Religious Skepticism Research Articles

Papal Reform and Canon Law in the 11th and 12th Centuries by Uta-Renate Blumenthal

BOOK REVIEWS103 came from a variety of groups, including merchants, moneylenders, minor nobles , furriers, and other artisans. Orviétans proved largely tolerant of local Cathars. A Dominican inquisition foundered for lack of local support in 1239, and during the 1240's several Cathars held civic offices. A more thorough Franciscan inquisition in 1267-68 marked the end of toleration and the beginning of the end of Orviétan Catharism. Lansing devotes much attention to the place of Catharism in the spirituality of thirteenth-century Italy. Catharism was not an isolated, fringe phenomenon; rather "... Cathar beliefs existed within a general climate of religious skepticism in thirteenth-century towns" (p. 83). Many people venerated both Cathar and Catholic holy persons, and some Cathars went to confession and took communion in Catholic churches. For many, theological subtleties counted for less than devotion and reverence for ascetic individuals. Some Cathars, to be sure, challenged Catholic dogma. Pointed divergences came over issues surrounding gender (a creation of Satan or the evil god), marriage (not a sacrament for Cathars), and the bodies of the dead (denial of miracles associated with a holy person's remains). This book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of Italian Catharism. Lansing's examination of Catharism in Orvieto provides a valuable study of heresy in a specific, local context. Her discussion of Cathar beliefs provides several worthwhile insights into the spiritual landscape of thirteenthcentury Italy. Some shortcomings mar the book. Lansing's discussion of the Orviétan inquisition would have benefited from a more thorough grounding in canon law. The book's subtitle overstates the work's actual coverage. It has little to say about Lombardy or other areas in northern Italy. More attention to those regions would have enriched the analysis of Cathar thought. These points notwithstanding, the book remains a worthy addition to scholarship on Catharism and medieval Italy. Peter D. Diehl Western Washington University Papal Reform and Canon Law in the IV and 12'" Centuries. By Uta-Renate Blumenthal. [Variorum Collected Studies Series CS 618.] (Brookfield, Vermont : Ashgate Publishing Company. 1998. Pp. xii, 334. $9995.) This recent volume in the "Variorum Collected Studies Series" brings together eighteen essays written by the distinguished historian of medieval canon law, Professor Uta-Renate Blumenthal of the Catholic University ofAmerica . Focusing on the eleventh and twelfth centuries, her period of specialization , these are based on extensive manuscript research and offer the reader insights into jurisprudence, theology, and political theory and practice. The papacy 's increasingly centralized, normalized control of the law is the connecting theme. 104BOOK REVIEWS The essays may be divided, roughly, into four groups. The first treats the transmission of non-conciliar, non papal-texts. These detailed studies shed light on key events in the ecclesiastical reform movement from the pontificate of Leo LX to that of Honorius III. Key moments in the reform, as well as in the crisis of church and state that ensued under Gregory VII, are treated in essays such as "Canossa and Royal Ideology in 1077 Two Unknown Manuscripts of De penitentia regis Salomonis" a brief, but detailed, study of a pro-imperialist treatise written shortly after Henry's submission to Gregory VII. Professor Blumenthal provides a provisional edition of the text with full apparatus. A bishop's engagement with canon law is examined in "An Episcopal Handbook from Twelfth-Century Southern Italy: Codex Rome, Bibl. Vallicelliana F. 54/??." Her analysis of the collection's formal sources, among them the Collectio of Cardinal Deusdedit, Ivo of Chartres' Decretum, and the (likely pseudo-Ivonian) Collectio Tripartita, demonstrates both the influence of these canonical collections in southern Italy and how they were exploited by a skillful compiler to meet the needs of a bishop concerned principally with administrative and jurisdictional matters. Here is an excellent illustration of canon law in action on the diocesan level. A second group of essays treats conciliar canons and papal decretals. From the pontificate of Leo G? ("Ein neuer Text für das Reimser Konzil Leos G?. [1049]") to "Opposition to Pope Paschal II: Some Comments on the Lateran Council of 1112," Professor Blumenthal considers the interaction of pope and council as witnessed by the transmission of conciliar canons. Paschal II...

