In chapter seven of his book, Redeeming Beauty:  Soundings in Sacral Aesthetics, Nichols discusses, among other things, Jacques Maritain’s view of pulchrum (the beautiful).  Maritain appeals to St. Thomas’ dictum in which beauty is defined as id quod visum placet.  According to Maritain this definition relates to the effect, not the essence, i.e., the beautiful [...]

In the previous post, I mentioned two experiences that helped bring Bulgakov back to the Orthodox Church.  In this post, we encounter the third experience, viz., the death of Bulgakov’s  four year old son in the summer of 1909.  At his son’s funeral, Bulgakov had a strong sense that “his child lived in the life [...]

My brief introduction to Bulgakov is based on Fr. Aidan Nichols article, “Wisdom from Above? The Sophiology of Father Sergius Bulgakov”[1]-an article that is worth reading in its entirety.  Bulgakov, who was to become an important 20th century theological figure in both Orthodox and Latin theological circles, was born in 1871 in a rural town [...]

“God is the light by which, indispensably, we perceive our darkness.  The light itself is not perceived.  The cognitive pursuit of God, like the sunflower weary of time, counts the steps of this Sun, seeking after journey’s end but falling again and again to earth with each circuit of the central and invisible Presence.  The [...]

I recently finished reading the book of Job, and came across a few surprising verses in the last chapter.  For example, at the end of Job, we read that part of Job’s restoration included ten more children-seven sons and three daughters-and that Job “named the first [daughter] Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch.” [...]

In a section discussing the ways in which Gadamer relativizes Heidegger’s ontological difference, Wachterhauser states the following:
If [according to Gadamer] we cannot raise issues of Being apart from other related issues like Being’s relationship to the other transcendentals-including the Good-and these issues in turn involve us in questions about the relationships between transcendentals and Ideas, [...]

Given Gadamer’s rejection of a foundationalist paradigm of knowledge, he does not attempt to provide indubitable justification for his ontological views.   According to Gadamer, all forms of foundationalism fail to demonstrate that their own claims are indubitable; hence, he “rejects the possibility of a reflexive self-grounding of any philosophical position.”  Rather, as we have seen, [...]

As mentioned in Part II, Gadamer’s conception of identity is dynamic rather than static and is based on Gadamer’s critical reworking of Plato’s reflections on unity and multiplicity.  As Wachterhauser explains, Gadamer’s “general strategy is to argue that all Being is such that it is always at one and the same time both ‘one and [...]

As Wachterhauser stresses, Gadamer’s path avoids the pitfalls of both the relativist and the ahistorical dogmatist, not by eschewing all things metaphysical, but rather by gleaning ontological insights from ancient philosophy (particularly the later Plato).   Here we encounter a significant divergence between Gadamer and Heidegger in that the former rejects important aspects of Heidegger’s critique [...]

In Job chapter 32, an interesting Melchizedek-like character appears on the scene, Elihu the Buzite.  Elihu is a mysterious fourth interlocutor who, though silent up to this point in the discourse perhaps due to his youth, now enters the conversation.  Chapter 32 opens by informing us that Job’s previous three interlocutors have been silenced, yet [...]

Brice R. Wachterhauser, in his book, Beyond Being:  Gadamer’s Post-Platonic Hermeneutical Ontololgy, argues that Gadamer’s hermeneutical studies must be read in dialogue with his work on Plato in order to properly understand a number of Gadamer’s significant hermeneutical insights, as well as to avoid common misreadings of Gadamer.     In other words, Wachterhauser’s claim is that [...]

Joel at Sacra Doctrina has a very interesting post on Reformed views of the visible Church:  On the Church visible. 
Andy continues his series on some of Jamie Smith’s works:  Part I and Part II. 
Daniel has two posts discussing Henri de Lubac: “On Christian Philosophy”:  Part I and Part II.
Bret blogs on Catholic Apologetics at the [...]

After several conversations with friends, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, I have formulated the following (rough, very unpolished) proposed reading of Augustine’s spiritual journey.  In light of the fact that it would take significantly more research to substitiate this thesis properly, I doubt that I will use it in my paper for the Villanova conference, [...]

Below are additional thoughts/findings related to my ongoing Augustine/Gadamer paper. 
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Interestingly, those who, in the spirit of B. Spinoza, adopt a strict grammatico-historical method of interpreting Scripture tend to embrace only the literal or historical sense of Scripture.  Likewise, those advocating this methodological stance often claim to interpret Scripture in an unbiased manner, free from all [...]

Through a very helpful dialogue with a friend, I am beginning to question the claim that Augustine had an intellectual conversion in book VII of the Confessions, and then a moral conversion in book VIII.   Instead of a twofold conversion, perhaps Augustine’s one conversion occurred as early as book V through his interaction with Ambrose (as [...]

According to Gadamer, we all have “fore-meanings” that we bring to the text-meanings that we each employ as a kind of standard in our attempts to understand the text.  If this is the case and my fore-meanings do not exactly match your fore-meanings, are we in a hopeless hermeneutical situation?  Gadamer answers with an emphatic [...]

According to Gadamer, romanticism shares a certain schema of the philosophy of history with the Enlightenment. In its reaction to the Enlightenment, romanticism takes this schema as a premise, viz., “the schema of the conquest of mythos by logos.”  Gadamer goes on to say, “[w]hat gives this schema its validity is the presupposition of the [...]

Corrine Crammer, in her article, “Balthasar’s Theology of the Sexes,” engages Balthasar’s views on gender and concludes that Balthasar’s theology of the sexes, though well-intended, is ultimately incoherent. If you have been following this blog for at least the last three months, you should know that I am a huge fan of Balthasar and am [...]

In preparing for the Patristic, Medieval, and Renaissance Conference this fall at Villanova, I have been reviewing texts by Augustine and Gadamer, as one of the goals of my paper (see abstract) is to bring the two into fruitful conversation. 
According to Gadamer, though it is the case that our prejudices and presuppositions can and do [...]

Robert McMahon, in his essay, “The Creation of the Church as the Paradigm for the Confessions,” suggests that in order to understand both the dynamism and the structure of the Confessions, one must distinguish between Augustine the narrator and Augustine the author.  If one is attentive to this distinction, then one is able to discern [...]