Gestures of Grace: Essays in Honour of Robert Sweetman

By Ronald A. Kuipers

Gestures of Grace is a celebration of the life and career of Robert Sweetman, H. Evan Runner Chair in the History of Philosophy at the Institute for Christian Studies (2001-present). These essays, written by students and colleagues, testify to the remarkable breadth and depth of Sweetman's research and teaching, from his early scholarly career at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies to his time at ICS. Throughout the volume, there is extensive engagement with Sweetman's influential historical scholarship on topics such as the emergence and development of the Dominican order in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, medieval women authors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and indeed on Sweetman's own systematic contribution to the nature and promise of Christian scholarship today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Dec 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666776041

Book preview

Introduction

Joshua Lee Harris and Héctor Acero Ferrer

Bob Sweetman joined the faculty of the Institute for Christian Studies in 1991 after a three-year stint in the History department at Calvin College (now Calvin University). ICS knew it needed a historian of philosophy, someone conversant with what is ancient, sensitive to what is new, and attendant to the deep and abiding connections therein. The inheritance of the combined intellectual legacy of H. Dooyeweerd and D. H. Th. Vollenhoven demanded such a person, and Bob was the man for the job.

His route was circuitous. After completing his undergraduate studies at Calvin in 1977, Bob spent one year studying at Johns Hopkins University and another at ICS before being admitted to the MA and PhD programs at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Medieval Studies and to the licentiate program at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies (PIMS). He studied under Fr. Leonard Boyle, OP, Dominican priest and eventual Prefect of the Vatican Library in Rome, among other things. At PIMS, Bob worked directly with medieval manuscripts in a scholarly community that was, quite frankly, the best of its kind in the world. Bob’s work centered on the early development of the Dominican order and its unique interpretation of the task of pastoral ministry in the so-called Low Countries of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Like a field biologist treading on forgotten, unmarked territory, Bob’s research brought him into thirteenth century Europe to discover some rather exotic species of saint in outlandish, era-defining hagiographies. His dissertation project on Thomas of Cantimpré gave shape to an entire genre of medieval studies, attending to ways in which formal liberal arts and theological training took shape on the ground in the pastoral ministry of radical communal projects in medieval Europe.

In short, when he received his PhD in 1989, Bob had made it. In and among a troop of the world’s best medievalists, Bob had distinguished himself. And so, although his most technical training had been in history proper (as opposed to philosophy), ICS saw fit to appoint him. After all, as Gayla Postma reports in the April 1991 issue of ICS’s periodical Perspective, Bob had been formed all along by what he called a refreshing blast of exuberant instruction in the intellectual legacy of Dooyeweerd and Vollenhoven⁹—one provided by a certain H. Evan Runner all those years before at Calvin. Here was a new opportunity for ICS, and indeed for a new generation of Reformational philosophy.

The essays in this volume are a celebration of Bob’s beautiful life and career. We write gratefully—as students and as colleagues—knowing indeed that the ductus and skopos of our respective scholarly trajectories are marked indelibly by his wisdom and friendship. The essays speak for themselves in this regard, but before moving into chapter summaries, it is worth recounting some of the key moments of Bob’s career, and some thematic considerations arising therefrom.

Early Years at ICS

Bob’s early years at ICS were those of an energetic, productive young scholar. On the one hand, he rode a steadily rising tide when it came to his own areas of expertise—a momentum built of PIMS-worthy insight into the life-worlds of medieval giants such as Bonaventure and Aquinas, as well as lesser known (to most of us, at least) figures such as Christine of St. Trond (the so-called Christina Mirabilis) and Gerard of Frachet.

