Lesser Feasts

One of my better covers Blessed John Duns Scotus, OFM, died (according to tradition) on 8 November 1308, so today is his feast day, for anyone inclined to celebrate. I actually started writing about Scotus entirely because someone else suggested the idea to me. That's not a particularly respectable reason to start working on a historical figure (my reason for working on Anselm is even less respectable; I'll get to that at some point), but the interest quickly became quite sincere, and Scotus has taken over my life and then relinquished it in waves ever since. I currently owe OUP the definitive (ha!) book on Scotus's ethics. Yeah, well, I owe lots of people lots of things. ***** I spent last weekend at home in Tampa. It was not a successful visit, since I spent the whole time suffering, and then recovering, from a stomach bug. I did lose 3.5 pounds over the weekend, but not, I suspect, in the way my trainer was encouraging. Our dog, Tess, is not particularly cuddly. She like...

Content warning: nekkid dudes in a weird painting. ***** I did a rough calculation: there were about 300 papers at this conference. Apart from the plenary talks, there were eleven sessions running concurrently at any given time. That's a lot of medieval philosophy -- more than I have an appetite for. But I missed more sessions than I would have liked, because my jet lag was absolutely brutal this time. ***** When I wasn't listening to papers or sleeping, I was out walking. I love long walks in cities. Paris was having a warm spell, and I made the (in retrospect obviously stupid) decision to walk all the way from my hotel to Sacré Cœur, a solid two miles away, on the hottest and sunniest day. Thanks to a timely rest and a liter of water, I was fine. My heart quailed when I reached the foot of the steps. Maybe I should take the funicular. No. Don't be ridiculous. You've climbed the Seven Hills of Edinburgh. You've walked in the Highlands. It's just steps. Turns ou...

The view from my balcony at the Hôtel D'Orsay  Normally I prepare for travel abroad. In the whirlwind of new faculty orientation and settling into my apartment and my new office, I just didn't this time around. I even managed to schedule an "onboarding" (I hate that word) call for my website redesign for Saturday morning, when I should have been getting properly ready. My packing consists of shoving back into my suitcase whatever I had taken out of it over the previous three days. (Conveniently, settling into my apartment did not include unpacking.) As soon as the call is over, I head for the airport. At some point I get a message from the place I'm supposed to be staying. If my French serves me correctly, they are telling me that for health reasons, they are no longer supplying bath towels. Google Translate informs me that my French is indeed serving me correctly. I'm not quite sure how you can advertise a place as "tout équipé" and then take away t...

"For when by heavenly mercy we arrive by our various roads at the homeland for which we now sigh, we will rejoice all the more that we have been called back from our diverse places of exile and now come together." -- Anselm of Canterbury, letter to Henry, a monk of Bec, c. 1070 Now Anselm is talking about heaven, as he so often did, not about Sewanee (aka God's Holy Mountain [aka Anglican Disneyland]). But he is also talking about friendship: the sorrow of friends when they are apart, and the marvelous joy of friends when they are reunited. At Tuesday's Eucharist, the celebrant prayed, "Remember those of our number who are grieved that they cannot be among us, and those whose absence we grieve." So many times during the week I thought "I would have loved to see the look on his face when that happened" or "I wish I could have talked with her about that bit." There was the sorrow of friends when they are apart. May God call them all back ne...

Tuesday There are, no doubt, some who think that the Mozarabic Preface is a bit much for a ferial Eucharist in the Season after Pentecost. They are, however, incorrect. And, more to the point, they are not celebrating the Eucharist in the Chapel of the Apostles today. The celebrant has remembered to put on his black shoes. He will maintain an unblemished record of black-shoe-wearing throughout the week, for the first time ever. Wednesday The Conference celebrates Solemn Eucharist, Rite One, with the propers For the Departed. The celebrant (who, to be fair, has been an Episcopalian for only forty years) mangles the Summary of the Law. The first performance of Malcolm Archer's setting of "Faire is the Heaven"  (beginning at 29:39) is beautifully sung. The thurifer, sacristan, and crucifer are all highly competent, flexible, and delightful. The person who runs the sound board and keeps me from having to keep turning my microphone on and off -- microphones are, of course, an ...

