James Wetzel | Villanova University (original) (raw)

Essays by James Wetzel

Augustine invites us to imagine ourselves as living pitched between a realm of angels, who can do... more Augustine invites us to imagine ourselves as living pitched between a realm of angels, who can do no wrong, and a realm of demons, who are forever in the business of wrong-doing. As most of us seem to be neither purely angelic nor purely demonic, it is tempting to imagine our in-between status as a morally mediocre mix of antipodes. But Augustine’s thinking about the matter is trickier and more interesting. Angels and demons, in his mind, can never mix. And if they ever did, that mixing took place “before” the invention of evil and so prior to very idea of an angelic fall. So where does that leave Adam’s heirs, who cannot hope to combine in themselves what a more-than-human fall has rent permanently asunder? I venture some thoughts about that under the rubric of “a politics of perfection” (normally a very scary idea).

Note: I gave this lecture as the Saint Auguste Lecture at Ave Maria University, March 25, 2024, sponsored by the Henkels Lecture Fund. I am particularly grateful to Megan Hare and Barry David, who did much to facilitate my visit.

The Journal of Religion, Vol.101, No. 1, 77-90, 2021

Among other things, this essay is a response to Samuel Scheffler's beautifully argued case for th... more Among other things, this essay is a response to Samuel Scheffler's beautifully argued case for the idea of an impersonal and collective afterlife. Most basically I look for life in the old alternative: "I am going to defend the imaginative extension of the work of relationship across the barrier of death and into an afterlife."

I should note that this essay forms part of a special issue of the Journal of Religion on Scheffler's Death & the Afterlife. The incomparable Willa Swenson-Lengyel was the guest editor.

"Angels and Demons," chapter 7 of the Cambridge Companion to Augustine's CIty of God, ed. David Meconi, 2021

Angels and Demons: The Eternal Foundations of the Two Cities Book XI of City of God begins what ... more Angels and Demons: The Eternal Foundations of the Two Cities

Book XI of City of God begins what Augustine characterizes in a letter to Firmus (ep. 1A*.1; cf. retr. 2.43.2), a fellow African Christian, as a tripartite unfolding of the two cities: origins (bks. 11-14), development (bks. 15-18), and ends (bks. 19-22). Book XI and its companion book, Book XII, both heavy on angelology, cover the eternal origins of the two cities, the day and night of divine creativity, and in that regard Augustine is thinking through a beginning that fails to follow the straightforward logic of a sequence, where beginnings always come before endings. Assume the truth of what he takes to be a doctrinal certainty: that the angels in heaven, having remained constant over the course of a rebellion, are now and forever more beyond the possibility of a fall. Conversely, the fallen angels—darkened, chaotic, and demonic—live lives of perpetually diminishing returns, beyond all hope of redemption. Here we have day and night, and (presumably) never the twain shall meet. But if we push the question of what originates this difference, so basic to two-cities theology, we will find ourselves drawn ever more tightly into the possibility that the beginning is really, and always has been, in the end. The middle part, where plot unfolds, recedes from view, like some unreachable horizon.

This essay first appeared in a special issue of Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy. The f... more This essay first appeared in a special issue of Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy. The focus was on the personal essay, and the issue appeared online in early January of 2021.

My contriibution plays out my debt to Augustine's angelology. Augustine was particularly imaginative when it came to angels; he more or less makes them up. But sometimes imagination is the road that truth takes.

On the road I walk with Augustine, I reconsider my dead father's deceptively simple Catholic piety and I try to make some sense of a brief but intense correspondence I had with a brilliant Brazilian psychiatrist who resisted any attempt to spiritualize the afterlife.

Academia Letters, 2021

Wittgenstein did not want to die in an English hospital. His doctor, Edward Bevan, was able to sp... more Wittgenstein did not want to die in an English hospital. His doctor, Edward Bevan, was able to spare him such a fate. Bevan had invited Wittgenstein, whose prostate cancer had become untreatable, to stay with him and his wife in their house on Storey's Way in Cambridge and live out his last days there. Dr. Bevan's wife, Joan, initially experienced the philosopher, famous for his flashes of temper and his unsettling insistence on the precision of words, as intimidating. But the two soon found their feet with one another and became good friends. They took regular walks together to the local pub and would always, in keeping Wittgenstein's love of informal ritual, order two glasses of port-one for Joan Bevan to drink, the other for Wittgenstein to pour into an Aspidistra plant. (The plant must have loved that.) On the night in late April when Wittgenstein lost consciousness and slipped into a quiet death, it was to the vigilant Joan that he had delivered his parting words: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." 1 Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein's American student and a professor at Cornell, had this to say about his teacher's last words: By 'them' he undoubtedly meant his close friends. When I think of his profound pessimism, the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in which he drove his intellect, his need for love together with the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end he himself exclaimed that it had been 'wonderful'! To me this seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance. 2 1 Ray Monk's justly celebrated biography of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990), is the fairest to Joan Bevan and her role in reconciling Wittgenstein to his own death. See the chapter, "Storeys End."

