[lbo-talk] jobs for medievalists

Ted Winslow egwinslow at rogers.com
Tue Mar 30 22:13:42 PST 2004


C. G. Estabrook wrote:


> I don't know if scholasticism under this description adequately
> captures
> economics, but a more sympathetic (if not contradictory) account of the
> "mindset" behind medieval scholasticism -- which meant formally just
> the
> practice of the schools (= the universities, a medieval invention) --
> was
> given by C. S. Lewis (a substantial scholar, whatever else he was) in a
> famous Oxford lecture forty years ago:

I meant only that aspect of medieval thought that fits the definition (Frank Ramsey"s) I gave.

It's only to this medieval bathwater that financial economics of the Bedlamite kind can be linked. The baby has gone missing.

The mindset involved is, for instance, cut off from the following insight:

"when your longings center on things such

that sharing them apportions less to each,

then envy stirs the bellows of your sighs.

But if the love within the Highest Sphere

should turn your longings heavenward, the fear

inhabiting your breast would disappear;

for there, the more there are who would say 'ours,'

so much the greater is the good possessed

by each - so much more love burns in that cloister."

"I am more hungry now for satisfaction"

I said, "than if I'd held my tongue before;

I host a deeper doubt within my mind.

How can a good that's shared by more possessors

enable each to be more rich in it

than if that good had been possessed by few?"

And he to me: "But if you still persist

in letting your mind fix on earthly things,

then even from the true light you gather darkness.

That Good, ineffable and infinite,

which is above, directs Itself toward love

as light directs itself to polished bodies.

Where ardor is, that Good gives of itself;

and where more love is, there that Good confers

a greater measure of eternal worth.

And when there are more souls above who love,

there's more to love well there, and they love more,

and mirror-like, each soul reflects the other."

The Divine Comedy [Mandelbaum translation], Purgatorio, Canto XV

Ted



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