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 Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion,
Theology and Biblical Studies

RELIGION IN REASON
METAPHYSICS, ETHICS, AND POLITICS
IN HENT DE VRIES

Edited by Tarek R. Dika and Martin Shuster

Religion in Reason

This book presents critical engagements with the work of Hent de Vries,
widely regarded as one of the most important living philosophers of reli-
gion. Contributions by a distinguished group of scholars discuss the role
played by religion in philosophy; the emergence and possibilities of the cat-
egory of religion; and the relation between religion and violence, secular-
ism, and sovereignty. Together, they provide a synoptic view of how de
Vries’s work has prompted a reconceptualization of how religion should
be studied, especially in relation to theology, politics, and new media. The
volume will be of particular interest to scholars of religious studies, theol-
ogy, and philosophy.

Tarek R. Dika is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy

at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Descartes’s
Method: The Formation of the Subject of Science (2023) and the co-author,
with W. Chris Hackett, of Quiet Powers of the Possible: Interviews in Con-
temporary French Phenomenology (2016) as well as numerous articles on
Descartes, Heidegger, and contemporary French phenomenology.

Martin Shuster is Professor of Philosophy and the Isaac Swift Distinguished

Professor of Judaic Studies at University of North Carolina—Charlotte.
In addition to many articles and essays, he is the author of Autonomy
after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity (2014), New
Television: The Aesthetics and Politics of a Genre (2017), and How to
Measure a World? A Philosophy of Judaism (2021). With Anne O’Byrne
he is the editor of Logics of Genocide: The Structures of Violence and the
Contemporary World (Routledge, 2020).
Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion,
Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical

Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back
into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and
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new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in
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Augustine and Contemporary Social Issues

Edited by Paul L. Allen

God After the Church Lost Control

Sociological Analysis and Critical-Constructive Theology
Jan-Olav Henriksen and Pål Repstad

Religion and Intersex

Perspectives from Science, Law, Culture, and Theology
Stephanie A. Budwey

Exploring Theological Paradoxes

Cyril Orji

African Churches Ministering ‘to and with’ Persons with Disabilities

Perspectives from Zimbabwe
Nomatter Sande

The Fathers on the Bible

Edited by Nicu Dumitraşcu

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.

com/religion/series/RCRITREL
Religion in Reason
Metaphysics, Ethics, and Politics
in Hent de Vries

Edited by
Tarek R. Dika
and Martin Shuster
First published 2023
by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa
business
© 2023 selection and editorial matter, Tarek R. Dika and Martin
Shuster; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Tarek R. Dika and Martin Shuster to be identified as
the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their
individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77
and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks
or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 9780367133610 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032283319 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780429026096 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096

Typeset in Sabon
by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.
Contents

List of Contributorsvii

Introduction 1
TAREK DIKA AND MARTIN SHUSTER

1 Theology on Edge 16
TOMOKO MASUZAWA

2 Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 34

GWENAËLLE AUBRY
TRANSLATED BY JACOB LEVI

3 Imagination, Theolatry, and the Compulsion to

Worship the Invisible 50
ELLIOT R. WOLFSON

4 Theology’s Figures of Abandon: Revisiting the

Topic of Original Affirmation 80
ASJA SZAFRANIEC

5 Theology as Searchlight: Miracle, Event, and

the Place of the Natural 92
WILLEMIEN OTTEN

6 Are Miracles Possible?: Avicenna Revisited 108

SARI NUSSEIBEH

7 On Laws and Miracles 129

ILIT FERBER
vi Contents
8 Spiritual Exercises in the Age of Their Technological
Reproducibility 139
ELI FRIEDLANDER

9 Violence Inside-Out: Staring into the Sun with

Georges Bataille 156
SAMANTHA CARMEL

10 The Graft of the Cat: Derrida, Kofman and the

Question of the Animal 177
SARAH HAMMERSCHLAG

11 Corpus Mysticum: Henri de Lubac, Ernst Kantorowicz,

Hent de Vries 196
BURCHT PRANGER

12 Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory:

John Rawls with Hent de Vries 215
ALEXANDRE LEFEBVRE

13 Adorno’s Secular Theology 233

PETER E. GORDON

14 Religion as Pretext, Art as Counter-Text 249

MIEKE BAL

15 Anti-Retractationes: On Inexistence, Divine, and Other 270

HENT DE VRIES

Appendix: List of Hent de Vries’s Works 375

Index 392
List of Contributors

Gwenaëlle Aubry is Director of Research at the Centre National de la

Recherche Scientifique (Centre Jean Pépin- École normale supérieure-
Université Paris Sciences & Lettres), Paris, France.
Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, critic, and video artist based at the
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of
Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Samantha Carmel is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative
Thought and Literature at the Johns Hopkins University, USA.
Hent de Vries is the Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities in the
Department of German, Religious Studies, Comparative Literature, and
Affiliated Professor of Philosophy at New York University, USA.
Ilit Ferber is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the
Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
Eli Friedlander is the Laura Schwarz-Kipp Professor of Modern Philosophy
at Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
Peter E. Gordon is the Amabel B. James Professor in the Department
of History, Harvard University, USA. He is a Faculty Affiliate in the
Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures and the Department
of Philosophy.
Sarah Hammerschlag is Professor of Religion and Literature, Philosophy of
Religions, and History of Judaism at the University of Chicago Divinity
School, USA.
Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy in the Department
of Government and International Relations and the Department of
Philosophy at the University of Sydney, Australia.
Tomoko Masuzawa is Professor Emerita in the Department of Comparative
Literature and the Department of History at the University of Michigan,
Ann Arbor, USA.
viii List of Contributors
Sari Nusseibeh is Professor of Philosophy and former President of Al-Quds
University, Jerusalem, Palestine (Occupied Territories).
Willemien Otten is the Dorothy Grant Maclear Professor of Theology and
the History of Christianity at the University of Chicago Divinity School,
USA, where she is also Faculty Co-Director of the Martin Marty Center.
She is Associate Faculty in the Department of History
Burcht Pranger is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Religion at the
University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.
Asja Szafraniec teaches at Amsterdam University College, the Netherlands.
Elliot Wolfson is the Marsha and Jay Glazer Endowed Chair in Jewish
Studies and Distinguished Professor of Religion at University of
California, Santa Barbara.
Introduction
Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
and University of Toronto

Religion
Max Weber’s now classic essay, “Science as Vocation” contains a remarka-
ble passage where he notes that:

It is the destiny of our age: given the rationalization and intellectual-

ization of the times, and especially given the disenchantment of the
world—its loss of magic—the ultimate and most sublime values have
retreated from public life, into either the otherworldly realm of mys-
ticism or the direct brotherly communities of individuals with one
another. It is no accident that our highest art is an intimate one, not
monumental; nor that today it is only in the smallest circle, between
individuals, pianissimo, that something pulses corresponding to what
once blazed through large communities as the breath of prophecy, fus-
ing them together.1

Hent de Vries’s work has explored, updated, concretized, radicalized, for-

malized—not to mention also contested yet not wholly denied—Weber’s
basic assessment and image. In an interview, de Vries notes that the title of
his first book, Theologie im pianissimo (1989), was “an homage and gentle
parody”2 of Weber’s phrase. From his first study of the thought of Theodor
W. Adorno and Emmanuel Levinas, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of
Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (the English translation and revi-
sion of Theologie im pianissimo), de Vries has shown how Weber’s thesis,
bold as it may be, in fact only points toward a subsequent analysis of the
relationship between religion and modernity. Religion’s positive content
and actuality in its traditional or properly confessional, social, and worldly

1 Max Weber, Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures, trans. Damion
Searls (New York: New York Review of Books, 2020).
2 Victor E. Taylor, “Minimal Difference with Maximal Import: ‘Deep Pragmatism’ and
Global Religion: An Interview with Hent De Vries,” Journal of Religious and Cultural
Theory 11, no. 3 (2011), 1-19.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-1
2 Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
aspects continue to retreat, becoming, in Weber’s words, ever more and
more faint—pianissimo; at the same time, this retreat is inversely propor-
tional to a certain dissemination of religion, because its content continues
to be invoked, reused, redeployed, refashioned, reformulated, not to men-
tion reviewed and reconstituted, in a variety of new sites ranging from the
political to the ethical to the aesthetic (whether in the form of the drawing
or redrawing of the public sphere, the qualification and understanding of
reason and rationality, or the evolution and spread of new media and new
technologies). It would not be too much to say that Hent de Vries’s work
has offered a detailed and comprehensive map of this terrain, the first such
cartographic exploration proposed exactly in a global context and with the
requisite archival—if not archaeological and genealogical—depth.
For de Vries, the cartographic domain of this register traverses several
interlocking issues, all originating from the continuing possibilities and una-
voidability of religion in the modern world. Cognizant and responsive to the
idea common in the human sciences that religion is “an anthropological and
social construct that could serve diverse, even contradictory purposes,”3 de
Vries’s work instead stresses how “citations from religious traditions are …
fundamental to the structure of language and experience.”4 In fact, involved
here is a fundamental dialectical procedure, where “the endless, if also inevi-
tably limited, refutations of religion’s truth-claims are so many reaffirmations
of its ever-provisional survival, ad infinitum.”5 This leads in to a powerful
image by de Vries, where “in religion’s perpetual agony lies its philosophical
and theoretical relevance. As it dies an ever more secure and serial death, it is
increasingly certain to come back to life, in its present guise or in another.”6
This prioritization of religion occurs amidst a broader discussion of
and reflection on rationality, especially, at least in his earliest work, with
an engagement with the work of Jürgen Habermas (as pursued in his The
Theory of Communicative Action).7 It is impossible here to offer a proper
account of Habermas’s theory of rationality, or of the various moves and
countermoves involved in its decades-old elaboration. It is sufficient instead
to note that Habermas aims to offer a theory of rationality oriented around
a formal or procedural definition of rationality, where “communicative
actions [of whatever sort or kind] always require an interpretation that is
[already] rational in approach.”8 Such a theory, in de Vries’s words, already
moves reason away “from essences or metaphysical substances and turns”

3 Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1999), 1.
4 Ibid., 2.
5 Ibid., 3.
6 Ibid.
7 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. T. McCarthy, 2 vols.
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1984).
8 Ibid., 106.
 Introduction 3
and instead toward “different formal structures that function as quasi-
transcendental—that is linguistic, pragmatic, in short enabling—conditions
for human cognition, agency, interaction, judgment, and expression.”9
Again, without entering into all of the complex details, objections, and
counter-objections to this view, it is important to note that de Vries shows how
even such a purely formal or “secular” reason—one grounded in a commonly
sharable language amidst standards putatively acceptable to everyone—there
persists an unavoidable religious remainder. To see how this is the case, note
that when Habermas claims that “all attempts at discovering ultimate founda-
tions … have broken down,”10 there are several ways to respond. On the one
hand, we might take it to be the case that there is some normative failure here,
and that Habermas’s theory is thereby somehow not properly justified (this
is the common line taken by a range of critics of Habermas).11 On the other
hand, we might instead stress the extent to which this points beyond reason to
something else, revealing in even a formal or procedural account of reason an
unavoidable recourse to “the traces (of the other) of reason.”12
According to de Vries, evident in Habermas’s account is an inescapa-
ble religious or theological or—perhaps most accurately—a negative
metaphysical dimension (termed so exactly because it cannot be properly
described, but only hinted at or referenced—more on all of this shortly).
Such a dimension can be acknowledged and discerned, for example, when
Habermas makes recourse to metaphors to elaborate his formal account,
as, for example, when he hearkens to an ultimate state of consensus that
can never be reached; Habermas’s theory is thereby, according to his own
self-conception, “still accompanied by the shadow of a transcendental illu-
sion.”13 As we will see, this diagnosis is explored and multiplied de Vries’s
work, ultimately raising “the question not so much of a comprehensive the-
oretical alternative but of how to comprehend the metaphysical and herme-
neutic supplement at once required and denied by his theoretical matrix.”14
De Vries continues, noting that in fact:

Such a supplement refers, rather, to a figure of thought and a faculty

of judgment which both, finally, resist the simple equation of ration-
ality with discursiveness, with the decidability of sharply delineated
(cognitive, practical, and aesthetically expressive) validity claims, and

9 Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas,
trans. Geoffrey Hale (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 76.
10 Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2.
11 For a summary and discussion, see James Gordon Finlayson, “The Persistence of
Normative Questions in Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action,” Constellations
20, no. 4 (2013), 518-532.
12 de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas, 28.
13 Ibid., 20.
14 Ibid., 91.
4 Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
with the force of the better argument alone. In this sense, my attempt
to supplement the theory under consideration requires a radical modifi-
cation, not just reinterpretation, of its paradigm of rationality; in other
words, it demands an extension of its scope—even an extrapolation
and extension of some of its central intuitions—that, I suspect, goes far
beyond the limits Habermas himself would accept.

