Marginalia, No. 3

'If the heart of one friend is open to another, the truth glows between them, the good enfolds them, and each becomes a mainstay to his companion, a helpmate in his endeavor, and a potent factor in his attaining his wish. There is nothing surprising in this: souls ignite one another, minds fertilize one another, tongues exchange confidences; and the mysteries of this human being, a microcosm in this macrocosm, abound and spread.' [1]

 

That is the 10th-century Islamic philosopher Abu Sulayman al-Sijistani--who, like Socrates, 'wrote little or nothing himself' [2]--speaking to his disciples in the Muqabasat, or 'Borrowings', of Abu'l-Hayyan al-Tawhidi, quoted from an excerpt of Joel L. Kraemer's Humanism in the Renaissance of Islam found in Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature, edited by Robert Irwin.

 

It's a powerful classical conception of friendship, on which of course there is a tradition of philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks, particularly Aristotle, and running through Cicero, and finding beautiful Christian treatments in St John Cassian's Conferences and Aelred of Rievaulx's Spiritual Friendship. Since this is only a marginalium and not a proper post, I won't go to the trouble of walking downstairs and finding my new volume on Islamic philosophy to see if there are any comments on these figures in there. But I will note that Irwin writes: 'Tawhidi and his teachers and friends were interested in Greek philosophy and Sufism, and in reconciling Sufism with Neoplatonism.' [175] I suppose then that it is at least very likely that Abu Sulayman would have been familiar with Aristotle's thoughts on the subject of friendship, whatever else he may have read.

 

The image above is from a manuscript of the Rasa'il Ikhwan al-Safa dating from 1287 AD (Suleimaniye Library, Istanbul).

 

 

[1] Robert Irwin, ed., Night & Horses & the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (NY: Anchor, 2001), p. 177.

 

[2] Ibid., p. 174.

 

[3] Ibid., p. 175.

Marginalia, No. 2

Engagement in the church's practices puts us in a position where we may recognize and participate in the work of God's grace in the world.

 

[Practices] become arenas in which something is done to us, in us, and through us that we could not of ourselves do, that is beyond what we do.

 

The practices of Christian faith turn out in the end not primarily to be practices, efforts. They turn out to be places in the contours of our personal and communal lives where a habitation of the Spirit is able to occur. And it is this that is the source of their power and meaning. [1]

This is Craig Dykstra, in Growing in the Life of Faith: Education and Christian Practices, quoted by Glenn E. Sanders of Oklahoma Baptist University in 'How Christian Practices Help to Engage Students Morally and Spiritually: Testimony from a Western Civilization Course', his contribution to Teaching and Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith & Learning, edited by David I. Smith and James K.A. Smith.

It strikes me as a good, evangelical-friendly way to explain the effect of 'good works' that avoids the opprobrium that term acquires for those who are quick to smell 'works righteousness'. In fact, it also seems to apply well to the 'practice' of the Mysteries or Sacraments. This may be significant for evangelicals too, since I was baffled several years ago to hear one of them object to the idea that Baptism had any importance to salvation since it was a 'work' that we did rather than an act of God. In Dykstra's terms, the Mysteries may be something that we practice, but they are nevertheless 'done to us, in us, and through us', they are something 'we could not of ourselves do, that is beyond what we do'.

[1] Qtd. in Glenn E. Sanders, 'How Christian Practices Help to Engage Students Morally & Spiritually: Testimony from a Western Civilization Course', Teaching & Christian Practices: Reshaping Faith & Learning, ed. David I. Smith & James K.A. Smith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), p. 161.

Marginalia, No. 1

 

 

I had toyed some time ago with the idea of doing some shorter posts featuring quotations from my reading, with less commentary and original input than has always been typical at Logismoi. It would be something, in fact, rather like the 'Marginalia' I have long admired over at The New Psalmanazar. I have been less than satisfied with simply posting quotations on Facebook, and partly to make some fun use of my new computer, I have decided that now is the time to begin. I hope I won't be reproached for being entirely unoriginal and also referring to these posts as 'Marginalia'. I mean, the Bible says there's 'nothing new under the sun' anyway.

 

So, to kick things off:

 

Ibn al-Alkami  The last vizier of Baghdad, who owned one of the largest libraries of that city. The library, which contained 10,000 books, was destroyed during the sack of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, when every one of Baghdad's thirty-six libraries also perished. [1]

  

This is one of the entries in 'An Annotated Guide to the Historical and Literary References in The Name of the Rose' (which novel I am rereading so as to discuss it with students this Autumn), located in The Key to 'The Name of the Rose', Including Translations of All Non-English Passages by Adele J. Haft, Jane G. White, and Robert J. White. [2]

 

I am somewhat embarrassed to admit it, as I always have been about those things that most fire my imagination, but I've recently been quite taken by the 'Orientalist' bug. I won't go into the details (although I think it coincided with reading some of the stories of Borges), but it has given me a new interest in Arab references everywhere, including those in Eco's novel.

 

But obviously it didn't take Orientalism to get me to sit up and take notice of this. The destruction of thirty-six mediaeval libraries, including at least one holding 10,000 books, was enough to do it. It reminds me of an anecdote I read last year in Jaroslav Pelikan's The Idea of the University: A Reexamination:

 

When the armies of the German Empire invaded Belgium in August 1914, one of their first victims was the University of Louvain, established by a papal charter of 9 December 1425. The burning of the university library cost the world of scholarship three hundred thousand books and more than a thousand original manuscripts (including the university's charter from 1425), and it has ever since symbolized the triumph of the irrational over the rational. As one historian has told the story, 'In Brussels the Rector of the University, Monseigneur de Becker, whose rescue was arranged by the Americans, described the burning of the Library. Nothing was left of it; all was in ashes. When he came to the word "library"--bibliothèque--he could not say it. He stopped, tried again, uttered the first syllable, "La bib--" and unable to go on, bowed his head on the table and wept.' [15-6]

 

The image above shows scholars at an Abbasid library, and was made in Baghdad in 1237, twenty-two years before the destruction.

 

 

[1] Adele J. Haft, Jane G. White, & Robert J. White, The Key to 'The Name of the Rose', Including Translations of All Non-English Passages (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan, 1999), p. 67.

 

[2] Unfortunately, I'm not sure where the reference to Ibn al-Alkami is in Eco's text.

 

[3] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Idea of the University: A Reexamination (New Haven, CT: Yale, 1992), pp. 15-6.