Having a bit of a break over Christmas and New Years. No new posts till 2010.

I went through a good chunk of the Summa Theologica by Thomas Aquinas the past two weeks.

There are many admirable sections in this pivotal work, such as his discussion of faith and reason. Many topics are treated in a clear and succinct manner, neither ignoring important objectives nor belaboring his points too much.

But when Aquinas starts discussing the Trinity, it’s a different matter. I remember thinking: “OK, now he’s done with the Trinity and he’ll move on to another topic.” But no, he went on. And I felt like that over and over again.

I’m sure Aquinas thought it necessary to address what he considered various misunderstandings and wrong descriptions of the Trinity, but to me it seemed like he was talking the whole concept of the Trinity to death.

Perhaps the Eastern Orthodox Church displayed more wisdom in this regard by stressing that the Trinity is a mystery that’s supposed to move us, not an invitation for endless definitions of how exactly the three Persons of the Trinity relate to each other and what words are appropriate to describe them.

For the past few months, I’ve been going through Shakespeare’s plays in a more systematic fashion. I’m done with all the comedies now, and it struck me just how often Shakespeare uses the plot devise of a mistaken belief.

Most of the time, the mistaken belief is a mistaken identity – not seldom of a woman disguising herself as a man and not being recognized by her lover.

Let’s briefly go through the fourteen comedies, though some of them could be classified as “drama with a happy ending” or “problem plays” rather than comedies. I’m following the order of William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, published by Gramercy Books:

1. In The Tempest, several people strand on an island and falsely believe each other dead – not knowing that the tempest and their fates were arranged by Prospero, who seeks to win back his rightful position as Duke of Milan. Another – and rather comic – mistaken belief is Prospero’s slave Caliban considering two drunkards as having come from the moon and hence treating them like gods.
2. In Two Gentlemen of Verona, Julia dresses up as a young man and followes her lover Proteus to Milan, where she becomes his page and discovers to her horror that Proteus has fallen in love with another woman.
3. In the Merry Wives of Windsor, the villain Sir John Falstaff is dressed up as an old witch to be smuggled out of a house in which he had tried to seduce a married woman. And her husband dresses up as someone else and meets Falstaff in order to find out what he is up to with his wife.
4. In the Twelfth Night, shipwrecked Viola masquerades as a page by the name of Cesario und serves the Duke Orsino, whom she is in love with. Orsino, though, is in love with Lady Olivia and tries to use Viola aka Cesario to win Olivia’s love – to no avail, because Olivia falls in love with Viola.
5. In Measure for Measure, there is no woman dressing up as a man, but Angelo’s betrothed Mariana does take the nun Isabella’s place with whom Angelo desires to have sex. He sleeps with his betrothed instead, all the while believing to enjoy Isabella. Also, the Duke of Vienna disguises himself as a monk for much of the play.
6. In Much Ado About Nothing, there are many (purposefully planted) mistaken beliefs, one of which is Claudio’s belief that his betrothed Hero had betrayed him with another man the night before their wedding day.

I’ll continue this in another post.

I’m in a video mood at the moment – creating videos, that is. So I’ve made another video and posted it on YouTube. This time about the most important questions of philosophy:

There are two very different kinds of government: civil government and church government. I put together a little video to show the job description for each:

“Here I stand, I can do no other” is one of my favorite sayings, which I take very seriously. But there is a time for everything: a time to be serious and a time to poke fun. Here’s an example of the latter:

“[A] question can be very interesting without being answerable and one of my main efforts as a teacher has been to train people to say those (apparently difficult) words ‘We don’t know.’”

- C. S. Lewis, in a letter dating Sept. 26, 1960

I had to go to Belfast yesterday and used the opportunity to visit the childhood home of C. S. Lewis:

Ever wondered what happened between the end of Malachi and the beginning of Matthew (if you primarily know the Protestant Bible)?

Well, here it is, the so-called 400 Silent Years – presented in a heavily slanted view. Conservative Jews at the time of Christ would have been happy with this presentation; hellenistic Jews, Greeks and Romans not so much.

I recorded this years ago in pre-YouTube days while doing a leadership course in Sweden, but I just posted it now online:

Though I have repeatedly mentioned Immanuel Kant in my posts, I must confess that I’ve never read all the way through his Critique of Pure Reason.

I’m trying to remedy that now – very slowly, every paragraph two or three times, underlining and reflecting, trying to understand this great philosopher and not-so-great writer more fully.

“Not-so-great” in the sense that Kant’s German is notoriously convoluted. In fact, it’s so convoluted that I once drew a comic strip about it:

http://schriftman.files.wordpress.com/2009/03/hux-lee-18_immanuel-kant_jacob-schriftman.jpg