There is a peculiarly philosophical use of memory that is not primarily about the retrieval of in... more There is a peculiarly philosophical use of memory that is not primarily about the retrieval of information. The aim of this essay is to evoke this memory. The evocation takes two forms: a reading of Virgil’s great character, Dido, who wants to be able to distinguish grieving from feeling defeated, and a tribute to the martyred Boethius, a late Roman philosopher who sees in his unjust treatment a reminder not to be unjust. If philosophical memory has practical value, it is not that it makes our lives easier; it is that it keeps us from becoming the people we don’t want to be.

I wrote this essay for the conference, The Church Today: Responding to the Sexual Abuse Crisis in... more I wrote this essay for the conference, The Church Today: Responding to the Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church (March 20, 2021). The conference was organized by the Charles Widger School of Law at Villanova and the Department of Philosophy, CLAS. My section was “The Future of the Church.”

I am part of an NEH workshop, orchestrated by Catherine Conybeare and José Luis Bermúdez, that is... more I am part of an NEH workshop, orchestrated by Catherine Conybeare and José Luis Bermúdez, that is reconsidering the Sources of the Self (think Charles Taylor) in the Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Periods. My task has been to source Plotinus. This is a draft, to be sure, but it is also a self-conscious attempt to write about a figure who clearly has vastly greater wisdom than my own. How does one do that and not simply punt or duck behind footnotes? My essay doesn't answer that question, but it does struggle with it.

2020 St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven In the Confessions (conf. 9.... more 2020 St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven

In the Confessions (conf. 9.6.14) Augustine insists that the voice of his son in the dialogue, The Teacher, is truly his son’s and not a father’s contrivance. But this clarification does nothing to render the dialogue any less strange. For roughly half the proceedings, Augustine tries to convince Adeodatus that teaching (docere) is all they do with words, and then for the rest of it, he ratchets things around the other way and insists that learning (discere) is all they do. The irony of the turn-about is that Augustine affects to teach us a profound lesson about language-learning while, at the same time, disavowing his authority to teach it. Socrates too insists that he has nothing to teach, but he doesn’t further insist on their being a divine teacher who takes up the slack. In this lecture I want to take a careful look at the emergence in Augustine of the divine teacher and the interiority that goes along with it. It is apparently of the highest importance that we come to see why the one and only teacher teaches from within, and yet this is nothing that Augustine can teach anyone, not even his own son.

Confessing in Public: Augustine and the Perils of Self-Disclosure, 2018

In what follows, I offer a reading, or really the sketch of a reading, of Augustine’s public port... more In what follows, I offer a reading, or really the sketch of a reading, of Augustine’s public portrait of his sexual persona, for the most part confining myself to books 7 and 8 of the Confessions.

I read this essay to an audience at the 2018 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. It is the beginning of an attempt to reconsider Augustine on sexuality. After some 30 years of studying Augustine, I still feel at sea on this topic. I begin the essay with Raymond Geuss's wicked criticism of Augustine (mostly ad hominem); what fascinates me about it is not Geuss's rhetorical extravagance, but that he continues to read Augustine anyway. What do we have to learn, what can we learn, from a love-to-hate figure?

Parting Knowledge: Essays After Augustine, 2013

Summary thoughts on Augustine's deployment of the concept of liberum arbitrium (usually translate... more Summary thoughts on Augustine's deployment of the concept of liberum arbitrium (usually translated as 'free will').

This essay was originally published in a festschrift for Cornelius Petrus Mayer OSA and appeared in the Res et Signa series put out by ZAF Volume 6 (2009). It was reprinted, in a corrected version, in Parting Knowledge.

This essay originated as a contribution to the second Reconsiderations conference at Villanova on... more This essay originated as a contribution to the second Reconsiderations conference at Villanova on the life, thought, and legacy of Augustine. My focus is on the way that Augustine's disorienting experience of self-recollection radically qualifies what he has to say about mystical ascent.