Had we the ability (per mirabile, as Bob loves to say) to go back to the early nineties to see this scholarly dynamo in action, we would have caught glimpses of what would eventually become a key theme of his life’s work: namely, the critical importance of exempla, or units of human experience,¹⁰ in the discovery and communication of philosophical and theological insight. One of our contributors, Rachel Smith, puts the point admirably when summarizing Bob’s work on Thomas of Cantimpre’s Bonum universale de apibus: exempla provide narratives of the human consequences and reactions—joy and horror—to virtue or vice, thus including the audience’s emotions in the work of persuasion, convincing ‘hearts to act in accord’ with doctrinal norms.¹¹ Thus, without denigrating the crucial role of abstractive intellection in the life of Christian scholarly witness, Bob knew from the beginning that there is irreplaceable power in story when it comes to getting the truth across about God and God’s world. In retrospect, it was precisely this beginning—still charting anew the delightfully bizarre world of medieval hagiographies—in which such an insight could hardly have been avoided.

And still, again, Bob never lost his sensitivity for what is new. In his inaugural address as Senior Member in the History of Philosophy, entitled Tracing the Shape of Wonder, he drew perceptive connections to raging debates concerning the characteristically postmodernist rejection of domineering, totalizing conceptions of the power of human reason and its place in the world. As Reinder Klein reports in the December 1991 issue of Perspective, Bob recounted that his own contribution to the work of ICS must begin with the medieval experience of miracle . . . [so as to] reject any world in which it is human beings who impose meaning and end upon the whole.¹² This would amount to another perennially Sweetmanian approach to the world—one that is constitutively open to the work of God in all things, even and especially when things happen beyond what our normal expectations of nature might suggest to us. The young medieval historian-turned-philosopher already had an uncommonly firm grasp on what he was learning, and, perhaps more importantly, what he could say.

The H. Evan Runner Chair

In May of 1997, Bob was awarded tenure. ICS could boast of having a world-leading scholar in medieval spirituality, and this newest tenured faculty member had also established himself as a cornerstone of the institution and an inheritor of its founding tradition. Indeed, as testament to this fact, on April 21, 2001, the friends and family of one H. Evan Runner gathered in the Calvin College Chapel to celebrate the inauguration of the new H. Evan Runner Chair in the History of Philosophy at ICS, Robert Sweetman. Dr. Runner attended himself, Bob’s former teacher at Calvin and key leader in the Association for the Advancement of Christian Studies (which would eventually open ICS in 1967). If there are such things as individual essences, ICS President Harry Fernhout surely captured Runner’s when he commemorated the Calvin College legend as a model of a thoroughly Christian approach to society and culture.¹³ In any case, the point is that an H. Evan Runner Chair would have shoes to fill.

In his inaugural address as Chair, fittingly titled Of Runners and Batons, Bob reflected on lessons he had learned from Dr. Runner. One such lesson cited in the address is especially interesting for our purposes, since it gives voice to yet another key theme in Bob’s career. It is worth quoting in full:

What is passed on then by a teacher or a text is not a single way of understanding the world but a patchwork of different ways. In fact, one can plot the passage of discrete ways or approaches through time. Once a distinguishable approach is developed it remains an enduring possibility. It can always be taken up and reworked by subsequent generations in ever new ways. When taken up, it will participate in new conjunctions. It will be smelted together with thematic possibilities drawn from other approaches. And so by the beginning of the twenty-first century the historian of philosophy faces a crazy-quilt tradition of immense and growing complexity.¹⁴

Like Runner, Bob was—and is—a Vollenhovian, that is, someone who understands that without exception the profoundest insights available to us in the history of philosophy are native to the concreteness of lives as they are lived, and indeed lives lived religiously. And yet, as this quotation shows, the complexity of this crazy-quilt tradition evidences an elaboration on this very point. An important concept in the Reformational tradition is that of ‘antithesis’, a conflict among properly spiritual ground motives¹⁵ out of which such philosophical insights are born. Without denying the prevalence of spiritual struggle in the history of philosophy, however, this crazy-quilt metaphor guards against a temptation towards uncritical, too-quick taxa of apostate and faithful ideas. The truth, as he would say 20 years later in Philosophia Reformata, is that the history of philosophy—Christian and otherwise—evidences the inevitability of synthetic conceptions, given, among other factors, the religious heterogeneity of the cultures productive of philosophical matter.¹⁶ The work of wisdom is collaborative, and it was up to the most prominent medievalist in the Reformational tradition to see as much.