DUALISM AND THEODICY IN R.S THOMAS' POETRY

This article investigates one aspect of R s. Tomas' creative response to the problem of theodicy in his poetry collections H'm, Laboratories of the spirit and Frequencies. It focuse on the use of dualistic and gnostic concepts in the mythopoeic presentation of GOd. H. Jonas' analysis of the heretical method of allegorical inversion in gnostic mythology serve as a theoretical background to the interpretation of various poems. An imaginative theodicy of protest feeding on religious scepticism is revealed.

Biblical Biology: American Protestant Social Reformers and the Early Eugenics Movement

The ArgumentIn most historical accounts, eugenic doctrines and Christian beliefs are assumed to be adversaries. Such a perspective is too narrow, however, for while many prominent eugenicists were indeed religious skeptics, others sought to reconcile eugenics with Christianity. Various American Protestant social reformers tried to synthesize new biological theories with older biblical ideas about the meaning of a good inheritance. Such syntheses played an important role in disseminating eugenic doctrines into America's deeply Protestant heartland.

Catholic converts: British and American intellectuals turn to Rome

From the early nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, an impressive group of English speaking intellectuals converted to Catholicism. Outspoken and gifted, they intended to show the fallacies of religious skeptics and place Catholicism, once again, at the center of western intellectual life. The lives of individual converts-such as John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day-have been well documented, but Patrick Allitt has written the first account of converts' collective impact on Catholic intellectual life. His book is also the first to characterize the distinctive style of Catholicism they helped to create and the first to investigate the extensive contacts among Catholic convert writers in the United States and Britain.Allitt explains how, despite the Church's dogmatic style and hierarchical structure, converts working in the areas of history, science, literature, and philosophy maintained that Catholicism was intellectually liberating. British and American converts followed each other's progress closely, visiting each other and sending work back and forth across the Atlantic. The outcome of their labors was not what the converts had hoped. Although they influenced the Catholic Church for three or four generations, they were unable to restore it to the central place in Western intellectual life that it had enjoyed before the Reformation.

Emily Dickinson's Vision of "Circumference" and Death from a Japanese Perspective

Emily Dickinson's Vision of "Circumference" and Death from a Japanese Perspective Midori Andō (bio) It can be said that, unlike all those around her who accepted God without question, Emily Dickinson entered into her own unique course of religious skepticism. I believe, however, that even though Emily Dickinson "disseminates" her "circumference" as an unbeliever, she is still a poet influenced by Christian Puritanism. I believe this perhaps because Japanese people know nothing of Dickinson's Puritan God and tend to look at Dickinson's "cicumference" comments from a completely different perspective. Even though many of Dickinson God of the Bible, as a Japanese I can still sympathize with her deeply. What is the source of my long fascination? First we should look at the nature of religion in Japan. It is said that religion in Japan is diverse and that even Western religion has been dissolved into Japanese traditional culture. There is a Japanese word "shūgō" (meaning compromise and fusion), which underlies Japanese culture, and can be summarized through Japanese dictionaries as follows: The word "shūgō" (compromise and fusion), symbolizes the essence of Japanese people who are good at accepting what they find favorable, while rejecting the unfavorable, in order to create something new. Japanese people generally live their daily lives according to teachings that fuse the two religions of Shintoism and Buddhism. There is a Japanese word "shin-butsu-shūgō" that refers to the compromise and fusion of Shintoism and Buddhism. In addition, Japanese have indigenous religious beliefs passed down through the generations, even though, on the surface at least, Japanese people may seem not to be very religious. Probably most Japanese, including Japanese Christians, have happy childhood memories of "matsuri," which are Shinto festivals held at local shrines. [End Page 221] Japanese also traditionally had the concept that Nature possesses mysterious powers greater than those of human beings. Especially to the ancient Japanese, Nature itself was an entity possessing life. Moreover, Japanese have indigenous beliefs concerning Death. One example is found in a passage from A Framing Green Tree, the latest novel by Kenzaburō Ōe, who won the Nobel Prize in literature in December, 1994. This novel is about the establishment and destruction of a religious group. In the story, a persona who later becomes the androgyne of the story is told by its grandmother about the way a man dies according to folklore. I have translated this passage as follows: At the moment of a person's death, the soul leaves the body, soaring high in the air and revolving in circles over houses, fields, and valleys to finally set down around the roots of the tree alloted to it before being born into this life. I would now like to suggest that, in light of the religious climate in Japan that I have just outlined, Japanese are well-suited for understanding Dickinson's "circumference" images of skepticism. Here I would like to add that, as far as "Circumference" is concerned, my own interpretation is not unlike Thomas H. Johnson's. He said that Dickinson associates the word's "circumference" images of skeptic "Awe" and "Circumference" "with cosmic expanse and the unknowable, and they must be interpreted in terms of her religious thinking" (Emily Dickinson 134). Japanese people are able to maintain almost any eschatological image under their philosophy of "shūgō." Tomiko Yamakawa (1879-1909), a "tanka" poet who lived during almost the same time as Dickinson, even regarded herself as God, writing a "tanka" in the previous year to her death: Lying sick on my quiet bed,I know unfeigned self as God. Perhaps the Japanese are more comfortable with Dickinson's skepticism than was Dickinson herself, for she always felt restrained by the image of God Almighty. She had to begin removing this image from within herself. But could she do it? There are countless reflections of God in her poems, such as "the silver strife—" (P157), "Heavenly Hurt" (P258), "Empress of Calvary!" (P1072), and others. In her poem beginning "Because I could not stop for Death—" (P712), the persona "I" passes through life and the grave, getting into the carriage with Death and Immortality, and then finally feeling skeptical...

