MacIntyre, and on to Virgil

Finished the review of Mong Ih-Ren a few days back (it was horrible--plagiarism on top of poor style), and finished re-reading a good part of After Virtue, but unfortunately I need to put off Whose Justice? Which Rationality? for now--the imperative of getting through a few classroom texts is gaining force. Maybe I'll still get to WJWR before the end of the summer...

One smaller thing: I re-read MacIntyre's very sharp essay from a few years ago, "Transformations of Enlightenment: Plato, Rosen and the Postmodern" (in Logos and Eros, ed. Nalin Ranasinghe (St. Augustine's P, 2006), which appreciates and critiques the thought of the Straussian philosopher Stanley Rosen. I don't know of any other place where MacIntyre actually confronts Straussianism, other than a review he wrote a few years back of a book by Thomas Pangle (but M. didn't seem to understand what was going on in that book). His critique of Rosen is thoughtful and illuminating, and basically turns on the claim that Rosen's Platonism and modified liberalism rely upon a version of Nature he is unwilling to credit as existent.

Now, as part of a class prep, I'm reading through Robert Fagles' translation of the Aeneid for the first time (I've usually read Fitzgerald before now), and I'm going through Lee Fratantuono's commentary, Madness Unchained: A Reading of Virgil's Aeneid (Lexington, 2007), at the same time. Fagles is pleasurable, though I find myself second-guessing his florid renderings from time to time. Fratantuono seems solid and very interesting so far, displaying some of the reading habits of his erstwhile mentor, the late Seth Benardete, but without descending into the maddening fog of Benardete's obscurantist prose.

Radner on Gregory

Read Ephraim Radner's review of Brad Gregory's Unintended Reformation (2011) in the new First Things. Pretty harsh. He sees Gregory's narrative as merely the latest instantiation of a problematic Catholic tradition of historiography, a tradition whose greatest representative was the 19th c. Catalonian Jaime Balmes (acc. to Radner). Against the Balmes/Gregory line, which traces Modernity's violence and division back to the Reformation, Radner calls for a "chastened Whig intepretation of history . . . reformulated in terms of Christian moral irresponsibility." Not sure exactly what that means, but he seems to be saying that the modern "progress" really has been a positive move away from the disappointing violence within Christianity, and this ought to chasten faithful Christians. At any rate, the whole review seems like an early advertisement for Radner's book A Brutal Unity: The Spiritual Politics of the Christian Church, which is coming out in October.

It's a very important question: how are we to understand Christianity's relation to the development of modernity. I'm inclined to be skeptical of the straight Balmes/Gregory line also, which lays all the blame at the feet of the Reformers (and Scotus and Ockham before them), but Radner's view seems problematic, in that he wants to think of modernity's origins as rooted above all in problematic Christian practice, while downplaying the importance of Christian thought. That's an either/or I don't want to choose between.

Now back to the reading I really should be doing: Mong's book on Newman (which is poor enough in quality to make periodicals look tempting!).

A first post

Reading Ambrose Mong Ih-Ren, The Liberal Spirit and Anti-Liberal Discourse of John Henry Newman (Peter Lang, 2011) in order to review it. Very interesting topic, but some unfortunate ESL problems already in the prose. More to come.

On the side, looking at John Alvis, Nathaniel Hawthorne as Political Philosopher (Transaction, 2012), a book by one of my old profs. Re-reading MacIntyre's After Virtue, and hoping to get to Whose Justice? Which Rationality? before the summer is out.