And so, even if Runner’s influence had always run deep in his bones (as Bob likes to say), the relationship was an emulative one, as opposed to merely imitative. But more on this later.

The Interim Presidency and Changing to Stay the Same

As it happened, this same H. Evan Runner Chair would eventually find for himself a new role in 2008, when Bob was chosen to be Acting President of ICS in addition to his role as Academic Dean. Times were unpredictable, as always, and ICS was in a transition period after the departure of John Suk from the position in June of the same year. What was predictable, by contrast, is that Bob Sweetman would be an instrument of God’s providence all the same.

During his tenure as President, Bob began writing devotional letters in ICS’s monthly newsletter, addressed to friends and supporters. These letters would eventually be collated and published as Bob’s second book in 2014, Changing to Stay the Same. As one of our contributors Allyson Carr puts it, these letters were ‘incidental’ in nature—dealing with the daily life and happenings of this fragile-but-resilient little institution.¹⁷ The letters are arranged according to the church calendar, with reflections detailing the life of ICS as inflected by the Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter seasons. Readers of these pages inhabit God’s time—perhaps the only sort of time in which the history of ICS can be adequately accounted. For example, in the Ordinary Time 1 section, we witness the quiet accumulation of wonders that have marked ICS’s struggle to survive,¹⁸ such as the hard financial decisions accompanying ICS’s institutional history. There is excitement, too, as testified in Bob’s recounting of the inauguration of the Centre for Philosophy, Religion, and Social Ethics in 2011.¹⁹

But if there were one way to capture the unique spirit of Changing to Stay the Same, I would venture the Week 17 Lenten reflection as a powerful contender. Commenting on the sublimity of Job 38, in which the Lord delivers an oration out of the whirlwind²⁰ as a means of putting our second-guesses into context, as it were, Bob reports that he has come to the conclusion that second-guessing God is an exhausting business. He continues, a grateful willingness to let things go in order to serve more wholeheartedly has been a hallmark of ICS’s internal spirituality at its best . . . Let him get on with his job, so that you and ICS can get on with ours . . . in his Providence, of course.²¹ This grateful willingness to let things go gets to the heart of the spiritual genius of Bob Sweetman—and indeed of the ICS he led in those years.

A Vision Realized: Tracing the Lines

In 2016 Bob published a long-in-coming treatise on the nature and promise of Christian scholarship in our age, Tracing the Lines: Spiritual Exercise and the Gesture of Christian Scholarship. As Bob himself reports in the Acknowledgements section, the volume began with invited reflections on the topic given as early as 2001, and then again from 2003 to 2005 in the form of lectures given at Dordt, Trinity Christian, and Calvin Colleges. It evidences a wisdom that can only be wrought from so many years of reflection, practice, and communal effort. The book is its own kind, an intellectual sign of Bob’s own haecceity that takes the form of what he calls thought exercises rather than some sort of theory with systematizing aspiration. These thought exercises are occasions for readers to recognize in the text scholarly experiences that she has ‘always and wordlessly known’ but can now ‘speak about’.²²

In a characteristically evocative metaphor, Bob asks his readers to consider Christian scholarship as a folk recipe whose principle of integrality lies ultimately with its animating spirit or ethos, rather than certain identifiable features of its methods and claims.²³ Folk recipes are famous for taking shape along the fainter lines of the character of individual cooks, rather than the starker ones measurable in cups or tablespoons. And that is indeed the point, since according to Bob it is a mistake to seek out a reliably discernible, once-and-for-all formula for doing Christian scholarship the right way. The diversity of expression present across millennia of Christian scholarship is data to be incorporated, not error to be excised.