Does Popper Explain Historical Explanation?

It is one of Karl Popper's great distinctions that he has an intense—some would say too intense—awareness of the history of philosophy within which he works. He knows not only its patterns, but also its comedies, and sometimes he plays rhetorically against their grain. He knows, for example, that the drive to consistency tends to turn philosophy into compositions of related doctrines, each seeming to involve the others. Religious belief, for example, tends to go with idealism and free will, religious scepticism with materialism and determinism. Popper does not believe in a religion, was for long some kind of a socialist, and takes his bearings from the philosophy of science. Aha! it seems we have located him. Here is a positivist, a materialist, probably a determinist. But of course he denies he is any of these things. Again, like many modern thinkers, he wants to extend scientific method not only to the social sciences but also to history. So far so familiar, until we discover that he regards nature as no less ‘cloudy’ than human societies.

Doubt and Divinity: Cicero's Influence on Hume's Religious Skepticism

Hume Studies Volume XX, Number 1, April 1994, pp. 103-120 Doubt and Divinity: Cicero's Influence on Hume's Religious Skepticism PETER S. FOSL It is standardly acknowledged that Hume was, to no small extent, a Ciceronian. He himself says so, writing for instance in a letter to Francis Hutcheson that "Upon the whole, I desire to take my catalogue of Virtues from Cicero's Offices, not from the Whole Duty of Man. I had, indeed, the former Book in my Eye in all my Reasonings."1 In his autobiographical essay, My Own Life, while discussing the years of feverish study he pursued during the late 1720s after having just left university, Hume mentions that My studious Disposition, my Sobriety, and my Industry gave my Family a Notion that the Law was a proper Profession for me: But I found an unsurmountable Aversion to every thing but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while they fancyed I was pouring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring.2 Analyses of Hume's biography and of the culture in which his thought developed give us every indication to regard these remarks as sincere.3 Current textual studies of Hume's œuvre are, on this point, in accord. However, the standard acknowledgement is incomplete and, in places, even erroneous. Whether by focusing their interpretive lenses too narrowly or by noticing only superficial aspects of comparison, commentators have significantly underestimated the depth of Cicero's influence upon Hume. Peter S. Fosl is at the Department of Philosophy, Religion, Classics, Hollins College, Roanoke, VA 24020 U.S.A. e-mail: foslp@minnie.hollins.edu 104 PeterS. Fosl John Valdimir Price's account of the similarities between the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and Cicero's De Natura Deorum is suggestive, as are the assessments of editors such as Norman Kemp Smith and Martin Bell. But Price's arguments are often weak, and his claims are in many cases mistaken, most notably in his characterization of Philo's contentions about God as "ironic."4 Price also fails to see how other dimensions of Hume's philosophical system—dimensions concerned with Hume's philosophy of mind, experience, and science—can be deployed to shed light upon his effort in the Dialogues. Peter Jones's work on Hume and Cicero is seminal, but in centering upon Hume's moral philosophy Jones's assessment of the extent and significance of Cicero's influence on Hume's skepticism and philosophy of religion remains rather limited.5 Christine Battersby's work addresses religious topics directly. Situating Hume's work within the tradition of "original imitations," her admirable interpretation enlists rhetorical features of the Dialogues in order to articulate the work's philosophical thrust. Battersby's central thesis is that both the rhetorical form of the Dialogues and the manner in which it deviates from Cicero's Deorum indicate that while Hume objected to the possibility of assuming the Pyrrhonian stance of a total suspension of belief (Battersby, 251), he also maintained that there remains an intrinsic indeterminacy to both theism and atheism: "Hume sees hypocrisy as the occupational disease of clergymen. But just as consistent belief is not possible on such subjects, so is a consistent disbelief " (249). However, in principally addressing the rhetoric of the two works, Battersby neglects features of Hume's Academical skepticism articulated in the Treatise and Enquiries, which, I maintain, suggest a different, more determinate position, if not on the nature of theological speculation, then at least on the issue of belief in God per se. What follows, then, will complete and correct preceding scholarship by showing how Hume drew upon the Académica and De Natura Deorum in developing his own "Academical" philosophy and religious skepticism, and it will do so by relating Hume's work in the Dialogues to the Academicism of his general philosophical system.6 To begin, therefore, I will first describe the principal features of Hume's Academicism and the distinction he draws between it and Pyrrhonian skepticism. Insofar as Hume's skepticism is a familiar topic, my presentation will be swift. I will then make use of this rendering in...

