THE SOCIETY OF CATHOLIC SOCIAL SCIENTISTS
Friday and Saturday, October 26-27, 2007
The St. John’s University School of Law
Paul Radzilowski
Madonna University
Orchard Lake Center
3535 Indian Trail
Orchard Lake, MI 48324
248-683-1752
“The Reduction of Glory to Beauty : Examples from the Historiography of Late Medieval and Renaissance Italy”
Abstract:
This paper discusses the role of essence principles as a means to the historian’s presentation of the actualities of the past, especially in their aesthetic aspects. In the case of history, “essence principles” refers above all to manifestations of human nature or social scientific generalizations. Considered aesthetically, these are the purvey of conventionally conceived intellectual beauty. The “actualities of the past,” by contrast, refers to the interrelated web of particularities that constitute the fabric of the acts of being (esse) of past temporal realities. Their aesthetic mode is what might be best called “glory.” The paper seeks to show that the role conventional intellectual beauty in presenting glory is large and necessary, but that the presentation of glory itself remains nonetheless the most fundamental task of the historian. It also seeks to show some major ways in which glory may be thus presented through beauty. It does so on the example of three major works of historiography: Machiavelli’ Florentine Histories; Burkhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; and Augustine Thompson’s Cities of God, considered against the background of analogous works.