With that said, this conclusion in response to Habermas’s work equally

shows the necessity of distinguishing de Vries’s position from another
recent, no less sophisticated approach to thinking about religion, notably
the work of Charles Taylor, who also has been a critic of Habermas. (And
it should be taken as given, furthermore, that both Habermas and Taylor
might be seen as stand-ins here for broader trends in the study of both rea-
son and religion.)
In A Secular Age, Taylor criticizes a variety of stories that he terms “sub-
traction stories,” where human beings are alleged to have “lost, or sloughed
off, or liberated themselves from earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or
limitations of knowledge.”15 On such a view, the emergence of modernity
or secularism is best understood “in terms of underlying features of human
nature” being now laid bare or revealed, since they “were there all along,
but had been impeded by what is now set aside.”16 Opposing such stories,
Taylor proposes to understand the rise of modernity and/or secularism as
ultimately “the fruit of new inventions, newly constructed self-understand-
ings and related practices, and can’t be explained in terms of perennial fea-
tures of human life.”17 Taylor terms what emerges “exclusive humanism,”
a worldview that he locates as developing from the 16th century onwards,
first as an alternative to Christian faith, but then as a view that instead
puts an end to “the naïve acknowledgment of the transcendent or of goals
or claims which go beyond human flourishing.”18 Exclusive humanism is
a view, however, that still allows for a range of options when it comes to
belief and unbelief, thereby locating religion, in transformed shape, as a
continuing possibility, even within an alleged secular age. The chief differ-
ence, according to Taylor, is that “unlike religious turnovers in the past …
naïveté is now unavailable to anyone, believer or unbeliever alike.”19 What
was once “adopted naïvely, that is, without the sense that there was an
alternative,” now instead “has to be recovered in full awareness.”20 The
“immanent frame” that emerges in modernity is “something which per-
mits closure [to transcendence or a beyond], without demanding it.”21 Such

15 Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 22.
16 Ibid.
17 Ibid.
18 Ibid., 21.
19 Ibid.
20 Ibid., 389.
21 Ibid., 544. Emphasis added.
 Introduction 5
talk of recovery appears to share at least some ground with de Vries’s sug-
gestion, pursued throughout his work, of understanding religions as the
“material traces, residues, and sedimentations of an immensely extended,
diversified, and deep-seated archive of the past—which is, in principle, an
actualizable and thus potential future as well—whose resources we have
barely begun to fathom, to realize, let alone to exhaust.”22
But there are important differences between Taylor and de Vries. The
very process of recovery appears itself as at stake in the two conceptions,
with Taylor suggesting that belief or unbelief is an option, one that is
pursued or avoided (just to name two options). Shifts in this domain
are described by Taylor as the idea that “one moral outlook gave way
to another. Another model of what was higher triumphed.”23 According
to Taylor, it was not a case where “a moral outlook” simply “bowed to
brute facts.”24 In other words, there was some normative shift, albeit one
affected and inflected by a complex, thick form of life or, we might even
say, shape of spirit. 25
Such a description raises questions about how such a normative shift
occurs for particular individuals, or indeed if it has in fact occurred at
all as an option among others. After all, whether one believes or doesn’t
believe is by no means optional for any particular person, rather you or I
believe or we don’t; belief is oftentimes not simply one preference amongst
others. For example, as one commentator notes, while “a great many peo-
ple seem no longer at ease in the full-dress garments of religious commit-
ment,” it remains the case that they cannot merely “cast them aside.”26
The multiplicity of serious contemporary faith possibilities—of what-
ever sort, from the sincere to the ironic, to the recovered or reinvented,
to the reworked or reasserted, to everything else in between—renders the
entire category of optionality a problem, still hinging on and asserting as
it does the very sense of naïvete that Taylor alleges was exactly no longer
an option.27 Related themes are explored in Asja Szafraniec’s “Theology’s
Figures of Abandon (Traces of the Archive),” where Derrida is presented as
a figure who forces us to rethink any naive opposition between the secular
and religious, and in Peter Gordon’s “Adorno’s Secular Theology,” where
Adorno’s aesthetics is harnessed as a site to think about Adorno’s complex

22 Hent de Vries, ed. Religion: Beyond a Concept (Bronx: Fordham University Press,
2009), 68.
23 Taylor, A Secular Age, 563.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid., 565. On the analogy between these two, see Terry Pinkard, “Innen, Aussen und
Lebensformen: Hegel und Wittgenstein,” in Hegels Erbe (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2004).
26 Peter E Gordon, “The Place of the Sacred in the Absence of God: Charles Taylor’s ’A
Secular Age’,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 4 (2008): 655.
27 De Vries has himself made this point, see Hent de Vries, “The Deep Conditions of
Secularity,” Modern Theology 26, no. 3 (2010): 392.
6 Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
and dialectical relationship to these themes, asking especially after the rela-
tionship between art and religion.
Furthermore, the continuing appeal of a variety of highly unreflective—
not to mention regressive—projects, especially in the last few years, with the
rise of allegedly defunct forms of fascism, populism, or authoritarianism,
puts pressure on the very periodization that Taylor introduces. When Taylor
stresses that it was “virtually impossible not to believe in God”28 earlier, we
might wonder both about how true this was (given alternative conceptions of
reality, whether in models of negative or apophatic theology to more ordinary
possibilities for unbelief in earlier periods, including any number of alterna-
tives to Christianity inside and outside of Western traditions). Furthermore,
we might also ask about how true it is now, especially if we take seriously
that contemporary modern political movements might not be seen as deny-
ing or avoiding the religious, but rather as themselves continuing instances
of deep religiosity, of political theology, and/or deep irrationality.29 All of
these points require more elaboration, a topic pursued more extensively in
this Introduction and throughout this volume. For example, it can be noted
that these broader trends and questions can also be addressed from differing
methodological perspectives, as Tomoko Masuzawa’s “Theology on Edge”
suggests by arguing that “theology was not a ruling discourse of the medi-
eval university; rather, its cardinal achievements resulted from perilous and
daring engagements with what was novel, alien, and potentially adversarial.”
We can also ask broader questions about the role that theology and the phi-
losophy of religion have played and ought to play in the contemporary uni-
versity, as suggested in Willemien Otten’s “Theology as Searchlight: Miracle,
Event, and the Place of the Natural.”

Religion and the Other

To get a grip on these issues, note that a close reading of Minimal Theologies
already reveals that de Vries is not a theorist of religion with a side interest
in rationality, but rather a theorist of rationality (in both its “theoretical”
and “practical” forms) for whom religion plays a central, constitutive role.
His central thesis in Minimal Theologies is that the emphatic concept of
reason—a concept of reason at once both sensitive to historical reality and yet
capable of criticizing it in terms that are not simply borrowed from it—has
two complementary dimensions, neither of which can be reduced to the other
and both of which are necessary in order to successfully evade the pitfalls of

28 Taylor, A Secular Age, 25.

29 See the discussion in Hent de Vries and Lawrence Eugene Sullivan, Political Theologies:
Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006),
1–91. See also Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West
(New York: Vintage, 2008).
 Introduction 7
historicism and positivism on the one hand, and classical metaphysics in its
rationalist, idealist, or materialist forms on the other. The first dimension is
negative metaphysics, which prohibits any representation of the absolute (be
it the absolutely true, good, beautiful, or just) that would enjoy unrestricted
validity and be immune to criticism. The second dimension is hermeneu-
tic judgment, which, in concrete circumstances, nevertheless appeals to an
absolute in order to evaluate singular states of affairs, but in a manner that
is necessarily or constitutively aporetic, since the absolute has no positive
content, and cannot be represented. Negative metaphysics and hermeneutic
judgment constitute the heart of de Vries’s concept of rationality in Minimal
Theologies, together illustrating why he regards theology and religion as an
ineliminable part of it. As he puts it in a crucial passage:

Negative metaphysics prevents us from positively or affirmatively antic-

ipating, articulating, imagining, visualizing, or narrating such a figure
of the successful life, prohibiting its conceptualization or figuration in
theoretical, practical, or aesthetic terms alone. Yet we cannot consistently
intuit – let alone maintain – a merely prohibitive idea of transcendence
whose empty referent and ascetic strategy could never stand on its own or
have the last word. Judgment, therefore, realizes the inevitable, necessary,
and imperative instantiation of the other by way of an act or acknowl-
edgement of concretization which signals incarnation and betrayal (divine
speech and blasphemy, iconology and idolatry) at once. The negative met-
aphysical idea and the hermeneutic judgment are thus complementary or
supplementary. Both together constitute what reason […] might mean in
the present day and age. Broadly defined, the faculty of judgement […]
designates our critical, selective use of a certain concept, figure, or ges-
ture: both by identifying it as such and by putting it to work at a certain
moment, in a certain context, and in a certain way. Formally defined, the
idea of negative metaphysics enables us to keep options open and explains
how we can return to earlier steps; it is the very principle of fallibility,
of counterfactuality, and hence the necessary reminder that this particu-
lar use we have for concepts, figures, or gestures is not all or not-yet-it
(i.e., true, adequate, good, just, beautiful, or sublime) when compared to
the immeasurable standard that makes up the emphatic idea of reason:
the infinite, the ab-solute, the other (or Other), for which the theologico-
religious tradition has thus far provided the most provocative and richest
vocabulary.30

Theology and religion play a role in minimal theology, but it is not one
that they do or can play elsewhere. Minimal theology is reducible neither
to dogmatic or confessional theology (whose validity minimal theology

30 de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 110.

8 Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
suspends in its pursuit in a rigorous “epoché,” to use the Husserlian term)
nor yet to the human and social-scientific study of religion (whose meth-
odological presuppositions it submits to an “epoché” no less rigorous).31
As de Vries puts it in Minimal Theologies, minimal theology is neither the
“science” of God nor the science of “God.”32 Its origins lie elsewhere: spe-
cifically in reflection on the possibility of critical theory after the so-called
“end” of metaphysics. The aim is to “show solidarity with metaphysics at
the moment of its downfall,” as Adorno famously (and enigmatically) puts
it in Negative Dialectics. This requires nothing less than conceiving the
possibility of an “absolute” whose irreducibility to any positive representa-
tional content or empirical fact at the same time conditions the possibility
of subjecting any and all such contents and facts to critique. The absolute is
not some ineffable entity beyond being (as it is in various apophatic theolo-
gies), nor is it a regulative ideal (as it is in various Kantian and neo-Kantian
transcendental philosophies), although it bears a certain affinity to both.
For de Vries, the absolute is merely the formal place of a radical otherness
whose ever-diminishing intelligibility is not inconsistent with a species of
radical phenomenality and experience. And while it is undeniable that “the
theologico-religious tradition has thus far provided the most provocative
and richest vocabulary” in which the negative metaphysics of the absolute
has been articulated, it is no less true that the absolute cannot be reduced
to the representations determinate religious and cultural traditions impose
upon it (be they Abrahamic or other). For all intents and purposes, then,
minimal theology simply is all that the emphatic concept of reason can be
after the so-called “end” of metaphysics. This opens up the possibility for
philosophy of religion to ask about the compulsion to worship an invisi-
ble God, as pursued in Elliot Wolfson’s “Imagination, Theoloatry, and the
Compulsion to Worship the Invisible.”
The concept of reason articulated in de Vries’s minimal theology under-
mines (or deconstructs) every opposition between “reason” and “religion,”
“faith” and “knowledge,” the “secular” and the “sacred,” “immanence” and
“transcendence,” however sophisticated or subtle these distinctions may be.

31 By “epoché,” Husserl means to suspend (neither affirm nor negate) the presuppositions
and theses of the human and the natural sciences in order to describe the phenom-
ena as they are given in intuition. See Husserl, Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology and
Phenomenological Philosophy, First Book: General Introduction to Phenomenology,
trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2014), §§27–32,
48–56. In De Vries, the epoché functions somewhat differently, and amounts to a sus-
pension of presuppositions and theses about religion so that religion may appear other-
wise than it does in both the “science” of God (theology) and the science of “God” (the
social-scientific study of religion) as the minimally theological remainder of the secular
reason mobilized in both the natural and human sciences, and indeed in philosophy.
32 de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas,
51–67.
 Introduction 9
This is why even Habermas, whose formal-pragmatic conception of reason as
communicative action is arguably one of the most sophisticated such concep-
tion to have emerged since World War II,33 cannot, according to de Vries, dis-
pense with minimal theology. As de Vries argues at length, Habermas’s theory
of communicative action is premised on idealizing presuppositions that cannot
be articulated in terms of the theory: “Habermas’s indefatigable emphasis on
‘the central experience of unconstrained, unifying, consensus-bringing force
of argumentative speech’ cannot itself be theoretically – that is, argumenta-
tively – articulated at all. Within both theoretical and practical discourses, as
well as within theoretical and therapeutic critique, the motivation and ultimate
grounds for argumentation cannot be conceived as argumentation.”34 De Vries
later continues: “Habermas’s analysis of each of the three value spheres and
respective types of value claims touches upon a ‘moment of unconditionality’
whose transcendence – albeit a ‘transcendence in immanence’ – it can no longer
articulate in theoretical, practical, or aesthetic terms. Hence, his recourse to
metaphor, to figural presentation of the ab-solute internal to each discourse.
Negative metaphysics, we indicated, formalizes this inevitable appeal at the
heart of all idealization, exceeding any presupposition, and keeps it open for an
illimitable series of non-synonymous substitutions, each of which instantiates
and betrays the idea in question.”35
De Vries’s critique of secular reason ought to be understood as general;
Habermas’s conception of reason is only one among other such conceptions
that fail, despite their best efforts, to dispense with a minimally theological
remainder. Returning to the discussion above, it is exactly to the extent that
minimal theology undermines any stable opposition between “religion” and
“reason” that it pulls the rug out from under the feet of any theory according
to which “religion” or “faith” can be regarded as “options” one can rationally
choose or refuse to adopt in a modern, “secular age,” as in Taylor. For de Vries,
the problem of religion is not the problem of “belief,” whether it be understood
as a propositional attitude, affective disposition, or a way of life. Religion is but
the historically and culturally privileged site of a negative metaphysics without
which no emphatic or critical conception of reason is possible.

Religion and Violence

De Vries demonstrates the enduring efficacy and importance of the religious
archive—an archive that cannot be reduced to any one religion—in a broad
variety of registers. (And it must also be noted, as it is in Sarah Hammerschlag’s

33 See Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, originally published in German

in 1981.
34 de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 123. The citation is from Habermas’s The Theory of
Communcative Action, vol. 1, 10.
35 Ibid., 130.
10 Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
“The Graft of the Cat: Derrida, Kofman and the Question of the Animal,”
that religion is not the only archive.) Having demonstrated the role played
by religion in even the most purportedly secular concept(s) of reason in
Minimal Theologies and Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (1999), de
Vries then turns his attention to a problem that has always been associated
with religion: the problem of violence. For de Vries, the problem of violence
is, in fact, inseparable from minimal theology, specifically in regard to his
concept of “hermeneutic judgment.” As de Vries argues in the long pas-
sage from Minimal Theologies cited above, in minimal theology the faculty
of judgment “realizes the inevitable, necessary, and imperative instantia-
tion of the other” here and now “by way of an act or acknowledgement of
concretization which signals incarnation and betrayal (divine speech and
blasphemy, iconology and idolatry) at once.”36 Violence is the inevitable
consequence of a negative metaphysics according to which the absolute or
the other both must and cannot be “instantiated” or “concretized” in some
way or other in each and every singular here and now.
As de Vries argues in Religion and Violence, violence “affects the heart
of religion in its most elementary and its most general features,” and this
means that reason, whenever it represents the absolute (as it must), inevita-
bly engages in a violence that is best understood in terms of the “idolatry,
blasphemy, and hypocrisy” that are ultimately “unavoidable in the pursuit
of divine names and belong to the religious and the theological – and, by
analogy, to reason – as such. […] Without it, without the saying of the unsay-
able, without the negotiation with (and of) the absolute, nothing would be
said or done at all. Nothing would be changed or saved; everything would be
left up to the powers that be.”37 Violence is not an isolated topic in de Vries’s
work, nor is his point to insist, in accordance with a highly suspicious rep-
resentation of the Enlightenment by popular intellectuals, on how historical
or positive religions cause violence, but rather to insist that violence must and
perhaps can only be properly understood in religious, indeed minimally the-
ological terms. Understood according to minimal theology, religion carries
the risk of what de Vries calls the horror religiosus, i.e., a horror in which
the ethical and the political are permanently exposed to the “the sovereign,
absolute, and (from our finite and human point of view) absolutely arbitrary
act of divine will,”38 a horror religiosus no doubt best represented Abraham’s
sacrifice as interpreted by Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling, and which
de Vries reads as central to any understanding of the ethical and the politi-
cal. Abraham’s sacrifice dramatizes the structure of all ethical and political
decision: “[I]n being responsive and responsible one must, at the same time,

36 Ibid., 110. Emphasis added.

37 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), xvi.
38 Ibid., 5.
 Introduction 11
also be irresponsive and irresponsible,” indeed this happens as soon as one
is responsive and responsible to one other to the exclusion of all others – an
exclusion that, in the end, “is always unjustifiable.”39 The horror religosus,
then, is not restricted to positive religion; positive religion indicates the
structure of the ethical as such, which is that in being ethical I must also
sacrifice the ethical: “The relation to the other demands that I sacrifice the
ethical, that is to say, ‘whatever obligates me to respond, in the same way, in
the same instant, to all the others.’”40 What Abraham shows is that “in every
genuine decision the ethical must be sacrificed” merely in order to be itself
(158).41 Thus, “[a]ccording to the paradoxical logic of responsibility and irre-
sponsibility, the ethical becomes possible precisely in the disturbing possibil-
ity of its suspension,” and as such it once more “forbids, indeed precludes, all
‘good conscience.’”42 Here again, de Vries does not hesitate to demonstrate
the minimally theological – in this case, sacrificial – structure of all ethical
and political decisions, even the most purportedly “secular.” This raises deep
questions about the very history of metaphysics in the West, a topic pursued
in Gwenäelle Aubry’s “Violence, Religion, Metaphysics,” where she discerns
a potential counter-trend in Aristotle’s ontology.