The Sceptical Mode in Modern Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Richard H. Popkin.

No long time of expectation: Hume's religious scepticism and the apocalypse.- Religious scepticism and China.- The two scepticisms of the Savoyard vicar.- John Wolley (ca. 1530-1596) and the first Latin translation of Sextus Empiricus, adversus logicos I.- Excluding sceptics the case of Thomas White, 1593-1676.- Montaigne on the art of judgment: the trial of Montaigne.- Intellectual autobiography: warts and all.- Publications of Richard H. Popkin, 1950-1986 inclusive.

Falling in love with wisdom: American philosophers talk about their calling

David Lynn Hall's love of philosophy began with a fifty-cent paperback. Then an adolescent facing an 18-hour bus trip across the great Southwest, desperate for anything to read, Hall bought Alfred North Whitehead's Adventures of Ideas at a rest stop in Pecos, Texas. He didn't have a clue who Whitehead was, but the book had a colorful, exotic cover, and nothing else on the revolving wire bookrack appealed to him. paid fifty cents, boarded the Trailways bus, nestled into my narrow seat and into the vastness of the desert spaces--and soon into the yet vaster spaces of humanity's great thoughts.... As I recall that first encounter with philosophic thinking, I seem to capture the exact emotion--a mixture of intrigue and perplexity, a congealed sense of awe--the apotheosis of which is the feeling philosophy now represents for me. That Mentor paperback still sits on his shelf, a treasured relic held together by rubberbands. Hall is just one of over sixty philosophers whose revealing memoirs appear in Falling in Love with Wisdom, a fascinating look at how some people became philosophers. Contributed by thinkers young and old, male and female, famous and obscure, these pieces reveal in very human terms both the rewards and hazards of a life dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom. Many recall a single memorable moment, an epiphany that changed forever the way they thought about themselves and the world around them. Huston Smith reveals how powerful these moments can be: My excitement had been mounting all evening and around midnight it exploded, shattering mental stockades. It was as if a fourth dimension of space had opened, and ideas--now palpable--were unrolling like carpets before me. Others, such as Diane Michelfelder, find their gravitation to philosophy more subtle: sometimes think that one becomes a philosopher the same way one becomes many other things: a lover, a neighbor, a friend, an adult. You wake up one morning to discover that is what have become. Still others speak of valued mentors (Angela Davis recounts her relationship with Herbert Marcuse), brushes with death, and the personal pain of social prejudice and ostracism. And throughout the book, there is much humor (Wallace Matson recounts his mother's horrified reaction to his precocious religious scepticism: If don't believe in God, she cried, you can never be elected to public office!) and many surprises (Arthur C. Danto, for instance, admits he entered Columbia's graduate program in philosophy simply to keep getting the GI Bill while he pursued his true ambition, painting: had no great interest in philosophy, and certainly no intention of becoming a philosopher). These sixty-four memoirs--almost all of which were written for this volume--reveal that the road to wisdom has many on-ramps. Yet all would ultimately agree with Henry Kyburg. imagine being asked, Kyburg writes, 'How did a healthy, ambitious, accomplished man like you, with all the advantages have had, end up in such a useless dead end profession?' To which I would smugly reply, 'Just lucky, I guess.'

