Reviews and News:
Over at Atlas Obscura, Sarah Laskow writes about the oldest items in twelve libraries—from the library of The College of Physicians of Philadelphia to Oxford’s Bodleian.
Herman Melville’s second son, Stanwix, was found dead in a San Francisco hotel room in 1886. What happened? “In 1869, Stanwix announced that—like his father before him—he wanted ‘to go to sea, & see something of the great world.’ Augusta Melville, Herman’s sister, added: ‘Herman & Lizzie have given their consent, thinking that one voyage to China will cure him of the fancy.’”
We celebrate Czeslaw Milosz, Andrew Motion argues in the latest issue of Hudson Review, because “we simultaneously admire the steadfastness with which he endures the Gorgon stare of History and relish the way he pays attention to the little guy—the one we recognize as being like ourselves, bent on tying up our tomatoes as Armageddon approaches.”
Don’t be true to yourself: “In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Polonius counsels his son: ‘This above all: to thine ownself be true, / And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ But that’s mostly wrong. It turns out that being fulfilled, just, and true to others does not flow from autonomy or authenticity.”
Daniel J. Flynn reviews Christopher Irmscher’s Max Eastman: A Life: “Max Eastman (1883-1969) trekked to Russia as an ideological tourist, bowled over by the idea of a heaven on earth. Years later, he wrote one of the most effective anti-Communist books of the 1930s, Artists in Uniform, the title of which refers to the surreal phenomenon of creative people seeking to don team costumes to show fealty to the Soviet Union. The son of two ministers naturally became an atheist. A committed feminist, he occasionally sponged off women and often juggled girlfriends with wives. A man whose fervent pacifism led to the suppression of his magazine by the post office, a ban of his presence behind the podium by local police, and the label of draft dodger during World War I became an early advocate for America’s entry into World War II. Even a flawed biography of the writer-poet-activist-gameshow host-Lothario can’t help but prove compelling, nearly 50 years after Eastman’s death. Eastman’s life traveled interesting roads in every direction, but Christopher Irmscher’s Max Eastman: A Life confines itself mainly to two roads. ‘It doesn’t cheapen the biography or the ambitions of its subject to describe what follows as a story largely about sex and communism,’ Irmscher maintains. But at times, it does.”
In Aeon, Laura Bland revisits the medieval idea of preternatural phenomena.
Essay of the Day:
No, the Reformation did not divide the church, Timothy George argues in Modern Age. He corrects this and two other myths and offers four “motifs” that help us understand the movement:
“Why did the Reformation happen when it did? A number of factors came together to create a perfect storm in the years leading up to and immediately following Luther’s posting of his Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. The Fifth Lateran Council, which concluded in that very year, failed to recognize the urgent need for reform in the church. Meanwhile, the New Learning provided scholars with hitherto unavailable textual and philological resources, such as those used by Lorenzo Valla to challenge the authenticity of the so-called Donation of Constantine, a major bulwark of papal authority. In 1516, Erasmus published the first critical edition of the Greek New Testament, which Luther used in drafting his Theses. The invention of the printing press brought about an explosion of knowledge and the expansion of literacy. It resulted in Luther’s becoming the world’s first bestselling author and Protestantism the first religious mass movement. In addition, the advance of Islam, signaled by the fall of Constantinople in 1453, changed the geopolitical equation for everyone on the other side of the Ottoman armies. In other circumstances, Luther’s protest against the abuse of indulgences, his focus on justification by faith alone, and even his appeal to Scripture as the normative authority for faith and practice (which was not an unknown idea) might have been accommodated within recognized ecclesial structures. Luther’s doctrine of the church was rooted in his early study of the Scriptures, and to this he returned in the years following his excommunication.
“The image of Luther as a rebellious monk pulling down the pillars of Mother Church and replacing her with his own subjective interpretation of the Bible stems from a misreading of his famous “conscience” speech at the Diet of Worms. Luther did appeal to his conscience but in a distinctive way: he declared that his conscience had been captured by the enduring Word of God. When asked to defend his right to challenge the received teaching of the church in which he had been ordained, Luther appealed to the vow he had made when he first became a doctor of theology in 1512. On that occasion he had sworn to preach faithfully and purely and teach ‘my most beloved Holy Scriptures.’
“Luther and the Reformers who followed him, including those in the Reformed and Anglican traditions along with a number of the Anabaptists, were not lonely, isolated seekers of truth asserting ‘the right of private judgment.’ They were rather pastors committed to proclaiming God’s Word in the company of God’s people. As Luther wrote in his 1535 commentary on Galatians: ‘This is the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person, or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God, which cannot deceive.’
“The priesthood of all believers, a distinctive Reformation idea, was set forth in 1520 in Luther’s address to the German nobility and its implications spelled out in his popular tract On the Freedom of the Christian. This teaching asserted that all Christians, by virtue of their baptism, had direct access to God and enjoyed the same spiritual status as priests, bishops, or popes. There is sanctity in the secular; no calling is intrinsically higher or more spiritual than another. The Reformation doctrine of the priesthood of all believers did not, however, produce modern rugged individualism, the ideology of ‘every tub sitting on its own bottom.’”
Images: Vintage Halloween cards
Poem: Rachel Hadas, “The Head of the Table”
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