Lev Shestov's By Faith Alone confrontsEastern and Western European conceptions of faith through Russian literature, ancient and medieval philosophy, and Christian theology. Written from 1910-1914, this first English-language translation brings together important early writings on the medieval church and Martin Luther.Shestov reconciles the Greek notion of rational truth with Biblical revelation by drawing on a wide range of ancient, medieval, philosophical and theological ...

The acclaimed philosopher and author of Homo Sacer contemplates the possibility of true human freedom through a deep analysis of monastic stricture.What is a rule, if it appears to become confused with life? And what is a human life, if, in every one of its gestures, of its words, and of its silences, it cannot be distinguished from the rule? It is to these questions that Giorgio Agamben's new book turns by means of an impassioned reading of the phenomenon ...

Originally published in 1957, this classic work has guided generations of scholars through the arcane mysteries of medieval political theology. Throughout history, the notion of two bodies has permitted the postmortem continuity of monarch and monarchy, as epitomized by the statement, “The king is dead. Long live the king.” In The King’s Two Bodies, Ernst Kantorowicz traces the historical dilemma posed by the “King’s two bodies”—the body natural and the body politic—back to the Mi...

In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Joseph Pieper delivers a stimulating quartet of essays on the four cardinal virtues. He demonstrates the unsound overvaluation of moderation that has made contemporary morality a hollow convention and points out the true significance of the Christian virtues.

Why has power in the West assumed the form of an "economy," that is, of a government of men and things? If power is essentially government, why does it need glory, that is, the ceremonial and liturgical apparatus that has always accompanied it?In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile monotheism with God's threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if the Trinity amounted to nothing more than a pro...

Published just after the Second World War, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages is a sweeping exploration of the remarkable continuity of European literature across time and place, from the classical era up to the early nineteenth century, and from the Italian peninsula to the British Isles. In what T. S. Eliot called a "magnificent" book, Ernst Robert Curtius establishes medieval Latin literature as the vital transition between the literature of antiquity and the vernacu...

With the publication of the Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, there finally came some measure of the fame that Schopenhauer thought was his due. Described by Schopenhauer himself as 'incomparably more popular than everything up till now', the Parerga is a miscellany of essays addressing themes that complement his work The World as Will and Representation, along with more divergent, speculative pieces. It includes his 'Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life', reflections on fate and clairvoyance, ...

Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer is one of the seminal works of political philosophy in recent decades. A twenty-year undertaking, this project is a series of interconnected investigations of staggering ambition and scope investigating the deepest foundations of every major Western institution and discourse.This single book brings together for the first time all nine volumes that make up this groundbreaking project. Each volume takes a seemingly obscure and outdated issue as i...

Fr. Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., explains why Thomism is the solution to the present crisis of Modernism in the Church. The problem: The indications of the current crisis in the Church have “been not of a crisis of faith, but of a very grave malady of the intellect, which conducts itself on the tracks of liberal Protestantism and through relativism to absolute skepticism.” Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange’s solution: Thomism. “Thomism corresponds to the profound needs of the modern world because...

In this follow-up to The Kingdom and the Glory and The Highest Poverty, Agamben investigates the roots of our moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy. Beginning with the New Testament and working through to late scholasticism and modern papal encyclicals, Agamben traces the Church's attempts to repeat Christ's unrepeatable sacrifice. Crucial here is the paradoxical figure of the priest, who becomes more and more a pure instrument of God's pow...

Aquinas at Prayer draws attention to important aspects of Aquinas's life and work which have been all too often overlooked or forgotten.Today Aquinas is almost exclusively regarded as an outstanding scholastic philosopher and theologian. But what is little known is that Aquinas was, first and last, a teacher of the Bible - a Master of the Sacred Page. Moreover there is a distinctly mystical character to his theology. And, as a writer, he was not only a poe...

A careful analysis of Luther’s thought in the context of his age, this volume examines Luther’s links with later medieval Thomism. The study is organized on the theme of theological anthropology—the state of humans within a theological system. In the course of the discussion, Janz studies parallels and divergences between the thought of Luther and the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Peter Lombard, John Capreolus, Henry of Gorkum, Conrad Koellin, Karlstadt, and Cajetan. Janz suggests that at som...