Freud's Religious Scepticism Resurrected

In a century dominated by the exacting methods and dramatic successes of science, it is difficult to imagine an informed contemporary religious believer never shaken by the doubt that his or her most sacred ideas are atavisms to a benighted age, vain and empty fantasies. To such a believer, Freud's late monograph, The Future of an Illusion, with its warm, solicitous tone, but relentless scepticism, must seem the patient knell of his or her worst fears. For here Freud uses his dialectical skill and his psychoanalysis to augment motives for self-doubt at least as old as Abraham: Perhaps the most cherished of my beliefs are a kind of madness, a condition I do not recognize because it is so widely shared. Perhaps like the madman bewitched by the tapestry of his delusions, I hold fast to my faith only because I could not endure the threadbare fabric of a life without it. But it is not as though the religionist is utterly without defence against this source of doubt, nor that the familiar defence is without considerable prima facie force against Freud. For when sceptics such as Freud turn their account of the origin of religious faith into a case against the truth of religious claims, the believer can attack this line with an unassailable axiom: No examination of the motives for a belief is relevant to an assessment of its truth. To assume otherwise is to commit the genetic fallacy. The question I want to deal with here is whether the religious believer should rest content with this rejoinder to Freud.

Imitating God: the allegory of faith in Piers Plowman B

The author offers a new reading of the B-text of Piers Plowman that challenges many of the prevailing critical assumptions about this enigmatic poem. In particular, she takes issue with the theory that Langland's paradoxical allegories reflect his religious skepticism and literary anxiety.

Pascal on Self-caused Belief

Let me begin with a true story. Years ago, early in my career as a professor of philosophy, I had a fascinating series of conversations with a student whom I will call Peter. He was a bright and incisive senior, with a double major in philosophy and psychology. Raised in a religious family, the son of a Christian minister, he was himself unable to believe. His doubts were too strong. But the odd fact was that he genuinely wanted to believe. His religious scepticism deeply troubled him; part of him envied the faith of his parents. How do you go about making yourself believe?, he asked me. How do you go about having the kinds of religious experiences that lead people to faith? These were long and intense conversations, and I was unable (though I tried) to move Peter away from his doubts. So far as I know he is still a sceptic.

Diviners and Divination in Aristophanic Comedy

Research Article| April 01 1989 Diviners and Divination in Aristophanic Comedy Nicholas D. Smith Nicholas D. Smith Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Classical Antiquity (1989) 8 (1): 140–158. https://doi.org/10.2307/25010899 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Nicholas D. Smith; Diviners and Divination in Aristophanic Comedy. Classical Antiquity 1 April 1989; 8 (1): 140–158. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/25010899 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentClassical Antiquity Search This content is only available via PDF. Copyright 1989 The Regents of the University of California Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville by David S. Reynolds

