>Get into classic literature>Great Courses and Modern Scholar are pretty good >Look for current stuff >All the material is from Christian universities>Skeptical, finally find a secular video on Virgil.>"So the thing to know about the Aeneid and the only thing to know is that it is just propaganda. We're going to focus on it as media analysis to deboonk."Is the Western tradition truly so dead that only insular religious schools do anything but deconstroooct it anymore? I didn't get any of it in school and now it seems even deader.
There is not much to say about classic literature which has not already been said over and over and over and over again and the bulk of it does not really apply to contemporary life in any meaningful way because it is the source of all the cliches everyone already knows. But applying modern analytical techniques to classic literature tells us something new, perhaps not about the literature but certainly about our society and how it has changed. This is the modernist approach to things, make everything about the individual in contemporary society and generally it has some critical theory thrown in to fill in the gapsThe irony is that most who complain about this stuff would probably love the pomo way of going about things if they would just stopped seething. Pomo lit crit is all about meeting literature on its own terms, not forcing it into an analytical method and letting it inform you how it should be analyzed which does a great job of building on the classical techniques while not being constrained by those techniques. Also, anyone who cares about classics should know how to greentext, should care about tradition and not just effecting an image.
"Christian" universities aren't actually Christian anymore, anon. You'll mostly find "Christian" universities talking about classic literature simply because most universities are "Christian."
West... fallen.
>>24702407I don't know more than half of these. Are most of them h index farmers with fake citing among friend research groups?
>>24702313>The point of a liberal arts education is muh "progress" and muh "new takes.">Human virtue and human nature is le modernity is le different Yeah, making the humanities ape the sciences has been a total success. So has raising even elites to be Homo oecononimicus, worker/consoomers. That totally isn't destroying culture, and in the long run, liberalism itself...What's important in Aristotle isn't the ethics itself but learning to do new hot takes where you reread him as a post-modern skeptic and misologue!
>>24702422A lot of them are textbook authors in core classes like algebra or introductory psychology, which is to be expected.The philosophy list is pretty dark though. And the push for "diversity" hasn't actually read to any pre-modern philosophers from different cultures being read (or much traditional literature either), but only the reading of more secular post-moderns who have different genitalia and skin colors. The Romans in particular have really suffered. Boethius and Virgil have a ghostly presence even compared to the New Athiests and pop liberals, let alone the critical studies crowd. bell hooks has almost surpassed Aristotle. With the exception of a small presence by Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas the top 100+ list for thinkers skips from Plato and Aristotle (the former often read "ironically") right to the modern era, with no one in between. bell hooks also beats Homer lol.
>>24702430Funny enough, it isn't just a bias for recent publications and secondary sources. Alasdair MacIntyre also is hardly read. Richard Dawkins is twice as likely to be assigned in *philosophy* courses. Sam Harris also beats him out by a solid margin.
>>24702313>This is the modernist approach to things, make everything about the individual in contemporary society>Pomo lit crit is all about meeting literature on its own termsHow did you manage to get it completely backwards?
>>24702283I have been gifted Great Courses maybe 3 times. It's ass. Not sure about modern scholar.
the western tradition is Christian lol
The history of European civilization is the history of a certain political institution which united and expressed Europe, and was governed from Rome. This institution was informed at its very origin by the growing influence of a certain definite and organized religion: this religion it ultimately accepted and, finally, was merged in.The institution—having accepted the religion, having made of that religion its official expression, and having breathed that religion in through every part until it became the spirit of the whole—was slowly modified, spiritually illumined and physically degraded by age. But it did not die. It was revived by the religion which had become its new soul. It re-arose and still lives.This institution was first known among men as Republica; we call it today “The Roman Empire.” The Religion which informed and saved it was then called, still is called, and will always be called “The Catholic Church.”Europe is the Church, and the Church is Europe.It is immaterial to the historical value of this historical truth whether it be presented to a man who utterly rejects Catholic dogma or to a man who believes everything the Church may teach. A man remote in distance, in time, or in mental state from the thing we are about to examine would perceive the reality of this truth just as clearly as would a man who was steeped in its spirit from within and who formed an intimate part of Christian Europe. The Oriental pagan, the contemporary atheist, some supposed student in some remote future, reading history in some place from which the Catholic Faith shall have utterly departed, and to which the habits and traditions of our civilization will therefore be wholly alien, would each, in proportion to his science, grasp as clearly as it is grasped today by the Catholic student who is of European birth, the truth that Europe and the Catholic Church were and are one thing. The only people who do not grasp it (or do not admit it) are those writers of history whose special, local, and temporary business it is to oppose the Catholic Church, or who have a traditional bias against it.These men are numerous, they have formed, in the Protestant and other anti-Catholic universities, a whole school of hypothetical and unreal history in which, though the original workers are few, their copyists are innumerable: and that school of unreal history is still dogmatically taught in the anti-Catholic centres of Europe and of the world.Now our quarrel with this school should be, not that it is anti-Catholic—that concerns another sphere of thought—but that it is unhistorical.
