Month: April 2024

Africa and Byzantium Exhibit at CMA

These flasks bear the image of Saint Menas, an early martyr of the Christian Church whose shrine was in the desert southwest of Alexandria in Egypt. These flasks were probably used by pilgrims to hold oil taken from the lamp that burned over this saint’s tomb. Probably manufactured near the shrine, pilgrim’s flasks often bear decorations hinting at their place of origin, as is the case here.

Yesterday, I enjoyed a preview of the Cleveland Museum of Art’s new exhibit, Africa and Byzantium, which will be on display from April 14 through July 21, 2024. Afterwards, I attended a curator lecture which pulled the artifacts in the exhibit together thematically. Many of the items in the display were absolutely stunning to see. I am always impressed by the quality of the exhibits which the CMA is able to display for its patrons. If you have the opportunity, and did not see this exhibit when it was at the MMA, do see it now. Link to information from the CMA is below.

Africa and Byzantium at CMA

History and Politics

Voltaire, suspicious of the utility of the study of history, wrote in a February 9, 1757, letter to Pierre-Robert Le Cornier de Cideville that history is “a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead.” Without passing judgment on the merits of Voltaire’s observation regarding history, it did strike me that a natural parallel statement is that politics is “a pack of tricks which we play upon the living.”

A Pithy Quote from Spinoza … and a Deep Rabbit Hole.

Always being suspicious of pithy quotes attributed to famous dead people when the quotes do not cite a source, I had occasion to go down a rabbit hole this afternoon. I was underground for several hours.

Yesterday, I received two issues of The New York Review of Books in the post. The first issue I reviewed was delightful and quickly devoured. It also had a pithy quote at the end of the review entitled Piety & Power (written by David A. Bell). The book under review was about the life of the niece of Cardinal Richelieu, while the quote at issue was attributed to Spinoza. The quote was recorded at the very end of the review as: “Smile not, lament not, nor condemn, but understand.“

Finding the quote intriguing, I marked it for research, which I conducted today. I found multiple variations on the quote but no citation as to its source online. Thus, I became more creative in my online research, and searched for fragments of the quote, and found a variation of the quote which departed more significantly from the usual versions, which had a citation to Spinoza’s Tractatus Politicus, an unfinished work exploring forms of government. He was writing the work in the year of his death. With that citation I was able to locate a copy of the manuscript, in Latin, and translate the entire text, which allowed me to see a most wonderful, robust quote in context, which is most certainly applicable to the dispassionate study of politics (the subject of the manuscript) as well as history.

I was also able to later find, on the Hathitrust.org website, an English translation from the 19th century, with which I will later compare the entirety of my translation. But overall, the comparisons I have made thus far show that my translation is able and where clunky, the older translation is also clunky — thus, the original Latin was clunky in places.

In any event, here is the original source for the quote above – which shows how transmuted the original words have become in the interest of pithy.

“Therefore, when I applied my mind to politics, I intended to demonstrate or deduce only those things which best agree with practice, are certain and indubitable, and to inquire into matters pertaining to this science with the same freedom of mind as we are accustomed to investigate mathematical subjects, but I diligently endeavored not to ridicule, mourn, nor detest human actions, but rather sought to understand them; and so I contemplated human emotions such as love, hatred, anger, envy, glory, mercy, and other movements of the mind, not as vices of human nature, but as properties which belong to it in such a way that they pertain to its nature as the movements of the air pertain to it, such as heat, cold, storms, thunder, and other such things which, although inconvenient, are necessary and have certain causes by which we try to understand their nature, and the mind rejoices equally in the true contemplation of knowing these things which are pleasing to the senses.” [Chapter I, IV]