Charles Victor on Religion

In the thirteenth century the mediaeval world crested, and Thomas Aquinas, the scintillate scholastic resident at the University of Paris, was its intellectual apex. His great contribution was to enlist Aristotle, the newly re-discovered “pagan philosopher”, for the service of the Christian vision of God and the soul. Continue reading →

Whensoever any great light ceases to shine, be it a civilization, a time of grace, or some lesser force, there is experienced a deep darkness, but as our faculties of sight and insight adjust, we begin again to detect the tangible power of light. We look, we recognize shape if not colour, we see if but darkly. There comes perhaps a moment when our focus is not so much outward as upward, and we discover a heavens of infinite lights, or turn again, and become seduced by a world quietly shimmering in the lustre of a moon-glossed night. Not, thus, was everything in the so-called “dark ages” darkled or dormant. A great power had shed its brilliance, and much was disoriented therein. Nevertheless, the world, the luminous capacities of heart and mind remained, and much that had been overshadowed by that more potent presence became free to claim command. Continue reading →

We are accustomed to looking upon the universities as the loci of scholarly investigation and consideration, but in the centuries before these institutions were born in the West scholarship found its hibernaculum in the great monasteries. The reflections of the ninth century Irish monk, John Scotus Erigena, evidence the vitality extant in these great houses of study and prayer. Erigena is beholden to Pseudo-Dionysius and thus to Plato and Plotinus, but also to a number of the Greek Fathers, the founding theologians of Eastern orthodoxy. Continue reading →

St. Paul, while preaching in Athens, converted to the faith a certain Dionysius, a member of the once potent but still prestigious body that sat at the Areogapus (Ares’ Hill). Centuries later (circa 500AD), an anonymous scholar of notable abilities seemingly wished to provide his considerations with greater cachet and adopted the name. It took a millennium to recognize an allonym had been employed, but the desired celebrity had been won. Continue reading →

Augustine lived in an age of anxiety.The established state and the civilized world were being eroded by foreign elements once considered the necessary components of political stabilization and economic surety, and by political divisiveness and uncertainty as to how to deflate or to correct this oversight of judgement now virtually incorporate in the system of state. Policies of immigration, accommodation, and colonialism—one time solutions to social, economic and security problems–had transformed into situations that were not only unravelling the status quo, but toppling an entire civilization, and replacing it with something very other, something the history texts are wont to call the barbarian invasions. The 330AD move of the imperial capital from Rome to Byzantium renamed Constantinople was a tacit abdication of imperial power in the West. Continue reading →

Plotinus is the last flower of the world as Greek. After him it is the Roman influence that ascends in cult and culture, and its power comes in two flavours: practicality, and legality. Both these, along with Plotinus, and the Judeo-Christian scriptures fuse in the anabatic mind of Augustine, fifth century bishop of Hippo, the last great philosopher and theologian before the crepuscule of the Dark Ages, the father of the theories of original sin, predestination, illuministic spirituality, and, not least, blain on my pre-adolescent mind. Continue reading →