The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, 2015

In book 19, chapter 25 of City of God, Augustine famously restricts true virtue to virtues that a... more In book 19, chapter 25 of City of God, Augustine famously restricts true virtue to virtues that are properly referred to God; the other virtues, however virtuous seeming, are really vices in disguise. This theologizing of ethics has fueled an abundant literature on the specifics of Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue and whether his claim in City of God 19.25 is as unqualified as it appears. The focus of this essay is less on that question than on how the God-reference of chapter 25 should be read. Augustine’s language there invites us to read the reference as a claim about superior will-power: God rules the soul as the soul rules the body, only much better. But this reading is at best misleading. It is clear from the broader context of City of God (book 10 especially) that the ruling God is incarnately self-sacrificial and not benignly tyrannical. The implications for Augustine’s moral psychology are profound. Basically, he trades in an ethics of self-mastery for an unresolved conflict of will, where resolution, were it to be possible, would take the form of patience—a willing suffering for the sake of a liberated love.

I delivered this essay at one of the Oxford Patristics gatherings. It situates Augustine's elusi... more I delivered this essay at one of the Oxford Patristics gatherings. It situates Augustine's elusive view of memory against Freud and Wittgenstein's sense of the mind as a city under constant construction--much more construction, in fact, than revision.

As part of the fourth meeting of The Early Modern Conversions project, Profs. Mark Vessey (UBC) a... more As part of the fourth meeting of The Early Modern Conversions project, Profs. Mark Vessey (UBC) and Sarah Beckwith (Duke), in concert with Paul Yachnin and Marie-Claude Felton of McGill University, organized a workshop, held at McGill (August 24, 2017), on the theme of “Conversion as Periodization—Turns and Returns of the Past in the Worlds of Pre-Revolutionary Europe.” Mark Phillips and I were invited to serve as lead respondents. This is my contribution. I am happy to acknowledgment here my deep debt to Mark’s subtle and wise book, On Historical Distance (Yale 2013).

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2019

What does it mean to say that God perfects the self or soul? What does it mean to seek perfection... more What does it mean to say that God perfects the self or soul? What does it mean to seek perfection in a life? Would perfection be well being? In Confessions 7.10.16, Augustine describes entering into his inner depths with God as guide, having an unsettling time with the view, and finally reaching a high point of self-realization: he discovers that he is already the perfect lover of God; he has nothing to prove. But his high point proves to be his low point as well. In Confessions 7.17.23, he confesses that as soon as he is taken up into divine beauty and transfigured, he is just as quickly drawn back into his skin by familiar desires, the gravitational pull of his “carnal habit” (consuetudo carnalis). The usual reading of the passage, that Augustine the Platonist is being tripped up by his Pauline struggle against the flesh, misses the possibility that he is actually describing a complex perfectionism, one that admits of struggle and loss and grief. I bring out this possibility by juxtaposing the Augustine of conf. 7.17.23 against Cartesian perfectionism in the Meditations and Anselmian perfectionism in Cur deus homo. I will be especially concerned to distinguish what I call “the perfectionist’s lament” (which is not far from a form of resentment) from the grief (and joy) that genuine perfectionism makes possible.

This essay was delivered on Feb. 4, 2017, at the Yale consultation on Contentment and Worry, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and the McDonald Agape Foundation, and May 6, 2017 at the annual gathering of the Duodecim Society at Princeton Theological Seminary. It has since been published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics.

I try to come to some terms with naturalism in this essay, in spite of my usual inclination not t... more I try to come to some terms with naturalism in this essay, in spite of my usual inclination not to care so much about policing the border between cognitive and affective forms of apprehension. Much of the essay is a literary play. To the extent it is also philosophical, it is a tribute of sorts to Wayne Proudfoot, who long ago rescued religious experience for me from the shallow pond of a sensationalistic empiricism.

Wayne Proudfoot's influential study, Religious Experience, came out when I was still a graduate s... more Wayne Proudfoot's influential study, Religious Experience, came out when I was still a graduate student at Columbia University. It is a work that has profoundly shaped my self-conception as a philosopher interested in the religious life. The Pragmatism and Empiricism Group of the AAR recently hosted a panel discussion on Wayne's book, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of its publication. My contribution is in large part my attempt to assess whether Wayne's critique of an apologetic appeal to religious experience ends up undermining experiential approaches to religion altogether.

I offer a reading of Anselm’s famous attempt to rationalize the incarnation (remoto Christo; sola... more I offer a reading of Anselm’s famous attempt to rationalize the incarnation (remoto Christo; sola ratione) that is bad but very difficult to evade, and hence compellingly bad. I find my break from the badness by way of two of Burcht Pranger’s characteristically ingenious essays, one cast as a critique of Marion on Anselm, the other a foray into Anselmian poetics. Pranger invites us to stop reading Anselm’s experiment with rationalized theology as (phenomenologically inadequate) secular apologetics and start seeing it as stage setting for the very things it is imagined to exclude: faith and vision. I conclude with an Augustinian side about Anselm’s affinities with Augustine.

