James Wetzel
I am broadly interested in the late antique transmission of Platonism (Augustine and Plotinus figure heavily) and in the implications of that tradition for philosophical conceptions of body, soul, spirit. I also have modernist interests in Cartesianism and its peculiar construction of God and postmodern interests in the eclipse of the res cogitans.
Phone: 610 733-5946
Address: Department of Philosophy
Villanova University
800 Lancaster Avenue
Villanova, PA 19085
Phone: 610 733-5946
Address: Department of Philosophy
Villanova University
800 Lancaster Avenue
Villanova, PA 19085
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Essays by James Wetzel
Note: I gave this lecture as the Saint Auguste Lecture at Ave Maria University, March 25, 2024, sponsored by the Henkels Lecture Fund. I am particularly grateful to Megan Hare and Barry David, who did much to facilitate my visit.
I should note that this essay forms part of a special issue of the Journal of Religion on Scheffler's Death & the Afterlife. The incomparable Willa Swenson-Lengyel was the guest editor.
Book XI of City of God begins what Augustine characterizes in a letter to Firmus (ep. 1A*.1; cf. retr. 2.43.2), a fellow African Christian, as a tripartite unfolding of the two cities: origins (bks. 11-14), development (bks. 15-18), and ends (bks. 19-22). Book XI and its companion book, Book XII, both heavy on angelology, cover the eternal origins of the two cities, the day and night of divine creativity, and in that regard Augustine is thinking through a beginning that fails to follow the straightforward logic of a sequence, where beginnings always come before endings. Assume the truth of what he takes to be a doctrinal certainty: that the angels in heaven, having remained constant over the course of a rebellion, are now and forever more beyond the possibility of a fall. Conversely, the fallen angels—darkened, chaotic, and demonic—live lives of perpetually diminishing returns, beyond all hope of redemption. Here we have day and night, and (presumably) never the twain shall meet. But if we push the question of what originates this difference, so basic to two-cities theology, we will find ourselves drawn ever more tightly into the possibility that the beginning is really, and always has been, in the end. The middle part, where plot unfolds, recedes from view, like some unreachable horizon.
My contriibution plays out my debt to Augustine's angelology. Augustine was particularly imaginative when it came to angels; he more or less makes them up. But sometimes imagination is the road that truth takes.
On the road I walk with Augustine, I reconsider my dead father's deceptively simple Catholic piety and I try to make some sense of a brief but intense correspondence I had with a brilliant Brazilian psychiatrist who resisted any attempt to spiritualize the afterlife.
In the Confessions (conf. 9.6.14) Augustine insists that the voice of his son in the dialogue, The Teacher, is truly his son’s and not a father’s contrivance. But this clarification does nothing to render the dialogue any less strange. For roughly half the proceedings, Augustine tries to convince Adeodatus that teaching (docere) is all they do with words, and then for the rest of it, he ratchets things around the other way and insists that learning (discere) is all they do. The irony of the turn-about is that Augustine affects to teach us a profound lesson about language-learning while, at the same time, disavowing his authority to teach it. Socrates too insists that he has nothing to teach, but he doesn’t further insist on their being a divine teacher who takes up the slack. In this lecture I want to take a careful look at the emergence in Augustine of the divine teacher and the interiority that goes along with it. It is apparently of the highest importance that we come to see why the one and only teacher teaches from within, and yet this is nothing that Augustine can teach anyone, not even his own son.
I read this essay to an audience at the 2018 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. It is the beginning of an attempt to reconsider Augustine on sexuality. After some 30 years of studying Augustine, I still feel at sea on this topic. I begin the essay with Raymond Geuss's wicked criticism of Augustine (mostly ad hominem); what fascinates me about it is not Geuss's rhetorical extravagance, but that he continues to read Augustine anyway. What do we have to learn, what can we learn, from a love-to-hate figure?
This essay was originally published in a festschrift for Cornelius Petrus Mayer OSA and appeared in the Res et Signa series put out by ZAF Volume 6 (2009). It was reprinted, in a corrected version, in Parting Knowledge.
This essay was delivered on Feb. 4, 2017, at the Yale consultation on Contentment and Worry, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and the McDonald Agape Foundation, and May 6, 2017 at the annual gathering of the Duodecim Society at Princeton Theological Seminary. It has since been published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics.
