Notes from Oxford’s Backroom: Of Forgetting
What have we forgotten? In the first few pages of the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius, who awaits trial for supposed treason, must confront this question. After his…
On Seeking a Cultural Model in the Past
Man is a historical and a cultural being. He is not merely a performer of functions, nor does he exist by chance in a fleeting and detached…
Roman Ruins
I stood atop the forum’s steps, where words once were spoken of truths eternal—love for wise and good existence. I walked between the stones and pillars, that…
Remembering Mycenae
Much have I roamed through labyrinthine land, Minding matters of man’s clandestine mien: Myths marked by incipiency unseen, ‘Til modern minds usurp and reprimand. Have I been…
The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200
The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400-1200. Mary Carruthers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. The craft of monasticism is to make…
The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures
The Medieval Craft of Memory: An Anthology of Texts and Pictures. Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, eds. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). This anthology…
Dominium v. Auctoritas: Nihilism and the Political Community
Anamnesis is a remembering or recollection of the orienting truths of existence that ought never to be forgotten. Mircea Eliade, in his Myth and Reality, wrote that…
Augustine: Memory as Sacrament
For Christians, rituals of sacrament are visible and affective signs of the presence of God. Augustine defines a sacrament as an outward sign of an inward grace…
Consciousness, Memory, and History in Tolstoy’s War and Peace
The Second Epilogue Although nearly all have admired Tolstoy’s War and Peace since its publication, critics have been divided over whether the novel has an organizational principle…
The Politics and Experience of Active Love in The Brothers Karamazov
Early reception of The Brothers Karamazov ranged from praise to condemnation, with most of the criticism and debate focused on Book V’s The Tale of the Grand…
Fathers and Sons: The Principle of Love in Turgenev’s Liberalism
The importance of place is often neglected by liberal theorists, with the assumption that liberal ideas are understood and articulated in the same manner from one society…
Try to Remember, Artfully
A few weeks ago, we touched on The Art of Memory, by Frances Yates, well known scholar of the Renaissance. When that book came out in 1966,…
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place with Everything Labeled
Many will recall the famous passage from In the Search of Order, where Voegelin analyses Hesiod's invocation of the Muses and how the Muses "remember" the gods…