In his Meditations, Descartes recounts the conversion of his naïve and errant self, subject to mi... more In his Meditations, Descartes recounts the conversion of his naïve and errant self, subject to misleading appearances, into a seer of sublime discrimination. The way to such intellectualized redemption is itself errant, a detour into the dark machinations of a dematerializing demiurge, Descartes’ Devil (looking suspiciously like his God). The aim of this lecture is to give the under-imagined Cartesian demon his due and track the effects of this never-quite-expurgated figure on the coherence of a paradigmatic form of modern selfhood.

Augustine invites us to imagine ourselves as living pitched between a realm of angels, who can do... more Augustine invites us to imagine ourselves as living pitched between a realm of angels, who can do no wrong, and a realm of demons, who are forever in the business of wrong-doing. As most of us seem to be neither purely angelic nor purely demonic, it is tempting to imagine our in-between status as a morally mediocre mix of antipodes. But Augustine’s thinking about the matter is trickier and more interesting. Angels and demons, in his mind, can never mix. And if they ever did, that mixing took place “before” the invention of evil and so prior to very idea of an angelic fall. So where does that leave Adam’s heirs, who cannot hope to combine in themselves what a more-than-human fall has rent permanently asunder? I venture some thoughts about that under the rubric of “a politics of perfection” (normally a very scary idea).

Note: I gave this lecture as the Saint Auguste Lecture at Ave Maria University, March 25, 2024, sponsored by the Henkels Lecture Fund. I am particularly grateful to Megan Hare and Barry David, who did much to facilitate my visit.

The Journal of Religion, Vol.101, No. 1, 77-90, 2021

Among other things, this essay is a response to Samuel Scheffler's beautifully argued case for th... more Among other things, this essay is a response to Samuel Scheffler's beautifully argued case for the idea of an impersonal and collective afterlife. Most basically I look for life in the old alternative: "I am going to defend the imaginative extension of the work of relationship across the barrier of death and into an afterlife."

I should note that this essay forms part of a special issue of the Journal of Religion on Scheffler's Death & the Afterlife. The incomparable Willa Swenson-Lengyel was the guest editor.

"Angels and Demons," chapter 7 of the Cambridge Companion to Augustine's CIty of God, ed. David Meconi, 2021

Angels and Demons: The Eternal Foundations of the Two Cities Book XI of City of God begins what ... more Angels and Demons: The Eternal Foundations of the Two Cities

Book XI of City of God begins what Augustine characterizes in a letter to Firmus (ep. 1A*.1; cf. retr. 2.43.2), a fellow African Christian, as a tripartite unfolding of the two cities: origins (bks. 11-14), development (bks. 15-18), and ends (bks. 19-22). Book XI and its companion book, Book XII, both heavy on angelology, cover the eternal origins of the two cities, the day and night of divine creativity, and in that regard Augustine is thinking through a beginning that fails to follow the straightforward logic of a sequence, where beginnings always come before endings. Assume the truth of what he takes to be a doctrinal certainty: that the angels in heaven, having remained constant over the course of a rebellion, are now and forever more beyond the possibility of a fall. Conversely, the fallen angels—darkened, chaotic, and demonic—live lives of perpetually diminishing returns, beyond all hope of redemption. Here we have day and night, and (presumably) never the twain shall meet. But if we push the question of what originates this difference, so basic to two-cities theology, we will find ourselves drawn ever more tightly into the possibility that the beginning is really, and always has been, in the end. The middle part, where plot unfolds, recedes from view, like some unreachable horizon.

This essay first appeared in a special issue of Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy. The f... more This essay first appeared in a special issue of Book XI: A Journal of Literary Philosophy. The focus was on the personal essay, and the issue appeared online in early January of 2021.

My contriibution plays out my debt to Augustine's angelology. Augustine was particularly imaginative when it came to angels; he more or less makes them up. But sometimes imagination is the road that truth takes.

On the road I walk with Augustine, I reconsider my dead father's deceptively simple Catholic piety and I try to make some sense of a brief but intense correspondence I had with a brilliant Brazilian psychiatrist who resisted any attempt to spiritualize the afterlife.

