Christopher Dawson’s Six Ages of the Church exhibit a cyclical pattern in historical events. Each Age exhibits an overall pattern of “rise and fall” during each cycle of spiritual renewal. Each new Age peaks and then encounters a new onslaught of adversities. It is possible to imagine the entire sweep of this non-linear history in [...]
Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et artes intulit agresti Latio “When Greece was captured, she captivated her wild conqueror, and introduced the Arts into savage Rome” — Horace, Epistles, II.1.156 (trans. Laura E. Ludtke) Christopher Dawson has identified Six Ages in the history of the Church. In Dawson’s First Age, we witness a unique encounter of [...]
How is it that Arabic translations of Greek writings could flourish for only a few centuries (the ninth to eleventh)? Remi Brague points out how these translations were frequently made by Christians under Arabic rule.[1] Empirical data such as this point to an important principle identified by Brague: namely, that Roman “secondarity” always maintains a [...]
Leo Strauss liked to call to our attention the creative tension between Athens and Jerusalem. With Remi Brague, I would like to refocus our attention onto the apparent mediation of this creative tension that was accomplished by Rome. Now, I say that this accomplishment occurred by the apparent mediation of Rome, only to nod to [...]
Our stark choice is indeed as Nietzsche puts it, says René Girard. It is a choice between Dionysus and the Crucified: between the Biblical concern for the mob’s victim, on the one hand, or, on the other hand, the justifications and defenses of the lies of myth. The lies of myth are offered in the [...]
René Girard’s mimetic theory has described how mimesis leads to collective violence. His readings of Greek and Shakespearean tragedy argue that tragedy reveals the origins of violent mimesis in its own mimetic representations. In tragedy, the dramatic representation becomes definitively “tragic” (thereby shaping our subsequent meaning of the word) because what is represented is that [...]
Hans Urs von Balthasar believed that tragedies that feature the death of the hero—the sacrificial crisis of the innocent victim—reflect the fullest dramatic meaning of the Passion of Christ: In these stories, good violence is needed in order to make the bad violence go away. Hans Urs von Balthasar, in Volume IV (The Action) of [...]
Perhaps most readers are familiar with the account of the beginning of the universe found in the Bible: “1 God, at the beginning of time, created heaven and earth. 2 Earth was still an empty waste, and darkness hung over the deep; but already, over its waters, stirred the breath of God. 3 Then God [...]