nonexistent brown sails at the Port of London, till then coasting adroitly on the tide. It’s the adroitness that makes us wary (the sailor and the craft “cunningly making use of the hidden drifts”) and the mildly ironic self-revision across a pun as “The Grace . . . nosed her way . . . passing, or surpassing, all the shipping there” (my emphasis). But Fitzgerald stops short of announcing the start of Tilda’s actual voice; only the deftly inserted datum of the boy’s age (the same age as she) and, in retrospect, the fact that someone imagines two people going to sea at all (for the spark of Willis’s observation could kindle nobody’s interest but Tilda’s), announce the passage as hers.

From the sentence beginning “But Grace wouldn’t need them [the sails] to go out to sea,” Tilda’s mind has been fantasizing before us.

A curious braid of indirect discourse has been in-woven, quirky, rough, full of holes, and full of clichés both fustian and melodramatic (“Long had he studied the secrets of the Thames”; “None but he” can read the hints correctly; a dead man’s hand “broke the surface. Farewell,” the six-year-old mariner says to “his father . . . missing now for countless years”— just as her father had been, though Tilda’s, only for a matter of months). Then there is the stylistic drag of an opposing style, its prose heavy and listless, perhaps gleaned from a signal manual, which Tilda has by heart, down to its adverbial addendum: “this is an indication that the bridge cannot be raised from mechanical or other cause” (my emphases).

Children in literature are either too knowing (Henry James’s children are egregiously so, like Maisie, and the pupil) or washed in the pity of the writer for the self he or she used to be (one senses this in J. D. Salinger, where it is a heldback temptation, and in the more fully yielded-to pity for the protagonists in the English authors of Jane Eyre and Great Expectations). But Fitzgerald belongs to a tradition of

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imagining the child that is considerably subtler and more various. Other makers in her lineage are often women— Elizabeth Bowen (The House in Paris, The Death of the Heart, and Eva Trout), the Australian with British and American citizenship Shirley Hazzard (The Great Fire), Iris Murdoch (The Black Prince and The Good Apprentice). But their novels seem hugely dense next to Fitzgerald’s works, which travel by side steps and compressions rather than through imitative exfoliations of plot. Fellow novelist Julian Barnes has written that Fitzgerald’s final work, The Blue Flower, which concerns a poet, his thirteen-year-old fiancée, and his parents’ ramshackle life in eighteenth-century Germany, feels like a novel that “just happens to be set in history, and which we enter on equal terms with the characters we find within them; it is as if we were reading them in the time they are set” rather than in our own present time. Barnes’s aperçu does not mention style, but it is preoccupied with its effects (his piece for The Guardian in 2008 is called “How Did She Do It?”), and it could well apply to the paragraph from Offshore before us. What has Fitzgerald given us but a consciousness that is not in explanatory mode, that is not preoccupied with the fact that it is thinking, and that lives in a world we enter on the same terms as she does, with all the ellipses intact?

This is not an aggressively narrated novel, but rather a novel almost accidentally guided among the dozen or so characters who people it. Its primary style is neither third-person limited nor third-person objective. Instead, it moves in sympathy with the brilliant phrase of the linguist Seymour Chatman, by means of shifting “interest point of view,” which, unlike what Chatman calls cognitive point of view and perceptual point of view, can work in a well-established character’s absence.4 We follow the threads and rhythms of Tilda’s consciousness, which does not fuss over itself or insist on a seamless self-portrayal. The examples of her thought are consequently pure in a way that stream-of-consciousness technique cannot be pure, for the latter assumes a current that is constantly being pushed through the conducting wire (particularly with sense impressions) at quite a relentless tempo.

Fitzgerald’s style hits on a truth, that thought as we experience it has something like a wave pattern: even when we are most alert and alive, we are not always aware of being “on.” Fitzgerald gives the child Tilda the same selective point of view that she provides to her adult characters, and the fact that Tilda’s consciousness is variable, as theirs is, makes her a more interesting and dimensioned being.

Dimension is supplied more sparingly by the narrator of

‘‘If I may use ‘poem’ as the archetype and covering term for all artful literature, including works in artful prose, then it seems to me that every experience of dawning utterance that builds to dimension in a poem is defined by an emotion of gladness.’’

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the poet David Ferry’s short poem “The Chair.” It appears to belong to a familiar mode of poetry-in-the-moment, a category of postmodernist minimalism devoted to the clear presentation of a small, clear, perfect truth. But because it does not introduce a first-person mask, the object at the center, by the law of simplified focus, draws all our sympathy.

The Chair The chair left out in the garden night all winter Sits waiting for the summer day all night.

The insides of the metal arms are frozen.

Over the house the night sky wheels and turns All winter long even behind the day.5 This poem is composed of three sentences, three declarative sentences that are syntactically and, on the face of it, semantically simple. Further, these are three sentences that mark their laconic declarative sobriety: the sentences lean on the objective simplicity of means associated with declarative syntax in the indicative mood. Their objective tone presumes an objective logic. Yet they are three sentences that mask or leave unmarked and unremarked the fact that the object that is the subject is subtly animated. The predicate of the first declaration introduces a human attitude to an inert piece of furniture—the chair sits waiting. And now to look back at the first line from the second entails the recognition that there is a mild elevation in affective temperature as the demeanor of waiting is superimposed on the fact of having been left out in the yard all winter. Once that temperature warms, we become more sensitive to the not-entirely-colloquial or idiomatic phrase garden night, from which we understand that the garden is not only not growing, but that it continues to be palpably subdued to what is (metaphorically speaking) a season-long night. As a result, a kind of empathy spreads to the newly sensitized third line, containing the second of the three sentences, which says the insides of the arms of this chair are frozen. The trope, long-encoded in English, of the rests for our arms as the chair’s arms, suggests that its veins, even if only tubular veins of air, have hardened with cold.