Academia Letters, 2021

Wittgenstein did not want to die in an English hospital. His doctor, Edward Bevan, was able to sp... more Wittgenstein did not want to die in an English hospital. His doctor, Edward Bevan, was able to spare him such a fate. Bevan had invited Wittgenstein, whose prostate cancer had become untreatable, to stay with him and his wife in their house on Storey's Way in Cambridge and live out his last days there. Dr. Bevan's wife, Joan, initially experienced the philosopher, famous for his flashes of temper and his unsettling insistence on the precision of words, as intimidating. But the two soon found their feet with one another and became good friends. They took regular walks together to the local pub and would always, in keeping Wittgenstein's love of informal ritual, order two glasses of port-one for Joan Bevan to drink, the other for Wittgenstein to pour into an Aspidistra plant. (The plant must have loved that.) On the night in late April when Wittgenstein lost consciousness and slipped into a quiet death, it was to the vigilant Joan that he had delivered his parting words: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life." 1 Norman Malcolm, Wittgenstein's American student and a professor at Cornell, had this to say about his teacher's last words: By 'them' he undoubtedly meant his close friends. When I think of his profound pessimism, the intensity of his mental and moral suffering, the relentless way in which he drove his intellect, his need for love together with the harshness that repelled love, I am inclined to believe that his life was fiercely unhappy. Yet at the end he himself exclaimed that it had been 'wonderful'! To me this seems a mysterious and strangely moving utterance. 2 1 Ray Monk's justly celebrated biography of Wittgenstein, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (New York: The Free Press, 1990), is the fairest to Joan Bevan and her role in reconciling Wittgenstein to his own death. See the chapter, "Storeys End."

There is a peculiarly philosophical use of memory that is not primarily about the retrieval of in... more There is a peculiarly philosophical use of memory that is not primarily about the retrieval of information. The aim of this essay is to evoke this memory. The evocation takes two forms: a reading of Virgil’s great character, Dido, who wants to be able to distinguish grieving from feeling defeated, and a tribute to the martyred Boethius, a late Roman philosopher who sees in his unjust treatment a reminder not to be unjust. If philosophical memory has practical value, it is not that it makes our lives easier; it is that it keeps us from becoming the people we don’t want to be.

I wrote this essay for the conference, The Church Today: Responding to the Sexual Abuse Crisis in... more I wrote this essay for the conference, The Church Today: Responding to the Sexual Abuse Crisis in the Catholic Church (March 20, 2021). The conference was organized by the Charles Widger School of Law at Villanova and the Department of Philosophy, CLAS. My section was “The Future of the Church.”

I am part of an NEH workshop, orchestrated by Catherine Conybeare and José Luis Bermúdez, that is... more I am part of an NEH workshop, orchestrated by Catherine Conybeare and José Luis Bermúdez, that is reconsidering the Sources of the Self (think Charles Taylor) in the Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Periods. My task has been to source Plotinus. This is a draft, to be sure, but it is also a self-conscious attempt to write about a figure who clearly has vastly greater wisdom than my own. How does one do that and not simply punt or duck behind footnotes? My essay doesn't answer that question, but it does struggle with it.

2020 St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven In the Confessions (conf. 9.... more 2020 St. Thomas Aquinas Lecture, Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven

In the Confessions (conf. 9.6.14) Augustine insists that the voice of his son in the dialogue, The Teacher, is truly his son’s and not a father’s contrivance. But this clarification does nothing to render the dialogue any less strange. For roughly half the proceedings, Augustine tries to convince Adeodatus that teaching (docere) is all they do with words, and then for the rest of it, he ratchets things around the other way and insists that learning (discere) is all they do. The irony of the turn-about is that Augustine affects to teach us a profound lesson about language-learning while, at the same time, disavowing his authority to teach it. Socrates too insists that he has nothing to teach, but he doesn’t further insist on their being a divine teacher who takes up the slack. In this lecture I want to take a careful look at the emergence in Augustine of the divine teacher and the interiority that goes along with it. It is apparently of the highest importance that we come to see why the one and only teacher teaches from within, and yet this is nothing that Augustine can teach anyone, not even his own son.

Confessing in Public: Augustine and the Perils of Self-Disclosure, 2018

In what follows, I offer a reading, or really the sketch of a reading, of Augustine’s public port... more In what follows, I offer a reading, or really the sketch of a reading, of Augustine’s public portrait of his sexual persona, for the most part confining myself to books 7 and 8 of the Confessions.

I read this essay to an audience at the 2018 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. It is the beginning of an attempt to reconsider Augustine on sexuality. After some 30 years of studying Augustine, I still feel at sea on this topic. I begin the essay with Raymond Geuss's wicked criticism of Augustine (mostly ad hominem); what fascinates me about it is not Geuss's rhetorical extravagance, but that he continues to read Augustine anyway. What do we have to learn, what can we learn, from a love-to-hate figure?