Political Theology and Miracles

If the ethical “becomes possible precisely in the disturbing possibility of its
suspension,” as de Vries argues in Religion and Violence, this is no less true
of the political. De Vries’s analysis of the relation between religion and vio-
lence opens onto a broader horizon in which the concept of violence, however
central, is only one among many in a series of concepts that determine the
political (as a philosophical category, and as both related to but distinct from
politics) in its broadest extension, including sovereignty, authority, law, jus-
tice, and democracy. Here as elsewhere, de Vries avoids simply repeating Carl
Schmitt’s thesis in Political Theology that all “significant concepts of the
modern theory of the state are secularized political concepts.”43 This asser-
tion remains incomplete when it is not properly analyzed and situated, and it
is in any case ambiguous in Schmitt, who oscillates between an historical or
genealogical and a purely structural or analogical interpretation of his own
thesis about the relation between political and theological categories.44 This

39 Ibid., 175. Emphasis added.

40 Ibid., 159. The citation is from Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Willis (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1995), 68. De Vries describes this as the ethico-political “dou-
ble bind” embodied in the “binding” of Isaac.
41 Ibid., 158.
42 Ibid., 10.
43 Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2005), 38.
44 See de Vries, Religion and Violence, 216.
12 Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
ambiguity alone suffices to undermine any straightforward conception of the
relation between theology and the political as one of, say, mere transfer of a
concept from one discourse to another, a translation without remainder or
modification, etc. A related theme is explored in Burcht Pranger’s “Corpus
Mysticum: Henri de Lubac, Ernst Kantorowicz, Hent de Vries,” where a dis-
cussion of De Lubac’s work and the Eucharist is harnessed to think about
the mystical (i.e., performative and, therefore, ultimately groundless) foun-
dations of sovereign authority.
Despite his openness to a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary
research on the theologico-political, de Vries’s preferred interlocutors fall
in the line that can be drawn from Schmitt and Benjamin through de
Certeau and Derrida. The problem of the political, de Vries argues, con-
cerns the manner in which sovereign power or authority is instituted no
less than the manner in which it is maintained or interrupted. The possi-
bility of sovereign power cannot be separated from the performativity of
the act whereby it establishes the legal order ex nihilo – “miraculously,”
so to speak. Nothing before, within, or beyond the legal order can legit-
imate this performative (indeed, passionate or illocutionary) act. This
performativity of sovereign power opens the door both to reactionary
affirmations of the authority of modern nation states to suspend the legal
order in order to restore the legal order in states of emergency (Schmitt)
as well as revolutionary affirmations of the authority of the proletariat
to suspend the legal order in states of emergency (or even to bring them
about in a “general proletarian strike”) in order to redeem history in an
act of “divine violence” (Benjamin). These possibilities are both equally
open, and it is not self-evidently the case that the latter contains any
less risk than the former (Derrida and de Vries). Whatever the case may
be, modern political philosophy ignores the theological foundations of
the modern concept of sovereignty at its own peril, indeed at the risk
of “obfuscation of the essence of the political” itself.45 Here, it is God’s
creation of the natural order and his ability to interrupt it via miracle
that is paradigmatic. Drawing on Jacob Taubes (another interlocutor no
less important than those mentioned above), de Vries argues that “the
miracle, in its formal structure – or in its messianic logic […] – reveals
the most general and fundamental trait of the political event.”46 Hence
de Vries’s long-standing interest in the histories and possibilities of the
concept of the miracle as a metaphysical, theological, and political cate-
gory, 47 as explored in Sari Nusseibeh’s “Are Miracles Possible? Avicenna
Revisited” (which discusses the possibility of miracles via Avicenna’s

45 Ibid., 245.
46 Ibid., 237.
47 See de Vries, Miracles et métaphysique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France), 2019; Le
miracle au coeur de l’ordinaire (Compiègne: Éditions Les Belles Lettres, 2019).
 Introduction 13
metaphysics) and Ilit Ferber’s “On Laws and Miracles” (which discusses
the relationship between miracles and the ordinary by means of David
Hume’s work).

Media, Miracles, and Special Effects

Equally tied to the theologico-political is de Vries’s long-standing interest
in media, which can be located as an extension of the basic “fact that, in
most of its historical formations, the concept of the political has always
been contingent, if not upon the authority or the explicit sanction of a dom-
inant religion, then at least upon a plausible translation and renegotiation
of the central categories of this religion’s historical beliefs, its central ritu-
als, and their implicit politics.”48 From this, we can note—as was already
clear, say, to Kant in his writings on religion, that the “question of religion
cannot be addressed without incessant reference to the categories and the
realm of the public,”49 thereby making questions of media and new media
perpetually relevant and central to any discussion of religion, to the extent
that “religion transpires through the media.”50
The form that new media takes becomes central to understanding the
way in which the relationship between religion and the public is navi-
gated. For example, it is striking, de Vries notes, that the publicity and
reemergence of global religion in the contemporary world (whether in
the form of the global war on terror or in the dizzying and profitable
heights of Christian evangelicalism) increasingly occurs in the modality
of television, a media form that operates “mostly in the privacy of one’s
home,”51 thereby already rubbing against the construction, pursuit, and
elaboration of a public and its interests. Equally, this tension unfolds
in other ways, from the ways in which religion invokes the mechanical
(ritual, repetition, the rote) and the mystical (miraculous, ephemeral,
non-repeatable) to the global and the local to the singular and the dif-
fuse. Throughout, we find a “digital and cybernated” culture that is
both “mobilized and exploited” even as it is opposed and “identified as
the … major enemy target.”52 De Vries is very much influenced here by
and engaging with Derrida, who suggests that “[n]o faith, therefore, nor
future without everything technical, automatic, machine-like supposed

48 Hent de Vries, “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Sphere, and the Task of
Contemporary Comparative Religious Studies,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de
Vries and Samuel Weber (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001), 3.
49 de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 64n40.
50 “In Media Res: Global Religion, Public Sphere, and the Task of Contemporary
Comparative Religious Studies,” 16.
51 Ibid., 17f.
52 de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 18.
14 Tarek Dika and Martin Shuster
by iterability.”53 Derrida continues, noting that such oppositions—
especially between faith and mechanism—should instead be “thought
together, as one and the same possibility.”54 Derrida, and also de Vries,
are here influenced by Henri Bergson’s remarkable concluding claim to
The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, where Bergson asserts that
“the essential function of the universe” is to be “a machine for the mak-
ing of gods.”55 Bergson notes that the human being is the sort of crea-
ture who, in virtue of its strengths and weaknesses, “must use matter
as a support if he wants to get away from matter,” or as Bergson sums
it up, “the mystical summons up the mechanical.”56 De Vries notes,
rightly, that while this has always been true, “new media never merely
convey the same message,” rather they “bring about a qualitative leap
and instantiate a certain supplementary ambiguity as well.”57
A conceptualization of miracles, which are oftentimes regarded as the
exclusive objects of theology or the philosophy of religion, are thereby lev-
eraged by de Vries as part and parcel of this same discourse, where he notes
that, “thinking about miracles has never been possible without introducing
a certain technicity and, quite literally, manipulation.”58 This point ought to
be obvious, if only in thinking about the alleged veracity or lack of veracity of
any particular miraculous event. De Vries further shows how the notion of a
miracle and the ways in which this notion has been conceptualized can also
help us understand certain contemporary phenomena, namely “the increas-
ingly complex relationships between, on the one hand, the real events of daily
life—whether private, public or political—events that are too often consid-
ered to be purely absolute and spontaneous, natural data—and, on the other
hand, those [events] which fall within the domain of manufacturing, artifi-
cial and calculated, technological and media.”59 In this way, de Vries suggests
we might draw a “common thread” between miracles and special effects.60
Work as historically wide-ranging, disciplinarily ambitious, and philo-
sophically sweeping as de Vries’s requires more elaboration that can be
provided in a short introduction. There are important themes that have

53 See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits
of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Palo Alto:
Stanford University Press, 1998), 47. This is cited in de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to
Religion, 17.
54 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason
Alone,” 48.
55 Henri Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra,
Cloudesley Brereton, and W. Horsfall Carter (New York: Henry Holt and Company,
1935), 306. Cited in de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 16.
56 Bergson, Two Sources of Morality and Religion, 298.
57 de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 33.
58 Ibid., 24.
59 Hent de Vries, Le miracle au coeur de l'ordinaire (Paris: Encre Marine, 2019), 16.
60 Ibid.
 Introduction 15
emerged as central for de Vries which can only be hinted at in this intro-
duction. Most notable of these, for example, is the notion of spiritual
exercises, a notion that de Vries inherits from Pierre Hadot, even as he
significantly transforms it, or the notion of the ordinary, a notion that de
Vries navigates by means of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Stanley
Cavell. In differing ways, this topic of spiritual exercises is explored in
Alexandre Lefebvre’s “Spiritual Exercises in Political Theory: John Rawls
with Hent de Vries,” Eli Friedlander’s “Spiritual Exercises in the Age of
their Technological Reproducibility,” and Samantha Carmel’s “Violence
Inside-Out: Staring into the Sun with Georges Bataille,” each chapter dis-
cussing figures as diverse as John Rawls, Walter Benjamin, and Georges
Bataille. Glimpses of each of these topics should already be apparent from
the present discussion: the notion of spiritual exercises—glossed minimally
as a phenomenon that is meant to transform the self61—is always already
implicated with any sense of the ordinary—as a phenomenon phenomeno-
logically involved with locating any self within a broader form of life—even
as both are involved in any conceptualization of religion. Both of these
features of human existence are fundamentally and unavoidably involved
with alterity, with the concrete encounter with and acknowledgment of an
Other, explored and cited in de Vries’s work through dialogue with figures
as diverse as Adorno, Wittgenstein, Cavell, Levinas, and Derrida (just to
cite the most prominent). Their work is marshaled, in part, to prioritize
the notion of hermeneutic judgment, which is the linchpin for locating the
self within a form of life, potentially pointing the self always beyond itself.
Given his multifaceted and expansive conception of reason, and its deep
relationship to religion and materiality—not to mention the relationship
between the two—it is not surprising that de Vries’s work has found cur-
rency and use in domains and disciplines that extend far beyond the aca-
demic discipline of philosophy. This is evident in Mieke Bal’s “Religion as
Pre-Text, Art as Counter-Text,” where the work of Indian artist, Nalini
Malani, is marshaled to think about the political power of art. One way to
understand this influence is to highlight that de Vries’s work is not a mere
academic exercise. De Vries’s work is throughout guided by “a quasi-
moral concern, whose ‘normativity’ is not governed by criteria, norms,
imperatives, or rules and whose ‘moral point of view,’ far from being
disincarnated, touches upon the amorality of … other domains.”62 Such
an approach is as inspiring and compelling as it is necessary, and it is an
enduring testament to de Vries’s work that it has decisively transformed
how religion is understood in both philosophy and the human sciences.

61 Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier
and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. Marc Djaballah and Michael Chase (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 2009), 87ff.
62 de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 111.
1 Theology on Edge
Tomoko Masuzawa
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, United States

Pearls are calcareous concretions of peculiar lustre, produced by certain

molluscs, and valued as objects of personal ornament. It is believed that
most pearls are formed by the intrusion of some foreign substance between
the mantle of the mollusc and its shell, which, becoming a source of irri-
tation, determines the deposition of nacreous matter in concentric layers
until the substance is completely encysted. The popular notion that the
disturbing object is commonly a grain of sand seems untenable; according
to Dr. Gwyn Jeffreys and some other conchologists, it is in most cases a
minute parasite; while Dr. Kelaart has suggested that it may be the frustule
of a diatom, or even one of the ova of the pearl-producing mollusc itself.
The experience of pearl-fishers shows that those shells which are irregular
in shape and stunted in growth, or which bear excrescences, or are honey-
combed by boring parasites, are those most likely to yield pearls.
(“Pearl,” Encyclopaedia Britannica, 9th edition, vol. 18 (1885))

There is much that is confusing and equivocal about theology in current

parlance of the English-speaking West. Among academics concerned
with the question of religion, there are deep differences of opinion—
though the disagreements are often shrouded in silence, be it of a polite,
insolent, or nervous kind—as to the nature of theology’s relation,
if any, to religious studies, to the academic study of religion, and to
Religionswissenschaft. To complicate the matter, there is no consensus
as to whether these latter three terms—and there are some others as
well—mean the same thing, or similar enough things, genealogically
related things, or perhaps have no meaningful relation at all. In this
turbid landscape appeared, in 2005, a very large volume called Minimal
Theologies. As the title of its original (and not quite so large) German
edition, Theologie im pianissimo, makes clearer, the minimal-ness sig-
naled here is not about the magnitude of confessional claims or about the
territorial expanse of theology as a field of knowledge. Rather, it refers
to an infinite attenuation of theology’s resonance, a sound that does
not die out. There is something about this diminution-without-end—
traversing the negative space of the apophatic—that rings antithetical
DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-2
 Theology on Edge 17
to a mere softening or a moribund atrophy. It seems to imply instead
a certain intensification of the nerves, demanding an all-out effort and
straining of the ear, as it were, to catch the ever more rarified intimation
of god language. Put prosaically, this is an advanced theology at its most
ruthlessly modern, and as such, it defies almost all of the ready-made
pigeonholes to which “theology” has been customarily assigned.
In this essay, I aim to consider the import of Minimal Theologies—a
treatise on and of theology—by placing it against the backdrop of the
current state of discourse about theology. This, to be sure, is to apply
a rather blunt instrument to measure this work of extraordinary sub-
tlety, precision, and force. Exercises of this sort would not likely further
the path of thinking blazed by the book or enhance the illumination it
sheds. The point, rather, is to reflect on the state of neuralgic disorder that
characterizes today’s discourse surrounding theology, just at the moment
when talk of “religion” and “theology” has become rampant in a domain
far beyond the academic trade guild of religious studies. A more immedi-
ate and specific aim is to recover an aspect of the material historicity of
theology as a discursive tradition, and, possibly, to find a point of entry
into a future reconsideration of the ways in which theology is positioned
(or not) in relation to the study of religion.
What has “theology” been in different moments in the history of the
Latin West? How far back does its tradition date? To the Middle Ages,
to the Church Fathers of late antiquity, or even to Biblical times? If
these were indeed its exemplary instances, what did “theology” look
like—with or without that particular moniker attached to it—in each of
these historical moments? What has been the relation between theology
on the one hand and what might be tolerably called “religion,” or more
specifically the “religion of Christianity,” on the other? What about the
relation between theology and the learned professions, or perhaps more
specifically, institutions of higher learning? How have these relations
changed over the past centuries? What factors observable in recent his-
tory have brought on the present condition where theology has now
come to appear—as exemplified by the volume in question—in the form
of apophatic minimalism? We may enter the deliberation through this
last question.