Only two lines remain, but they are elusive and disturbing ones. The terms of winter and night counterpoint the tentative terms of day. They do so by numerical weight (twelve words versus the last four, “even behind the day”), and by thematic, that is semantic, outcome: The night sky’s stellar motion never stops, although we may be unable to verify this by looking up in daylight. The vision of day is infused with and subdued to the actions of night. The freezing is a further effect of the persistence of night from line one.

But Ferry gives no perceptual evidence for the wheeling of the stars, nothing, for example, about the thin veil of granularity that seems to dim even broad sunlight in winter, nor does

he provide outside authority (no mention of astronomy). No, the authority comes first of all through the position of the speaker who is looking on at a remove from both chair and house, and next through the implied passage of time needed to accumulate an awareness of movement that is slower than our organs of perception can take in.

Thus far the data, against which to play my impression that the poem shadows an impulse toward sublimity. But how does Ferry’s poem “The Chair” provide any pleasure at all, let alone point toward the sublime? It is not groomed to be pleasing. It does not embody amplitude of feeling. It ends almost before we can awaken to it. It is not historically dense.

Its tropes take work to recognize. It is not—particularly— artistically ornamented. To use an old polarity, it is not written in the sweet style, but in the somewhat obtuse style called “plain” or “drab.” Nor does it explain itself. Rather, it acts in thrall to what it exhibits—as though its aim were to suffer as artifact the blank vulnerability that its theme reveals— vulnerability to the sweep of invisible laws, which drive more than the planets. Because these laws rule even when we remain unaware, the poem is stripped bare of pretty stuff.

But there is gladness taken, by the presumed speaker, in that bareness, in his deprivations and laconic reserve. He delights in the mild marks of what the poem denies itself— delights, perverse as it sounds, in the conviction with which his poem resists the closure of the archetypal short lyric.

Consider the effect and the affect of a typical Dickinson poem, as it falls almost heavily toward its reversal: I reason, Earth is short And Anguish -- absolute -And many hurt, But, what of that?

I reason, we could die -The best Vitality Cannot excel Decay, But, what of that?

I reason, that in Heaven -Somehow, it will be even -Some new Equation, given -But, what of that?6 There is no dividing Dickinson’s tact from her daring: She dares to outrage the operative religious attitudes of her place and time. Just as she refused to be “saved” during revivalism, so her poem refuses to be comforted by the idea of heaven. Indeed, she blames heaven for keeping itself obscure. The pain we suffer on earth is constant and dire, but for two stanzas, at proofs of this fact, she shrugs. Then she reasons for the third time that eventually, in heaven, all the uncertainties will be clarified and the struggles made equal, yet her response surprisingly is the same, “But, what of that?”

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So what if we’re smilingly urged to reconcile with the cruelty imposed upon us as frail human beings? So what if we are soothed out of uncertainty? Still, asserts Dickinson, it will not be forgivable that we have suffered here. There cannot be reconciling if the condition of mortality—anguish on earth— is to be faced and taken seriously. However isolated Dickinson felt in her inability to convert, to swoon and attest, she made poems that insist on her right to play gadfly toward a creed that rationalized pain, and to condemn both the pain and the doctrinal casuistry of postmortal reward. She does this by taking the identical question (which has the rhetorical force of assertion) in two senses. First, it accords with the taking on of pain in light of a higher end in that religious system that the question in its second phase then rejects. The casual shrugging off of huge unpleasantness in the first two stanzas gives way to the bitter shrugging off of consolation and redemption in the third.

Unlike Dickinson, Ferry does not have a point to make, a stand to take, a persona to drape about himself and persuade us about; his poem “The Chair” is practically without a voice.

Whatever “I” is implied is less a dramatized sensibility caught in a critical moment than an effortlessly engaged continuation of person. Ferry’s poems do not presume a different state of being or a different set of problems in moving from one text to the next. With a few exceptions, the attitudes in his poems, as in “Scrim,” are not bound by occasion, because they draw him back to the same occasion.

Scrim I sit here in a shelter behind the words Of what I’m writing, looking out as if Through a dim curtain of rain, that keeps me in here.

The words are like a scrim upon the page, Obscuring what might be there beyond the scrim.

I can dimly see there’s something or someone there.

But I can’t tell if it’s God, or one of his angels, Or the past, or future, or who it is I love, My mother or father lost, or my lost sister, Or my wife lost when I was too late to get there, I only know there’s something, or somebody, there.

Tell me your name. How was it that I knew you?7 Ferry’s final question resembles those asked by Dante in the underworld: What is it that you do? Who were you in life?

Ferry’s speaking enters a shadowland through the poem’s medium, a blurred twilight that only the dramatic uncertainty of the poem makes possible, although he also thinks of this as thwarting him. This is Ferry’s persistent attitude of address, to stand quizzical and attentive before the mystery that is invariably his experience. He queries the clustering of

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the dead in “Scrim” just as he does the mental states of the street people in other poems or the doomed rope-dancer’s gallant plunge, appealing to all of them with the same wonderment he employs to approach old photographs of family members, visits to a demented relative in a nursing home, or dinner with a decorous, dying woman, at which there will be ashes to be eaten, and dirt to drink. In the hope that it is true that some works of art take time to acquire their beauty, while firm in the belief that Ferry’s work must appear in the vanguard of those that will do so, I offer the remainder of my homage (on the next two pages).

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As in David Ferry’s poem Scrim I am looking through the palings of the poem its iron bound with ivy words a grill out which the meanings scatter to stand in their own light dappled and violet against the other hints of perforation (How was it that I knew you?