Parting Knowledge: Essays After Augustine, 2013

Summary thoughts on Augustine's deployment of the concept of liberum arbitrium (usually translate... more Summary thoughts on Augustine's deployment of the concept of liberum arbitrium (usually translated as 'free will').

This essay was originally published in a festschrift for Cornelius Petrus Mayer OSA and appeared in the Res et Signa series put out by ZAF Volume 6 (2009). It was reprinted, in a corrected version, in Parting Knowledge.

This essay originated as a contribution to the second Reconsiderations conference at Villanova on... more This essay originated as a contribution to the second Reconsiderations conference at Villanova on the life, thought, and legacy of Augustine. My focus is on the way that Augustine's disorienting experience of self-recollection radically qualifies what he has to say about mystical ascent.

The Routledge Companion to Virtue Ethics, 2015

In book 19, chapter 25 of City of God, Augustine famously restricts true virtue to virtues that a... more In book 19, chapter 25 of City of God, Augustine famously restricts true virtue to virtues that are properly referred to God; the other virtues, however virtuous seeming, are really vices in disguise. This theologizing of ethics has fueled an abundant literature on the specifics of Augustine’s critique of pagan virtue and whether his claim in City of God 19.25 is as unqualified as it appears. The focus of this essay is less on that question than on how the God-reference of chapter 25 should be read. Augustine’s language there invites us to read the reference as a claim about superior will-power: God rules the soul as the soul rules the body, only much better. But this reading is at best misleading. It is clear from the broader context of City of God (book 10 especially) that the ruling God is incarnately self-sacrificial and not benignly tyrannical. The implications for Augustine’s moral psychology are profound. Basically, he trades in an ethics of self-mastery for an unresolved conflict of will, where resolution, were it to be possible, would take the form of patience—a willing suffering for the sake of a liberated love.

I delivered this essay at one of the Oxford Patristics gatherings. It situates Augustine's elusi... more I delivered this essay at one of the Oxford Patristics gatherings. It situates Augustine's elusive view of memory against Freud and Wittgenstein's sense of the mind as a city under constant construction--much more construction, in fact, than revision.

As part of the fourth meeting of The Early Modern Conversions project, Profs. Mark Vessey (UBC) a... more As part of the fourth meeting of The Early Modern Conversions project, Profs. Mark Vessey (UBC) and Sarah Beckwith (Duke), in concert with Paul Yachnin and Marie-Claude Felton of McGill University, organized a workshop, held at McGill (August 24, 2017), on the theme of “Conversion as Periodization—Turns and Returns of the Past in the Worlds of Pre-Revolutionary Europe.” Mark Phillips and I were invited to serve as lead respondents. This is my contribution. I am happy to acknowledgment here my deep debt to Mark’s subtle and wise book, On Historical Distance (Yale 2013).

Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics, 2019

What does it mean to say that God perfects the self or soul? What does it mean to seek perfection... more What does it mean to say that God perfects the self or soul? What does it mean to seek perfection in a life? Would perfection be well being? In Confessions 7.10.16, Augustine describes entering into his inner depths with God as guide, having an unsettling time with the view, and finally reaching a high point of self-realization: he discovers that he is already the perfect lover of God; he has nothing to prove. But his high point proves to be his low point as well. In Confessions 7.17.23, he confesses that as soon as he is taken up into divine beauty and transfigured, he is just as quickly drawn back into his skin by familiar desires, the gravitational pull of his “carnal habit” (consuetudo carnalis). The usual reading of the passage, that Augustine the Platonist is being tripped up by his Pauline struggle against the flesh, misses the possibility that he is actually describing a complex perfectionism, one that admits of struggle and loss and grief. I bring out this possibility by juxtaposing the Augustine of conf. 7.17.23 against Cartesian perfectionism in the Meditations and Anselmian perfectionism in Cur deus homo. I will be especially concerned to distinguish what I call “the perfectionist’s lament” (which is not far from a form of resentment) from the grief (and joy) that genuine perfectionism makes possible.

This essay was delivered on Feb. 4, 2017, at the Yale consultation on Contentment and Worry, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and the McDonald Agape Foundation, and May 6, 2017 at the annual gathering of the Duodecim Society at Princeton Theological Seminary. It has since been published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics.

I try to come to some terms with naturalism in this essay, in spite of my usual inclination not t... more I try to come to some terms with naturalism in this essay, in spite of my usual inclination not to care so much about policing the border between cognitive and affective forms of apprehension. Much of the essay is a literary play. To the extent it is also philosophical, it is a tribute of sorts to Wayne Proudfoot, who long ago rescued religious experience for me from the shallow pond of a sensationalistic empiricism.