Bob’s conviction is that there is indeed an ever-resilient unity to Christian scholarship—a unity visible not in the finalizing deliverance of some Aristotelian differentia,²⁴ but rather in attunement to the shape of our Christian hearts.²⁵ Such hearts and their shapes will have certain things in common, no doubt, including a love of the Jesus encountered in the New Testament, a sense that what is good is more original than what is not, and a trust in the future redemption of God’s beloved world. As Bob puts it in the conclusion, Christian scholars,

Go ready and willing to learn from [the world] via the conversations we are directed to by the very dynamic of our Christian hearts. And we go to it caring enough to be sensitive to its unredeemed moments, hoping to contribute our voices there where there is most need in ways that can transform conversation consonant with our deepest sense of what it means to live before the face of God.²⁶

It is rare in our age of scholarly metrics of production to witness such patient, attentive reflection on a topic of such importance. But Tracing the Lines is one such example—a work that is worthy of the sacredness of its subject, and an insight into the heart of its author, true to form.

New Insights, Future Directions

From 2015 to 2018, Bob served a second term as Academic Dean at ICS. It was during this time—having published Tracing the Lines two years before—that he began pursuing the new scholarly ventures that keep him busy today. In October 2017, he gave the first of what would be a series of presentations on the emulative dimension of the famed scholarly friendship of 12th century lovers of letters, Abelard and Héloïse. Indeed, more generally, Bob has shown that this medieval notion of aemulatio—that is, competitive imitation among friends—is a spiritual practice that shines an entirely new light on the now pervasive ethos of competitiveness in Western cultures. The idea is as beautifully simple as it is original: in friendships of virtue (as opposed to mere friendships of utility or pleasure), each friend not only admires what is best in the other, but also seeks to outdo her counterpart accordingly. The result is therefore a competition, of sorts, because each friend seeks to best the other precisely to the degree that they love one another. This spirit of competitive aemulatio is licensed and even encouraged in the Christian Middle Ages via (among other things) reflection on scriptural texts such as John 14:12, in which Jesus himself assures those who believe in him that they will do even greater things than he has done on earth.²⁷

To have recognized what Bob is on about here is to have recognized a truly original mind and work in the field he loves. Now, having passed on his Deanship, Bob’s is an upward trajectory in terms of scholarly originality, productivity, and ambition. At this stage in his career, Bob evidences such a fluency in the inner life of the Reformational tradition that one can hardly parse its various beginnings and ends—not unlike the way in which grammar rules recede from the conscious mind of a speaker with mastery over a language. And of course, Bob is a recognized magister beyond his native tradition, as testified by recent honours including his induction into the ΑΣΝ Honours Society of the Society of Jesus and his appointment as Fellow at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies.

In short, Bob’s best work is ahead of him. And so, for those of us friends who cannot help but love him, perhaps these essays are best understood as an exercise in the very aemulatio that we are only now aware of because of him. It is a fool’s errand to try and best him, of course, but we are friends. Here is our best shot.

Contributors and Editors

Each contributor to this volume can claim a deep connection with Bob in some way or another. Many were or continue to be students of Bob directly, whether at ICS, the University of Toronto, or the Toronto School of Theology. Others are colleagues in a teaching and/or research capacity. In both cases, multiple generations of scholarly life lay behind the following pages.

The volume’s editors have been Bob’s students as well. Joshua first came to the ICS in the fall of 2013 to begin the PhD program in philosophy. He eventually defended his dissertation on Thomas Aquinas’s notion of transcendental multiplicity under Bob’s tutelage in September 2019, not long after starting a teaching position at The King’s University in Edmonton, Canada. Deeply influenced by Bob’s scholarship, Joshua’s current scholarly work centers on problems in the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of social science.

Héctor came to ICS in the fall of 2013 to pursue the MA program in philosophy. Throughout his MA and PhD studies, Héctor has taken many of Bob’s courses, which have awakened in him a deep interest in the historical development of Latin America’s philosophical and religious thought. Underscored by this inquiry, Héctor’s scholarly work explores how Liberation Theology contributes to the development of distinctive notions of justice, reconciliation, and peace in post-colonial Latin America.

In every case, the gift of Bob’s friendship is something of a unitive principle of contributors and editors, one that informs each of the essays in the volume and orients the lives of pedagogical and scholarly practice of their authors.

