"... Giordano Bruno might have been a pantheist. A pantheist believes that God is everywhere, even in that speck of a fly you see there. You can imagine how satisfying that is—being everywhere is like being nowhere. Well, for Hegel it wasn’t God but the State that had to be everywhere; therefore, he was a Fascist.”
“But didn’t he live more than a hundred years ago?”
“So? Joan of Arc, also a Fascist of the highest order. Fascists have always existed. Since the age of . . . since the age of God. Take God—a Fascist.”
Umberto Eco in the
New Yorker
posted by matteo
on Feb 28, 2005 -
36 comments
Pico's Brain. The "
Discourse on the
Dignity of Man" (1486) by
Pico della
Mirandola (1463-1494) is considered the "
Manifesto of the
Renaissance" and a key text of
Renaissance Humanism. The Discourse merits attention today precisely on account of its affirmation that human nature, which is in itself indeterminate and weak, comes alive and obtains its identity through the plurality of human cultures, each representing customs that, though distinct, are essentially identical. Hence the possibility of harmony and grounds
for "peace" among cultures.
The
Pico Project makes accessible a complete resource for the reading and interpretation of the Discourse within its own context, from an initial encounter through direct contact with the original text, presented here in its first printed edition (Bologna 1496) of which there exist no extant manuscripts.
Of course, Pico was also a
Kabbalistic scholar (Umberto Eco
is not a fan of Pico's kabbalistic work
.pdf file). More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 19, 2005 -
8 comments
"Jesus?" he murmured, "Jesus -- of Nazareth?..." Pontius Pilate,
prefect of
Judea, is
the only historical figure named in the
Nicene Creed -- Coptic
saint or
eternally damned, his role in the
greatest story ever told has been debated by many of history's greatest minds:
St Augustine,
Dante Alighieri,
Tintoretto,
John Ruskin,
Mikhail Bulgakov,
Monty Python. Unfortunately,
there is very little historical evidence about him. His role in the
death of a
certain charismatic
Galilean healer and
apocalyptic preacher
is still being debated today by
theologians and historians
alike. He is also, of course, the main character of
The Procurator of
Judea, the classic short story (complete text in main link) by
Anatole France. (France's magnificent story has lately been tragically neglected by publishers, even if the author was one of his era's most acclaimed writers in the world -- he won the Nobel Prize in 1921 over Shaw, Yeats, Joyce, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, and Proust, and when he died in 1924,
hundreds of thousands of people followed his funeral procession through Paris). These last 2,000 years of fascination with
Pilatus can be explained, some argue...
(more inside, for those unwilling to wash their hands of this post)
posted by matteo
on Jun 24, 2004 -
37 comments