As I look I try to keep on writing of those words with the tang or chock of metal that locks a brogue or bond against the tongue metal or an alloy of silver leaf with iron

made of

Tensile raises itself to me shyly wrong word for the words that seem to be alive inside the metal with decay from the gluey prongs of ivy

lacy

as it clung near the sharp fence of holly incising itself staglike to a clutch of points some whorled like thorns with a hint of rust from those it wounded (Was it bedouins wove lace on tiny thorns . . .

Nothing grew beneath the hollies or perhaps my grandmother had only one thought in a flowerbed each given to a single kind one to crepe myrtle along the chainlink fence a family named Word put up between her yard and theirs (The Words! weird I saw them running in white between the blossoms low springy cypress shrubs along the white stucco front of her house pronged holly around the screened in porch that had a glider with a canvas plaid upholstered cloth that we could not forbear to glide in till it hit the wall of white stucco that was outside yet inside

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and far indoors ivy in discolored water hanging near a window that looked north where my grandmother would sit her migraines out and I rub her hot stockinged feet *** Tempting to leave it there

childhood ununderstood among adults

You think they are like you but not so for you would rather tap with a clod of rock the strip of caps until each popped and stank than have your feet rubbed look through the ferocious holly or let the glider be in the tidal ease of earth

silent

Grill of speech bound with lace of living ivy that never touches words about the suffocating things falling through chasms behind each day mises en abîme repeating themselves penitentially (or with the air of these

Mary Kinzie Professor of English and Director of the English Major in Writing, Northwestern University Presenter at 2010 NDIAS Conference on Beauty Notes 1.

Calvert Watkins, The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, rev. ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 29.

2.

Other transfers include that from glitan (to glide, which moves into English as glitch and then obeys the association brought about by rhyming with the hitch that means trouble); gloaming is another case (from Old English glom or twilight), which changes over time to gloom, darkening any hint of brightness.

3.

Penelope Fitzgerald, Offshore (1979; reprint, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 28.

4.

Seymour Chatman, “Discourse: Nonnarrated Stories” (1978), in Essentials of the Theory of Fiction, ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick Murphy (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1988).

5.

“The Chair,” in David Ferry, Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 57. Poems of David Ferry are reprinted by kind permission of the poet.

6.

J301/Fr. 403, in The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. R.W. Franklin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 1999), 186.

7.

“Scrim,” in David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 111.

This article is an excerpt from The Many Faces of Beauty (UND Press), edited by Vittorio Hösle, which culminated from the NDIAS Beauty Conference.

Fresh courage, Hollie Chastain.

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interview with maxim kantor

by Grant Osborn

Maxim Kantor is a Director’s Fellow at the NDIAS this spring 2015, researching Russian politics, painting many great works, and delivering numerous lectures and workshops.

GO: Maxim, as a Russian artist, playwright, and novelist deeply rooted in philosophy and social commentary, how do you see yourself, your call to be an artist and writer, and your work— particularly in the context of contemporary Russia?

MK: I do believe I work not only in the context of contemporary Russia but also in the wider context of Europe. My link to Russia, of course, will remain always. But for years I have lived in Europe—in Germany, in Oxford [UK], in France—splitting my time between three countries, which has given me a wide spectrum of European acumens. And since I have deep connections and friends who work in all three places, it is not that I see only the surface of European life; I am in it. Being abroad also aids my perspective when looking at Russia, seeing it both from the inside out and outside in.

My family, having moved to Russia about ninety years ago, in 1929, does not even have the longest of histories there.

They were invited by the Soviet government as scientists; my grandfather, who was a famous mineralogist from Argentina, went to research the mountains in Russia, by what is Crimea and Ukraine.

The history of Russia through the last century gives us, and gives to any who may look at it precisely, the possibility to study not only Russian problems but problems of power,

problems of democracy, problems of republics, problems of tyranny, and many serious problems that are also an agenda of the history of Europe—or, let me say, of humanity’s history.

Russia only represents this history in a very sharp way. So one can receive Russian history as a good challenge to improve basic historical knowledge.

I cannot deny the fact that, since I spent many, many years in Russia and my native language is Russian, I probably understand Russian people better than other people, and even their mistakes, their sins, their guilt, and their hopes of course are much more clear to me than the hopes and guilt of British and Germans, though I do know those as well.

All that I do—pictures, plays, novels, or my articles—is connected with Europe and Russia. Right now, I am not able to divide the Russian crisis from the crisis of Europe and the wider world. Russia does not exist in isolation; it is not just a chemical experiment somewhere on the edge of the world. It is in many ways the core of the world, the center of many crossways. By studying Russia you study everything in connection with the rest of the world.

GO: When you speak of the crises facing us today, specifically Russia’s annexation of Crimea and war in Ukraine, do you feel a responsibility to address these issues in your art and writing?

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MK: Of course, no doubt. This is a great issue that each artist and each writer who has just a shadow of conscience should bring to an audience. It is something that no one could have expected and that absolutely powerfully appeared—as I repeat these days—quite suddenly like a fire in a dry forest.

We have to study this phenomenon, not only to oppose this war, which is unconscionable. This war must be terminated and those responsible put on trial. Crimea has to return to Ukraine and Russian troops should be withdrawn.

GO: President Putin has stated publically that there is no possibility Crimea will ever return to Ukraine. As a political critic of this stance, as well as a student of history and someone with a keen eye on current events, how much power do you believe artists and writers wield to influence such issues or, for that matter, the minds of individuals?

MK: I believe it is not only about artists or writers. I believe it is about everyone; each of us has our own influence, and if we deny our personal influence we are making a grave mistake.