FCB Caddell, Head of a Young Man  (1934) My employment at the University of South Florida ended last week. I had a good run. They hired me with tenure, promoted me to full professor, paid me reasonably well, let me use up tons of sick leave when I was desperately ill, allowed me to go half-time for a couple of years just because I felt like it, and basically left me alone to do what I wanted to do. I'm not leaving angry. Far from it. But I am  leaving. Starting August 1 I will be the Isabelle A. and Henry D. Martin Professor of Medieval Philosophy at Georgetown University. I am thrilled beyond words about this. I get to be in a department and at a university where my focus on the Christian intellectual tradition isn't a generously tolerated eccentricity, but essential to the institution's self-conception. I get to teach, by all accounts, really first-rate undergraduates. Yesterday I started cleaning out my office. I'm not going to go all Kon-Mari on it, but any book tha...

  I sent Anselm: The Complete Treatises  off to Hackett last Friday, all 250,000 words of it. Tomorrow I'm sending off a complete draft of Anselm: A Very Short Introduction  to Oxford University Press. At a mere 36,000 words, it will be a much slenderer volume (that's kind of the point), but I'm really pleased with it. I am tired, but content. The VSI will be sent out to readers for the press, so I'll have those comments to take into account, as well as comments from friends who have been kind enough to read the draft. So there will be more work to do, but for now I can put it aside and concentrate on the more immediate task of teaching Plato's Phaedo  to my intro class and figuring out Sunday's sermon. I conclude the VSI with a reflection on a short passage of Anselm's Prayer to the Holy Cross. Here's my final paragraph, followed by the full text of the Prayer. You might wish to keep it on hand for Holy Cross Day, September 14. (It may also help to know...

William McTaggart (1835-1910), Winter Wheat I returned from my very productive New York/Philadelphia trip in good shape to have both Anselm: I Can't Believe How Short This Introduction Is  and Anselm: Complete Treatises with Selected Recipes and Sick Twitter Burns  off to the publishers by my September 1 deadline. This week, though, is all about getting ready for the start of classes on the 23rd. I posted the skeleton of a syllabus yesterday (the deadline to do so, though what the penalty is, or even could be, for failure to meet the deadline is not at all obvious). I do not believe in this syllabus. It's pretty close to my syllabus from the last time I taught the class, and that went pretty well, so maybe I should have more confidence this time. But I have a sinking feeling that I have not remotely accommodated the differences between last time and this time. Last time I had 100 students, so I could get some discussion going (a fair bit, as it turned out). This time I have 30...

The initial capital from On the Procession of the Holy Spirit , which goes unmentioned in the book (Bodl. 271 f 109r). 'N' of course stands for New York. Getting away to a place where I had nothing to do but write during the day and catch up with friends in the evening has proved to be more productive even than I had hoped. Last week I wrote the chapter on the fall of the angels. On Monday, thanks to the realization that I basically had already written the Atonement chapter, I finished that chapter as well. (Copy-and-paste plus maybe three hours of editing was all it took.) That means yesterday I started chapter 7, "Life in the meantime." This one may take a while longer because I don't have a clear plan for it, just a jumble of themes: living on the knife-edge between heaven and hell, the central concepts of obedience and order, grace, what goes on in the prayers and meditations, why Anselm thinks you definitely shouldn't marry your late husband's brother...

The view from atop the coffee bus (is that a thing?) in the patio of the High Line Hotel, Chelsea Despite the best efforts of General Seminary to thwart me by randomly changing the library's opening hours, not to mention my own occasional late nights (late for me, anyway) catching up with dear friends, I have managed to settle into a productive routine. It's nothing fancy: just breakfast, about four hours of writing (interrupted by lunch if I got a late start), nap, gym, miscellaneous stuff. That last part could use some refining. Still, I got Chapter 5, "How things went wrong," drafted from start to finish over the course of five days. I'll take it. Serendipitously, I stumbled across this post  about how one can't consistently do focused mental work for more than three or four hours a day. I'm finding this guy's writing useful. ***** This week's excerpt summarizes the philosophical issues at play in Anselm's account of the fall of the angels a...

Monday, 2 August I have been assured that there will be Morning Prayer in Good Shepherd Chapel at 9:00. There is, but only because I've shown up with my Daily Office Book  in my overfilled briefcase and say it by myself. I almost forget to turn east for the creed, but no one is there to see it but God, who already knows I'm a bit scatter-brained. **** At home I have a stained-glass Saint Anselm presiding over my work. At General Seminary I have John Henry Hobart, founder of the seminary. He would be glad that I said Morning Prayer, but he would wonder where everyone else was. A bit of Episcopal Church trivia I know for some reason: he hated that portrait. ***** By noon I've made some decent progress, so I ask the cheerful woman at the front desk whether there's anywhere close, good, and cheap for lunch. "Well, there's La Bergamote. It's close and good, though not especially cheap." The Croque Monsieur is excellent. It is not especially cheap. ***** Thi...