>>24703004trvke
>>24702423You are conflating pomo philosophy with pomo lit, they are only related by time period. >>24702513Because postmodernism is all about the turn inward and stream of consciousness and relatable characters?
>>24703004Greece is not Europe? Byzantium and the Orthodox faith are not Christendom? Where does this sectarianism lead you? As a Muslim, a Shia specifically, sectarianism causes the systemic legal oppression and lawless murder of my people. It is the theological weapon of the zionists against my people, the same zionists which bomb Catholic churches in Lebanon today.My Christian brother, what do you have to gain from preaching sectarianism? Is it your pride? Step into reality. The early immigrants to America simply attended the nearest church to them, and in those houses they were welcome. A Catholic, a Protestant, an Orthodox, each of them can walk into any church this Sunday morning and find themselves welcome.Be good to your Christian brother. Promote unity rather than sectarianism. You will be stronger as a people for it. When you find the time, read as well about the Christian companions of Imam Husayn at Karbala. Christians today still trek to Karbala for Arbaeen, just as they serve in Hizb Allah as defenders of Lebanon today.Like the great Charlemagne, father of Europe, the greatest leaders of history were uniters and not dividers. Unity is strength, division is weakness. The zionist propagandist attacks us both with sectarian propaganda.
>>24702283history is the same, it's all >knighthood and women, roman emperors and woman, the golden age of piracy and womenunbearable
>>24705052no european cares what muslims think bro go marry your cousin or something
you're gonna be locked away from understanding or engaging with classic literature unless you can understand religion, myths, magic, values, etc. all these things the modern mind can't comprehend except for a sterilized and very dumbed down version of them that removes the core of what these things are.
>>24705579Quite the appropriate response. But your quasi-secularist approach described here >>24703004 is inherently antithetical to Catholic doctrine itself. I'd rather atheists didn't cling to arbitrarily chosen aspects of religion to make their assertions and justify their positions.
>>24705052The Orthodox East is its own thing, which the Orthodox agree about. However, we are united in the common bonds of faith.>ZionistFuck off. If you people cared when China or anyone else genocides Muslims, I would take you seriously. Or when countries like Egypt open up on their own Islamists with belt feds or gas them like Syria. It's patently obvious that the concern over Gaza just boils down to "Wesssst, you need to win back the Holy Land for us!" This is why you lobby and demand that not one child he allowed to leave the war zone in Gaza. You need their suffering and bodies to stake your claim. No, fuck off and do it yourselves. Go back and take care of it, you're welcome to leave.
Tbf no one gives a shit about the Aeneid outside of classical studies because it still lacks a powerful translation, though the Loeb translation is excellent. Goes to show you that when a dry, prose translation of a poem makes for great reading but all the verse translations suck, the problem is in the translators, not the poet
>>24705644America is strongly supporting Israel. I do agree about Egypt and Obama supporting the massacre of anti government protests, but then the death toll was not comparable and it isn’t ethnic cleansing. If America were blatantly funding something like what China does and were trying to force an end to any dissent or protest against it, you would have the same issue. Your point is therefore highly Jewish and retarded, it would be like if America started trying to push eating children and subsidize the cooking of them with tax dollars and say, “oh so you’re upset??? Where were you when these African guerrillas were eating kids???”
>>24703004Very good, but this doesn't help us in the present.
