The piano sonatas, too, are like this. Although Haydn, if anyone, was the father of the classical forms, these do not dominate or constrain his piano sonatas, which take their time and let their motives unfold and drift as they will. At the same time, they demand the full restraint of the classical style--there's nothing quite so dull as a pianist who leans into them like you would Beethoven. When I saw on Spotify that Emmanuel Ax had recorded them I knew he'd do them justice. I had seen him once in rehearsal in Columbus along with Yo-Yo Ma, listening in the empty hall to his light but muted touch at the keys. This is what you need for Haydn, I thought. And indeed. Sonata 31 in Ab Hob. XVI,46 is a real feast, especially the mesmerizing triplet figurations of the development section:
For my tastes, Haydn is underplayed and underloved. They always play the London symphonies on the radio, but seldom the Paris symphonies, almost never the Sturm and Drang symphonies and, aside from Le Matin, none of the early symphonies. I recall quite clearly the day (during my undergrad years) they dropped the needle on one of the middle symphonies while we looked on at the score, and how what seemed to be self-evidence and understatement revealed itself to be something altogether different. Here, I thought, was a hearty meal. Haydn, like so many others, gains so much when you listen with the score in hand. The piano sonatas, too, are like this. Although Haydn, if anyone, was the father of the classical forms, these do not dominate or constrain his piano sonatas, which take their time and let their motives unfold and drift as they will. At the same time, they demand the full restraint of the classical style--there's nothing quite so dull as a pianist who leans into them like you would Beethoven. When I saw on Spotify that Emmanuel Ax had recorded them I knew he'd do them justice. I had seen him once in rehearsal in Columbus along with Yo-Yo Ma, listening in the empty hall to his light but muted touch at the keys. This is what you need for Haydn, I thought. And indeed. Sonata 31 in Ab Hob. XVI,46 is a real feast, especially the mesmerizing triplet figurations of the development section: These then unfold into a series of tonal mysteries and tocatta-like improvisations, which Ax sets free to breathe and wander before returning to the highly structured conclusion. Two thumbs up.
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A new self-imposed task: to work through Randall Meissen's Scholastic Latin: An Intermediate Course. After Wheelock, which covers most of the Latin grammar you'll ever see, S.L. is pretty straight-forward, especially given his Meissen's highly relevant aids. Such as the vocab from Chapter 1, including:
For translating exercises Meissen has selected from Josef Donat's 1914 Ontologia, a work hearkening back to the golden age of the manualists. (You can find the full text at archive.org.) Perhaps it will make for a nice complement to Mercier's Manual of Modern Scholastic Philosophy. In reading Mercier I have discovered there the same basic difficulty I find in Aquinas and Augustine, namely that their references to physical phenomena are all couched in defunct scientific theories. So that time and again I have to undergo the acrobatics of cashing out "fire tends upwards" and the like in terms of a contemporary theory. For his part, Mercier signed off on the manual in 1915, three years before Eddington vindicated Einstein's then still fringe ideas. At that point the work linking physics and chemistry was all the rage, but, taking Mercier as a guide here, there seemed to prevail the pre-Bohr assumption that the atom was homogeneous on the inside and that atoms of different kinds differed only in atomic number and weight. Clearly this left the gaping problem of why different kinds of atoms behave so very differently, and others besides. And a rather mind numbing section from D. Nys' Cosmology section of Mercier's manual takes advantage of the manifest shortcomings of the reigning model to showcase the strengths of the scholastic approach to matter. Yes, since the divorce of philosophy and so-called science in the early modern age philosophers of whatever stripe have been doing the same basic thing (action at a distance, anyone? actual infinities?) There's really no way around it. I only wish Dr. Nys, or so many other scholastics for that matter, wouldn't ride the excluded middle quite so hard when they hit such an impasse in the contingent state of the natural sciences. It discredits what they set out to defend. A classic example of this is the tendency out there to dismiss the Mind-Body Problem with an appeal to De Anima: hylemorphism takes care of that! Of course it does, if by that you mean the erroneous positing of two substances having no conceivable way of interacting. To note that powers flow from properties, which in turn flow from essences, does in fact take care of that. But to go one step further, as tacitly happens, and declare yourself exempt from the diabolical details of neuroscience is a mistake. Because, we have to ask, how exactly do immaterial mental powers flow from physical properties? Indeed, to note that all physical beings possess a basic