One of my mentors, Kobus Smit, drew my attention as an undergraduate student to the comparison between Rembrandt's Bathsheba and Rubens' Bathsheba. What can we learn of the very different approaches to the human person of these two artists from this comparison?









(See also this list of paintings on the same theme.)

There are few no painters from whom we can learn more about being human than Rembrandt and Vermeer. In the second class on philosophical anthropology in this terms Introduction to Philosophy course, one of the things we will do is to try and see what we can learn from these two masters.

Here is a link to a map of thumbnails of all the paintings of Vermeer.

And here is a link to some of Rembrandt's wry, wise self-portraits.

Last night we watched the final movie in my Introduction to Philosophy course: the director's cut of Ridley Scott's Bladerunner. (See a transcript of the complete script of the earlier version here, and a mess of related links here.)

This was the first of two classes on philosophical anthropology. The question we are asking is "What does it mean to be human?"

Frank Schaeffer (Francis Schaeffer's Eastern Orthodox pro-life activist son and the proud father of a U.S. Marine Corps corporal) has said this about Bladerunner:

And if you want to see a movie that I would suggest you all rent sometime, whether you are nice Christians that don't watch R rated movies or not I suggest you make the exception for this one, go down to your local video store and rent Ridley Scott's "Bladerunner." "Bladerunner" is the future of the United States of America if the pro-abortion side wins. A country, a country divided into two peoples living in one land. One group, the yuppie fascists that control the society living in the high towers of the mythical Los Angeles, while on the street, it rains perpetually on second-class citizens, mutants, mere, mere creations of genetic engineering in which false life forms are toyed with and experimented with, in which human life is trivialized, in which the meaning of sacredness and dignity is squandered for profit and filthy greed, in which the freedoms so hard won in the Second World War and by our forefathers are squandered as we ourselves create the Nazi totalitarian nightmare as if we had lost the war and were now forty or fifty years into the eugenics program.

(Note that this quote is sourced from a website that offers it as part of an intended exposé of the younger Schaeffer.)

We will be spending some time on Raphael's wonderful School of Athens (representing natural and moral philosophy) in my philosophy class this evening. I am reading a collection of essay, Raphael's 'School of Athens', edited by Marcia Hall, and it is blowing me away. Raphael is now my third favourite painter!


Apart from clicking on this image of the painting to access a virtual map that identifies various of the philosophers, I also recommend this student-built site.

The other walls of the Stanza della Segnatura hold ...







... The Disputation of the Holy Sacrament (La Disputa, representing theology) and The Parnassus (below, representing poetry). The paintings and other decorations of the room represent the whole of human learning, as it was understood in the Renaissance. The room was known as "the upper library" in the time of Julius II, the pope who comissioned the painting. Earlier in his career Julius had helped Pope Sixtus IV organize the Vatican Library (which I would imagine was "the lower library"). This smaller library was the pope's private room for study and meeting with formal visitors, and contained a representative sampling of the great books of theology, philosophy (including what we would now call the sciences), poetry (including what we would now call the arts), and law. It soon became used for the signing of formal papal documents, and was thus known as "the signing room" (Stanza della Segnatura) by the time Vasari wrote his Lives of the Artists, from which we draw much of what we know about Raphael.






The fourth wall has several images, together representing jurisprudence. These include Justinian Presenting the Pandects to Trebonianus (symbolizing Roman law) and Gregory IX Approving the Decretals (symbolizing canon law), and The Cardinal Virtues (below).

See the ceiling frescoes here and a view of the room from the side here.

Those of my students moved by the story of The White Rose may be interested in this World Youth Alliance conference In Memoriam Hans & Sophie Scholl.

This Tuesday we are pulling together our reading from Garber and our viewing of Wit, Finding Forrester, and The White Rose, and considering the ways in which conviction/worldviews, character/mentors/heroes, and community/friendships serve as resources in the pursuit of wisdom. And then we begin to ask ourselves: how do we do philosophy?

Daniel Silliman's list of good things.

Tomorrow evening is the third meeting of the Introduction to Philosophy Class I teach at Redeemer University College, and we will be watching the movie The White Rose.

We are watching this movie to jumpstart our imaginations as we prepare to read chapters 7 ("The Context of a Common Life") and 8 ("Convictions, Character, Community Incarnate") in Steven Garber's Fabric of Faithfulness. Garber writes (pp. 174-175):

Somewhere, deep in the mysteries of how we learn to see and hear, and what we learn to care for and about, there is a place where presupposition meets practice, where belief becomes behavior. The reality of Iris Murdoch's insight is there for all of us to ponder: "At crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over."