Each free will must exercise as free will and, if we are not sentenced to pronounce a lie, if we are not killed, we simply must speak truth. And the single evidence of truth, just the single evidence of it, has enormous power.

Putin is lucky as a tyrant, molding the present situation with the help of history, culture, and propaganda. He is lucky to have the support of slaves who are cheated. But this does not mean that truth does not exist. During American history and English history, in fact during any history, there are moments when the majority crowd marched towards something incorrect until somebody appeared who said “you are wrong.” And even if that person’s not appreciated in this moment, their word carries weight. And if even just a single person remains who is able to pronounce truth, it is valuable and has to be pronounced.

Certainly an artist or writer who speaks for truth has the privilege of being heard by many. I cannot say that I am the only one who struggles now. There are several. I cannot say many, regretfully; I cannot say many—maybe tens, maybe hundreds, not thousands regretfully. But hundreds are enough. I believe that in Stalin’s time we did not have hundreds; we had far fewer. What always made me angry and puzzled is that I do not know of much anti-Stalinist literature and art during the 1930s. I know of anti-Fascist art in Germany, France, and many other countries. If you were to look at Bertold Brecht, or Thomas Mann, or George Grosz, for example, there were hundreds of pages written against Hitler; hundreds of pictures too. But I do not know a single picture painted or a single book written against Stalin within Stalin’s

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time. Solzhenitsyn came after him, and not even then was a single picture painted against Stalin. So that period of history was very gloomy. Well, if the difference between Stalin’s years and nowadays is that now we can count hundreds who stand against injustice, what a great progress, what a great hope! It’s also quite interesting that Putin and his clique feel discomfort that somebody disagrees. We all who oppose him receive threatening letters, anonymous phone calls, articles against us, and even demonstrations against us, the few people who stand in opposition. From one side it is nonsense, but from the other side it shows that the word of the few is valuable, is believable.

GO: I found it interesting when you mentioned George Grosz earlier because, even though your art is quite different, when I was first introduced to your series of etchings and prints a few years ago Grosz’s Ecce Homo immediately came to mind.

It is also interesting that you and Grosz have an apparent closeness of themes, this examination of the ugliness of humanity; but then your art works with very polarizing themes: the ugliness of humanity as well as the love and redeemability of humanity. How do you reconcile these two very polarizing themes in your work?

‘‘. . . if nothing else is possible, art should leave us evidence of the existence of [unprotected] people; it should be like a memorial, it should be like a tomb, like a monument.’’

MK: You got exactly the point. Indeed, Grosz is among those whom I admire. I would mention also Francisco Goya of course and van Gogh. Goya is perhaps the closest. But from the last century, yes, Grosz would have been. From early childhood, I started to draw and polarized heroes and figures in art.

I had a very sharp feeling of tenderness for unprotected life under the Soviet regime. I looked at my family, at my father particularly who was very brave and as he opposed the regime he could not publish. But as a boy, I looked at him as absolutely unprotected; he can be at any moment terminated.

And I thought about art like about something that may, that should, that must…if nothing else is possible, art should leave us evidence of the existence of such a people; it should be like a memorial, it should be like a tomb, like a monument. So when I painted all of them—my family, my friends, and people I respected—I did it almost like a tomb.

When I was about thirty, no one could tell me that the Soviet regime would ever end. We all thought that it would last forever. We then had a good break for about twenty-five years and now I am fifty-seven and it is all back. Our reprieve was only twenty-five years. It is like a joke. It is unbelievable.

So that is how it started: it started with just a wish to leave the faces of those who are dear and who are brave as a memory. I thought, “They will probably be defeated, they

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probably will die, and they probably will be smashed by power.

But I am here to leave their faces.” That was the first intention.

The second one, complementary to this, was somehow to blame and to leave evidence of evil. It is the reason why I will paint about Ukraine. Putin’s clique thinks they can hide everything and no one will say a word. They think it is all allowed, that they are well-protected by newspapers, by TV, by the crowd, that no one may touch them, and that there will be no evidence of their crime. No, no. Here I am, and there will be evidence of their crime.

These two polar intentions construct my art, a balance between faces and masks. For instance, I am doing a concert series with violinist Gidon Kremer that will be in several cities—Brussels, Milan, Luxemburg, and Paris— with the title “Russia: Masks and Faces.” It will start in April and ends in late May; there will be eight concerts. That exact polar structure that you pointed to is there in the masks and faces.

GO: As we have already spoken of artists that you admire like Goya and van Gogh, what writers have served as an inspiration for your work?

MK: When I think about art and literature and philosophy, I do not divide them into groups and disciplines. It is not that I am speaking about writers, then about philosophers, and then about artists. For me, they are all together, and when I think about Goya or Michelangelo, I think immediately about Dante and I do not think of one as just a writer and the other as just an artist. I think it is all spiritual work as they all were “teachers” in the best way of this word. It is the same with philosophers: Plato, Socrates, and Kant are really as influential

in art as good artists. Writers that I keep close and reread from time to time are Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Rabelais, Goethe, Plato who I love to read and always carry in my suitcase, Plutarch, Tacitus, and Tolstoy to think about Russia.

GO: In addition to the great thinkers we have already discussed, how would you characterize your father as a philosopher and his influence on your work and who you are as a person?