directionality, such that the intentional, irreducibly directional mind is part and parcel of a universal natural tendency and not a freakish anomaly, does do well to lay the teleological framework within which mind and body ought to reconcile. But this seems to be the high water mark of hylemorphic thought on the matter, after which sympathetic minds retreat to their favorite problems of ethics, transubstantiation and risibility. Would that--and here I am no less guilty--someone of hylemorphic persuasion would actually take on the problems of neuroscience, or the double-slit experiment, or the quantum froth! I mean, what if the talent pool of hylemorphists was brimming over to the point that the runoff would fill the ranks of the particular sciences? And we'd be spared the bubble-gum atheism of those convinced that cyclotrons have something to do with theology? To dream... Check out my translation of a couple of her songs.
Washington St., Hoboken: drove up here with the darlings yesterday to visit family and take walks amidst the beautiful brownstones. We listened to The Hobbit in the car, including the part with the riddle game between Gollum and Bilbo. An original riddle occurred to me: Sphere am I, but with a tip, I seek the ground or seek your lip, I have no arms, legs have I none, I never walk but sometimes run. In that rarest of things, the good used bookstore (Symposia on Washington St.), I picked up a copy of Schall's slim volume, A Student's Guide to Liberal Learning. It's as I imagined--a defense of a bygone educational ideal that eschews the false modesty of the current University. The multiplicity of perspectives does not necessarily entail the legitimacy of those perspectives: knowledge in the sense of ἐπιστήμη or scientia is neither illusory nor, when found, oppressive. Instead, the prospect of real knowledge, when combined with physical and intellectual self-mastery and access to the right classics, is genuinely liberating. Of course, you can't get at the content of this sought-for knowledge in 50 pages; Schall doesn't try and I didn't expect him to. What I most wanted to see, rather, was which passages of which classics he'd reach back on in framing his case, and which books he'd single out for his list of recommendations. There's nothing I love quite like another what-else-to-read list. A couple points worth passing on. He suggests that (a) belief in knowledge, (b) self-discipline and (c) a classic library together form a mutually reinforcing unit, in part by indicating the shortcomings of each in isolation. Belief in knowledge without discipline or proper guides won't amount to anything. Moreover, self-discipline by itself, as an end in itself, was an error of the Stoics (others being, I would venture to add, a disembodied ideal of ethics and a Heracleitean notion of eternal recurrence). And finally, citing Strauss's "What is Liberal Education?", he notes the paradox of the classics: the "Great Books" approach to education frequently amounts to a relativism. For if great minds conflicted, "who am I to dispute them?": The whole point of this present essay, while in no way doubting Strauss's point about the great minds contradicting each other, is to suggest that this controversy among the great minds can lead to a false sort of humility, something that misunderstands what the mind is about. In the modern world, Chesterton said, humility is misplaced; it is thought to be located in the intellect where it does not belong, whereas it is a virtue of the will, an awareness of our own tendencies to pride. We should not doubt our minds but our motives. The condition of not knowing should not lead us to a further skepticism but to a more intense search for truth. We should see in what sense a great mind might reveal something of the truth even in its error. Not that the classics are without inherent value: The very existence of the great books enables us to escape from any tyranny of the present, from the idea that we only want to study what is currently "relevant" or immediately useful. But there is, I have noted, a tendency to fetishize the classics even among their most able defenders, and I wonder if Schall, too, succumbs to this tendency. "I always tell my students that I expect them to keep the books I assign them for the rest of their lives," he says. Does this mean he only assigns classics? Don't we have to have one foot in this world, too? Is not the current crisis or aporia the very thing that reveals the burning relevance of the perennial questions? And might, conversely, our familiarity with the tradition serve us well in addressing today's problems? Now to be fair, Schall is if anything neck deep it current events, as his never ending stream of editorials attests. But I must follow through this thought to the end. In its best expressions, conservativism sees us as involved in a dialogue with the dead and those not yet born. To exclude present and future from the great dialogue: this is head-in-the-sand antiquarianism, and we who love the deep past must be on our guard against it. A little antiquarian sentiment, on the other hand, like a row of well-preserved brownstones, is a beautiful thing. By the way, the answer to my riddle is "a teardrop".