Note: I gave this lecture as the Saint Auguste Lecture at Ave Maria University, March 25, 2024, sponsored by the Henkels Lecture Fund. I am particularly grateful to Megan Hare and Barry David, who did much to facilitate my visit.
I should note that this essay forms part of a special issue of the Journal of Religion on Scheffler's Death & the Afterlife. The incomparable Willa Swenson-Lengyel was the guest editor.
Book XI of City of God begins what Augustine characterizes in a letter to Firmus (ep. 1A*.1; cf. retr. 2.43.2), a fellow African Christian, as a tripartite unfolding of the two cities: origins (bks. 11-14), development (bks. 15-18), and ends (bks. 19-22). Book XI and its companion book, Book XII, both heavy on angelology, cover the eternal origins of the two cities, the day and night of divine creativity, and in that regard Augustine is thinking through a beginning that fails to follow the straightforward logic of a sequence, where beginnings always come before endings. Assume the truth of what he takes to be a doctrinal certainty: that the angels in heaven, having remained constant over the course of a rebellion, are now and forever more beyond the possibility of a fall. Conversely, the fallen angels—darkened, chaotic, and demonic—live lives of perpetually diminishing returns, beyond all hope of redemption. Here we have day and night, and (presumably) never the twain shall meet. But if we push the question of what originates this difference, so basic to two-cities theology, we will find ourselves drawn ever more tightly into the possibility that the beginning is really, and always has been, in the end. The middle part, where plot unfolds, recedes from view, like some unreachable horizon.
My contriibution plays out my debt to Augustine's angelology. Augustine was particularly imaginative when it came to angels; he more or less makes them up. But sometimes imagination is the road that truth takes.
On the road I walk with Augustine, I reconsider my dead father's deceptively simple Catholic piety and I try to make some sense of a brief but intense correspondence I had with a brilliant Brazilian psychiatrist who resisted any attempt to spiritualize the afterlife.
In the Confessions (conf. 9.6.14) Augustine insists that the voice of his son in the dialogue, The Teacher, is truly his son’s and not a father’s contrivance. But this clarification does nothing to render the dialogue any less strange. For roughly half the proceedings, Augustine tries to convince Adeodatus that teaching (docere) is all they do with words, and then for the rest of it, he ratchets things around the other way and insists that learning (discere) is all they do. The irony of the turn-about is that Augustine affects to teach us a profound lesson about language-learning while, at the same time, disavowing his authority to teach it. Socrates too insists that he has nothing to teach, but he doesn’t further insist on their being a divine teacher who takes up the slack. In this lecture I want to take a careful look at the emergence in Augustine of the divine teacher and the interiority that goes along with it. It is apparently of the highest importance that we come to see why the one and only teacher teaches from within, and yet this is nothing that Augustine can teach anyone, not even his own son.
I read this essay to an audience at the 2018 meeting of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. It is the beginning of an attempt to reconsider Augustine on sexuality. After some 30 years of studying Augustine, I still feel at sea on this topic. I begin the essay with Raymond Geuss's wicked criticism of Augustine (mostly ad hominem); what fascinates me about it is not Geuss's rhetorical extravagance, but that he continues to read Augustine anyway. What do we have to learn, what can we learn, from a love-to-hate figure?
This essay was originally published in a festschrift for Cornelius Petrus Mayer OSA and appeared in the Res et Signa series put out by ZAF Volume 6 (2009). It was reprinted, in a corrected version, in Parting Knowledge.
This essay was delivered on Feb. 4, 2017, at the Yale consultation on Contentment and Worry, sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation and the McDonald Agape Foundation, and May 6, 2017 at the annual gathering of the Duodecim Society at Princeton Theological Seminary. It has since been published in the Journal of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics.
Augustine’s outsized influence on politics and the religious life takes plural forms, even if he is not often read as himself a pluralist. The conference explores that tension. In the program notes we are told that “despite his inconsistences,” he “planted seeds of pluralism in ways we have only begun to understand.”
I have my doubts. In my opening remarks, my doubts collect in and around this question: "Is it possible to hold to the universal validity of one’s own religion, as the path of paths so to speak, and still have a reasonable hope of affirming a robust pluralism?"
I happen to have a 14 year old son. I wrote to "me" and not to him, but he was definitely in the background.