MK: He had a tremendous influence on me and I would say that all that I have done and continue doing is due to him, his influence, and his education. He was the one who introduced me to writing and painting, although he was not a writer or painter. But he made me a writer and a painter. He was my first and only teacher. I was of course in the art institute and art school, but he remained always my teacher, and I only heard his voice and what he said. I sought his advice. He was a very special man, and, by the way, he introduced me to philosophy. Each evening through my childhood until I was probably 15 or 16, we had a walk around our house, maybe about 500 circles around, and he read me philosophers out loud as we walked. We walked slowly with a book, or we sat somewhere on the fallen tree or on the bench and it was about two hours each day. He took it from his schedule. He was a great father….I would never have been able to read Hegel or Plato or Kant without hearing them in my childhood from the voice of my father. It is quite astonishing, but it is true. I never graduated from a philosophical institute, but as an adult speaking to professional philosophers I found that I had read what they had and it was all due to my father. He implanted thought in myself—that there is an eidos of all ideas together, art, literature, philosophy all live in one eidos and one has to be involved in all processes of all ideas. So there is nothing for which you should think “oh, it is not my field; my field is this one, not that one.” No; he was interested in chemistry, in physics, in mathematics and so on. I am not very good in mathematics and physics. But in philosophy and literature, art, history, geography, chemistry, I am very interested. It was only him who made it possible for me to learn this. It was him from his voice, from his constant daily reading.

My father was a philosopher. He had a very special life by the way. After the war, he came home and entered the philosophical institute in 1947. In 1952 he graduated.

But before getting into aspirantur, he was arrested as a cosmopolitan and only due to Stalin’s death was he released.

After that, for many years, he lost any possibility to publish or even be employed. Later he became an art historian since he was unable to publish on philosophy contrary to Marxist philosophy. So he became an art historian and a rather successful one at that. He was an editor of a liberal magazine at this time called Applied Art. He served as editor and chief for years until he was taken out of this role by the order of

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defined by the borders of morality. I do not divide my work as the government for anti-Soviet publications, and then he was an artist and my work as a writer. I wish to live long enough again without work. to write another couple of novels—I know which I wish to It was a very special life and a special world around him. We, write—and to paint another fifty pictures. In the pictures I his children, used to ask him why he did not complain about am trying to show the structure of society nowadays. I think, never being published. But he used to say, “Well, Homer was altogether, one day after my death when my work has all also never published.” As a philosopher, he created his own been completed, it will give a certain convincing picture of our system that was based on his theosophical construction—he time with a very definite impact on how it has to be improved. was a believer, not a confessional believer, but a believer. He In this way I believe that the role of the artist and writer thought that there is a main paradigm from which history has has sense. Otherwise I do not see any sense of writing and its source. He then came to the point where there are several painting. projects of world history involved in religion, in renaissance, and in science. Also, since he was a socialist, he thought GO: Speaking on your desire to return to an older aesthetics or that Marxism is one of these historical projects. He was of create a new aesthetics defined by morality, what role or value course not an orthodox Marxist. And it was all connected with do you think beauty should have in society? the divine picture. So it is a rather complex theory which he described. He has written two books, one of which I managed MK: I never counted beauty as a value. Beauty is a virtue, not to gather from his manuscripts and publish. I am still working a value. If features express virtue, then they are beautiful. If on the other one with my eldest son, who helped me with not, I do not understand what beauty is. It doesn’t exist alone. the first book, because my father left behind hundreds if not I remember an episode when Socrates was introduced to a thousands of pages. It is very interesting, it is very unusual, beautiful boy and said “Now and it is very significant in say something so that I may my opinion. It is his own see you.” The boy obviously work, and he worked each ‘‘. . . when my work has all been was beautiful but Socrates day never making any effort completed, it will give a certain convincing asked him to pronounce a to be appreciated. He simply word to make this beauty made a wall between himself picture of our time with a very definite alive. If beauty is silent, it does and the world. I think it was a very significant life that had a impact on how it has to be improved. In not have virtue and then it is not beauty for me. I cannot great, great influence on my this way I believe that the role of the artist understand beauty by itself. life.

We should clearly and writer has sense. Otherwise I do not understand that there are GO: Now, because we were talking about your father’s see any sense of writing and painting.’’ several types of art. To be honest, we are living in an legacy, when you think of epoch of applied art, which yourself with two new young is decorative, and manipulative art, which manipulates your boys and an older son and you think about your own legacy, brain, soul, wishes, and intentions. what do you want that legacy to be? Is it a particular art However, art should create a dialogue from soul to soul, work or a collection that you would like to direct them to or like Plato’s dialogues or Shakespeare’s plays, like verses from something you have written or is it something greater?

Dante. This is not common, even throughout all of art history.

Normally art is manipulative and decorative. Normally art MK: I used to think about my own work as a burden and as just shows us the surface of things and this is enough for an attempt, if you wish, to oppose nowadays the tradition art as many people think and as many artists do. But there of postmodern thinking. Thinking of breaking the tradition of is another sort of art that goes to the core, to an eidos, and postmodern thinking, which I am sure negatively contributed this art is much more valid for me. I think this type of art has to our civilization, I always kept in mind the experience of the something to do not with beauty but with virtue, and beauty Renaissance. I wish to return to categorical philosophy in art appears as a gift of its role. and to bring morality to the very focus of art, to bring the human image back to art. To put it briefly, that is the target.

GO: I know you have stated that you do not distinguish But when speaking about art it is not enough just to say between your work as an artist and writer, yet do you prefer “human image”; it will not be enough because which human working in particular mediums? Do you think a particular image, what kind of human image, with which materials medium has a particular purpose for a particular message? and how, with which characteristics? But in principle, and to say it briefly, I wish to create aesthetics which have—unlike MK: I do love oil painting, and I do love it for a purpose. I am postmodernity—very definite and very sharp borders as

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convinced that oil painting is the peak of development in visual art, and I think that is due to the variety of nuances that the medium of oil gives to the artist, to the spectator, to the picture—this variety has something to do with a complexity of feelings and thoughts that lend themselves to reflection. For me, oil painting is the way of reflection. It is not a statement as icon, for instance, or installation. But it is a kind of reflection.