Chapter Summaries

Responding to Bob’s scholarship and pedagogy, the contributors to this collection are from diverse disciplinary clusters, scholarly approaches, and geographical locations. Throughout this volume, our editorial goal has been to uphold such a diversity of voices, while providing a cohesive sense of Bob’s transformative influence on generations of scholars. We strongly believe that these voices—of both colleagues and students—represent a significant number of the communities that Bob has served throughout his professional career. More importantly, the contributions included in this collection identify the bonds of collegiality and friendship that Bob has forged in his unfailing commitment to listen, in gratitude, to what others have to say to their shared scholarly and faith traditions. Gratitude, therefore, has emerged for us as a galvanizing force of the sometimes-eclectic scholarly efforts of this dedicated set of contributors—not only because of Bob’s interest in gratitude as an object of study, but in virtue of the relationships he has nurtured throughout his scholarly and pedagogical careers.

Throughout this volume, gratitude will be presented as a point of departure for philosophical reflection; as an approach to the practice of scholarship and as an object of study in of itself. In some essays, the concept of gratitude will appear clearly articulated and thoroughly researched, in others it will be an inarticulate background, somewhat of a gesture sustaining the world of meaning opened up by the authors. The richness of dialogue across these contributions appropriately represent who Bob has been and will continue to be for our community of learning and academic tradition.

We have clustered the essays found in this collection into the following four parts, corresponding to the type of gestures our contributors make toward the notion and practice of gratitude: I: Gratitude as a Philosophical Practice, II: Gratitude as an Approach to Religious Texts and Practices, III: Gratitude and Divine Naming, and IV: Gratitude in Interdisciplinary Dialogue.

I: Gratitude as a Philosophical Practice, begins with Benjamin Groenewold’s essay Sweetman on Edge, who launches our reflection with a reference to Bob’s habit of inhabiting boundary areas as sites of profound intellectual fecundity. Groenewold argues that for Bob such boundary areas of the knowable are not places to be passed through quickly but places in which it is possible, and sometimes preferable, to dwell. Groenewold goes on to say that Bob’s way of dealing with the edge cannot be reduced to a single approach, but to three different forms: he can either lean on the edge, push the edge forward, and (of late) go even further. This threefold model leads Groenewold to conclude that Bob’s trajectory of engagement with the edge is moving in the same direction of recent ecological thought, a discovery that gives Groenewold the occasion to explore more carefully this unexpected parallel, with an eye to understanding more closely how Bob manages to take up his remarkable position.

Turning to the practice of philosophy in itself, we have Jonathon Polce’s essay, Humility and the Spiritual Art of Living Philosophically, in which he explores the potential positive impact of spiritual exercise on the philosophical practice. He accomplishes this by bringing the spiritual exercise developed by Ignatius of Loyola into conversation with the ways in which some philosophers have practiced their craft—using them as exemplars of the principles contained in Ignatius’ thought. Appealing to the thought of Pierre Hadot, who has written extensively on the idea of understanding philosophy as a way of life or as spiritual exercise, Polce argues that the goal is not to make philosophy a properly religious pursuit in the modern sense, but rather, to unearth fruitful insights for ways to approach philosophy from spiritual practices of non-philosophical disciplines. Deeply influenced by Bob’s philosophical and pedagogical practices, Polce concludes that if philosophy itself is understood as a way of living, the connection with spiritual practice must be retrieved, restored, and understood anew.

In Meg Giordano’s essay Gratitude in Thomas Aquinas: A Spiritual Exercise of Alignment with the Good, she explores the subject of personal violence, understood as that which hinders human flourishing. Giordano’s essay is an adaptation from a larger research project in which she considers how a specific reading of Thomas Aquinas’ account of human nature can guide us in our human task of adopting affirming orientations rather than violence toward others. Considering an account of human flourishing through a reading of Thomas in which nature and grace collaborate, Giordano’s project explores what violence against human flourishing would entail and how we can shape our dispositions and concrete practices to affirm the flourishing of our neighbors. Within the framework set out by her larger project, Giordano’s essay addresses how we can maintain our connection with the good, and even restore it when it has waned. Inspired by Bob’s understanding of gratitude as a disposition that helps to align a person’s orientation to divine good, Giordano explores how human activity subsequently affects the reception and realization of the good as divine gift.