>>24705708its almost guaranteed you are less than 10 minutes away from a Catholic Church
>>24705772Yes, but hasnt the Catholic Church become another neo-liberal institution? From what I have heard, the Catholic Church of today is very different from the Catholic church of one hundred years ago. I could be wrong, and I am more than happy to be corrected.
>>24703004>your framework for pre-christoid rome is catholicismFuck off retard, I‘m not worshipping jews.
>>24705786Neoliberal is a spook word, it's more complex but I think the key thing to understand is just the Church is basically just a loose guarantor of specific revelation and a way of accessing the sacraments, it's specific political and social manifestations are largely a product of the society it exists in and it's kind of absurd to expect otherwise. We are in a transitional era and post the telegram in the early 19th century the every culture has basically been subjugated by the international finance crowd who has done their best to destroy local culture. A standard sort of principle in classical (and Catholic) political philosophy is the notion of subsidiarity, society is essentially hierarchical levels of abstraction of simple units that account for the units contained within them. A father orders his household and property, the father is part of associations/villages/communities that order themselves towards their good, those communities organize at a higher level and over that we get nations with various levels of order. The church can't magically fix that if we broke it, that's basically been destroyed and currently all order is basically just oligarchic social engineering. So that whole way of understanding of transmitting information based in subsidiarity and communities is gone, and in that environment how could any institution not be totally dysfunctional? The church takes money from NGOs and federal governments and does the mass immigration stuff which I hate, but again that just is what our current political order is, I hate it but how the Church is acting is just a consequence of the political and technological situation. Their ability to have the sacraments and maintain revelation hasn't changed, they are just retarded because the means of actually understanding culture (and culture itself) has largely been destroyed. It's the same Church it's just the world that is different, but it despite it's issues points how the world as it is is not actually ordered properly. Like we are basically dominated by a cartel of organized crime, intelligence agencies, oligarchs/bankers. If you want social institutions to not be gay you have to deal with that.The Church still has the Eucharist, Christ on his throne, and has confession and the ability to forgive sins. That hasn't changed. (and they are the only force against divorce/contraception basically still)>>24705817judaism as we know wasn't a thing until several centuries after Christ
>>24705690Sure thing news cycle babby
>>24705822Judaism is a bloodline and cultural lineage which includes christianity, you lying kike shill. Might as well say that catholicism didn‘t exist until the schisms because it hadn‘t been identified as such.
>>24705822>It's the same ChurchNot since Vatican II but sure. If the Eucharist, Christ on his throne, confession, and the ability to forgive sins are the main things you are interested in, why not convert to the Church wherein its head, who might be an agent of those international cartels you've mentioned, is not considered the infallible Vicar of Christ? Is it because of the aforementioned quasi-secular idea that Europe is the Church?
>>24705831Palestinians have more genetically in common with jews from that time period then modern jews do. Judaism was basically invented centuries after the temple was destroyed, whatever pre-dated Christianity was primarily rooted in the mosaic covenant and temple sacrifice, something modern jews have never done (since it began several centuries after Christ)At the time before and during Christ's life there was no such thing as Jewish beliefs or religion, everyone had wildly different views and didn't even have the same scripture. Some believed in reincarnation, some thought there was no afterlife, etc. All that unified them was temple sacrifice. Some rabbis forming a cult influenced by eastern religion centuries after Christianity began and only unified by their rejection of Christ is not terribly relevant to me. They even stopped using scripture that had been popular because it had prophecies pointing towards Christ. >>24705837Sorry im a weird existentialists whose really into greeks i view the Church as a thing and I view the efforts of jews or whatever to try to alter doctrine in vatican 2 as not terribly interesting, this would be the proper view that any serious theologian would hold it's not higher than any other council. Sedes are just incoherent and larpers and also are just a product of mass media. We've had popes that we knew were just agents of organized crime in italy centuries ago, nothing in their charism guarantees they will be good people or not compromised. Just that they won't authoritatively teach anything contrary the faith, and being vague and scandalous doesn't count. As I said though as a weird existentialist I think the over-emphasis on the Pope is basically a product of mass media that is a product of 19th century technology and anyone who cares that much about what the Pope says is the issue, basically someone who thinks CNN is real or something.The idea we are supposed to care about everything said thousands of miles away and try to go through thousands of years of documents to try to hash out if there is contradiction or something is absurd. If someone is authoritatively teaching something contrary to the faith it's not subtle, and even the idea of what teaching is (truth as textural lineal statements vs force dictating relationships) makes trads just come off as kind of silly and living in lala land.
