Art and Philosophy in the Life of  Étienne Gilson  –Pt 3 of Chapter 1

by Francesca Aran Murphy

Social Modernism or Action Française?

Where Bergson took individually experienced time as the key to the cre­ativity activating the cosmos, Auguste Comte thought of ideas as emerging from set stages of humanity's social evolution toward positivism. Fr. George Tyrrell asserted that the thought of Aquinas was produced by the civilization of the Middle Ages. Tyrrell complained that Leo's promotion of Thomism, in Aeterni Patris, makes "the medieval expression of Catholicism its primitive and its final expression." In effect, for Tyrrell, Thomism can be reduced to mediaeval culture. He felt it was absurd to expect anyone living in a modern liberal society to think as Thomas had done.³⁰ Assigning the former Jesuit to the cohorts of the modernists, Pius X responded to Tyrrell's contentions by denouncing what he called "social modernism," that is, liberal individu­alist society, as a corollary of doctrinal modernism.

Reflections on the Strauss-Voegelin Correspondence

Medieval Rationalism or Mystic Philosophy? —Part 4

by Ellis Sandoz

Professor Sandoz is the Editor of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. He has written many books and published many essays on the significance of Eric Voegelin's thought and on the political and spiritual foundations of the United States. This essay is one of several commentaries which appear in Faith and Political Philosophy: The Correspondence Between Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin, 1934-1964, and which is available from the University of Missouri Press. This essay appears in four parts. It appears with permission of the publisher.

IV  Behind Strauss and Spinoza stood the Averroists

Hermeneutics: the Art of Understanding and Interpreting

This is taken from the video of the lecture given on November 24th, 1978 at York University, Toronto. The lecture was delivered at the conference "Hemeneutics and Structuralism: Merging Horizons" which was the same conference from which the DVD "Voegelin in Toronto" was taken. Nicholas William Graham organized the original conference in 1978 and has kindly prepared the transcription for our use here at VoegelinView.  Professor Graham is President of the Northrop Frye Society. This is the second part of a two part article.

 Part 2

Reading as the Stabilization of a Text

When I read a literary text, then I feel I should return to it; I should return to it again; and I shall discover more in it; it is not exhausted by the picking up of information conveyed by the text. Oh no! It becomes more and more a work.¹¹ 

We grow more and more familiar with it; it is a process of enrichment, which happens there. And I think going into the interplay of soundings and meanings, of allusions and descriptions, and moments of tension and moments of lowering the tension and all the different forms of literary works; all that is never exhausted by our acquaintance with it. But it is like a good painting: we begin to read it. We must read a text like a painting; a painting like a text.

And what is reading? Reading is a very complicated structure of temporal approach. It is not that we read one word or one letter after another; that is a form in which one learns reading but is not yet being able to read: then one must spell it, then one must construe. The construction in a foreign language: we learned it in Latin and Greek. Our schoolmasters would say: don’t divine it; construe it.

from  The Northern Lights

History and the Holy Koran

by Barry Cooper

Professor Cooper is the author of numerous books and essays in political science. He is the editor of several volumes of the Collected Works of Eric Voegelin. This essay appears in New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism, University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri, 2004. It appears as an appendix and the references are to chapters in the main volume. This is published  with permission of the publisher and appears in two parts.

In the course of the analysis of Islamist terrorism, we made a basic analytical distinction that needs to be discussed in more detail. On the one hand, we said, there existed the history of societies and political orders informed by Islam, an account of which we called a history of the Islamic community. We assumed here that the status of the history of this community, its res gestae, was as unproblematic as the history of the U.S. mail or of gunpowder. On the other hand we said there existed a paradigmatic Islamic history, which we tentatively described as the account of God and his messengers to humanity. Early in chapter 3 we said further that Islamic history, which we also identified as the "Islamic vulgate," by analogy with the Christian Bible given its official form by Saint Jerome in the fourth century, would be discussed "without preju­dice."

The intention of this terminology was to maintain the frontier between piety and political science; we assumed here that it was possi­ble to study the Islamic story of God and his messengers to humanity without taking a position with respect to the veracity or the literal truth of Islamic history. But this means that it is possible to be neutral before the actual messages that were delivered concretely on specific occasions. We have seen, notwithstanding the Koranic assurance that there can be no compulsion in matters of religion, that this second assumption, even more than the first one concerning the history of Islam, contains or expresses a major problem.