Part I closes with Daniel Napier’s essay, The Alexandrian Jewish Origins of the Concept of Immaterial Spirit: An Essay in the History of Philosophy. Here, Napier provides a brief historical overview of the concepts of immateriality and of spirit leading up to their novel reception and transformation by the Jewish philosophers of Alexandria. He engages in this process in order to, à la Sweetman, make these novel developments more understandable and enable an assessment of their import. Napier sustains that the West came, by and large, to see thought and prayer as operations of the spirit due, in significant measure, to the success of these Alexandrian Jews in advocating the novel concept of immaterial spirit. In this paper, Napier shows that the Jewish philosophers who framed this concept are, principally, the author of the Wisdom of Solomon and Philo of Alexandria, who draw on prior developments in Alexandrian Philosophical Judaism, especially those of Aristobulus, and work from characteristically Jewish sources and for characteristically Jewish reasons.

II: Gratitude as an Approach to Religious Texts and Practices, begins with Reading Law and Finding Love, an essay in which contributor Allyson Carr attempts to retrieve new meanings from the scriptural passage depicting the interaction between Jesus and an expert in the law in Luke 10. Inspired by Bob’s approach to the reading of historical texts, Carr develops an intertextual interpretation that sets Luke 10 in conversation with the book of Deuteronomy, focusing on the key question of Who is my neighbour? With the aid of Bob’s unique way of developing intertextual connections, Carr compels the reader to rethink the law and commandments, reflecting on what it means to pass on a given understanding of the law and how to impress it on future generations. Carr concludes that there is a need to hear the voice of Jesus anew, by asking ourselves again: how do we read the law? This task, she argues, can only be achieved if we take a hard look at the question who is our neighbour, and what does it mean to love them?

Also within Part II, Rachel Smith, "Keeping Time: Performing Eternity in Henry Suso’s The Life of the Servant," addresses the question: what kind of time is constituted in devotion to Christ if time is performatively constituted? Smith considers the way in which performances of time are inseparable from performances of feeling. Informed by Bob’s understanding of Dominican narrative theology as performative—teaching in such a way that the expression of their doctrinal content is efficacious or soteriologically significant—Smith explores The Life of the Servant, by the fourteenth-century theologian and spiritual teacher, Henry Suso (c. 1295–1366), in pursuit of an answer to her question. Smith argues that The Life of the Servant is an example of what medievalists often call ‘affective devotion,’ in which the practitioner seeks to identify with the sufferings of Christ and, through compassion, feel his mother’s grief at the death of her son. For Smith, if clocks and schedules are performative means of having the institutional forces of time come to seem like somatic facts, the scripts provided by works of affective piety, including those in The Life of the Servant, attempt to cultivate dispositions and emotions by means of a repeated devotional engagement with the Passion narrative such that its events and feelings of compassion for and identification with Christ and Mary come to be so real and ever-present for devotees that they shape the perception, experience, and bodies of the devout.

In her essay "Mediating between Humanity and Divinity: Priestly Identity, Eucharistic Theology, and Aemulatio in the Writings of Gertrude the Great of Helfta," contributor Ella Johnson explores Gertrude the Great’s complex understanding of her own priestly identity. Johnson argues that Gertrude sees herself as a genderless priest, engaging in the spiritual activities she sees as critical to the priesthood. By besting even Saints Peter and Paul at these activities, Gertrude invites others into the priestly competition, and by deploying gender strategies and subverting dichotomies, she makes room for all in the competition. Taking her cue from Bob’s reading of pre-Enlightenment texts and his approach to female writers of the time, Johnson concludes that Gertrude’s writings transform dichotomies and include ideas liberating for women.

