Saturday, September 7, 2013

"the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end"

"If then a practical end must be assigned to a University course, I say it is that of training good members of society.  Its art is the art of social life, and its end is fitness for the world.  It neither confines its views to particular professions on the one hand, nor creates heroes or inspires genius on the other.  Works indeed of genius fall under no art; heroic minds come under no rule; a University is not a birthplace of poets or of immortal authors, of founders of schools, leaders of colonies, or conquerors of nations.  It does not promise a generation of Aristotles or Newtons, of Napoleons or Washingtons, of Raphaels or Shakespeares, though such miracles of nature it has before now contained within its precincts.  Nor is it content on the other hand with forming the critic or the experimentalist, the economist or the engineer, though such too it includes within its scope.  But a University training is the great ordinary means to a great but ordinary end. . . ."

     John Henry Newman, The idea of a university defined and illustrated, Discourse VII.10 (ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1976), 154).
     Note the word "must" in that first sentence.  In the two previous Discources Newman has argued that "Knowledge" (or, rather, the inculcation of the habit of thinking about what one has learned) is "Its Own End" above all (V).
     Note, too, that Newman does not claim that "a University training is the [only] means" to the inculcation of a habit of "Thought or Reason exercised upon Knowledge" (VI.7 (pp. 124-125)).

Thursday, September 5, 2013

"you must be above your knowledge, not under it, or it will oppress you; and the more you have of it, the greater will be the load."

     John Henry Newman, The idea of a university defined and illustrated, Discourse VI.7 (ed. I. T. Ker (Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1976), 125).

Tuesday, September 3, 2013

"Here is Russia and here is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa."

"'Your map of Africa is all very fine,' Bismarck famously told the traveller and writer Eugen Wolf, 'but my map of Africa lies in Europe.  Here is Russia and here is France, and we are in the middle; that is my map of Africa.'"

"'I h r e Karte von Afrika ist ja sehr schön, aber meine Karte von Afrika liegt in Europa.  Hier liegt Russland, and hier'nach links deutend—'liegt Frankreich und wir sind in der Mitte; das ist m e i n e Karte von Afrika.'"

     As quoted by Niall Ferguson (but with the emphasis in the original reinserted) in "Balancing acts," Times literary supplement no. 5758 (August 9, 2013), 4 (3-4), a review of Brenda Simms' Europe:  the struggle for supremacy, 1453 to the present (London:  Allen Lane, 2013).  German (following Wikiquotes) from Eugen Wolf, Vom Fürsten Bismarck und seinem Haus:  Tagebuchblätter von Eugen Wolf, 2nd ed. (Berlin:  Egon Fleischel & Co., 1904), 16.  (I'm not seeing an earlier edition in WorldCat.)

Monday, September 2, 2013

"the penetrating Catholic intelligence of John Courtney Murray is difficult to imagine outside of a church that could not through the exercise, in Gleason's words, of 'raw ecclesiastical power, wielded in utter contempt of academic freedom,' silence John Courtney Murray."

     Mark Noll, "Reconsidering Christendom?", in Mark A. Noll and James Turner, The future of Christian learning:  an Evangelical and Catholic dialogue, ed. Thomas Albert Howard (Grand Rapids, MI:  Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2008), 51.
     Noll refers to Philip Gleason, Contenting with modernity:  Catholic higher education in the twentieth century (New York:  Oxford University Press, 1995), 282.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

"now and at the hour of our death"

     "Thomas wrote the Oratio ['Adoro te devote' (actually 'Te devote laudo')] in 1264, and until [his death in] 1274 prayed [it] during the second Mass [at which he was almost daily present [as a non-celebrant].  The prayer upon which he had come to rely came [therefore] spontaneously from his tongue when presented with the Viaticum [(beim Erblicken des Viatikums)], as, in March of 1274 in Fossanova, he arrived at his home-going [(sich . . . auf seinen Heimgang einstellte)].

     Robert Wielockx, in "Adoro te deuote:  zur Lösung einer alten Crux," Annales theologici:  revista internazionale di teologia 21 (2007):  123 (101-138).

     According to Wielockx, there would have been time for (so Thomas would have prayed) the Adoro te devote (Te devote laudo) between the Transubstantiation and the Tu rex gloriae, Christe (121 ff.).  (Silently, of course.)
     The Te deuote laudo was from a short time after Thomas' death in 1274 until 2007 and beyond mistakenly called the Adoro te deuote.  From the abstract-in-English rather than my own notes on the body of the article:  "the [Te deuote laudo] was mistakenly considered an elevation prayer and, as . . . often happened also later on, was transmitted in a Liber precum [(Book of prayers)] among other prayers of this kind.  As early as the beginning of the 13th century these elevation prayers began regularly with the formula Adoro te under the influence of the popular incipit of the prayers for the adoration of the Holy Cross which, already in [t]he Carolingian age, were universally spread" (138), and this was the mechanism by which the substitution was effected.
     Note that though there was (if memory serves) a tradition of his Adoration of the Cross as well, the painting by Sasseta (above) could also be taken as illustrative of the confusion that, according to Wielockx, resulted in the "old Crux"-creating and for that reason unworkable substitution of the incipit Adoro te devote for the incipit Te deuote laudo (which is what, in all probability, the incipit Thomas actually wrote).
     Cf. this post here, which I worked up in a so-far-abortive attempt to verify in the early sources the claim (made by Pope Pius XIin Studiorum ducem 6 (29 June 1923)among many others) that Thomas was in the habit of "lean[ing] his head in the fervor of his unaffected piety against the Tabernacle containing the august Sacrament".  Jean-Pierre Torrell, in vol. 2 (?) of his Saint Thomas Aquinas (or maybe it was via a consultation of Torrell communicated by Fr. Bernard Blankenhorn?), makes it clear that the claim for the Tabernacle must be an anachronism, given what we know about the rise of Tabernacle-based reservation.