>>24705817Based. All these walls of text just boil down to worshiping people with big noses.
>>24705852So ultimately you have your own interpretation of The Bible and of doctrine? So you're a protestant at best and a secular "cultural Christian" at worst? And a heretic in the eyes of the church either way?Not trying to be contentious but these are the implications here.
>>24705868No the protestants are all based in textual interpretation they are the exact opposite. Trads basically are just sola scriptura with more paper with the documents of the Church.The whole point of the magisterium is authority, force. The church is a thing, a substance, the mystical body we come into relation with and it's teaching is the way it acts upon us.It's a complex point Marshall Mcluhan and Heidegger/Nieztsche kind of talk about it, in the shift in greece from an oral to literary culture with the introduction of the phonetic alphabet. (alethia vs verum)I think most of the issues people have is essentially a typographic mindset dictated by type and the printing press and it shifted culture after that, and we are escaping from with the advent of modern electrical media. My view is more in line with the early medieval and greek views of truth. It's principally about proper relationship to being and being grateful and faithful to our experience with it. I am quite against the sort of typographic attitudes, which people who have them see nothing else as being "true" (why you call me a cultural Christian) but that's just the technological attitude where you need a determinate orderly system by which to engage the world or it does not exist for you, which to me is the neuroticism of typographic culture and has basically nothing to do with truth. Your father has authority over you, we call priests father. The idea of what authority is has been totally removed from society. The whole scientific conception of reality and the idea of rights and that sort of thing has totally alienated people from the underlying metaphysics of what ethics and rationality actually is. People who larp as trad or whatever are literally just operating on a dead typographic culture that didn't exist at all a thousand years ago, and really only got any distinct from with the destruction of local culture in the 19th century, and is basically hand in hand with the technological and financial subjugation of the world. Nothing I said is even slightly heretical, or protestant, or "cultural" only. It's just against your neurotic deranged conception that you can squeeze all of reality into your head and if something can't get into your head it doesn't exist.
>>24705852Yes, jews were dispersed within the local population and had some heterodoxy—that‘s exactly what christianity is. They were still jews.
>>24702283I don't think authentic Christian/conservative institutions really exist anymore. They're just a containment zone carefully managed by Jews, capitalists, and secular liberals.
>>24705822You have given me a bit to think about. I guess my inability to engage with religion is that I tend to look at it as more a set of doctrines or tenets that one follow, so they can achieve a happy life. Like how a diet and exercise plan can improve physical health. I am not treating religion as an experience. And as for the church, in the world I grew up in, it was essentially a community center for boring people. You do make a great point that the societal changes cause by digital tech, finance, and NGOs is far larger than what a church, as an organization, can handle. I can only imagine what living through the societal change that the television brough about would be like. I guess I could just attend a Mass to see what the church is actually about, instead of demanding too much from it from the outside.
>>24705892I recently finished reading The Shallows by Nicolas Carr. The book is essentially him explaining the change to general psychology as we moved from deep reading to the internet. I think you are saying something like that. That there was a change, a massive change in how information was transmitted and the hierarchies/institutions for that transmission, from the pre-mass literacy age to the mass-literacy age. And that we are going through another massive reorganization from mass-literacy to mass-internet. And each of these reorganizations take us further from a real and truthful organization of individuals and society. Or am I putting words in your mouth?
>>24702313Wouldn't the best literature be timeless because it says something about the human condition that is more integral to the work than it's historical context? Obviously it depends on what you're analyzing but aren't most of the works that we still talk about today works that have influenced our culture and the way we think so pervasively that it would be impossible that they're completely inapplicable to the modern day? I don't see how a book about WWII wouldn't be of interest to people who want to understand modern warfare.