Oil painting, in my opinion, is a kind of philosophy. And, by the way, I feel that there should be a history written of oil painting like a separate chapter within the history of art. This history of oil painting occupies only a very short period in the history of humanity, probably starting from the 15th century, 14th perhaps but mainly 15th, and terminating at the end of the 20th century. It does not mean that certain examples are not still able to appear, but mainly it spanned five hundred years, a very short history yet I think the peak of development of visual art.

to find in it. I will help the students understand how to operate with and view pictures. It is always good to involve all your knowledge in the process of looking. Observing a picture is not a lazy exercise; you have to really work together with the artist. The artist usually does only half the work.

What am I going to paint? I am going to paint a few pictures that are regretfully inspired by the Ukraine events. It would have been better if the events that served as the inspiration never have happened. However, they did, and this is a response that must be pronounced, that has to appear, and this I wish to do. One is called “Death of Empire.” One is called “Leviathan” speaking about Hobbes’s view of state. Several will be dedicated to the subject of refugees. Soon we are going to see them. I am curious myself how they will be finished.

GO: Transitioning from oil painting as a medium to your time in residence as a Director’s Fellow at the Institute, where you are in the process of creating many great oil paintings and are set to deliver a number of lectures, can you speak a bit about the lectures you intend to give and describe some of your paintings in progress?

MK: Normally I do not care where I am. If I have a studio, my children are around, and I have my books, then I am absolutely content. Of course I am used to my studio in France and in Berlin; it is easier to operate things with which you are accustomed. However, coming to Notre Dame was a great opportunity to see friends, my new friends at the NDIAS, and my dearest friend Vittorio [Hösle], who is my closest friend.

It is a great gift to see him. Just to have the possibility to visit and stay with Vittorio for a while is the greatest gift; it is also a gift for my children.

Above all, or besides all of that, the fellowship is a very interesting opportunity for me. Though I do not think I should be in a rush to make this judgment, to hurry myself to pronounce what I discover in America. I do not think it is good to push myself in this discovery. It will appear by itself.

But obviously what I feel most at present is the greatest crisis in Russia. It’s a crisis not only economically, not only militarily, not only with fascism, but let me even exaggerate it—it is a big cultural crisis and it’s a big disappointment with the possibility of the changes. As I told you, we emerged out of Soviet times about twenty-five years ago. And now again, what does it mean? That all the culture is not able to change anything? That sounds dramatically bad. So it’s a big cultural crisis, not an historical crisis. It is something that really closes the door of hope in principle. So that’s a big disappointment.

Having this, I wish to see the world around and to tread slowly. I wish to understand what happened in Russia and put it in a global context. In America, are there mutual problems?

Are there things that can be better understood from here looking there? I do remember that when Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to America and wrote Democracy in America, he did it thinking about his France. While I have been to America more than a dozen times, I have never stayed for more than three months. So I have certain expectations, a certain hope that slowly, slowly, slowly an American understanding will enter my brain. I wish to be able to look at things from your

MK: In one of the lectures, I will speak on the state of the Russian empire. In another, I would love to speak about several artists whom I consider to be great and whom I consider to be turning points in the history of art. So we may choose five or six, like van Gogh and Rembrandt, and I would love to introduce my vision, how I see them, why they, in my opinion, painted, what they painted, and what was the reason for them to take up the brush, and so on. When I speak to students, I wish to introduce them to the possible ways of observing a picture, because it is also a kind of special knowledge—how to look at a picture and what we should try

GO: What do you find distinctive about your time at the University of Notre Dame?

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perspective and understand it better as well as to compare life in America and Europe. So all this illness that made Russia rotten, I don’t know how far it went in the world. I don’t know how and which medicine we are able to give, if such medicine exists in principle, and if this medicine exists here—this I wish to investigate.

GO: One of your previous trips to the states was in January 2010 when you presented at the NDIAS conference on beauty, delivered lectures and workshops, and donated four of your prints to the Snite Museum of Art. How would you characterize that experience?

MK: It was a truly great experience for myself. I love the atmosphere of Notre Dame. I love the scholars here and the attitude of scholars to each other. I love this type of American openness between scholars. I love the structure of discussions. All of this is very much appreciated. Again, I wish to see it longer, and I wish to engage many at Notre Dame.

And I loved the conference. Notre Dame, especially with its Catholic tradition, means a lot to me since I am Catholic myself. *** Maxim Kantor is an internationally-known Russian painter, sculptor, novelist, playwright, and essayist. In addition to his

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appointment at Notre Dame, he is an Honorary Fellow of the University of Oxford’s Pembroke College as well as a member of Oxford’s Senior Council for St. Antony College and Wolfson College.

A recurring feature of his work is his rejection of formalism in the visual arts, which he regards as a flight from moral responsibility.

His art is deeply humanistic and frequently focuses on human suffering and the opportunity to overcome it through solidarity and love. While perhaps best known for his cycles of large oil paintings, he has also created three great portfolios of etchings and prints since 2000—Wasteland. Atlas (2001), Metropolis. Atlas (2004), and Vulcanus. Atlas (2010)—that offer a moral interpretation of the most momentous political changes of the twentieth century.

His work is featured in galleries and museums worldwide, from Moscow to London to Canberra as well as in the University of Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art and at the Vatican.

Earning a reputation as a novelist and essayist in 1993 with the publication of House in No-Man’s Land, Kantor went on to win the Russian National Literature Award in 2006 for his novel Drawing Textbook. Recently, Kantor has published the novel Red Light (2013), which was shortlisted for multiple Russian literary awards, and Empire Upside Down (2015).