Wayne Proudfoot's influential study, Religious Experience, came out when I was still a graduate s... more Wayne Proudfoot's influential study, Religious Experience, came out when I was still a graduate student at Columbia University. It is a work that has profoundly shaped my self-conception as a philosopher interested in the religious life. The Pragmatism and Empiricism Group of the AAR recently hosted a panel discussion on Wayne's book, on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of its publication. My contribution is in large part my attempt to assess whether Wayne's critique of an apologetic appeal to religious experience ends up undermining experiential approaches to religion altogether.

I offer a reading of Anselm’s famous attempt to rationalize the incarnation (remoto Christo; sola... more I offer a reading of Anselm’s famous attempt to rationalize the incarnation (remoto Christo; sola ratione) that is bad but very difficult to evade, and hence compellingly bad. I find my break from the badness by way of two of Burcht Pranger’s characteristically ingenious essays, one cast as a critique of Marion on Anselm, the other a foray into Anselmian poetics. Pranger invites us to stop reading Anselm’s experiment with rationalized theology as (phenomenologically inadequate) secular apologetics and start seeing it as stage setting for the very things it is imagined to exclude: faith and vision. I conclude with an Augustinian side about Anselm’s affinities with Augustine.

In his Meditations, Descartes recounts the conversion of his naïve and errant self, subject to mi... more In his Meditations, Descartes recounts the conversion of his naïve and errant self, subject to misleading appearances, into a seer of sublime discrimination. The way to such intellectualized redemption is itself errant, a detour into the dark machinations of a dematerializing demiurge, Descartes’ Devil (looking suspiciously like his God). The aim of this lecture is to give the under-imagined Cartesian demon his due and track the effects of this never-quite-expurgated figure on the coherence of a paradigmatic form of modern selfhood.

Syllabus for an honors section of the foundation course in philosophy at Villanova University, Sp... more Syllabus for an honors section of the foundation course in philosophy at Villanova University, Spring 2023.

An experimental course being taught concurrently (Spring 2015) at Villanova's School of Business ... more An experimental course being taught concurrently (Spring 2015) at Villanova's School of Business and SCI Graterford, Pennsylvania's largest state prison. It invites reflection on how to integrate higher and lower values within a comprehensive conception of economy.

Doctoral Seminar in Philosophy, Villanova University, Fall 2014

I have long been fascinated by the folktale of Genesis 2:4b-3:24--garden life and its aftermath. ... more I have long been fascinated by the folktale of Genesis 2:4b-3:24--garden life and its aftermath. This fascination probably accounts for most of my long fascination with Augustine, whose insanely influential misreading of the story continues to haunt. Here is (respectfully) my alternative to Augustine's reading.

These are opening remarks for a conference sponsored by The Augustinian Institute at Villanova Un... more These are opening remarks for a conference sponsored by The Augustinian Institute at Villanova University and organized by Bolek Kabala, Ashleen Menchaca-Bagnulo, Thomas Harmon, and myself. The theme: “Augustine: Frontiers of Pluralism.”

Augustine’s outsized influence on politics and the religious life takes plural forms, even if he is not often read as himself a pluralist. The conference explores that tension. In the program notes we are told that “despite his inconsistences,” he “planted seeds of pluralism in ways we have only begun to understand.”

I have my doubts. In my opening remarks, my doubts collect in and around this question: "Is it possible to hold to the universal validity of one’s own religion, as the path of paths so to speak, and still have a reasonable hope of affirming a robust pluralism?"

The Truth We Told Ourselves, 2021

Part of a collection of letters, entitled The Truth We Told Ourselves and organized by Kingdom Em... more Part of a collection of letters, entitled The Truth We Told Ourselves and organized by Kingdom Empowerment Inc., a mentorship initiative. The contributors span a diversity of ages, backgrounds, and experience. The only directive: write to your 14 year old self.

I happen to have a 14 year old son. I wrote to "me" and not to him, but he was definitely in the background.

This meditation is queued to book 1, chapter 21, of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo. I attempt to negotiat... more This meditation is queued to book 1, chapter 21, of Anselm's Cur Deus Homo. I attempt to negotiate the gravity (gravitas) of sin. I wrote this out for an intro philosophy class: "Knowledge, Reality, Self."

In conjunction with the conference at Villanova University on Transformative Consumer Research (M... more In conjunction with the conference at Villanova University on Transformative Consumer Research (May 31 to June 2, 2015), I participated on a panel whose change was to initiate "a frank conversation about racism." These are my opening remarks.