I'm only planning on translating parts of the Treatise on God, then maybe on Happiness and on Law. So far I'd say that Aquinas isn't half as hard as Augustine. Check out my progress so far.
Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration, watershed of political theory that it is, arguably marks the point where mention of religion and, as a result, what used to count as morality started getting swept out of the public sphere and, ultimately, into the void. Private religion being an oxymoron. So I had to rub my eyes when I picked it up to see this on its opening pages: Now, though the divisions that are amongst sects should be allowed to be never so obstructive of the salvation of souls; yet, nevertheless, adultery, fornication, uncleanliness, lasciviousness, idolatry, and such-like things, cannot be denied to be works of the flesh, concerning which the apostle has expressly declared that "they who do them shall not inherit the kingdom of God." Whosoever, therefore, is sincerely solicitous about the kingdom of God and thinks it his duty to endeavour the enlargement of it amongst men, ought to apply himself with no less care and industry to the rooting out of these immoralities than to the extirpation of sects. But if anyone do otherwise, and whilst he is cruel and implacable towards those that differ from him in opinion, he be indulgent to such iniquities and immoralities as are unbecoming the name of a Christian, let such a one talk never so much of the Church, he plainly demonstrates by his actions that it is another kingdom he aims at and not the advancement of the kingdom of God. The apple, it would seem, has fallen far indeed from the tree.
I’ve recently been reminded of the distinction in German between essen (eating like a person) and fressen (eating like an animal). There’s a similar distinction in Greek which plays a prominent role in the meaning of John 6:52-58. At first Jesus tells us that unless you eat (φάγητε) his body and drink his blood you will not have life within you. Now φάγητε, from the aorist tense of ἐσθίω, is a bit like the latter’s cognate essen in connotation: the Middle LSJ gives simply “to eat”. But at this point Jesus leaves off use of φαγεῖν to adopt a more provocative tone: he who eats (τρώγων) his body and drinks his blood will have eternal life. Now τρώγων, a participle of τρώγω, in a sense bears more resemblance to fressen: the Middle LSJ gives “gnaw, nibble, munch”. And this, the Catholic exegete (e.g. Robert Barron) will tell you, would have shocked the listener. Unlike φαγεῖν, τρώγω, which calls to mind the animal act of eating, is much harder to dismiss as figurative speech. This passage begins with the debate over how Jesus is supposed to give us his flesh/body (σάρκα) to eat. How is this possible? Jesus does not answer directly, but assures them, in effect, that they are to really, physically eat his real, physical body. And, as if they had missed it the first time, Jesus hammers it in three more uses of τρώγων. But, interestingly, there’s enough of a difference between τρώγω and fresse to preclude any German translators that I know of from using fressen to mark the variation in Jesus’ speech. I suppose this is because fressen above all connotes the abandon with which animals devour their food. And if anything, what Jesus had in mind was a civil and communal meal. Still the animal associations of τρώγων, to meditate on the image a moment, recall the manger that Jesus, who now calls himself the bread of life, was first placed in a town notably called Bethlehem - the House of Bread. I don't know how long it took me as kid to figure out that a manger is something animals eat out of, but this is doubtlessly more than a fact Luke picked out to indicate the meager circumstances attending the birth of Jesus. Just as mention of Bethlehem was more than a means to reconcile the messianic birth with the prophecy of Malachi. Just as, for that matter, calling attention to Jesus' swaddling clothes foreshadows the wrappings worn by Lazarus and those left neatly folded by Jesus himself before leaving the tomb. On the patristic reading, the