Worldviews do become ways of life, always and everywhere. Hans Scholl's too-truthful taunt "Why don't we rent ourselves an island in the Aegean and offer courses on worldviews?" and his sister Sophie's plain, yet plaintive, "Somebody, after all, had to make a start" reflect beliefs about meaning and morality ground out in the bloody face of history. Their beliefs were never an abstraction. Instead, in their simplicity there is a strength that teaches all of us about the formation of moral meaning during the university years - they are a time for negotiating the issues and ideas of life, of deciding what matters most and what difference it will make. Choices about meaning, reality and truth, about God, human nature and history are being made which, more often than not, last for the rest of life.

Part of what I am trying to do with the reading and the movie is to raise the basic question of community: Who are my friends? Why are they my friends? What community of faith enfolds me? Of what other communities am I a member? How do these relationships shape who I am? How do they serve as a context for working out, living out the implications of what I believe? Will these relationships last a lifetime? What difference will that make? And what does all of this have to do with the philosophical pursuit of wisdom?

(Note to my students: The Garber reading is crucial for connecting the movie's story to the developing worldview of the young friends who wrote and published the White Rose pamphlets.)


Hans Scholl



Sophie Scholl

Here are a few good sites on The White Rose: Jenna's White Rose site (a very fine site, the best I have found), an excerpt from Anton Gill's An Honourable Defeat, a memoir by George Wittenstein, one of the survivors, and a broader history of the German resistance. And the text of the White Rose leaflets can be found here.

"I am more and more convinced that the people you choose to have around you have more to do with how you act upon what you believe than what you read or the ideas that influence you. The influence of ideas has to be there, but the application is something it's very hard to work out by yourself. You work it out in the context of friends - just as you work it out with your spouse, so you work it out with a group of friends." (Bob Kramer)

"... my best teachers were my best friends. We were all trying to figure this out together." (Ron Stegall)

"One thing I have learned is that it is the people you surround yourself with that is one of the most important choices you make." (Michelle Clark)

From Chapter 7, "The Context of a Common Life," in Steven Garber, The Fabric of Faithfulness: Weaving together belief & behavior during the university years.

How do your friendships sustain or strain the connection between your deepest beliefs and your everyday life?

The story of God does not offer a resolution of life's difficulties, but it offers us something better - an adventure and struggle, for we are possessors of the happy news that God has called people together to live faithfully to the reality that he is the Lord of this world. ... Moreover, through initiation into such a story I learn to regard others and their difference from me as a gift. Only through their existence do I learn what I am, can or should be.

Stanley Hauerwas, A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic, pp. 148-149. Via Garber, p. 146.

Those most trapped in the language of the isolated self ("In the end you're really alone") are troubled by the nihilism they sense there and eager to find a way of overcoming the emptiness of purely arbitrary "values." We believe that much of the thinking about the self of educated Americans, thinking that has become almost hegemonic in our universities and much of the middle class, is based on inadequate social science, impoverished philosophy and vacuous theology. There are truths we do not see when we adopt the language of radical individualism. We find ourselves not independently of other people and institutions but through them. We never get to the bottom of our selves on our own. We discover who we are face to face and side by side with others in work, love and learning. ... We are parts of a larger whole that we can neither forget nor imagine in our own image without paying a high price.

Robert Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, p. 84. Via Garber, p. 145.

The self is now thought of as lacking any necessary social identity, because the kind of social identity that it once enjoyed is no longer available; the self is now thought of as criterionless, because the kind of telos in terms of which it once judged and acted is no longer thought to be credible. What kind of identity and what kind of telos were they? In many premodern, traditional societies it is through his or her membership in a variety of social groups that the individual identifies himself or hersel and is identified by others. I am brother, cousin and grandson, member of this household, that village, this tribe. These are not characteristics that belong to human beings accidentally, to be stripped away in order to discover "the real me." They are part of my substance, defining partially at least and sometimes wholly my obligations and my duties. Individuals inherit a particular space within an interlocking set of social relationships; lacking that space, they are nobody, or at best a stranger or an outcast. To know oneself as such a social person is however not to occupy a static and fixed position. It is to find oneself placed at a certain point on a journey with set goals; to move through live is to make progress - or fail to make progress - toward a given end.

Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, pp. 33-34. Via Garber, p. 144.

(Here is a little more on MacIntyre.)