***

Confronted at the outset by theology’s extreme attenuation, an inciden-

tal reader of Minimal Theologies—say, an amateur philosopher with
only a casual acquaintance with the field of theology1—might blanch.
This could easily happen because, for one thing, there have been some

1 I could be described as one in any circumstance other than the present.

18 Tomoko Masuzawa
very loud theologies around, especially in North America, so much so
that we are often inclined to identify “theology” precisely with those
emphatic, unapologetically assertive pronouncements; in other words,
we are in the habit of calling it “theological” and “dogmatic” when-
ever we meet the kind of asseverations that appeal to higher authorities
beyond the ordinary or ordinarily accessible, and on that account, pur-
port to rise above all possible counter-arguments that might challenge
them. And this may not be so far-fetched when we consider that, to
bolster such claims for carte blanche legitimacy and blanket immunity
from criticism, learned proponents of those vociferous theologies could
refer to some well-known sayings attributed to one or another of the
ancient Church Fathers, the best known of which may be: Credo non
quod, sed quia absurdum est. 2 Whatever its original import, this dictum
is often cited as a way of suggesting that improbability, or even absurd-
ity, is no bar to religious truth-claims, when such claims are based on
revelation or personal experience; and that, when push comes to shove,
theology could revoke any routine procedures of the mundane sciences
and even fly in the face of logic.
These, to be sure, are not the only theologies that have been around.
For the last two centuries or more, theologies of quite another sort,
which generally aim to strike a more even tone, have been staking out a
regular place in the modern university and, indeed, cornering sizeable
territory in the ever-changing landscape of the modern learned profes-
sion. Theologies in this register—which we may call, loosely and col-
lectively, academic theology—seem to be intent on enunciating at no
higher volume than occasional mezzo forte. In any event, its voice is
never meant to be shrill, and its style is to be marked by equanimity, not
passion. Consistent with this ideal of mental and dispositional sobriety,
academic theology refrains from demanding what Max Weber called
“sacrifice of the intellect”; it does not require or recommend that one
renounce either logic or scientific method. On the contrary, foremost
among the public missions of academic theology appears to be to estab-
lish its own profile as a bona fide Wissenschaft, that is, as a distinct,
coherent, and systematic knowledge-practice on an equal footing and,
in theory, commensurate with other sciences. As such, academic the-
ology on the whole claims to be predicated on the principle of sound
reasoning, possessing a materially definable sphere of reality proper to
itself, even if the question of what exactly constitutes that sphere may
never be easily settled. Such, as it appears, has been the condition of

2 Max Weber, who quotes this in the last pages of his famous lecture, “Science as a Vocation”
(1917), attributes it to St. Augustine, whereas today’s textbook accounts more commonly
credit Tertullian. “Science as a Vocation,” trans. Rodney Livingstone, in The Vocation
Lectures, ed. David Owen and Tracy B. Strong (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), 1–31, at 29.
 Theology on Edge 19
theology that has taken up residence in the university at least since the
nineteenth century. 3
The great range of discursive activities in academic settings that have
come to be called theology, its long history, as well as the ever recurrent
and multifarious attempts to systematize its copious contents, all these fac-
tors render it difficult to circumscribe just what should count as academic
theology. That said, from a certain perspective, Minimal Theologies is
undoubtedly a superlative example that stands at its vanguard; it marks a
frontier of this genre, its extremity, the edge. At the same time, this treatise
constitutes a class of its own. The vista it opens up is not of any familiar
kind; some might say it is well-nigh unrecognizable. In effect, Minimal
Theologies belongs to the genre of academic theology by virtue of exceed-
ing it, by transgressing its boundaries. This paradoxical positioning, to my
mind, offers more than one advantage. For, not only does it illuminate a
new horizon of metaphysical thinking, but it also affords an opportunity to
consider afresh the peculiar location and functionality of theology in rela-
tion to the longer and broader history of intellectual discourses in the Latin
West. From this expanded perspective, the Middle Ages may be recognized

3 Its extent and diversity can be gleaned from any number of treatises that survey its his-
tory. While these historical accounts themselves may be variable, they typically inform
us that the claim for theology to be a science—that is scientia, rather than sapientia, or
“wisdom”—dates back no earlier than the thirteenth century, roughly the same time that
the term theologia came into use more or less in its currently recognizable sense, and in
the sense particularly associated with Christianity. (See Wolfhart Pannenberg, Theology
and the Philosophy of Science, trans. Francis McDonagh [Philadelphia: Westminster
Press, 1976)] 7–14.)
Despite all the credit that may rightly go to Aquinas and the tradition of scho-
lasticism that he is said to have initiated—and despite the fact that his most important
compendium is known to us as the Summa Theologiae (or “summary of theology”)—it
seems doubtful, according to some medievalist historians, that either the concept or the
term “theology” had any appreciable function for Aquinas himself. “The term theology
is used in two fundamentally distinct senses: first, in the sense of what we could term
natural or rational theology, but what Aquinas will designate as ‘first philosophy’; sec-
ond, in the sense of what his later commentators will designate as dogmatic theology
and what Aquinas himself refers to as sacred doctrine, the teachings of faith or simply
Christian theology and ‘things which have been divinely revealed.’” John A. Mourant,
“Aquinas and Theology,” Franciscan Studies, 16:3 (1956) 202–212, at 202–203. See also
G. R. Evans, Old Arts and New Theology: the Beginnings of Theology as an Academic
Discipline (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 29.
A more meaningful place to look for the point of inception for academic theology
in our sense of the term may be Schleiermacher, the first Dean of Theology Faculty at
the newly established University of Berlin, and his brief but famous programmatic trea-
tise, Kurze Darstellung des theologischen Studiums (1811). (Friedrich Schleiermacher,
Brief Outline of the Study of Theology, trans. William Farrer [Edinburgh: T. & T.
Clark, 1850]). Cf. John M. Stroup, “The Idea of Theological Education at the University
of Berlin: From Schleiermacher to Harnack,” in Schools of Thought in the Christian
Tradition, ed. Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 152–176.
20 Tomoko Masuzawa
as the point of origin for both academic theology proper and its institu-
tional setting: the university. And it is to this latter endeavor—to revisit and
reassess the positioning of theology in the history of the university—that
this essay aims to make a modest overture.
To be sure, wishing to make even a small dent in a subject as monumental as
this might seem a preposterous ambition, immediately raising the question of
why such a reconsideration is necessary in the first place. My grounds, admit-
tedly, are not much more than a suspicion that we, the denizens of modern
times, might be habitually inflating and therefore consistently overestimating
the centrality, the power, and the hegemonic overlordship of theology in the
premodern world, particularly when it comes to the Middle Ages.4 This suspi-
cion first germinated while I was attempting to sketch a wide-angle overview
of the curricular structures of the first universities that came into existence in
the Latin West, that is, those emerging in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
In brief, this glancing survey revealed two points of particular interest.
First, among the oldest universities, Bologna and Paris, which are uni-
versally acknowledged to be the two most important prototypes, were very
differently structured from the beginning and have never come to resemble
each other since. Bologna was indeed a prototype for almost all universities
emerging in those early centuries, whereas Paris was anomalous and nearly
unique, with the exception of two English universities that came to be, in
tandem, modeled after Paris. The University of Paris, which ceased to exist
as such in the late eighteenth century, nevertheless left its indelible mark,
as it eventually became the prototype for an overwhelming majority of the
universities originating in the late medieval to early modern centuries, most
of which were to be located in the north, particularly in the Germanic lands.
Second, modern scholarship on the history of the university has hith-
erto focused heavily—in fact, disproportionately—on Paris and its prog-
eny in the north. The impact of Paris is undeniable; for instance, it was the
University of Paris that established the now-familiar configuration of four
faculties, comprising one “lower” (Arts and Sciences) and three “higher”
(Theology, Law, and Medicine); and it was Paris that originated the very
idea, and the term “faculty.” And we have come to imagine this configu-
ration as the ideal, if not universal, form in which all medieval universi-
ties were constituted. But historically speaking, Paris was an exception;
other universities were quite differently structured. Bologna exemplified
this other type, and it comprised, on one hand, a school of law (subdi-
vided into civil law and canon law), and on the other, a school of medicine
and the arts. Theology was not to be found within its precincts. 5

4 This impression of course is not original with me. See for example Bernard McGinn,
“Regina quondam…,” Speculum, 83/4 (2008) 817–839.
5 I have discussed this matter at greater length in another essay, Tomoko Masuzawa,
“Theology, the Fairy Queen,” Modern Intellectual History, 18 (2021) 1–24, at 13–19.
 Theology on Edge 21
The upshot may be stated as follows: our overemphasis on the Paris and
its progeny—we might call this a “northern prejudice”6 —has distorted our
view of the medieval university and, in particular, our notion of the place
(or not) of theology within it. As a way of working toward correcting this
refracted vision and reorienting our perspective, we may begin by briefly
rehearsing some aspects of the medieval university and the circumstances
of its origination.

***

The geographical location of the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth

centuries was predominantly the western Mediterranean. Being the ear-
liest and a numerical majority, these universities first emerging in Italy,
the Iberian Peninsula, and what is today the south of France—i.e., region
known as le Midi or Mezzogiorno7—reflected the historical circumstances
of the university’s arising. By the same token, they may be said to embody
its raison d’etre as an altogether new institution at this time, in contrast
to those universities that came to be founded—usually by fiat of regional
rulers—in the late medieval to early modern era.8
Among the defining attributes of the earliest universities, none is
more important than its character as a self-forming guild, that is, self-
governing corporations of masters (i.e., teachers) and scholars (students).9
Chartered corporations were in fact new and burgeoning societal enti-
ties in this period; they were novel entities made possible by legal prin-
ciples and technologies derived from classical Roman jurisprudence,

6 This is not a recent phenomenon but at least as old as Gibbon, Kant, and John Henry
Newman, to cite but a few of the most celebrated (but historically unfounded) pro-
nouncements on the origin and the nature of the university.
7 The area includes such notable early university towns as Montpellier, Toulouse, and
Avignon. Modern historians often unhelpfully categorize these universities as “French,”
as we see for example in Hastings Rashdall’s highly influential three-volume work, The
Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, originally published in 1895 (Oxford University
Press, 1936). See vol II, pp. 115–210. We would do well to remember that this region
belonged to the Mediterranean world and was politically distinct from the Frankish north
until the fourteenth century, and culturally and linguistically different even longer.
8 See a series of maps included in Hilde de Ridder-Symoens, ed., Universities in the Middle
Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 68–74.
9 Exceptions in their mode of origination are, first, the University of Naples (1224)
founded by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II and, second, the studium of the
Roman Curia (1245)—the first “university” in Rome founded through the efforts of
a series of popes from Gregory IX to Innocent IV, all bitter rivals of the Emperor.
Cf. Aleksander Gieysztor, “Management and Resources,” in Ridder-Symoens, ed.,
Universities in the Middle Ages, 108–143, at 110–111. The subsequent development
of these two universities, however, is said to have conformed to the character of other
Italian universities. Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 41–64.
22 Tomoko Masuzawa
itself a recently rediscovered and reactivated tradition in the Latin West.
The rise of the university was therefore not only contemporaneous with
but also structurally parallel and constitutionally akin to other devel-
oping self-governing communities, or commonwealths, which included
various professional trade guilds, incorporated townships and free city-
states, and, in the religious sphere, collegiate churches as well as certain
new monastic and mendicant orders.10 As a corporation and guild of the
learned, the universities of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries enjoyed
the status and privileges of an institution that was not only administra-
tively but also jurisdictionally independent from both church and state.
This relative independence and freedom that was characteristic of the
early universities stands in sharp contrast to what the university was to
become in later eras.11
When the position and the status of theology in the universities of those
early centuries are comprehensively considered, it becomes immediately
apparent that, with the exception of Paris (and the two English universi-
ties that followed suit), a faculty of theology did not exist. Being largely
absent, then, theology was in no position to lord over other faculties. To
be sure, it is probable that some sort of theological instruction was taking
place in the vicinity of the university, either in the same municipality or,
more likely, in some nearby monasteries and friaries; and that there was a
degree of confluence, if not exactly cooperation, between the university and
those who were instructing and being instructed in the monastic or mendi-
cant orders, especially with regard to the more rudimentary or preparatory
stages of study in the arts (i.e., so-called trivium and quadrivium). But such
activities were at best institutionally peripheral to the university proper.
As the Italian universities are the most typical in this regard, theological

10 Brian Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought 1150-1650
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), especially pp. 19–28. It may be
kept in mind, moreover, that during this period the term universitas referred to self-
formed political communities, or commonwealths, in all these forms, whereas the guilds
of masters and scholars (i.e., “university” in our sense) were more commonly called
studia generalia. Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press 1957; originally published in 1923), 4–5.
11 The contrast was greatest in comparison to those universities of late medieval and early
modern founding. There is of course much to be said about this claim as well as about
its corollary, namely, that the university’s relation to both church and state changed
substantially beginning in the fourteenth century. A succinct and useful discussion can
be found, for example, in Paolo Nardi’s chapter entitled “Relation with Authority” in
Universities in the Middle Ages, ed. Hilde de Ridder-Symoens [volume I of A History of
the University in Europe, general ed., Walter Rüegg] (Cambridge University Press, 1991),
77–107. The transformation that began in the Late Middle Ages became even more pro-
nounced and radical in the early modern period, which can be observed in a parallel
essay, also entitled “Relation with Authority” by Notker Hammerstein, in the volume II,
the volume-specific title of which is Universities in Early Modern Europe (1500-1800)
(Cambridge University Press, 1996), 113–153.
 Theology on Edge 23
instruction was conducted not as an integral part of the university but out-
side of it, both physically and institutionally.12 It is therefore fair to say that,
in the universities in their original condition—which on that account we
may call with some justice quintessentially medieval universities—theology
as a philosophical, metaphysical, and scholastic sort of learning, that is,
academic theology as we understand it now was as yet largely alien to the
new institution; it was yet to be integrated into the university curriculum,
and there is no evidence, moreover, to indicate that those within the uni-
versity during this period expected that a theology faculty should ever
come to exist among them. This situation, however contrary to today’s
pervasive assumptions, becomes readily understandable when we call to
mind the circumstances of the university’s arising.