Part II concludes with Jennifer Constantine-Jackson’s essay, "On Wizards, Hobbits, Saints, and Friendship in Fratelli Tutti. Here, she considers a spiritual therapy in the service of a world marked by growing concerns about the ubiquitous and invasive experiences of polarization, isolation, segregation, and cancel culture" alienating individuals and communities. The primary focus of Constantine-Jackson’s contribution to this collection is Pope Francis’ call to social friendship in his encyclical letter, Fratelli Tutti: On Fraternity and Social Friendship (2020), which considers friendship as a fundamental element of human flourishing. Attuned to Bob’s consideration of intellectual tools of pre-Enlightenment anthropologies, Constantine-Jackson’s essay reflects on relational anthropologies that seek to retrieve what has been lost through post-Enlightenment individualistic thought and practices.

III: Gratitude and Divine Naming, presents two reflections on divine naming, by Joshua Lee Harris and Eric Mabry. In his contribution "Non curare de nominibus: Aquinas, Scotus, and Sweetman on Divine Naming, Harris considers Bob’s essay, Univocity, Analogy and the Mystery of Being according to John Duns Scotus, which corrects the record on the purported role of Scotus’ doctrine of univocity in the now-infamous genealogy of secular reason invented by Anglican theologian John Milbank. In his contribution to this collection, Harris explores Bob’s take on Scotus’ oft-invoked but little understood doctrine of univocity as something that cannot be credibly characterized as a precursor to modern, purely secular conceptions of reason; for Scotus abandons neither the analogy of being (Milbank’s preferred alternative to univocity), nor the theological unity of human knowing. In this contribution, Harris offers an elaboration" on Bob’s essay by proposing a new framework for understanding the relationship of Scotus and Aquinas on the question of the analogy of being.

In "Theologia Descendit: Kenosis and Divine Naming in the Twelfth Century," Eric Mabry considers Bob’s love of eloquence as the starting place of philosophical inquiry. Mabry sustains that Bob, a philosopher at heart, has never ceased to pursue wisdom, but he has also never sought to sever wisdom from eloquence. He goes on to suggest that Bob’s pedagogical method emerges from a deeper understanding of theological method as it traverses every text (but especially sacred texts) pilgrimatically. Texts are worlds, and they have distinctive topographies. Discovering the shape of a text means that it can be etched onto the inscape of one’s own heart. Following Bobs approach, Mabry presents the exegetical and theological horizons within which Gilbert of Poitiers and Peter Lombard deploy pseudo-Augustinian citation regarding the descent of divina theologia to justify their claims about divine names, arguing that not only does the theme of descending and ascending evoke incarnation, but for twelfth century theologians would have also constituted a reference to the exinanivit or self-emptying of the second chapter of St. Paul’s Letter to the Philippians.

In IV: Gratitude in Interdisciplinary Dialogue, we receive a glimpse into the rich life of meaning that emerges from Bob’s dedicated dialogue with other disciplines.

In her essay In the Lingual Mode: Dooyeweerd and the Reformational Philosophical Tradition on the Nature and Interrelation of the Lingual Aspect, Julia De Boer opens this section with a consideration of the definition of the lingual mode as ‘symbolic signification’ alongside some alternatives. Examining the received tradition à la Sweetman—with gratitude as much as with curiosity for what else might be useful in finding the scope of this vital aspect of our experience—De Boer delves into the genealogy of Herman Dooyeweerd’s ‘symbolic signification’ and into subsequent Reformational thought, and uses this discussion to lead toward her conviction that the definition and placement of the mode need to be reconsidered in light of some weighty aesthetic considerations. To aid her exploration, De Boer appeals to the works of the generation of scholars who followed Dooyeweerd and tried to expand the implications of his ontology into a systematic basis for linguistics.

