A post-Easter reflection

"Since our world conditions have changed, we can do no other than to think our own thoughts about the redemptive significance of the death of Jesus and all that is connected with it, basing our thoughts, so far as possible, on the original and Primitive-Christian doctrine. But if we undertake this task, as we needs must, we ought to make clear to ourselves what we are doing. We ought not to bemuse ourselves with the belief that we are simply taking over the whole of the dogmatic conceptions of Jesus and of Primitive Christianity, seeing that this is, in fact, impossible. And we ought not to regard the obscurities and contradictions, in which we find ourselves involved, as originally attaching to Christian doctrine; we ought to be clearly conscious that they arise from the transformation of the historical and Primitive-Christian concepts into concepts necessary to adapt them to a later situation. Instead of simply being able to take over traditional material as we find it, we must, exactly, as did Ignatius and Justin, recast it by a creative act of the Spirit."

Albert Schweitzer. THE MYSTICISM OF PAUL THE APOSTLE.

I should write a compare/contrast piece involving Albert Schweitzer and Josiah Royce. I believe earlier in this blog I summarized a book by Royce on Christianity, in which Royce portrayed Jesus's actual views as unknowable, and saw Paul as the fellow who created Christianity as itself a fit object of self-idealizing loyalty.

So Paul, to be crude about it, ends up the hero of Royce's story.

Is Paul also the hero of Schweitzer's story? Is it in broad terms the same story?

Yes and no. A proper compare-and-contrast would go further. Schweitzer doesn't think Jesus is unknowable, merely unembraceable. The Jesus he presents to us is charismatic, insightful, and deluded. We live in a world in which that latter point is obvious to us even if we want to try to ignore it.

Jesus for Schweitzer is an eschatological figure, who really believed that apocalyptic events were just days away, and whose teachings only make sense on that presumption. Since the apocalypse has been delayed and continues to be delayed, in Schweitzer's and our own day, there has to be a transformative hero of the story in a sense, for someone with an eschatological view of Jesus to maintain that (a) Christianity is a good thing and (b) speaks directly to us. It is otherwise "impossible," as Schweitzer says in the above quote, for us just to take over the whole.

But for Schweitzer, Paul cannot be that hero. Paul was almost as eschatological as Jesus was, and his timeframe for the apocalypse was ... only a little delayed. The pertinent creative act of the spirit, the one that made Christianity something for the ages, something that can endure without embarrassment about what hasn't yet happened, the role Royce attributed to Paul, has to be pushed back another generation, to the patristics such as Ignatius and Justin, on Schweitzer's telling.

Easter is what they made of it.

Dates? Ignatius (35 - 107 AD). Justin (100-165 AD).

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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