REVIEWS Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1988. 625 pp. Cloth: $35.00. David S. Reynolds’ Beneath the American Renaissance is a bold, wide ranging work of scholarship, based on extraordinary research in the popular writings of the period, and powered by a strenuous imaginative attempt to relate this literature to the writings of seven accepted “canonical” authors: Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and Dickin­ son. Reynolds is an overreacher, and in some respectshis study seems seriously flawed. Never­ theless, he has succeeded in opening up a range of questions that ought to engage students of mid-nineteenth-century American literature for years to come. Reynolds sees the chiefwriters of the American Renaissance not as alienated from their culture, as is commonly supposed, but as emerging out of its popular preoccupations and as nurtured by its common texts. He shows that all seven of these writers in their different ways were stimulated by the rhetoric of reform, by the sensational press and the fiction it sponsored, by the literature of women’s rights and women’s wrongs, and by popular humor writings. Alongside the “conventional” popular literature written in conformity with the ruling platitudes ofante-bellum American culture (pastoralist novels, domestic fiction, fireside poetry), he uncovers a “subversive” literature that he characterizes as bizarre, sensational, politically radical, and theologically skeptical. He describes a host ofrelatively unknown texts that make up this subversive literature, among them crime pamphlets, frontier adventure stories, novels of sensual, wronged women, city mysteries, and humorous pieces in urban magazines. One of the most valuable features of Reynolds’ work is his rediscovery of neglected nineteenthcentury authors like John Neal, George Lippard, and Laura Curtis Ballard, who together with many others created a far more pugnacious and chaotic popular literature than we have been aware of. Reynolds argues that the major writers of the period reconstructed the popular subversive imagination by reconceiving and fusingpopular stereotypes, exploiting thelanguage of reform, and transfiguring the sensational artistically. While Reynolds teaches us something about each of his seven major writers, his treat­ ment of them is uneven. He is best on Whitman and Poe, both of whom clearly grappled with popular literature in the course of finding the means to express themselves. Reynolds has an intuitive sympathy for Whitman’s poetry, for “the seaminess and moral breadth” of Leaves of Crass (p. 104). He presents Whitman convincingly in relation to forerunners and contemporaries who shared his culture, his tastes, and his political views. The study is also effective in its account of texts like The Confidence-Man, “The Black Cat,” and parts of MobyDick that are grounded in popular culture. Reynolds’ literary criticism of Dickinson’s poems and Hawthorne’s tales and novels seems to me perfunctory or misguided, but he does establish a valuable context for Dickinson by displaying the writing of other women who shared her religious skepticism and her outrage concerning human misery, and he reminds us effectively of Hawthorne’s interest early and late in crime novels and in melodramatic incidents he found in the sensational press. Reynolds seems weakest on Emerson and Thoreau, whose impas­ sioned commitment to their own New England religious idealism does not fit his framework. While Reynolds’ work is deeply grounded in social history, it is vague in its representa­ tions of intellectual history. He does not deal effectively with Thoreau’s or Emerson’s ideas, or Hawthorne’s use of Puritanism, or with the intellectual character of periods or figures outside his central focus. The literary theory on which Reynolds bases his judgments also seems rough and ready, casually eclectic in its principles and mechanical in operation. Still, because he is persistent in his approach and consistently daring in his ambition, his critical method at times yields impressive insights into the texts he explores. Overall, Reynolds’ study gives us a detailed new perspective on the whole period. This perspective raises more questions than it resolves, but it is a significant achievement to have nudged scholars to reconsider their shibboleths from his new angle of vision. Some key questions Reynolds has raised ought now be the...

“Wisdom Speaking Copiously”: Renaissance Humanism Revisited

You cannot travel very far in Renaissance studies without running into Paul Oskar Kristeller. He has catalogued and commented on countless manuscripts and texts. Prefaces almost invariably acknowledge his generous assistance with projects ranging from bibliography and anthology to radical reinterpretation. And Kristeller is largely responsible for the theory of that displaced Jacob Burckhardt's and charted courses for so much subsequent work. Fifty years ago, when Kristeller joined the conversations about the Renaissance's modernity and medievalism, despotism and libertarianism, piety and religious skepticism, Burckhardt's Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860) still towered over the field. Others questioned Burckhardt's idealization of Renaissance consciousness; Kristeller, however, argued decisively that Renaissance humanism was less philosophical system than cultural and educational program in which the place of rhetoric expanded and developed ... and came to pervade all areas of civilization (1979:242; 1988:130-37). As the program developed in each discipline, it coupled humanist classicism with a core of

Nothing to Repent: The Life of Hesketh Pearson (review)

