New Scholastic Year Quotes

In order to “situate” the doctrine of a Scholastic, for example, or even of a Prophet, a “psychoanalysis” is prepared — it is needless to emphasize the monstrous pride implicit in such an attitude — and with an entirely mechanical and perfectly unreal logic, the “influences” to which this doctrine has been subject are laid bare; in the course of this process there is no hesitation in attributing to saints all kinds of artificial and even fraudulent conduct, but it is obviously forgotten, with satanic inconsequentiality, to apply the same principle to oneself and to explain one’s own — supposedly “objective” — position by psychoanalytical considerations; in short, sages are treated as sick men, and one takes oneself for a god. In the same line of thinking, it is shamelessly asserted that there are no primary ideas: that they are due only to prejudices of a grammatical order — hence to the stupidity of the sages who were duped by them — and that their only effect has been to sterilize “thought” for thousands of years, and so forth; it is a case of expressing a maximum of absurdity with a maximum of subdety. For procuring a feeling of self-satisfaction, there is nothing like the conviction of having invented gunpowder or of having stood Christopher Columbus’ egg on its point!

Lately, however, the routine had begun to pall. Coprolites and Jurassic snails no longer held the fascination they once did, and the incessant backbiting and political manoeuvring endemic in upperechelon academia—which she had always known and accepted as part of the scholastic landscape—was proving more and more of an irksome distraction. The further she travelled into darkest PhD territory, the more the fossilised remains of extinct creatures dwindled in fascination; she was rapidly specialising herself beyond caring about her subject. Whether or not the world learned what the latest new megasaurus ate for lunch sixty million years ago, what difference did it make?

The universal Church touched every corner of western Europe and practically all aspects of life from politics to market behavior, but it was not a monolithic institution. Very much the opposite: Because it channeled and encompassed practically all spiritual life, the Church, by necessity, had to be a big tent. It contained multitudes: poor, illiterate priests in isolated rural parishes with secret wives and broods of children, who rarely saw their uninterested parishioners; charismatic Dominican preachers capable of attracting crowds of thousands in towns and cities; places like the brand-new castle church of Wittenberg, built in Renaissance style and packed with holy relics in expensive gilded cases; towering Gothic cathedrals, already centuries old, dominating the skylines of the continent’s prosperous urban centers and serving as headquarters for rich, powerful bishops who pulled political strings from London to Leipzig; leaky-roofed monasteries, housed by a few elderly monks in threadbare robes begging for donations to fix a tumbledown refectory; university theologians steeped in the brutally dense works of Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham who spent their time teaching students and arguing about scholastic philosophy; devout laywomen, reading books of hours in the privacy of their prosperous homes; sword-swinging Hospitaller Knights, soldier-monks in armor and black habits, beheading Muslim sailors on the decks of galleys under a blue Mediterranean sky. The Church was all of these things: corrupt and saintly, worldly and mystical, impossibly wealthy and desperately impoverished.

These speculations about infinity are a completely new chapter in the history of mathematics of recent years, but it is necessary to recognize that this chapter does not escape paradoxes. Thus, one can define certain numbers that belong, and at the same time do not belong, to specific sets. All problems of this type are caused by a lack of agreement on what existence means. Some believers in set theory are scholastics who would have loved to discuss the proofs of the existence of God with Saint Anselme and his opponent Gaunilon, the monk of Noirmoutiers.

In 1429, a seventeen-year-old girl who would soon come to be renowned as Jehanne la Pucelle (“Jeanne, the maiden”) left a small town in northeast France to offer her services as a military strategist to Charles VII, the Dauphin—or heir to the throne—whose forces were losing a protracted war against English partisans threatening to displace him. At first, no one took her seriously, but Jehanne’s determination overcame initial resistance: her skill and insight helped the French develop new battle plans and her courage inspired the demoralized troops. Under Jehanne’s leadership, the French forces successfully thwarted a siege on the city of Orleans. Later she led a campaign to retake the city and cathedral of Reims, where the kings of France had been crowned ever since the Frankish tribes were united under one ruler, allowing the Dauphin to be crowned king in the ancient tradition. Jehanne’s remarkable successes seemed divinely ordained, which necessarily implied Charles’s divine right to rule France. In 1430 Jehanne was captured in battle and imprisoned. An ecclesiastical tribunal stacked with English partisans tried her for heresy. But Jehanne’s faith was beyond reproach. She showed an astonishing familiarity with the intricacies of scholastic theology, evading every effort to lure her into making a heretical statement. Unable to discredit her faith through her verbal testimony, the tribunal seized on the implicit statements made by Jehanne’s attire. In battle, she wore armor, which required linen leggings and a form-fitting tunic fastened together with straps—both traditionally masculine attire—and, like the men she fought alongside, she adopted this martial attire when off the battlefield as well. Citing the biblical proscription in Deuteronomy 22:5 (KJV) which warns, “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a women’s garment, for all who do are an abomination to the Lord your God,” the tribunal charged Jehanne with heresy. They burned her at the stake in 1431.