Sir David Young Cameron, Cliffs and Crags of Ross Chapter 1 is drafted! I haven't read through it from start to finish, and I have a feeling it will need a good bit of revision. The organization is a bit weird: the thematic treatment gives way to a chronological treatment about halfway through. And I forget to mention Anselm's actual writings during a decade or two. But it's drafted, on time, and the hard part -- reminding myself of the historical tidbits and then figuring out how to craft them into something cohesive, with the right amount of detail -- is done. I hope I've managed to convey something of Anselm's complex character, which is intriguing and has given rise to strikingly different readings in his recent(ish) biographers. I find myself increasingly drawn to Sally Vaughn's portrait of Anselm. Her Anselm is less baffled, less overwhelmed, a better tactician and administrator than Sir Richard Southern and Gillian Evans credit him with being. Yet she nev...

The incipit of Anselm's letter On the Incarnation of the Word (Bodleian Library, MS 271, c. 1100-1140) I'm roughly halfway finished, I think. I've written three and a half of seven chapters, 18,000 words of no more than 35,000. I was a week late with my list of illustrations, and I may well be a week or two late with the final manuscript (due September 1), but that's close enough. In last week's entry  I told the story of how Anselm reluctantly became archbishop of Canterbury. One of the threads in that story is Anselm's life as a monk, and I spent most of this week trying to figure out something illuminating to say about how his monastic profession shaped Anselm's life and thought. This turned out to be rather tricky. It's not as if there's anything in his treatises to which you can point and say, "Only a monk could have written that" (with the obvious exception of the bits where he says that he wrote a given work at the request of his bro...

James Paterson, Edinburgh from Craigleith This painting is part of an exhibition of the Glasgow Boys at The Fine Art Society in Edinburgh. (A lot of my images lately have been from that exhibition.) I had hoped to see it in person, but it closes a week from today, and restrictions on travel from the US to Scotland are still too prohibitive. I won't make it to Scotland at all this summer, but I'm taking a few days to get a change of scenery a little closer to home, including a week to ten days of focused work at the library at General Theological Seminary. My main job this week was to get started on Chapter 1, "Anselm's life, work, and contexts." I was planning to save it for last because it will be the most difficult to write, but after drafting Chapters 2-4 I realized that I need the first chapter to make my list of illustrations, which currently requests "a map or maps including all the places mentioned in Chapter 1." That list is due to the press, wel...

Madonna , William Crosbie Chapter 4 is done! Or drafted, anyway. True, a captious reader might note that I introduce the doctrine of the Trinity but fail to get around to the Holy Spirit. ("No, we have never even heard that there is  a Holy Spirit.") And there's definitely other work to be done. But still, it feels good to have three of seven chapters drafted. Wait (you may be saying to yourself): I thought you said Chapter 4 is done. Quite right. I haven't written Chapter 1, which is the biographical/contextual/historical bit that I can't do as easily off the top of my head. That has to be next, though, because I have to submit my list of illustrations on July 15, and that list includes a request for "a map of all the places mentioned in Chapter 1," which in the absence of Chapter 1 is not a super-helpful directive. I also ask for a picture of a manuscript and make several suggestions. Here's one I particularly like, from an early MS of Anselm's...

Sir William George Gillies, "Moorfoot" (1961) I was about two weeks behind at the beginning of the week. Now I'm just a day or two behind. I accomplished this feat by revising my schedule, frankly, though I did get a bit of work done as well. The path I'm trying to take is somewhat winding: I have to get from creation to the Word to the "truth" of creatures without losing anyone along the way. I'm still figuring out how to finesse that turn from the Word to creatures, but once that's done, the rest of the chapter will write itself. And the next chapter, about freedom and the fall, should also be easy. In addition to working on Anselm, I led a Bible study on Revelation 11:19-15:4. It was a lot of material, and I thought I could cover it best by focusing on three passages that introduce characters who play a major role in that part of the vision. I found some nice images, which I might as well pass along. We first read about the woman, the child, and t...