Ann Sirek closes this collection with her essay, The View from Below: Towards a Fresh Metanarrative for Healthcare, where she addresses the ethical dilemmas that are right in principle but, in the context of the circumstances, do not sit well within the self’s bodily perceptions. Sirek initiates the process of building a moral systematics based upon narratives describing felt sensory experiences—of what feels good, like flourishing, and what feels bad, like suffering. This type of discourse, in which the ethical dilemma is fleshed out, is the view from below that gives a name to this essay. In support of this narrative, Siker develops a systematics based upon Thomas Aquinas’ description of a return to the phantasms or an immersion into the imprints of the sensory nature. In working towards a systematic theoretical underpinning for the view from below, Sirek takes her cue from Bob, drawing upon Thomas as well as the contemporary scholarship of René Girard, James Alison, Brian Robinette, and David Burrell.

As it is evident in the contributions collected in this volume, Bob’s far-reaching scholarship does not fall short of Bob’s own hope for Christian scholarship, namely, to be shaped by the Christian heart. Our contributors, both colleagues and students of Bob’s, engage in work that is respectful of their Christian orientations and that expresses their sense of Christian vocation in the dialogue they promote within and between their fields of study. Without an exception, all of these authors attribute to Bob their keen awareness of what it means to truly practice Christian scholarship. and of the consequences of being responsible to one’s Christian heart in academic settings. After reading this collection, we hope you, too, learn to recognize Bob’s profound insight about Christian scholarship, embracing gratitude as the disposition that paves the way for a robust scholarly practice responsible to the world it seeks to serve.

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12

. Perspective

25

.

6

:

1

.

13

. Perspective

35

.

2

,

2

.

14

. Sweetman, Of Runners and Batons, Perspective

35

.

3

,

3

.

15

. See Dooyewerd, Roots of Western Culture,

1

–

8

.

16

. Sweetman, Reading Ancient and Medieval Philosophers after Vollenhoven,

226

.

17

. Sweetman, Changing to Stay the Same, xi.

18

. Sweetman, Changing to Stay the Same,

26

.

19

. Sweetman, Changing to Stay the Same,

34

.

20

. As the NRSV has it (

38

:

3

b–

7

): I will question you, and you shall declare to me. / Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? / Tell me, if you have understanding. / Who determined its measurements—surely you know! / Or who stretched the line upon it?/ On what were its bases sunk, / or who laid its cornerstone / when the morning stars sang together / and all the heavenly beings[a] shouted for joy?"

21

. Sweetman, Changing to Stay the Same,

50

.

22

. Sweetman, Tracing the Lines,

3

.

23

. Sweetman, Tracing the Lines,

10

.

24

. The classical Aristotelian account of what constitutes a good definition is the addition of some conceptually discernible difference to an equally discernible genus, which in turn yields the essence of the thing in question. It is a recurring theme in Tracing the Lines that such a difference is not available when we are trying to give definition to the enterprise of Christian scholarship.

25

. Sweetman, Tracing the Lines,

165

.

26

. Sweetman, Tracing the Lines,

166

–

67

.

27

. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. (NRSV)

Gratitude as a Philosophical Practice

chapter 1

Sweetman on Edge

Benjamin Groenewold

Introduction: Noticing It

Perhaps the most fundamental insight I gained as a student of Robert Sweetman comes from one of his favorite aphorisms: Show me a fence, and I’ll mistake it for a Lazy-Boy. Looking over the conceptual fields Sweetman has travelled through, this certainly seems an accurate self-representation: Sweetman the medievalist engaging postmodern thought, Sweetman an interdisciplinary translator, Sweetman the Dutch Calvinist thinker deeply immersed in Catholic thought, Sweetman the scholar able to apply Aristotelian concepts to the Platonizing mysticism of the Beguines, and, not least, Sweetman the one-man show, translating the complexities of twelfth-century symbolist thought into the cadences of Dr. Seuss through half a dozen accents.¹ Over the passage of my own years of teaching worldview and the history of philosophy, Sweetman’s proclivity for edges has become for me increasingly remarkable: not an aspiration or a threat but a promise. Sweetman will find himself most relaxed in the space others find the most stressful, most at home in the place others find the least attainable.

This attitude strikes me as fairly original. It is a stance that resonates particularly happily with my own work. As I teach in an institution that