350 biography Vol. 11, No. 4 destroyed by flooding on the Colorado River. Profits in a copper mine were lost when a clerk absconded with substantial funds, and Sylvester lost his life after spending time in a San Diego jail. James could have turned his luck around by staying in California and accepting a generous land grant, but the requirements to become a Mexican national and a Roman Catholic were too much to ask of a confirmed Protestant from Kentucky. He traveled to Mexico City to file a claim for services rendered in California, but the Mexican government failed to give him satisfaction. James returned by ship to the United States, where he eventually met with Timothy Flint to produce his story. Pattie's trail ends with a Kentucky tax record of 1833, at which time he may have died in a cholera epidemic. Reports that he may have later lived in California are vague at best. In his biography, Richard Batman has done a fine job of maintaining the spirit and excitement of Pattie's original narrative. His clarification of facts, new interpretations, and abundant explanatory materials make this a valuable contribution to western literature . Iris H. W. Engstrand University of San Diego Ian Hunter, Nothing to Repent: The Life ofHesketh Pearson. London: Hamish Hamilton , 1987. 211 pp. £14.95. Reflecting Hesketh Pearson's temperament, this warm-hearted biography is energized by a lively spirit, glimpses of famous persons, and a taste for good talk, close friendships , and amorous liaisons. It even pays tribute to Pearson's biographical methods, using the chronology of his life as a conventional underpinning while characterizing him with a stress on anecdotes. Yet Hunter's closeness to his subject has some drawbacks . As a biographer Pearson was more prolific than great, as a person he was more well-meaning than profound. Relative to most exceptional figures he cut a narrow swath, achieving minor notice less in his own right than in the fame or uniqueness of those he wrote about. Consequently Hunter's chronological detailing and anecdotes often beg for justification: given Pearson's derivative status as a biographer and small distinction as a personality, how significant or interesting or amusing are details or anecdotes about him; are they worth one's time? Such questions may dog the reader throughout this biography, particularly since the author appears to have little awareness of them. Early pages spent on Pearson's ancestors, his hatred of a schoolmaster, and the beginnings of his religious skepticism seem almost gratuitous; later pages on his "senseless and boring" wartime experiences are only slightly more than that; and, near the end, details of his walking expeditions with Hugh Kingsmill seem needlessly discursive. Throughout the book, vignettes of various famous personalities give an impression that Hunter, short of primary materials , is padding. More engaging portions of the narrative include accounts of Pearson's professional and personal faux pas. Failing as a clerk, he pursued an acting career but nearly destroyed his chances on the stage when he ridiculed actors and theater managers in his first book, Modem Men and Mummers (1921). Learning slowly, he later pretended that his third book, an attack on diplomats and world leaders titled TL· Whispering Gallery (1926), was by someone else. The truth brought a lawsuit against him by the publisher, almost terminating his writing career. Equally imprudent as a REVIEWS 351 womanizer, Pearson finally decided to marry his mistress and asked his wife for a divorce, only to discover that meanwhile the mistress had become engaged to another. Contrary to the biography's title, this marital cruelty was one thing he did repent, especially when his wife kindly forgave him. In capitalizing on these missteps and in critically probing other foibles, Hunter can be adroit at humanizing his subject. Yet sometimes when he attempts to build Pearson 's character by quoting him, he fails to notice how the quotations compromise his effort. As a young actor, Pearson first came across Oscar Wilde, Shakespeare, Herbert Beerbohm Tree, and Bernard Shaw. These, he declared, provided the "four major revelations of my life, as a result of which I grew up." The reader may suspect that growing up in...

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," "The Bostonians," and Henry Ward Beecher: Discourse on the Idealization of Suffering

That Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Henry James's The Bostonians were being simultaneously serialized in the Century magazine in 1885 would seem to testify to the fact that America's fiction is as diverse as its landscape--for there would seem to be great distance, geographical and otherwise, from the Mississippi river towns of Mark Twain's America to the elite Boston parlors of the America of Henry James. Yet these novels share more than a publication date. They both address social reform in nineteenth-century America, although quite differently. Recent critics such as Forrest Robinson and Stephen Mailloux suggest that Mark Twain's primary social concern in Huckleberry Finn may well have been the inadequate efforts of the abolitionist movement in post-reconstruction America, while Henry James condemns what he obviously thought to be the degeneration of New England abolitionism into the feminist movement at the end of the century. Mark Twain apparently wanted to re-ignite abolitionist fervor; James seems more intent on debunking at least a particular type of feminism as a virulent form of political ideology. Thus it was with quite different purposes that both authors turned with the same uncanny instinct to a contemporary issue that served as an inspiration for both their novels. Both Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Bostonians explore the integral relationship between social reform in America and a contemporary idealization of suffering, but they arrive at very different conclusions. The idealization of suffering became a prominent feature of Christian theology in its battle against religious skepticism in America's late 1880s, especially in the preaching of Henry Ward Beecher. Desperate times took desperate measures. Beecher was one of the more ingenious ministers of his time because of his ability to convey religious precepts to the masses through the use of homely parables and through the appropriation of the skeptical language of science to serve his religious message. Darwinian theory was in fact turned on its head by Beecher, who argued that the doctrine of evolution should actually encourage religious faith rather than engender skepticism. By suggesting that natural evolution merely reflected in paler form the process of spiritual evolution, Beecher made it seem that