entire Bible is steeped in eucharistic imagery, and when it comes down to it, expressions of the Real Presence of the table-pounding variety such as the one above. Another, just for fun: the emphatic use of ἐστιν (is) in Matthew 26:26, Mark 14:22, Luke 22:19 (Τοῦτό ἐστιν τὸ σῶμά μου) and 1 Corinthians 11:24 (Τοῦτό μού ἐστιν τὸ σῶμα τὸ ὑπὲρ ὑμῶν). In Greek the appropriate form of "to be" is very often omitted. Going though the Gilson some these days... A moral doctrine whose principles are so profoundly rooted in the real, so strictly dependent upon the very structure of the being they rule, experiences no embarrassment in solving the much-debated problem of the basis of morality. The basis of morality is human nature itself. Moral good is every object, every operation enabling man to achieve the virtualities of his nature and to actualize himself according to the norm of his essence, which is that of a being endowed with reason. Thomistic morality is, accordingly, a naturalism. But it is by that very fact a rationalism because reason acts as its rule. Just as nature makes those beings which are not endowed with reason act according to what they are, so it insists that beings endowed with reason find out what they are so that they may act accordingly. Become what you are is their highest law. Actualize to their ultimate limits the virtualities of the rational being that you are! Going through some of First Things online matter I came across R.R.Reno's The Closing of the American Mind, Revisited. There have been a spate of misty-eyed tributes to Bloom's runaway success on the web recently, and none of them, Reno's included, give me the impression that the writer in question actually went through the entire book. Indeed, it seems few ever did, except for Alexander Nehemas, who in his review of Bloom descried the strong Straussian influence on Part III. What we usually hear of, though, is Bloom's savage and largely accurate criticism of the University as it was in 1987--and sadly still remains--the "professional training of clever and sybaritic animals, who drink, vomit and fornicate in the dorms by night while they posture critically and ironically by day...[all the while] moved by no desire to know good or evil, truth or falsehood, beauty or ugliness". Yes, Reno certainly can turn a phrase. But then so can Augustine, who described the very same phenomenon back in the 5th century: To Carthage then I came, where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. My freshman dorm in nuce. Was there a time, somewhere between the Fall of Rome and the Savings and Loan Crisis, when we were better? I'd like to think so, and Reno evidently does: I don’t think that the lectern should be turned into a pulpit, but the soul of Catholic education requires classrooms haunted by the authority of the Church and the holiness of her saints. That was the actual, experienced effect of the old system, when large numbers of faculty were priests and nuns. But back to my main point, what Bloom's book really is--as those who did in fact trudge through Bloom's protracted analysis of Nietzsche, Freud and Max Weber and all the rest might surmise--is a Straussian induction rite, and a good one at that. At some point I'll expound. Yes, First Things excels at hand-wringing, and maybe that's why I love it so . Another one of their online pieces notes the verbal subterfuge with which Planned Parenthood covers over the plain facts of biology: "product of conception", "embryo", "fetus", but never "baby". We might as well throw in conceptus, too, but here we might note that, if the point is in fact to efface the humanity of our little ones, conceptum would do a lot better, right? Or am I too much the pedant? Speaking of Latin and pedantry, I am next setting my sites on Summa Theologica, Part I, Question II for my next translation etude. I once had the good fortune of listening to John Wippel himself lecture at length on Questions I through XIII. But it was my first pass through the text and I'm sure the real subtlety was lost on me. And so, back I go.
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