For more information on Maxim Kantor and his work, please visit ndias.nd.edu.

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Top Left: Plato (being viewed by chuck loving); Right: Crucifixion (in progress at NDIAS); Center Left: Hegel; Bottom : Two pieces in progress at NDIAS. Maxim Kantor.

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2016-2017 call for fellows The Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS) is dedicated to fostering and supporting integrative scholarship addressing ultimate questions at the intersection of the arts, engineering, humanities, law, and natural, physical, and social sciences, especially those that transcend disciplinary boundaries.

The NDIAS encourages scholars to include questions of values in their analyses, to integrate diverse disciplines, and to ask how their findings advance civilization. The Institute offers its fellows the opportunity to engage not only in analysis but also in evaluating what should be done, to analyze the world in substantive and collaborative ways, and to think through the implications of present behavior for the future of the world.

As a collaborative academic community, the Institute cultivates the contemplative ideal that is an essential factor in the Catholic intellectual tradition and vital for the progression of scholarship. The greatest advances do not occur in solitude but in the company of others who share a passion for advancement and are open to dialogue and collaboration.

TOP: Socrates; Bottom: Kant; Maxim Kantor.

For more information on fellowships at the NDIAS, please visit ndias.nd.edu/ fellowships. The application period for 2016-2017 fellowships will open

by June 1, 2015. The awarding of the 2015-2016 fellowships will also take place in spring 2015.

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NDIAS QUARTERLY Winter 2015

alumni fellow news Elise Berman *Congratulations to Elise Berman, Spring 2013 NDIAS Fellow, on the recent birth of her son!

Paolo Bernardini *On November 9th, 2014, Paolo l. Bernardini, Spring 2011 NDIAS Fellow, was among the official observadores internacionales (international observers), of the International Commission of European Citizens, at the referendum for the independence of Catalunya. *In early 2015, Bernardini obtained the “Qualification of Director of Institute” (“Idoneità a Direttore di Istituto”) from the CNR, the Italian National Research Council, for the “Institute for the History of the European Mediterranean” (ISEM, located in Cagliari, Sardinia). * In London on February 19th, Paolo Bernardini participated in a most interesting and challenging session of the Global History Seminar of the London Global Gateway of Notre Dame, directed by Professor Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, on “The Mediterranean and the Mediterraneans in World History,” along with Professors David Abulafia (Cambridge), Peregrine Horde (Royal Holloway), Cyprian Broodbank (Cambridge), and Nicholas Purcell (Oxford). This occasion marked the first time Bernardini publically discussed his major project of a global history of the Mediterranean from 1791 to 1920. *In addition, Paolo Bernardini is pleased to announce the publication of Venetia. Tessere di un mosaico infinito, Milano: Mimesis, 2015, pp. 134.

Justin Biddle *Congratulations to Justin Biddle, Spring 2014 NDIAS Fellow, for his promotion to Associate Professor with tenure in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Justin is also serving currently as the Director of the Philosophy Program.

Brandon Gallaher *From September to December 2014, Brandon Gallaher, Spring 2014 NDIAS Fellow, was a Visiting Scholar at Doshisha University in Kyoto, Japan. *In addition, Brandon Gallaher has taken a Permanent Lectureship in Christian Theological Studies for the Department of Theology and Religion at the University of Exeter, UK.

Ulrich Lehner *Ulrich L. Lehner, Fall 2010 NDIAS Fellow, member of the Marquette University Theology Department, was promoted to Full Professor.

Congratulations, Ulrich! *Ulrich Lehner was also recently awarded the Helen Way Klingler Humanities Fellowship, a three year research grant and one of the highest honors of Marquette University. *Ulrich received a Carl Friedrich von Siemens Suppl.

Fellowship for his archival research in Munich for the years 2015-2017. *In addition, Ulrich Lehner is pleased to announce the publication of Mönche und Nonnen im Klosterkerker.

Ein verdrängtes Kapitel der Kirchengeschichte, 175 pp.

(Topos Taschenbuchverlag: March 2015). This book is a substantially enlarged translation of the English original.

Jonathan Marks *Jonathan Marks, 2013-2014 Templeton Fellow at the NDIAS, is pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Tales of the Ex-apes: How We Think about Human Evolution with the University of California Press this fall, based upon his research while an NDIAS Fellow.

Richard Oosterhoff *Richard Oosterhoff, 2012-2013 NDIAS Graduate Student Fellow, is pleased to announce the following publications: • “The Fabrist Origins of Erasmian Science: Mathematical Erudition in Erasmus’ Basel,” Erasmian Science, special edition of Journal of Interdisciplinary History of Ideas 3:6 (2014), 3:1-37.

• “Idiotae, Mathematics, and Artisans: The Untutored Mind and the Discovery of Nature in the Fabrist Circle.” Intellectual History Review (2014): 1-19.

Stefan Voigt *Stefan Voigt, Spring 2013 NDIAS Fellow, is pleased to announce the following publications: • (with Lars Feld and Jerg Gutmann) “Economic Growth and Judicial Independence, a Dozen Years On: Cross-Country Evidence Using an Updated Set of Indicators.” Forthcoming in European Journal of Political Economy 2015.

NDIAS Quarterly Winter 2015

• •

•

•

(with Jerg Gutmann) “The rule of law and constitutionalism in Muslim countries.” Forthcoming in Public Choice 2015. (with Nora El-Bialy) “Identifying the determinants of aggregate judicial performance: taxpayers’ money well spent?” Forthcoming in European Journal of Law and Economics 2015. (with Axel Dreher and Heiner Mikosch) “Membership Has Its Privileges—The Effect of Membership in International Organizations on FDI.” Forthcoming in World Development 2015. (with Lars Hornuf) “Preliminary References— Analyzing the Determinants that Made the ECJ the Powerful Court it Is.” Forthcoming in European Journal of Law & Economics. DOI 10.1007/s10657014-9449-9 (2015).