>>24706000read marshall mcluhan and harold innis carr is a midwit i hate all the fucking recent authors talking about the internet or phones or some shit.https://www.amazon.com/Medium-Massage-Marshall-McLuhan/dp/1584230703best intro you can read it in an hourAnyone who talks about any technological shift making things "more false or real or truthful" has literally no idea what they are talking about. Technology and different media impact how people relate with reality, but our experience with reality is always mediated. The principle shift to where we are occurred with the telegram in the 1800s, it's not "the internet" (the internet properly speaking isn't even a technology it's just computers that are networked together) My point is mainly the orientation towards truth is basically the same error as the scientific attitude, and is largely due to the printing press (and other things like paper becoming cheap, the university system becoming wide spread, the plague destroying the established classes and economy and cities etc, a ton of factors made it primed for that) This is what retards like carr would call "mass-literacy age" or what lead to it, which I view as a large anti-nature thing and the trappings of it still around are basically used by a criminal cartel to socially engineer people, and that we largely need to get away from it. History is much more complicated and there was much more going on, the technologies weren't necessarily causes even mcluhan says the effects of the technologies seem to precede the cause.It's the attitude of people and the culture towards reality that shifts often and the technology is then introduced to facilitate that shift. I think the "mass culture" mass society stuff of widespread international trade and communication is basically a blip and is largely going away and it's quite evident while that's maintained societies fail to function as everything just gets captured by criminals who will destroy society. Anyone who misses our previous "literary" age is just a slave of the current system and fill me with disgust. There is nothing more "unreal" then people who think they can capture all of reality in systems and map everything out absolutely. The technology doesn't cause anything unreal though, it's the deep moral failings of the individuals that alienate them from reality.
>>24705980>I guess my inability to engage with religion is that I tend to look at it as more a set of doctrines or tenets that one followYes this is sort of the modern protestant view. Christ didn't come and establish a set of doctrine, or write a book. He founded a Church which has the power to bind and loose sins, and is able to offer Christ's actual physical body as a sacrifice for a sins and as food to use for our spiritual well being. It's extremely practical, in the gospels itself it's used in the imagery of a field hospital. The doctrinal authority is a consequence of just maintaining that field hospital, it's a tool to the actual end of the Church the point is not "being correct" it's to be faithful to God act out our good and take up our cross etc. and ultimately get to heaven.And yes actually attending mass would be the key thing, that's how it would work for most of history. The mass is specifically:>A re-presentation of the sacrifice of the cross. A sin is an infinite offense to God who is infinitely superior to us, so we need to make an offering of infinite value to make up for it, and Christ gave us that through his passion which every mass represents. In it Christ is physically present and consumed by the attendants through communion (When Christ introduced this teaching in the gospels the majority of his followers left because it seemed so odd, but it really stresses the very incarnate and physical aspect of the Church) The whole fundamental idea of what the Church/Christianity is we are basically all fallen, in a somewhat cursed state where even if we want to do something good we will fail to do it and are in some sense at enmity with God due to our offense. To repair things God himself became human (after preparing the way through previous revelation) and for our sake took on the suffering of man and offered his suffering for the expiation of our sins, to make up for them. Through this sacrifice we can repair our relationship with God such that we can actually see and know the good and will it perfectly (this is what the beatific vision/afterlife is) and not go to hell, which is just the just punishment for the intentional evil we have done in this life. We are given other tools like the sacrament of matrimony, confession, chrismation so we can more easily attain this and repair our relationship with God again if we ever break it.Going over this just so you can say with what I've said, none of what I described is even slightly impaired by the problems in the Church. Arguably it could be done better, a mass that shows the substantial value of it more, or maybe more helpful confession advice but like, the actual tools still work fine and there aren't any issues. Christ was incarnate and gave us those, he didn't give us a doctrine. (The idea a medieval peasant in 800 ad would even be able to understand or care about technical theological disputes like monophysiticism is also just absurd)
>>24706369Kind of verbose but the point is just doctrine is a tool to facilitate the main point of the Church, to repair and maintain our relationship with God. Doctrine and the sacraments are for this end the point is not at all the doctrine and not necessarily to achieve a happy life. Very often saints were and are met with intense suffering, and many were killed and tortured for their faith and rather than renounce Christ. Regardless our entire being is dependent on God and a gift from him so fidelity to him is in some sense the highest happiness metaphysically I guess but it's not just to have a comfortable life.