***

What brought the university into existence? While modern histori-

ans are in agreement as regards the time—it is squarely in the twelfth
century—their emphases vary when it comes to the question of prin-
cipal causes or instigating factors. Some scholars attribute this devel-
opment primarily to the overall societal maturity of the Latin West,
thus stressing the factors internal to the West.13 But even in the eyes of
such West-centric scholars, it is impossible to ignore the fact that the
initial stimulus and, more substantially, the very content of university
instruction came from outside. As the pioneering American medieval-
ist of the early twentieth century Charles Homer Haskins definitively
stated, beginning sometime in the eleventh century, there was a sud-
den and massive influx of new knowledge coming to the Latin West
from elsewhere, primarily through two portals: on the one hand, Iberia,
where Islamic and Jewish scholarship had been flourishing for centuries,
and on the other, southern Italy (Sicily and Naples in particular) where
the confluence of both Byzantine Greek and Arabo-Islamic knowledge
and cultures had been particularly rich. All of that flooded in to create a
situation where an entirely new sort of institution for higher learning

12 This is well documented by scholars who study the medieval universities in the western
Mediterranean region, especially Italy. Paul Oskar Kristeller, “The Curriculum of the
Italian Universities from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance,” in Studies in Renaissance
Thought and Letters, vol. 4 (Rome, 1996; originally published in 1984), 75–96; Paul F.
Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance.
13 This tendency is particularly strong among historians who concern themselves with the
northern universities (in the sense discussed above). See for example Stephen C. Ferruolo,
Origins of the University: The Schools of Paris and Their Critics, 1100-1215 (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1985); Alan B. Cobban, The Medieval English Universities:
Oxford and Cambridge to c. 1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
24 Tomoko Masuzawa
could not but arise.14 In short, all of the new sciences and philosophies
that created the groundswell—from the knowledge of Aristotle, Euclid,
Galen, and Ptolemy to Avicenna, Averroes, and Maimonides, to name
some of the earliest and the latest—were foreign and hitherto unknown
to the Latin West, and none of them were Christian.15 In fact, as Dag
Nikolaus Hasse observed in a recent study:

It is a remarkable feature of the history of European universities that

Arabic authors had an important place in the university for several
centuries, especially in medicine, philosophy, and astrology. […] The
students of universities of the Christian world read very few Christian
authors… The bulk of teaching was on Greek and Arabic authors. The
firm rooting of Arabic works in medieval curricula is the backbone of
their long-lasting reception in the Latin West.16

If such a list of characters as mentioned above constituted the core curricu-

lum of the university education, it is no mystery that theology did not imme-
diately find a suitable place among them, let alone a ruling seat. For, what
would this formidable procession of Pagan philosophers, Muslim infidel doc-
tors, and benighted Jewish polymaths have to offer to benefit the knowledge
and wisdom of the Latin Church? This being the general outlook of the uni-
versity at its origin, it is entirely unsurprising that, for Christian theology to
be integrated into the milieu of the university, there had to be considerable
work of mediation—including the work of mitigation and neutralization of
heterogenous and potentially inimical elements—before any of these ancient
and foreign authorities could be rendered safe, salubrious, and productive.
This process of mediation in fact did take place in the course of the
thirteenth to fourteenth centuries.17 The main stage was Paris, and this

14 “So long as knowledge was limited to the seven liberal arts of the early Middle Ages,
there could be no universities, for there was nothing to teach beyond the bare elements of
grammar, rhetoric, logic, and the still barer notions of arithmetic, astronomy, geometry,
and music, which did duty for an academic curriculum.” Charles Homer Haskins, Rise
of Universities, 4.
15 Before this time, classical Greek knowledge had been systematically translated and
comprehensively transmitted, nurtured, and developed in the largely Arabic-speaking
Islamic world, particularly through the efforts of the Abbasid Caliphate from the late
eighth to the eleventh century. See Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture: the
Graeco-Arabic Translation Movement in Baghdad and Early ‘Abb āsid Society (New
York: Routledge, 1998); Amira K. Bennison, The Great Caliphs: the Golden Age of the
‘Abbasid Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
16 Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Successes and Suppression: Arabic Sciences and Philosophy in the
Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016) 17.
17 Regarding this gradual process of theology’s absorption of Arabic sciences and philos-
ophies, see Etienne Gilson, The History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages
(Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1955), especially “Part 6: Early
Scholasticism” and “Part 7: Theology and Learning,” pp. 235–324.
 Theology on Edge 25
was owing to several reasons specific to the city and the region.18 In con-
nection to this historic turn of events, moreover, the name of Thomas
Aquinas (1225–1274) stands as a towering monument to the success of
this synthesis and amalgamation.19 A brilliant Italian youth, Thomas,
was first sent by his noble parents to the imperial University of Naples,
which had been recently founded by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II,
known as “the Great” (he was also an arch-rival of several popes on
multiple issues, including the Crusades), in order to promote the study of
civil law. The young Thomas, however, defied his parents and, with the
help of some wily Dominican friars, soon defected to Rome, and eventu-
ally to Paris, in order to pursue studies in theology instead. The historic
outcome of this was nothing less than the birth of what has since been
called scholasticism, the first academic theology proper. The essential for-
mula for the transfiguration of the Greco-Arabic learning in the service
of theology may be summarized thus: Aristotelian logic and metaphysics
tailored to suit Latin Christian doctrine, with a little help from Averroes,
but not too much.
This turn of events, often dubbed the “Triumph of St. Thomas
Aquinas,” has been one of the most celebrated themes in the Latin
Christian art, numerously represented by renowned European painters
beginning in the early fourteenth century, that is, as early as the time
of Thomas’s canonization. In some of the most monumental and well-
known versions—for instance, paintings by Lippo Memmi (ca. 1323),
Andrea di Bonaiuto (1365–1367), and Benozzo Gozzoli (ca. 1471)—an
oversized Thomas is typically flanked by Plato and Aristotle, with the
“defeated” Averroes at his feet in variously dejected postures of igno-
miny, clutching his book of commentaries on Aristotle, or his book
lying nearby, half abandoned. 20 In some later renditions of this picture,
Averroes is no longer acknowledged as a critical conduit of the Greek
greats but merely set among other heretics vanquished by the trium-
phant church over the centuries. 21

18 Marcia L. Colish, “Teaching and Learning Theology in Medieval Paris,” in Schools of

Thought in the Christian Tradition, ed. Patrick Henry (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984),
106–124.
19 Etienne Gilson, “Part 8: The Golden Age of Scholasticism,” in The History of Christian
Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 325–383, esp. 361–383.
20 For a close analysis of these paintings, and particularly that by Memmi, see Joseph
Polzer, “The ‘Triumph of Thomas’ Panel in Santa Caterina, Pisa. Meaning and Date,”
Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorishen Institutes in Florenz, vol. 37, no. 1 (1993) 29–70.
21 For example, in the “Triumph of Thomas Aquinas” panel in the cloister of San Marco,
Florence (fifteenth century), and a small panel by Giorgio Vasari, now dismantled.
Cf. Liana de Girolami Cheney, “Giorgio Vasari, Saint Thomas of Aquinas and the
Heretics in the Chapel of Pius V: A New Discovery,” Explorations in Renaissance
Culture, vol. 39, no. 1 (2013), 111–133.
26 Tomoko Masuzawa

Lippo Memmi, Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Santa Caterina (Pisa)

 Theology on Edge 27

 ndrea di Bonaiuto, Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas, (detail), Spanish Chapel,

A
Santa Maria Novella, Florence.

B enozzo Gozzoli, Triumph of St. Thomas Aquinas (detail), Louvre Museum

28 Tomoko Masuzawa
This parade of images, monumental artworks located in prominent loca-
tions all, may impart an impression—a false one, as it turns out—that by the
fourteenth century or so, the Muslim sage once so revered not only as an indis-
pensable explicator of classical Greek science but also as an astute philoso-
pher in his own right was thoroughly repudiated and castigated, as the Latins
learned to get their own Aristotle, so to speak, “directly” from the Greek com-
mentators, thus skirting the invidious Arabic mediation. In this picture—as
represented in all of the above-mentioned paintings, but by Lippo Memmi in
particular—the victorious Thomist theology is front and center, and the rays
of theological enlightenment emanate from this center, while Thomas himself,
or his halo, is showered with rays darting not only from Plato and Aristotle
by his side but also from the higher Christian authorities, comprising the four
Evangelists, Paul, and Moses, each holding his book (or tablet), the source of
each ray; and finally, above them all, the multiple strands of golden light issue
from the mouth of the Lord Jesus, the Word Himself.
It is hardly necessary to mention that this was the theologians’ perspec-
tives. However much we today may champion this image and presume it
to be a representation of the mindset of the Middle Ages, there is ample
evidence to suggest that the rest of the medieval world had other ideas. For
one thing, it appears that scientists and philosophers—particularly those in
the universities—went on to extol the learning and the virtues of the Arabic
authors in general and Averroes and Avicenna in particular, for many more
centuries thereafter. For, as Hasse has demonstrated with much specificity,
well beyond the Renaissance period, the Latin translations of Arabic works
continued to be reproduced, compiled anew, and sold in large quantities.
Nothing testifies to the early modern appetite for those texts more vividly
than the numbers of editions of those Arabic authors that were printed, with
Averroes topping the list at 114 editions, followed by Avicenna’s 73, and 2
other physicians with similar numbers. “Altogether forty-four Arabic authors
were available in Latin edition [before 1700],” observes Hasse, of which
“the great majority of editions appeared before 1600.” These numbers—
in comparison to, for example, Abelard’s one and Roger Bacon’s two edi-
tions—would be hard to explain away. 22
It goes without saying that the primary (if not exclusive) market for these
books was the university and, in particular, schools of medicine and the arts.
In addition to the extant statistics regarding early printed books, there remains
the record of a number of university statutes that prescribed the reading of
such Arabic texts, including Averroes, but especially Avicenna’s Canon of
Medicine (originally completed in 1025), which is said to have “assumed a
central position in medical education, especially in the dominant universities in
the field: Montpelier, Paris, Bologna, and Padua.”23 This is as much to say

22 Hasse, Successes and Suppression, 7–27; quotation at 7.

23 Hasse, Successes and Suppression, 17–18.
 Theology on Edge 29
that, despite the opinion of their colleagues in theology, the inmates of the
University of Paris did not stop reading—indeed, never stopped requiring the
reading of—the Arabic authorities. The medical historian Nancy Siraisi has
shown that this practice of giving such weight to Arabic medicine was not
limited to a few Mediterranean universities in the South but permeated much
of the Latin West, and that the condition persisted well into the eighteenth
century.24 Seen from this perspective, then, it is evident that the Thomist
victory over Averroes the heretic was a matter relevant only to the theology
faculty; the rest of the university—even in Paris—went their own way, little
encumbered by the theologians’ opinions and, for the most part, it appears
that they managed to avoid censure by the church.
In sum, it was with reason that theology lagged behind other sciences
in finding a foothold in the university. And it was no doubt in Paris that a
theology faculty was first established, though, as with all other university
corporations originating in this period, its exact point of origin is shrouded
in the mist of pre-history. What is certain is that, by the time Paris’s first
university statutes came to be written in the early thirteenth century, theol-
ogy was counted among its four faculties. There is, however, much to cast
doubt on the notion that it was preeminent.
Why did theology make its way into the university in Paris? To con-
sider factors at the infrastructural level, we may recall that, as much as a
century before the legal establishment of the University, the city of Paris
had been attracting numerous aspiring youths from all over the Latin West
hoping to receive the best and the latest in theological education—or what
we today would recognize as such, avant la lettre. We may surmise that
this was largely due to Paris’s already well-established reputation as a hub
of the most illustrious dialecticians and metaphysicians of the time who
were teaching at the cathedral school of Notre Dame or in one or the other
of the monastic schools in the environs. As the career trajectory of Thomas
Aquinas was but one example, nearly all of the most renowned theologians
of the period passed through the gates of Paris, some as teaching masters,
and many more as students. Accordingly, this rare and conspicuous faculty
of theology became a mark of distinction of the University of Paris, or even,
according to the opinion of some within, its crowning jewel. But evidence
abounds that this lofty reputation was not shared by their contemporaries
elsewhere, or those belonging to other faculties in Paris, for that matter.
Furthermore, it is well attested that few other universities—and none in the
South—exhibited any inclination to incorporate a theological faculty into
their premise. From our perspective today, it might seem rather puzzling

24 Hasse, Successes and Suppression, 19. Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy:
The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1987); idem, History, Medicine, and the Tradition of Renaissance
Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007).
30 Tomoko Masuzawa
that no theology faculty emerged in any of the universities in Italy, that is,
in the “pope’s backyard,” as some modern historians called it. But if the
papal court in Rome was not eager to embrace theological instruction in
the university, this was not because the church was indifferent to university
affairs; far from it. It meant rather that the church’s primary interests and
investments lay elsewhere in the university, as we shall see below.

