Who in the world
is a man constrained by conscience,
who awakens to censure
like a fine stallion to the whip?Those restrained by conscience
are rare —
those who go through life
always mindful.
Having reached the end
of suffering & stress,
they go through what is uneven
evenly;
go through what is out-of-tune
in tune.
whiskey river stares into the abyss:
I pace back and forth on the edge of the abyss, looking down into the dark. And when you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you.
[Friedrich Nietzsche said that. But you knew that.]
And now, feel it begin to sink.
Here’s hoping everything’s okay down by the whiskey river.
John Henry Newman: The Idea of A University, 1854
The general principles of any study you may learn by books at home; but the detail, the colour, the tone, the air, the life which makes it live in us, you must catch all these from those in whom it lives already. You must imitate the student in French or German, who is not content with his grammar, but goes to Paris or Dresden: you must take example from the young artist, who aspires to visit the great Masters in Florence and in Rome. Till we have discovered some intellectual daguerreotype, which takes off the course of thought, and the form, lineaments, and features of truth, as completely and minutely as the optical instrument reproduces the sensible object, we must come to the teachers of wisdom to learn wisdom, we must repair to the fountain, and drink there. Portions of it may go from thence to the ends of the earth by means of books; but the fullness is in one place alone. It is in such assemblages and congregations of intellect that books themselves, the masterpieces of human genius, are written, or at least originated.
John Henry Newman was a man in search of trouble. Highlights of his eventful life include the following:
- Ordaining as an Anglican preist and denouncing the Pope
- A switch, at age 44, to Catholicism
- Defending the Pope during the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England
- Getting successfully sued for libel by a Dominican monk
- Fired as rector of Dublin Catholic University after an essay he wrote was censured by Rome, thought to be a statement against papal infallibility
- Taking on Anglicans once the doctrine of papal infallibility was confirmed, in defense of the Pope
Amazing. He comes full circle in 89 years of full on living.
Throughout his life he remained fairly suspicious of authority and his thoughts on universities reflected that somewhat. He was truly ahead of his time in many ways.
Muslims discovered Greek thought hundreds of years before the Western Christians, yet it was the latter who ultimately assimilated it. Why did the reverse not happen? By tracing the major currents of medieval Islamic and Christian thought, this article, in part, proposes that the outcome had little to do with the virtues or vices of the tenets of either Islam or Christianity (they were both obstacles), but with older and deeper dispositions of mass belief. The Roman Christians (unlike the Byzantine Christians) lacked a significant spiritual-mystical dimension in the faith of their masses, unlike in the Islamic heartland, where such presence was strong. In particular, the latter led to Sufism, the dominant face of Islam until the 19th century (when orthodoxy began rising, partly in reaction to colonialism and modernism). Widespread mysticism thus indirectly denied critical mass to the early Islamic rationalism.
In the medieval West, on the other hand, there was hardly a mystical tradition; it had precious little of the non-denominational spirituality that seeks worldly detachment. As Protestant reinterpretation and Greek rationalism challenged their dogma-centric metaphysics, the temporal naturally gained wider emphasis, with its external engagement and human agency. It fostered popular attitudes and values similar to those of Classical Greece, which too had no spirituality. Notably, this took root in regions with relatively recent barbarian pasts and poorer records of spiritual life � northwestern Europe. At the expense of Catholicism, these attitudes snowballed into the abstraction of individualism, ultimately leading to the scientific method and political institutions built via negotiation. Much of what followed sprang from an interplay of its internal logic and contingency.
In the Epilogue, I propose a different classification, from the clich�d east-west, of mankind’s significant and seminal metaphysical responses down the ages. It would be no fun writing this just for the sake of polemics � like Protagoras, I am ever mindful of the shortness of human life, if not the obscurity of the theme � this article also discusses some of the key events and the lives & times of many remarkable personalities of early Islam: al-Beruni, Omar Khayyam, Firdausi, al-Farabi, Ibn al-Arabi, and Avicenna, besides others.