Vittorio Hösle *In early 2015, Vittorio Hösle, 2008-2013 NDIAS Director, published the Korean translation of A Short History of German Philosophy as well as the Spanish translation of a book, co-authored with Boris Groys, on reason and power.

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Piotr Kosicki *At the end of February, the NDIAS and University of Notre Dame Department of History were pleased to co-sponsor a public lecture by Piotr Kosicki, Assistant Professor of History at the University of Maryland and currently the W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell Hoover National Fellow at Stanford University, on Catholic social teaching and the Polish transition to democracy titled “The Life and Death of a Catholic Alternative: The Case of Tadeusz Mazowiecki.” During the 20th century, various European Catholics initiated a range of political projects charting a “third way” between liberalism and communism, with Catholic social teaching the basis for social and political activism. The recent death of former Polish Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki, who shepherded Poland’s transition from communism to democracy in 1989, offers an extraordinarily illuminating lens on Catholic “third way” projects. A devout Catholic intellectual who spent four decades attempting to harmonize Catholic social teaching with state socialism, Mazowiecki ultimately, as prime minister, broke with both to pursue free markets aggressively. This lecture explored Mazowiecki’s story and the question of why a prime minister of one of the world’s most Catholic countries was unable to build a political program around Catholic social teaching. *In addition to his very successful public lecture, Professor Kosicki offered graduate and undergraduate seminars to students in the Departments of History, Political Science, Theology, and the Program of Liberal Studies. Picture from graduate seminar on left.

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NDIAS Quarterly Winter 2015 UARTERLY Winter 2015

alumni fellow news continued . . .

publication showcase

For information on upcoming Institute events with Lawrence M. Principe, visit ndias.nd.edu or contact ndias@nd.edu.

The Secrets of Alchemy

I

by Lawrence M. Principe

n The Secrets of Alchemy, Lawrence M. Principe, one of the world’s leading authorities on the subject, brings alchemy out of the shadows and restores it to its important place in human history and culture.

By surveying what alchemy was and how it began, developed, and overlapped with a range of ideas and pursuits, Principe illuminates the practice. He vividly depicts the place of alchemy during its heyday in early modern Europe, and then explores how alchemy has fit into wider views of the cosmos and humanity, touching on its enduring place in literature, fine art, theater, and religion as well as its recent acceptance as a serious subject of study for historians of science. In addition, he introduces the reader to some of the most fascinating alchemists, such as Zosimos and Basil Valentine, whose lives dot alchemy’s long reign from the third century and to the present day. Through his exploration of alchemists and their times, Principe pieces together closely guarded clues from obscure and fragmented texts to reveal alchemy’s secrets, and—most exciting for budding alchemists—uses them to recreate many of the most famous recipes in his lab, including those for the “glass of antimony” and “philosophers’ tree.”

This unique approach brings the reader closer to the actual work of alchemy than any other book.

Lawrence Principe is Professor of Chemistry, Drew Professor of the Humanities, and Director of the Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe at Johns Hopkins University. His research focuses on early modern (1500-1750) science and technology and the history of chemistry/alchemy.

The College of Science, the History and Philosophy of Science Graduate Program, and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study (NDIAS) are pleased to announce a jointly-sponsored public lecture by Lawrence Principe titled “Scientism and the Myth of the ‘Warfare’ between Science and Religion.”

The lecture will be held on Thursday, March 26 at 4:00 p.m. in Room 140 of DeBartolo Hall.

In addition to his public lecture, Professor Principe will offer a student seminar on the Scientific Revolution and a faculty book seminar focused on his work, The Secrets of Alchemy. Questions regarding Professor Principe’s lecture and seminars may be directed to Don Stelluto, Associate Director of the NDIAS (dstellut@nd.edu).

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Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C. (1917-2015) President Emeritus, University of Notre Dame

Father Ted (Far Left) conversing with students.

Thank you Father Ted for your leadership, vision, and commitment to what is right and just.

We loved you and will miss you dearly. May we never forget and remain forever in your debt.

“We do mean to be a great university and a great Catholic university. We are open to all the great questions of our times. We are confident enough, of ourselves and our students, to look at a wide variety of possible answers and to be assured that new light will be brought to bear upon these problems as we discuss them in a Christian context. We have no problem with other universities choosing to do their discussing in what might well be a more restrictive context, more secular, less religious, more purely or exclusively scientific and technological. So be it. But we need not be defensive in placing the same discussion in a different context, more universal (which is the meaning of catholic), more Christian, more moral, more spiritual, more open to God, but no less intellectual. We do what we do freely, and in the conviction that the times, and especially the future, will need such an approach.”

— From “And they called it the University of Notre Dame du Lac,” 1977

Nonprofit Org. US Postage Paid Notre Dame, IN 46556 Permit No. 10 Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study 1124 Flanner Hall University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 ndias.nd.edu

Spring 2015 NDIAS Class 1st Row (L to R): Dylan Belton, Naomi Fisher, Carolyn Sherman, Clifford Ando; 2nd Row: Grant Osborn, Hilary Davidson, Thadious M. Davis, Donald Stelluto; 3rd Row: Daniel John Sportiello, Margaret Abruzzo, Kimba Allie Tichenor; 4th Row: Mark A. Noll, Lewis Ayres, Sabine Doering, Robert E. Sullivan, Susannah Monta, and Maxim Kantor.