***

Momentous though the fresh infusion of Greco-Arabic sciences and philos-

ophies was for the rise of the university, this was not the only impetus for
its development. Arguably, even more important and, some would say more
critical, was the rediscovery of the Roman legal tradition that was taking
place around the same time.25 This turn of events, too, was not unrelated to
the increased traffic with the East. To be sure, in some other circumstance,
the recovery of classical Roman jurisprudence occurring in northern Italy—
somewhere near Bologna, perhaps Pisa, as legends would have it—might
be thought to be a matter more or less internal to the West, insofar as the
ultimate source of this tradition was none other than the city of Rome and
the Empire it came to rule. But the actual circumstance, and the historical
course leading up to that moment in the eleventh century, had been such that
there was no unbroken line of direct transmission between the ancient and the
medieval in this regard. For, as we know, when Constantine I relocated the
capital of the Roman Empire far to the East in the early fourth century,
the center of the juridical operation of the Empire shifted eastward as well;
accordingly, the imperial legal system continued to function and went on
to accumulate its legacy for many more centuries in the East, that is to say,
not in Latin-speaking Rome, but in largely Greek-speaking Constantinople.
Meanwhile, in the West, the legal system of the Empire had seriously eroded,
its jurisdiction irregularly fragmented, especially after the political demise of
the western half of the Empire in the fifth century.
It would be inaccurate to say that knowledge of Roman law had been
altogether lost in the post-imperial West. On one hand, elements of the
ancient legal system had worked their way into the formation of canon
law, the all-important governing instrument of the emerging Christian
church; on the other hand, Roman law (just as many other aspects of the
Empire) exerted considerable influence in the development of regional secu-
lar laws—i.e., the so-called “tribal,” “Germanic,” or “barbarian” courts—
which came to replace the imperial system in the West. That said, it is
nonetheless indisputable that it was not these piecemeal adaptations by the
“barbarian” West but the Byzantine imperial court system that not only

25 Peter Stein, Roman Law in European History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
 Theology on Edge 31
preserved but also carried forward the Roman legal tradition as a univer-
sal principle of justice. And it was the generations of Byzantine emperors
presiding in this “new Rome” who periodically issued decrees ordering the
systematization of laws and legal opinions accumulated over preceding
decades and centuries. The most celebrated instance of this was the compi-
lation by Justinian I, or what is known as Corpus Iuris Civilis, popularly
and metonymically called “Justinian Code” (529–534). And it was this
massive body of legal literature that, more than five centuries after its com-
pletion, the Latins came upon and adopted for their own use, to incalcula-
ble and lasting consequences thenceforward. It is therefore of little account
precisely where or how a copy or copies of this compendium came into the
possession of the Latins. Of far greater significance is the fact that what
was then discovered in the West was this imperial document dating back
to the sixth-century Byzantine court—which, to all concerned at the time,
East or West, was still the Roman Empire—and that this literature was
in some respects nearly as “new” and foreign to the Latins of the time as the
knowledge of Aristotle, Galen, Averroes, or Avicenna. 26
The impact of the rediscovery of the Roman jurisprudence on the
university—i.e., on the origination and immediate efflorescence of the
university—was direct, massive, and multifarious. To begin, the robust func-
tion of sophisticated legal technology that was becoming available as a result
of this recovery made it possible for the emerging population of teachers and
students to organize themselves not merely as a voluntary collective but as a
corporate body with specific rights and privileges. Though this process often
took decades, sometimes even a century, it finally created the domain of learn-
ing and scholarship as an unprecedented, legally speaking, third realm of
power, that is, as studium, sanctioned by, yet independent from, both church
(sacerdotium) and state (regnum, or imperium). Today, we may hark back to
this medieval legal principle, which rendered the university as the third realm
of power, as a reference point or perhaps even a cornerstone of the concept of
academic freedom. Ironically—that is, contrary to the assumptions of many
moderns who are in the habit of thinking that things generally get better, freer,
and more secular over time—this principle of academy’s institutional inde-
pendence, mandated de jure (if not realized entirely de facto) in the earliest cen-
turies of the university’s existence, would come to be seriously compromised in
the centuries that followed.
Laying legal grounds for its corporate status was an indispensable and
foundational role that the revival of Roman law played for the cause of the
university. This, however vital, was by no means all. A far more extensive

26 The point here is not to stress the “borrowed” nature of this body of knowledge,
hence the “indebtedness” of the Latin West to elsewhere; rather, it was the newness
and the prima facie alienness of this knowledge at the time of the Latins’ discovery
that had the effect of challenging and transforming the status quo ante.
32 Tomoko Masuzawa
material impact is plainly in sight. A glance at various statistical records
from the universities of the twelfth and thirteen centuries would readily and
incontrovertibly testify that by far the most preeminent faculty was that of
law. A vast majority of medieval university students were studying law,
that is, either canon law or civil law, or, not infrequently, both (doctor juris
utriusque). When the two wings of the law are thus considered together, in
almost all universities, the law faculty constituted an absolute, sometimes
overwhelming majority. 27 On the whole, law professors were far better
remunerated in comparison to all others, and the law graduates had the best
and the most immediate prospects for lucrative and high-ranking employ-
ment. This was because the secular state courts at all levels—municipal,
royal, as well as imperial—and, not least, the church itself needed, valued,
and rewarded university graduates with legal expertise. It should come as
no surprise, then, that among the most eminent prelates of the church—
bishops, cardinals, and popes—there were far more canon lawyers than
those with doctorates in theology.
All this effectively meant that, in the new reality that dawned by the
twelfth century, juridical wherewithal made any institution powerful, and
therefore it was in the vital interest of the Latin church—which was then
growing ever stronger and increasingly centralized, and at the same time in
fierce competition with various secular state powers28 —to acquire as many
well-trained jurists as possible, and at the same time, to curb the number
of future lawyers who would enter into the service of emperors, kings, and
magistrates. In short, at this turn of Latin European history, the emergent
legal culture was veritably revolutionizing and galvanizing society in every
sphere, and every arena where there was a body to exercise power. And the
Latin Church, increasingly centered in Rome, had the ambition to become
the greatest and the universal—that is, catholic—of them all.

***

27 “Every medieval university offered degrees in canon law. Because some acquaintance
with Roman law was essential for canonists, moreover, most universities provided some
teaching in Roman law, although not all offered degrees in it. Nearly all universities
taught the liberal arts and many could boast a medical faculty as well. Very few, however,
offered organized teaching in theology: Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge were the only
universities authorized to confer theology degrees before 1300.” James A. Brundage, The
Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians, and Courts (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2008), 244. It may be noted in addition that even in the
Paris-styled University of Oxford with a relatively robust theological faculty—and in
the country ruled by common law, where civil law therefore did not apply—the law fac-
ulty (canon and civil laws combined) outnumbered theology. Cf. T. H. Aston, “Oxford’s
Medieval Alumni,” Past and Present, 74 (1977), 3–40, at 9–16.
28 Cf. Colin Morris, The Papal Monarchy: The Western Church from 1050 to 1250
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
 Theology on Edge 33
In sum, there are broadly speaking two main reasons for the marginality
of theology in the university of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. One
is that the very subject matter, or the intellectual tradition of theology as
it had developed in the Latin West up to that point—which was essentially
an ecclesiastical and monastic tradition—was fundamentally alien to the
body of knowledge that caused the university to be established. This alien-
ness and the consequent marginality of theology was manifest not only
conceptually but institutionally as well, though with Paris as a conspicuous
exception. Secondly, theology graduates were vastly outnumbered by oth-
ers, particularly by lawyers. Moreover, the dominance of the legally trained
over the theologically trained—not merely numerically but also in terms
of their societal prestige—was an indisputable reality within the church
organization itself. In effect, theology was marginal not only within the
university but also in the church.
To be outnumbered does not have to mean that the party of the numerical
minority was thus negligible. It is at least conceivable that the scarcity of
those with theological expertise might enhance their value precisely because
of their rarity; such was indeed the opinion of some—perhaps most—of the
Paris theologians, whose doctorate could be earned only after many years of
study. (Posterity seems to have taken this claim of self-worth largely at face
value.) But even so, it is difficult to deny, or ignore, all the other factors and
senses in which theology during this period was peripheral and marginal. For
better or for worse, theology dwelt, perhaps even thrived, on the edge.
Was theology ever at the center rather than on the margin? Was there
a time—some time before the fateful twelfth and thirteenth centuries—when
theology reigned as the very font of knowledge and wisdom that governed
the world, or at least when theology presided as an indomitable authority
within the medieval sanctuaries of monasteries and the church? And was
such an irenic felicity of religious life really a proper context for theology?
It seems to me doubtful that to practice theology has ever been a matter of
continuous, seamless rolling out of the undulating fabric of belief. Posterity
may hold in high esteem an Abelard, a Thomas, or even an Ockham as an
apotheosis of the Church Triumphant, now that they are blessedly main-
stream and each secure in his position as an inexhaustible source of Christian
truth. But for all we know, their lives were lived on the edge. Their victory
as the paramount theologians of all time came posthumously; it was earned
through a lifelong series of polemics and strife, mental as well as otherwise,
some less irenic than others. From a historical point of view, then, it might be
a mistake to try to comprehend the nature of theology by insisting on begin-
ning with the image of its triumphs ex post facto. For, in real time, theology
worthy of its name often—perhaps always—has dwelt in the outer zone of
infinite danger, negotiating with some foreign agents, taking risks to contain
unwelcome commotion, an intruder, or possibly, an enemy. That said, every
once in a while, the struggle seems to result in a permanent asset, a gem.
2 Violence, Religion, Metaphysics
Gwenaëlle Aubry
Centre National de la Recherche Scientific, Paris, France

Translated by Jacob Levi

The thought of Hent de Vries is traversed in its entirety by the question

of violence. In the patient and disquieting formulations that are proposed
in the trilogy comprising Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, Religion
and Violence, and Minimal Theologies, the dialogue with Jacques Derrida
occupies a privileged position. The question of violence is articulated in the
first place for de Vries and Derrida in terms of foundation, or more precisely
what Derrida calls the “paradox” of foundation, namely, the fact that “the
foundation of law – law of the law, institution of the institution, origin of
the constitution – is a ‘performative’ event that cannot belong to the set that
it founds, inaugurates, or justifies.”1 This is what Derrida names, in a dou-
ble echo of Montaigne and Pascal, “the mystical foundation of authority.”2
De Vries in turn probes and deploys this motif, notably by demonstrat-
ing its relationship with Kierkegaard’s horror religiosus, Adorno’s horror
(Grauen), and even Levinas’s “il y a.”3 Derridean deconstruction operates
as the matrix which, over the long term and for multiple traditions, allows
the interrogation and manifestation of this “‘outside’ and ‘exteriority’ – or,
what comes down to the same, [this] deep-down ‘Inside’ and ‘interiority’ –
that is [this] nondiscursive element or ferment that surrounds and pervades,
enables and threatens the life of words and concepts, arguments and style”
(Minimal Theologies, 545).
While exploring this intimate other of reason, this collapsed foundation
whose exposition is the best way to take apart its potentially catastrophic
effects, de Vries accompanies Derrida’s reflection on the violence within
the metaphysical tradition. The key text here is the critical commentary
that Derrida consecrates to Levinas in “Violence and Metaphysics,” a her-
meneutic gesture which de Vries extends in Philosophy and the Turn to
Religion and Religion and Violence, and whose importance is even more

1 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” Acts of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002),
57.
2 Ibid. Cf. also “Force of Law,” 230.
3 Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence, chap. II; Minimal Theologies, 556.

DOI: 10.4324/9780429026096-3
 Violence, Religion, Metaphysics 35
essential in his own progression because Levinas was his first “hero.”4 As
Derrida formulates it, Levinas’ project consists in restoring metaphysics
“in opposition to the entire tradition derived from Aristotle,” and by con-
necting it to ethics, that is, to the “nonviolent relationship to the infinite
as infinitely other, to the Other” (“Violence and Metaphysics,” 102). This
identification of metaphysics with ethics goes together with its identifica-
tion with religion, insofar as the ethical and the religious relation are iden-
tically relation to transcendence. Identified as such, metaphysics, ethics,
and religion are together in opposition to ontology, understood as egology
and tautology, the primacy of the same, and the self, over the other. To
characterize ontology in this way designates it as an intrinsically violent
philosophy since, according to the extensive definition that Levinas offers,
violence is precisely subsuming the other under the same.5
Derrida’s critical strategy consists in reinscribing violence in an econ-
omy. The first moment of “Violence and Metaphysics” already mobilizes,
regarding and in defense of Husserl, the notion of “transcendental vio-
lence,” that is, the idea that the relation to the other is relation to another
transcendental ego who constitutes the world in the same way as myself
rather than being constituted by it, “the irreducible violence of the relation
to the other” being, writes Derrida, “at the same time nonviolence, since it
opens the relation to the other” (128–129). In the second moment, entitled
“Of Ontological Violence,” Derrida likewise objects to Levinas, this time
in defense of Heideggerian ontology, that the thinking of being is the con-
dition for ethics, and not its denial. “Ontology as first philosophy is a phi-
losophy of power,” writes Levinas in Totality and Infinity (46). But Derrida
responds that the thinking of being, insofar as it is not intra-ontic, not
a “first philosophy concerned with the archi-existent, […] is neither con-
cerned with, nor exercises, any power. For power is a relationship between
existents ( “Violence and Metaphysics,” 171). The comprehension of being
rather conditions that of alterity, such that one must say that “ethico-
metaphysical transcendence […] presupposes ontological transcendence”
(Ibid, 177). While the thinking of being is, for this reason, “as close as
possible to nonviolence,” it cannot be said to be pure nonviolence. Because,
writes Derrida, “like pure violence, pure nonviolence is a contradictory
concept” (Ibid, 183). Once again, violence must be inscribed in an econ-
omy and conceived of as indistinguishable from the regimes of revealing,
history, and meaning.
We have taken this brief detour through a seminal text for Hent de
Vries because we wish to propose a series of interventions intended to
reinscribe in a history this triplicity of terms which is also central for his

4 Religion et violence, Preface to the French edition, 32.

5 On the extensive character of Levinas’ definition of violence, see: Hent de Vries, Religion
and Violence, 124.
36 Gwenaëlle Aubry
thought: violence, religion, and metaphysics. “In a history,” this means in
an economy of ruptures and decisions, which is susceptible as such to reveal
distinct metaphysical moments, rather than a linear and destinal move-
ment of metaphysics. In this way, “the paradox of foundation” is clearly
inscribed in the Christian theology of omnipotence, and more specifically,
in the medieval distinction between absolute power and ordained power.
Yet, this theological moment goes hand in hand with an ontology which
is historically identifiable as well, and which asserts the identity of being
and power. In other words, the founding possibility [possibilité princip-
ielle] of violence is not inscribed in ontology as such, but in a determined
ontology. It is not certain that the Platonic moment of the ἐπέκεινα τῆς
οὐσίας (beyond being) – which, we will see, is invoked by Derrida as well
as Levinas and Heidegger – offers an exit from this ontology: for while
this formula opens the way for an overcoming of ontology as well as neg-
ative theologies, it secondarizes being only at the price of an elevation of
power. The traditional opposition of ontology and henology must therefore
be called into question because both are ultimately thoughts of power or
“dynamo-logies.” But for this opposition, we can substitute another which
operates between the thinkings of being (and/or the principle) with power,
and the thinking(s) of being (and/or the principle) without power. As par-
adoxical as it might seem, such an alternative to dynamology is found at
the source of the tradition against which Levinas proposes to restore the
concept of metaphysics: that is to say, in Aristotle’s ontology, which, by
dissociating being and the god of power, also escapes the fate of violence.