Coleman Brown, a much beloved professor at Colgate University and a gifted chaplain, died on Dece... more Coleman Brown, a much beloved professor at Colgate University and a gifted chaplain, died on December 14, 2014, after a long struggle with Lewy body dementia. A memorial service, in honor of his memory, was held at Colgate's chapel on June 6, 2015. My remarks are attached.

Cartesian philosophy is first and foremost a discipline of the mind (a form of mental training) a... more Cartesian philosophy is first and foremost a discipline of the mind (a form of mental training) and secondarily a form of argumentation. Descartes"s arguments for his preferred versions of self, God, and world are moments in his deepening meditation on the distinction between the human soul and the body-a meditation he invites his readers to do on their own. To evaluate Descartes on his own terms, then, is to evaluate both the power and the limitation of his kind mental discipline. Is it reasonable to expect that meditation on the master distinction (between soul and body) will be our best bet for winning the Cartesian prize: perfection in knowledge? And what standards of reasoning are we to use to evaluate the meditations themselves, when they are-presumably-the very exercises we need to do before our minds can fairly evaluate anything?

The tone of The Accused Share is a cross between that of a mystic pornographer, marketing the psy... more The tone of The Accused Share is a cross between that of a mystic pornographer, marketing the psyche's deepest desire for intimacy, and a social cartographer, dispassionately mapping the ways, past and present, that societies have served, albeit without much self-consciousness, the general economy. But when Bataille gets to the part about capitalism, I find it hard not to conclude that he just dislikes that particular species of alienated eros and all of its pathetic compensations. But perhaps I am presuming too much that I understand what Bataille means when he claims that capitalism reduces people to things (p. 129):

Journal of Roman Studies, 2022

Published in Journal of Religion 94.4 (2014) 552-553

Review for the APA Newsletter on Feminism and Philosophy, Fall 2008

For Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 76:2 (June 2007) 395-397.

Published in Journal of Religion 86.3 (July 2006)

Written for Notre Dame Philosophy Reviews (on-line), 2007.08.18

xv + 396 pp. $26.95 hardbound.

For Religious Studies 41.2 (2005) 242-246.

A once venerable answer to the question, "What, after all, is the good?," is that the good is God... more A once venerable answer to the question, "What, after all, is the good?," is that the good is God and, indeed, God alone. The thinking here is roughly that all the other things that may seem good, though not necessarily deceits, are so bone-deep derivative of God and his goodness that compared to him they are, in their conceptually meager independence, quite literally nothing at all. For professional thinkers who are nowadays more attuned to ecosystems than to grave and metaphysical hierarchies, the blithe assimilation of all good to God is apt to come off as unearthly and off-putting. If our theologies rob us of our respect and love for the fragile mortal beauties that we are and that we inhabit-not least of all the globe itself-what more is love of God than, as Nietzsche suspected, an all-too-human resentment of animality?

What follows are a series of lecture notes, revisited and refined from the summer of 2015, when I... more What follows are a series of lecture notes, revisited and refined from the summer of 2015, when I was recording a series of lectures for the Media Company, Now You Know (see www.NowYouKnowMedia.com).

A framework for reading the Confessions, thoughts on the difference between confessional writing ... more A framework for reading the Confessions, thoughts on the difference between confessional writing and autobiography.

Focus on Confessions, book 1: learning a first language, perfectionism and the philosophical life... more Focus on Confessions, book 1: learning a first language, perfectionism and the philosophical life, on childish things.

Focus on Confessions, books 2 and 2: the theatrics of sin.

Focus on Confessions, book 4: anatomy of a grief, the "great question" of human love.

Focus on Confessions, books 5 and 6: gnostic fantasies, painful parting, the perfectionist's disi... more Focus on Confessions, books 5 and 6: gnostic fantasies, painful parting, the perfectionist's disillusionment.

Focus on Confessions, book 7: Augustine's Platonism, his inner apocalypse, the veil of incarnation.

Focus on Confessions, book 8: agony in the garden, inner conflict, origination ex femina, putting... more Focus on Confessions, book 8: agony in the garden, inner conflict, origination ex femina, putting on Christ.

Focus on Confessions, book 9: ecstasy at Ostia, death of the mother, forgiveness.

Focus on Confessions, book 10: memory and redemption; the eternal constitution of temporal things.

Focus on Confessions, book 11: the puzzle of time, affective realism.

Focus on Confessions, books 12 and 13: creation and redemption, eternal materiality, the ungraspa... more Focus on Confessions, books 12 and 13: creation and redemption, eternal materiality, the ungraspable unity of things.

Some retrospective musings: perfectionism and confession, a hierarchy of values, the rent in love.