Saturday, April 23, 2011
If you think community is so important, then why aren't you living in accordance with what you teach?
More thoughts on the topic of this post.
What about the scholastics? Is their witness diminished because so many of them did not labor where they came from, but were instead teaching at "international" centers of learning? They can be defended because they had been excused from family and communal duties because they had been set aside for God and His work.
I also note that it seems that the treatment of community and its origins in their political treatises and commentaries on Aristotle is short, if not "dry"short if not "dry" because the nature of communal life and how it came to be was not at issue in that day; it was simply taken for granted. Could they have imagined the various social and technological changes that have made modern atomistic living possible? As Fr. Cessario pointed out in class one time, the reason why the medievals didn't write much on the community is because they were living it. It is a more developed topic for us and the subject for so much spilled ink precisely because we don't have it.
I think it is correct to say that the teachers at the medieval universities were all clergy, secular priests or religious. When did lay masters first appear at the European universities, and when did they become a significant minority? How did they live up to their duties to family and community? What institutions were there, other than the state, for forming the laity? How much resistance was there to the centralizers of modern Europe, and was any of it found outside the nobility? Was there a lack of training among the elites in political science, or was alienation from the masses a greater factor? That is, the elites fought against centralization in order to maintain power and status, not to protect the communal life of those subordinate to them.
What about the scholastics? Is their witness diminished because so many of them did not labor where they came from, but were instead teaching at "international" centers of learning? They can be defended because they had been excused from family and communal duties because they had been set aside for God and His work.
I also note that it seems that the treatment of community and its origins in their political treatises and commentaries on Aristotle is short, if not "dry"short if not "dry" because the nature of communal life and how it came to be was not at issue in that day; it was simply taken for granted. Could they have imagined the various social and technological changes that have made modern atomistic living possible? As Fr. Cessario pointed out in class one time, the reason why the medievals didn't write much on the community is because they were living it. It is a more developed topic for us and the subject for so much spilled ink precisely because we don't have it.
I think it is correct to say that the teachers at the medieval universities were all clergy, secular priests or religious. When did lay masters first appear at the European universities, and when did they become a significant minority? How did they live up to their duties to family and community? What institutions were there, other than the state, for forming the laity? How much resistance was there to the centralizers of modern Europe, and was any of it found outside the nobility? Was there a lack of training among the elites in political science, or was alienation from the masses a greater factor? That is, the elites fought against centralization in order to maintain power and status, not to protect the communal life of those subordinate to them.
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