The Theology of Omnipotence and

the Question of Foundation
In “Force of Law,” echoing Montaigne and Pascal, Derrida names “the
mystical foundation of authority” the fact that “the very emergence of
justice and law, the instituting, founding, and justifying moment of law
implies a performative force, that is to say always an interpretative force
and a call to faith [un appel à la croyance]” (241). This reflection on foun-
dation is connected to a reading of Benjamin’s Zur Kritik der Gewalt and
the distinction that it formulates between the founding violence of law and
the preserving violence of law. It is the founding act of law [droit], of all
justice and law [loi], which Derrida designates as structurally violent, or
even as a “coup de force”: “the operation that amounts to founding, inau-
gurating, justifying law, to making law, would consist of a coup de force, of
a performative and therefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither
just nor unjust and that no justice and no earlier and previously founding
law, no preexisting foundation, could, by definition, guarantee or contra-
dict or invalidate” (Ibid, 241).
The motif of the “coup de force,” or even of the inaugural “perverform-
ative,” is developed in numerous ways by Hent de Vries. This is notably
Another random document with
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“Oh, Bud! He’s such a delightful rascal. You don’t mind my calling
him that? I shouldn’t if I weren’t so fond of him. He’s absolutely
necessary to our social existence. We’d stagnate without him.”
“Bud was always a master hand at stirring things up. His methods
are a little peculiar at times, but he does get results.”
“There’s no question but that he’s a warm admirer of yours.”
“That’s because he’s forgotten about me! He hadn’t seen me for five
years.”
“I think possibly I can understand that one wouldn’t exactly forget
you, Mr. Storrs.”
She let the words fall carelessly, as though to minimize their daring
in case they were not wholly acceptable to her auditor. The point was
not lost upon him. He was not without his experience in the gentle art
of flirtation, and her technic was familiar. There was always,
however, the possibility of variations in the ancient game, and he
hoped that Mrs. Shepherd Mills was blessed with originality.
“There’s a good deal of me to forget; I’m six feet two!”
“Well, of course I wasn’t referring altogether to your size,” she said
with her murmurous little laugh. “I adore big men, and I suppose
that’s why I married a small one. Isn’t’ it deliciously funny how
contrary we are when it comes to the important affairs of our lives! I
suppose it’s just because we’re poor, weak humans. We haven’t the
courage of our prejudices.”
“I’d never thought of that,” Bruce replied. “But it is an interesting idea.
I suppose we’re none of us free agents. It’s not in the great design of
things that we shall walk a chalk line. If we all did, it would probably
be a very stupid world.”
“I’m glad you feel that way about it. For a long time half the world
tried to make conformists of the other half; nowadays not more than
a third are trying to keep the rest on the chalk line—and that third’s
skidding! People think me dreadfully heretical about everything. But
—I’m not, really! Tell me you don’t think me terribly wild and
untamed.”
“I think,” said Bruce, feeling that here was a cue he mustn’t miss, “I
think you are very charming. If it’s your ideas that make you so, I
certainly refuse to quarrel with them.”
“How beautifully you came up on that! Something tells me that I’m
not going to be disappointed in you. I have a vague sort of idea that
we’re going to understand each other.”
“You do me great honor! It will be a grief to me if we don’t.”
“It’s odd how instantly we recognize the signals when someone
really worth while swims into our ken,” she said pensively. “Dear old
Nature looks after that! Bud intimated that you’re to be one of us;
throw in your lot with those of us who struggle along in this rather
nice, comfortable town. If you enjoy grandeur in social things, you’ll
not find much here to interest you; but if just nice little companies
and a few friends are enough, you can probably keep amused.”
“If the Freemans’ friends are specimens and there’s much of this sort
of thing”—he waved his hand toward the company within—“I
certainly shall have nothing to complain of.”
“We must see you at our house. I haven’t quite Dale’s knack of
attracting people”—she paused a moment upon this note of humility
—“but I try to bring a few worth while people together. I’ve educated
a few men to drop in for tea on Thursdays with usually a few of my
pals among the young matrons and a girl or two. If you feel moved
——”
“I hope you’re not trifling with me,” said Bruce, “for I shall certainly
come.”
“Then that’s all settled. Don’t pay any attention to what Bud says
about me. To hear him talk you might think me a man-eater. My
husband’s the dearest thing! He doesn’t mind at all my having men
in for tea. He comes himself now and then when his business
doesn’t interfere. Dear Shep! He’s a slave to business, and he’s
always at work on some philanthropic scheme. I just talk about
helping the world; but he, poor dear, really tries to do something.”
Henderson appeared presently with a dark hint that Shepherd was
peeved by their long absence and that the company was breaking
up.
“Connie never plays all her cards the first time, Bruce; you must give
her another chance.”
“Oh, Mr. Storrs has promised me a thousand chances!” said Mrs.
Mills.
 CHAPTER THREE
I
Sunday evening the Freemans were called unexpectedly into town
and Bruce and Henderson were left to amuse themselves.
Henderson immediately lost himself in a book and Bruce, a little
homesick for the old freedom of the road, set out for a walk. A
footpath that followed the river invited him and he lounged along, his
spirit responding to the beauty of the night, his mind intent upon the
future. The cordiality of the Freemans and their circle had impressed
him with the friendliness of the community. It would take time to
establish himself in his profession, but he had confidence in his
power to achieve; the lust for work was already strong in him. He
was satisfied that he had done wisely in obeying his mother’s
mandate; he would never have been happy if he had ignored it.
His meeting with Shepherd Mills had roused no resentment, revived
no such morbid thoughts as had troubled him on the night of his
arrival in town. Shepherd Mills was his half-brother; this, to be sure,
was rather staggering; but his reaction to the meeting was void of
bitterness. He speculated a good deal about young Mills. The
gentleness and forbearance with which he suffered the raillery of his
intimates, his anxiety to be accounted a good fellow, his serious
interest in matters of real importance—in all these things there was
something touching and appealing. It was difficult to correlate
Shepherd with his wife, but perhaps their dissimilarities were only
superficial. Bruce appraised Connie Mills as rather shallow, fond of
admiration, given to harmless poses in which her friends evidently
encouraged and indulged her. She practiced her little coquetries with
an openness that was in itself a safeguard. As they left the
Freemans, Shepherd and his wife had repeated their hope of seeing
him again. It was bewildering, but it had come about so naturally that
there seemed nothing extraordinary in the fact that he was already
acquainted with members of Franklin Mills’s family....
Bruce paused now and then where the path drew in close to the river
to look down at the moonlit water through the fringe of trees and
shrubbery. A boy and girl floated by in a canoe, the girl singing as
she thrummed a ukulele, and his eyes followed them a little wistfully.
Farther on the dull put-put-put of a motor-boat broke the silence. The
sound ceased abruptly, followed instantly by a colloquy between the
occupants.
“Damn this fool thing!” ejaculated a feminine voice. “We’re stuck!”
“I had noticed it!” said another girl’s voice good naturedly. “But such
is the life of the sailor. I wouldn’t just choose this for an all-night
camp!”
“Don’t be so sweet about it, Millicent! I’d like to sink this boat.”
“It isn’t Polly’s fault. She’s already half-buried in the sand,” laughed
the other.
Bruce scrambled down to the water’s edge and peered out upon the
river. A small power boat had grounded on a sandbar in the middle
of the stream. Its occupants were two young women in bathing suits.
But for their voices he would have taken them for boys. One was
tinkering with the engine while the other was trying to push off the
boat with an oar which sank ineffectually in the sand. In their
attempts to float their craft the young women had not seen Bruce,
who, satisfied that they were in no danger, was rather amused by
their plight. They were presumably from one of the near-by villas and
their bathing suits implied familiarity with the water. The girl at the
engine talked excitedly with an occasional profane outburst; her
companion was disposed to accept the situation philosophically.
“We can easily swim out, so don’t get so excited, Leila,” said the girl
with the oar. “And do stop swearing; voices travel a long way over
the water.”
“I don’t care who hears me,” said the other, though in a lower tone.
She gave the engine a spin, starting the motor, but the power was
unequal to the task of freeing the boat. With an exclamation of
disgust she turned off the switch and the futile threshing of the
propeller ceased.
“Let’s swim ashore and send back for Polly,” said the girl addressed
as Millicent.
“I see myself swimming out!” the other retorted. “I’m not going to
leave Polly here for some pirate to steal.”
“Nobody’s going to steal her. This isn’t the ocean, you know.”
“Well, no fool boat’s going to get the best of me! Where’s that flask?
I’m freezing!”
“You don’t need any more of that! Please give it to me!”
“I hope you are enjoying yourself,” said the other petulantly. “I don’t
see any fun in this!”
“Hello, there!” called Bruce, waving his arms to attract their attention.
“Can I be of help?”
Startled by his voice, they did not reply immediately, but he heard
them conferring as to this unlooked-for hail from the bank.
“Oh, I’m perfectly harmless!” he cried reassuringly. “I was just
passing and heard your engine. If there’s a boat near by I can pull
you off, or I’ll swim out and lift your boat off if you say so.”
“Better get a boat,” said the voice he had identified with the name of
Millicent. “There’s a boathouse just a little farther up, on your side.
You’ll find a skiff and a canoe. We’ll be awfully glad to have your
help. Thank you ever so much!”
“Don’t forget to come back,” cried Leila.
“Certainly not!” laughed Bruce and sprang up the bank.
He found the boathouse without trouble, chose the skiff as easier to
manage, and rowed back. In the moonlight he saw Millicent standing
up in the launch watching him, and as he approached she flashed an
electric torch along the side of the boat that he might see the nature
of their difficulty.
“Do you need food or medical attention?” he asked cheerfully as he
skillfully maneuvered the skiff and grounded it on the sand.
“I think we’d better get out,” she said.
“No; stay right there till I see what I can do. I think I can push you off.
All steady now!”
The launch moved a little at his first attempt to dislodge it and a
second strong shove sent it into the channel.
“Now start your engine!” he commanded.
The girl in the middle of the boat muttered something he didn’t catch.
“Leila, can you start the engine?” demanded Millicent. “I think—I
think I’ll have to row back,” she said when Leila made no response.
“My friend isn’t feeling well.”
“I’ll tow you—that’s easy,” said Bruce, noting that her companion
apparently was no longer interested in the proceedings. “Please
throw me your rope!”
He caught the rope and fastened it to the stern of the skiff and called
out that he was ready.
“Please land us where you found the boat,” said Millicent. She
settled herself in the stern of the launch and took the tiller. No word
was spoken till they reached the boathouse.
“That’s all you can do,” said Millicent, who had drawn on a long bath
wrapper and stepped out. “And thank you very, very much; I’m sorry
to have caused you so much trouble.”
This was clearly a dismissal, but he loosened the rope and tied up
the skiff. He waited, holding the launch, while Millicent tried to
persuade Leila to disembark.
“Perhaps——” began Bruce, and hesitated. It seemed unfair to leave
the girl alone with the problem of getting her friend ashore. Not to put
too fine a point on the matter, Leila was intoxicated.
“Now, Leila!” cried Millicent exasperatedly. “You’re making yourself
ridiculous, besides keeping this gentleman waiting. It’s not a bit nice
of you!”
“Jus’ restin’ lil bit,” said Leila indifferently. “I’m jus’ restin’ and I’m not
goin’ to leave Polly. I should shay not!”
And in assertion of her independence she began to whistle. She
seemed greatly amused that her attempts to whistle were
unsuccessful.
Millicent turned to Bruce. “If I could get her out of the boat I could put
her in our car and take her home.”
“Surely!” he said and bent over quickly and lifted the girl from the
launch, set her on her feet and steadied her. Millicent fumbled in the
launch, found a bath wrapper and flung it about Leila’s shoulders.
She guided her friend toward the long, low boathouse and turned a
switch.
“I can manage now,” she said, gravely surveying Bruce in the glare
of light. “I’m so sorry to have troubled you.”
She was tall and fair with markedly handsome brown eyes and a
great wealth of fine-spun golden hair that escaped from her bathing
cap and tumbled down upon her shoulders. Her dignity was in
nowise diminished by her garb. She betrayed no agitation. Bruce felt
that she was paying him the compliment of assuming that she was
dealing with a gentleman who, having performed a service, would go
his way and forget the whole affair. She drew her arm about the now
passive Leila, who was much shorter—quite small, indeed, in
comparison.
“Our car’s here and we’ll get dressed and drive back into town.
Thank you so much and—good-night!”
“I was glad to help you;—good-night!”
The door closed upon them. Bruce made the launch fast to the
landing and resumed his walk.