Hume's Interest in Newton and Science

166 HUME'S INTEREST IN NEWTON AND SCIENCE Many writers have been forced to examine — in their treatments of Hume's knowledge of and acquaintance with scientific theories of his day — the related questions of Hume's knowledge of and acquaintance with Isaac Newton and of the nature and extent of Newtonian influences upon Hume's thinking. Most have concluded that — in some sense — Hume was acquainted with and influenced by Newton's thought in particular and scientific thought in general. The genesis of this paper is the recent point of view put forward by Peter Jones which challenges the many permutations of this almost ritualistic standard line by removing Hume entirely from the Newtonian and the scientific scenes of thought. Jones argues that Hume knew less about Newton and science, and needed to know less about Newton and 2 science, than he believes is required by the above interpretation. Indeed, Jones argues that Hume's fundamental assumptions, which, according to Jones, derive ultimately from a form of Ciceronian humanism, drive a "wedge" between Newton's thought and that of 3 Hume. Even Hume's introductory remarks in the Treatise about his universal "science of man" are, for Jones, a declaration of independence from the materialistic trend (as Jones sees it) of Newtonian 4 science and not, as so many commentators have maintained — however tenuously or strongly evidence for linkage of Hume's project with Newtonian or scientific thought. Jones baldly argues that Hume totally lacked interest in science in general and in Newton and Newtonian science in particular. Following J. H. Burton's observation that Hume's work is surprisingly free from the "opinions" of contemporary scientists, 167 Jones states there is no evidence that Hume ever studied science at the University of Edinburgh or that he "pursued" scientific studies of any formal sort. Regarding Newtonian scientific thought, he emphasizes the paucity of specifically Newtonian scientific textbooks in the early eighteenth century 7 which might have been available for Hume to study and argues that nowhere in Hume's writings is there evidence of precise and detailed knowledge of Newton's science beyond what is available in Q Chamber's Cyclopaedia. Jones acknowledges that, in the Introduction to the Treatise, Hume utilizes a "general version" of Newton's "Regulae Philosophandi" from the beginning of Book III of Newton's Principia. Nevertheless, in Jones' view, Hume's fundamentally humanistic orientation separates him completely from g any Newtonian influence. Finally, according to Jones, Hume does not betray the least bit of knowledge of Newton's mathematics and its role in Newton's experimental methodology. On this evidence Jones grounds his central claim of Hume's "total lack of interest in contemporary science." What references there are to Newton and to science in Hume's works Jones finds "traceable to essentially literary predecessors such as Fontenelle or Montesquieu, or to standard works of theologians ] 2 or free-thinkers." The absence of clearly direct references to what Jones feels are scientific works results both from Hume's "total lack of interest in science" and from his commitment to a form of Ciceronian humanism which is "inimical" to what Jones finds to be the obvious materialistic tendencies of 13 science in the early modern period. Jones' account of the Ciceronian and French contexts of Hume's thought is excellent. But his claim that Hume had no interest whatsoever in science 168 is simply too strong and finally forces us to view science in Hume's day as equivalent to science in our own time, a manifestly anachronistic point of view. Throughout this paper, my argument will be conditioned by my view that Hume's interest in science cannot be separated from his epistemology or his religious scepticism. Hume's interest in science was precisely that of a man of letters of the eighteenth century vitally engaged in determining the proper use of scientific methodology in establishing the limits of the secular science of man once it has 14 been freed from the fetters of theology. Hume's interest in theological and epistemological issues inevitably gave rise to a strong interest on his part in the science of his day and in Newton's contributions...

Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism

Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism

Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism

Religious Belief and Religious Skepticism