II
When he returned to the Freemans, Henderson flung aside his book
and complained of Bruce’s prolonged absence. “I had begun to think
you’d got yourself kidnapped. Go ahead and talk,” he said, yawning
and stretching himself.
“Well, I’ve had a mild adventure,” said Bruce, lighting a cigarette; and
he described his meeting with the two young women.
“Not so bad!” remarked Henderson placidly. “Such little adventures
never happen to me. The incident would make good first page stuff
for a newspaper; society girls shipwrecked. You ought to have taken
the flask as a souvenir. Leila is an obstreperous little kid; she really
ought to behave herself. Right the first time. Leila Mills, of course; I
think I mentioned her the other day. Her friend is Millicent Harden.
Guess I omitted Millicent in my review of our citizens. Quite a
remarkable person. She plays the rôle of big sister to Leila; they’re
neighbors on Jefferson Avenue. That’s just a boathouse on the Styx
that Mills built for Leila’s delectation. She pulls a cocktail tea there
occasionally. Millicent’s pop made a fortune out of an asthma cure—
the joy of all cut-rate druggists. Not viewed with approval by medical
societies. Socially the senior Hardens are outside the breastworks,
but Millicent is asked to very large functions, where nobody knows
who’s there. They live in that whopping big house just north of the
Mills place, and old Doc Harden gives Millicent everything she
wants. Hence a grand organ, and the girl is a regular Cecelia at the
keys. Really plays. Strong artistic bent. We can’t account for people
like the Hardens having such a daughter. There’s a Celtic streak in
the girl, I surmise—that odd sort of poetic strain that’s so beguiling in
the Irish. She models quite wonderfully, they tell me. Well, well! So
you were our little hero on the spot!”
“But Leila?” said Bruce seriously. “You don’t quite expect to find the
daughter of a prominent citizen tipsy on a river, and rather profane at
that.”
“Oh, thunder!” exclaimed Henderson easily. “Leila’s all right. You
needn’t worry about her. She’s merely passing through a phase and
will probably emerge safely. Leila’s hardly up to your standard, but
Millicent is a girl you’ll like. I ought to have told Dale to ask Millicent
here. Dale’s a broad-minded woman and doesn’t mind it at all that
old Harden’s rolled up a million by being smart enough to scamper
just a nose length ahead of the Federal grand jury carrying his rotten
dope in triumph.”
“Miss Mills, I suppose, is an acceptable member of the Freemans’
group?” Bruce inquired.
“Acceptable enough, but this is all too tame for Leila. Curious sort of
friendship—Leila and Millicent. Socially Millicent is, in a manner of
speaking, between the devil and the deep sea. She’s just a little too
superior to train with the girls of the Longview Country Club set and
the asthma cure keeps her from being chummy with the Faraway
gang. But I’ll say that Leila’s lucky to have a friend like Millicent.”
“Um—yes,” Bruce assented. “I’m beginning to see that your social
life here has a real flavor.”
“Well, it’s not all just plain vanilla,” Bud agreed with a yawn.
 CHAPTER FOUR
I
Henderson made his wife’s return an excuse for giving a party at the
Faraway Country Club. Mrs. Henderson had brought home a trophy
from the golf tournament and her prowess must be celebrated. She
was a tall blonde with a hearty, off-hand manner, and given to plain,
direct speech. She treated Bud as though he were a younger
brother, to be humored to a certain point and then reminded a little
tartly of the limitations of her tolerance.
When Bruce arrived at the club he found his hostess and Mrs.
Freeman receiving the guests in the hall and directing them to a dark
end of the veranda where Bud was holding forth with a cocktail-
shaker. Obedient to their hint, he stumbled over the veranda chairs
until he came upon a group of young people gathered about Bud,
who was energetically compounding drinks as he told a story. Bruce
knew the story; it was the oldest of Bud’s yarns, and his interest
wavered to become fixed immediately upon a girl beside him who
was giving Bud her complete attention. Even in the dim light of the
veranda there was no mistaking her: she was the Millicent Harden
he had rescued from the sand bar. At the conclusion of the story she
joined in the general laugh and turned round to find Bruce regarding
her intently.
“I beg your pardon,” he said and bowed gravely.
“Oh, you needn’t!” she replied quickly.
He lifted his head to find her inspecting him with an amused smile.
“I might find someone to introduce us—Mr. Henderson, perhaps,” he
said. “My name—if the matter is important—is Bruce Storrs.”
“Possibly we might complete the introduction unassisted—my name
is Millicent Harden!”
“How delightful! Shall we dance?”
After the dance he suggested that they step out for a breath of air.
They found seats and she said immediately:
“Of course I remember you; I’d be ashamed if I didn’t. I’m glad of this
chance to thank you. I know Leila—Miss Mills—will want to thank
you, too. We must have seemed very silly that night on the river.”
“Such a thing might happen to anyone; why not forget it?”
“Let me thank you again,” she said seriously. “You were ever so
kind.”
“The incident is closed,” he remarked with finality. “Am I keeping you
from a partner? They’re dancing again. We might sit this out if I’m
not depriving you——”
“You’re not. It’s warm inside and this is a relief. We might even
wander down the lawn and look for elves and dryads and nymphs.
Those big trees and the stars set the stage for such encounters.”
“It’s rather nice to believe in fairies and such things. At times I’m a
believer; then I lose my faith.”
“We all forget our fairies sometimes,” she answered gravely.
He had failed to note at their meeting on the river the loveliness of
her voice. He found himself waiting for the recurrence of certain
tones that had a curious musical resonance. He was struck by a
certain gravity in her that was expressed for fleeting moments in both
voice and eyes. Even with the newest dance music floating out to
them and the light and laughter within, he was aware of an
indefinable quality in the girl that seemed somehow to translate her
to remote and shadowy times. Her profile—clean-cut without
sharpness—and her manner of wearing her abundant hair—carried
back loosely to a knot low on her head—strengthened his impression
of her as being a little foreign to the place and hour. She spoke with
quiet enthusiasm of the outdoor sports that interested her—riding
she enjoyed most of all. Henderson had intimated that her social life
was restricted, but she bore herself more like a young woman of the
world than any other girl he remembered.
“Maybelle Henderson will scold me for hiding you away,” she said.
“But I just can’t dance whenever the band plays. It’s got to be an
inspiration!”
“Then I thank you again for one perfect dance! I’m afraid I didn’t
appreciate what you were giving me.”
“Oh, I danced with you to hide my embarrassment!” she laughed.
Half an hour passed and they had touched and dismissed many
subjects when she rose and caught the hand of a girl who was
passing.
“Miss Mills, Mr. Storrs. It’s quite fitting that you should meet Mr.
Storrs.”
“Fitting?” asked the girl, breathless from her dance.
“We’ve all met before—on the river—most shockingly! You might just
say thank you to Mr. Storrs.”
“Oh, this is not——” Leila drew back and inspected Bruce with a
direct, candid gaze.
“Miss Harden is mistaken; this is the first time we ever met,” declared
Bruce.
“Isn’t he nice!” Leila exclaimed. “From what Millie said I knew you
would be like this.” And then: “Oh, lots of people are bragging about
you and promising to introduce me! Here comes Tommy Barnes; he
has this dance. Oh, Millie! if you get a chance you might say a kind
word to papa. He’s probably terribly bored by this time.”
“Leila’s a dear child! I’m sure you’ll like her,” said Millicent as the girl
fluttered away. “Oh, I adore this piece! Will you dance with me?”
As they finished the dance Mrs. Henderson intercepted them.
“Aren’t you the limit, you two? I’ve had Bud searching the whole
place for you and here you are! Quite as though you hadn’t been
hiding for the last hour.”
“I’m going to keep Mr. Storrs just a moment longer,” said Millicent.
“Leila said her father was perishing somewhere and I want Mr. Storrs
to meet him.”
“Yes; certainly,” said Bruce.
He walked beside her into the big lounge, where many of the older
guests were gathered.
“Poor Mr. Mills!” said Millicent after a quick survey of the room.
“There he is, listening to one of Mr. Tasker’s interminable yarns.”
She led the way toward a group of men, one of whom was evidently
nearing the end of a long story. One of his auditors, a dark man of
medium height and rather stockily built, was listening with an air of
forced attention. His grayish hair was brushed smoothly away from a
broad forehead, his neatly trimmed mustache was a trifle grayer than
his hair. Millicent and Bruce fell within the line of his vision, and his
face brightened instantly as he nodded to the girl and waved his
hand. The moment the story was ended he crossed to them, his
eyes bright with pleasure and a smile on his face.
“I call it a base desertion!” he exclaimed. “Leila brings me here and
coolly parks me. A father gets mighty little consideration these days!”
“Don’t scold! Mr. Mills—let me present Mr. Storrs.”
“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Storrs,” said Mills with quiet cordiality.
He swept Bruce with a quick, comprehensive scrutiny.
“Mr. Storrs has lately moved here,” Millicent explained.
“I congratulate you, Mr. Storrs, on having fallen into good hands.”
“Oh, Miss Harden is taking splendid care of me!” Bruce replied.
“She’s quite capable of doing that!” Mills returned.
Bruce was studying Franklin Mills guardedly. A man of reserves and
reticences, not a safe subject for quick judgments. His manner was
somewhat listless now that the introduction had been accomplished;
and perhaps aware of this, he addressed several remarks to Bruce,
asking whether the music was all that the jazzy age demanded;
confessed with mock chagrin that his dancing days were over.
“You only think they are! Mr. Mills really dances very well. You’d be
surprised, Mr. Storrs, considering how venerable he is!”
“That’s why I don’t dance!” Mills retorted with a rueful grin.
“‘Considering his age’ is the meanest phrase that can be applied to a
man of fifty.”
Bud Henderson here interrupted them, declaring that dozens of
people were disconsolate because Bruce had concealed himself.
“Of course you must go!” said Millicent.
“I hope to meet you again,” Mills remarked as Bruce bowed to him.
“Thank you, Mr. Mills,” said Bruce.
He was conscious once more of Mills’s intent scrutiny. It seemed to
him as he walked away that Mills’s eyes followed him.
“What’s the matter, old top?” Bud demanded. “You’re not tired?”
“No; I’m all right,” Bruce replied, though his heart was pounding hard;
and feeling a little giddy, he laid his hand on Henderson’s arm.
 CHAPTER FIVE
I
Franklin Mills stood by one of the broad windows in his private office
gazing across the smoky industrial district of his native city. With his
hands thrust into his trousers’ pockets, he was a picture of negligent
ease. His face was singularly free of the markings of time. His thick,
neatly trimmed hair with its even intermixture of white added to his
look of distinction. His business suit of dark blue with an obscure
green stripe was evidently a recent creation of his tailor, and a wing
collar with a neatly tied polka-dot cravat contributed further to the
impression he gave of a man who had a care for his appearance.
The gray eyes that looked out over the city narrowed occasionally as
some object roused his attention—a freight train crawling on the
outskirts or some disturbance in the street below. Then he would
resume his reverie as though enjoying his sense of immunity from
the fret and jar of the world about him.
Bruce Storrs. The name of the young man he had met at the Country
Club lingered disturbingly in his memory. He had heard someone ask
that night where Storrs came from, and Bud Henderson, his sponsor,
had been ready with the answer, “Laconia, Ohio.” Mills had been
afraid to ask the question himself. Long-closed doors swung open
slowly along the dim corridor of memory and phantom shapes
emerged—among them a figure Franklin Mills recognized as himself.
Swiftly he computed the number of years that had passed since, in
his young manhood, he had spent a summer in the pleasant little
town, sent there by his father to act as auditor of a manufacturing
concern in which Franklin Mills III for a time owned an interest.
Marian Storrs was a lovely young being—vivacious, daring, already
indifferent to the man to whom she had been married two years....
He had been a beast to take advantage of her, to accept all that she
had yielded to him with a completeness and passion that touched
him poignantly now as she lived again in his memory.... Was this
young man, Bruce Storrs, her son? He was a splendid specimen,
distinctly handsome, with the air of breeding that Mills valued. He
turned from the window and walked idly about the room, only to
return to his contemplation of the hazy distances.
The respect of his fellow man, one could see, meant much to him.
He was Franklin Mills, the fourth of the name in succession in the
Mid-western city, enjoying an unassailable social position and able to
command more cash at a given moment than any other man in the
community. Nothing was so precious to Franklin Mills as his peace of
mind, and here was a problem that might forever menace that
peace. The hope that the young man himself knew nothing did not
abate the hateful, hideous question ... was he John Storrs’s son or
his own? Surely Marian Storrs could not have told the boy of that old
episode....
Nearly every piece of property in the city’s original mile square had
at some time belonged to a Mills. The earlier men of the name had
been prominent in public affairs, but he had never been interested in
politics and he never served on those bothersome committees that
promote noble causes and pursue the public with subscription
papers. When Franklin Mills gave he gave liberally, but he preferred
to make his contributions unsolicited. It pleased him to be
represented at the State Fair with cattle and saddle horses from
Deer Trail Farm. Like his father and grandfather, he kept in touch
with the soil, and his farm, fifteen miles from his office, was a show
place; his Jersey herd enjoyed a wide reputation. The farm was as
perfectly managed as his house and office. Its carefully tended
fields, his flocks and herds and the dignified Southern Colonial
house were but another advertisement of his substantial character
and the century-long identification of his name with the State.
His private office was so furnished as to look as little as possible like
a place for the transaction of business. There were easy lounging
chairs, a long leathern couch, a bookcase, a taboret with cigars and
cigarettes. The flat-top desk, placed between two windows,
contained nothing but an immaculate blotter and a silver desk set
that evidently enjoyed frequent burnishing. It was possible for him to
come and go without traversing the other rooms of the suite. Visitors
who passed the office boy’s inspection and satisfied a prim
stenographer that their errands were not frivolous found themselves
in communication with Arthur Carroll, Mills’s secretary, a young man
of thirty-five, trained as a lawyer, who spoke for his employer in all
matters not demanding decisions of first importance. Carroll was not
only Mills’s confidential man of business, but when necessary he
performed the duties of social secretary. He was tactful, socially in
demand as an eligible bachelor, and endowed with a genius for
collecting information that greatly assisted Mills in keeping in touch
with the affairs of the community.
Mills glanced at his watch and turned to press a button in a plate on
the corner of his desk. Carroll appeared immediately.
“You said Shep was coming?” Mills inquired.
“Yes; he was to be here at five, but said he might be a little late.”
Mills nodded, asked a question about the survey of some land
adjoining Deer Trail Farm for which he was negotiating, and listened
attentively while Carroll described a discrepancy in the boundary
lines.
“Is that all that stands in the way?” Mills asked.
“Well,” said Carroll, “Parsons shows signs of bucking. He’s thought
of reasons, sentimental ones, for not selling. He and his wife moved
there when they were first married and their children were all born on
the place.”
“Of course we have nothing to do with that,” remarked Mills, slipping
an ivory paper knife slowly through his fingers. “The old man is a
failure, and the whole place is badly run down. I really need it for
pasture.”
“Oh, he’ll sell! We just have to be a little patient,” Carroll replied.
“All right, but don’t close till the title’s cleared up. I don’t buy law
suits. Come in, Shep.”
Shepherd Mills had appeared at the door during this talk. His father
had merely glanced at him, and Shepherd waited, hat in hand, his
topcoat on his arm, till the discussion was ended.
“What’s that you’ve got there?” his father asked, seating himself in a
comfortable chair a little way from the desk.
In drawing some papers from the pocket of his overcoat, Shepherd
dropped his hat, picked it up and laid it on the desk. He was trying to
appear at ease, and replied that it was a contract calling for a large
order which the storage battery company had just made.
“We worked a good while to get that,” said the young man with a ring
of pride in his voice. “I thought you’d like to know it’s all settled.”
Mills put on his glasses, scanned the document with a practiced eye
and handed it back.
“That’s good. You’re running full capacity now?”
“Yes; we’ve got orders enough to keep us going full handed for
several months.”
The young man’s tone was eager; he was clearly anxious for his
father’s approval. He had expected a little more praise for his
success in getting the contract, but was trying to adjust himself to his
father’s calm acceptance of the matter. He drummed the edge of the
desk as he recited certain figures as to conditions at the plant. His
father disconcertingly corrected one of his statements.
“Yes; you’re right, father,” Shepherd stammered. “I got the July
figures mixed up with the June report.”
Mills smiled indulgently; took a cigarette from a silver box on the
taboret beside him and unhurriedly lighted it.
“You and Constance are coming over for dinner tonight?” he asked.
“I think Leila said she’d asked you.”
His senior’s very calmness seemed to add to Shepherd’s
nervousness. He rose and laid his overcoat on the couch, drew out
his handkerchief and wiped his forehead, remarking that it was warm
for the season.
“I hadn’t noticed it,” his father remarked in the tone of one who is
indifferent to changes of temperature.
“There’s a little matter I’ve been wanting to speak to you about,”
Shepherd began. “I thought it would be better to mention it here—
you never like talking business at the house. If it’s going to be done it
ought to be started now, before the bad weather sets in.”
He paused, a little breathless, and Mills said, the least bit impatiently:
“Do you mean that new unit at the plant? I thought we’d settled that. I
thought you were satisfied you could get along this winter with the
plant as it is.”
“Oh, no! It’s not that!” Shepherd hastily corrected. “Of course that’s
all settled. This is quite a different matter. I only want to suggest it
now so you can think it over. You see, our employees were all
mightily pleased because you let them have the use of the Milton
farm. There’s quite a settlement grown up around the plant and the
Milton land is so near they can walk to it. I’ve kept tab this summer
and about a hundred of the men go there Saturday afternoons and
Sundays; mostly married men who take their families. I could see it
made a big difference in the morale of the shop.”
He paused to watch the effect of his statements, but Mills made no
sign. He merely recrossed his legs, knocked the ash from his
cigarette and nodded for his son to go on.
“I want you to know I appreciate your letting me use the property that
way,” Shepherd resumed. “I was out there a good deal myself, and
those people certainly enjoyed themselves. Now what’s in my mind
is this, father”—he paused an instant and bent forward with boyish
eagerness—“I’ve heard you say you didn’t mean to sell any lots in
the Milton addition for several years—not until the street car line’s
extended—and I thought since the factory’s so close to the farm, we
might build some kind of a clubhouse the people could use the year
round. They can’t get any amusements without coming into town,
and we could build the house near the south gate of the property,
where our people could get to it easily. They could have dances and
motion pictures, and maybe a few lectures and some concerts,
during the winter. They’ll attend to all that themselves. Please
understand that I don’t mean this as a permanent thing. The
clubhouse needn’t cost much, so when you get ready to divide the