In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Athens, Arden, Jerusalem: Essays in Honor of Mera Flaumenhaft by Paul T. Wilford and Kate Havard
  • Jeffrey Dirk Wilson
WILFORD, Paul T. and Kate Havard. Athens, Arden, Jerusalem: Essays in Honor of Mera Flaumenhaft. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2017. xvii + 324 pp. Cloth, $110.00

This festschrift explores a classic Straussian theme, the relation of philosophy and faith under the metaphor of Athens and Jerusalem, but with a difference. Arden intervenes between the two, more than a suggestion of Shakespeare's As You Like It. The epigraph, taken from that play, begins "Sweet are the uses of adversity." The contributors—including Ronna Burger, Eva Brann, Leon Kass, and Wilfrid McClay—engage in friendly dialectical contretemps, with the emphasis on "friendly." The volume emanates friendship and especially as found among the faculty and students of St. John's College, Annapolis.

Playfulness also characterizes this book, again signaled in the title. Mera Flaumenhaft wrote her doctoral dissertation on Politics and Technique in the Plays of John Arden. Arden, who died in 2012, was a distinguished British Marxist dramatist, influenced by Bertolt Brecht. Thus, in a sense, for Flaumenthaft, the dialectic of Athens and Jerusalem unfolded in the plays of Arden. To fully appreciate this collection of essays, one must always be alive to the possibility of the esoteric coursing through the text just beneath the surface. Like the river of Cratylus, this book cannot be stepped into even once.

The volume is divided into three sections. "Athens" begins with seven essays on topics of ancient Greek mythology and philosophy. "Arden" follows with seven essays on Shakespeare. "Jerusalem" has four chapters on themes from the Hebrew scriptures. As an epilogue, Mera Flaumenhaft's husband, Harvey, closes the collection with a chapter on George Washington. Although the first section is the most explicitly philosophical, like the life and work of Mera Flaumenhaft—and indeed the culture of St. John's College—all the essays illustrate how to read any text philosophically. In this way, the collection expresses the essentially communitarian character of philosophy qua philosophy as opposed to philosophy qua academic subject. That this is a book about reading texts [End Page 403] is explicit and intentional on the part of the editors. They give details of Mera Flaumenhaft's encounter at the University of Chicago with Karl Joachim Weintraub, who told her that "'disciplined imagination' was a habit that could make the most alien-seeming thinkers, accessible and even fundamental, to all readers, even if they were not ultimately convinced by their arguments." That led ultimately to a life dedicated to guiding young people in the engaged reading of primary texts.

Kass's essay, "Professor or Friend," is the first chapter. After a brief reflection on the friendship between him and his wife with the Flaumenhafts, Kass plunges into Aristotle's account of friendship in the Nicomachean Ethics as it relates to politics, happiness, the nature of rationality, and the way that human reason is somehow the divine in human beings. He observes that the Ethics gets inside the reader in ways that perhaps none of Aristotle's other works do, and concludes that the Nicomachean Ethics is Aristotle in act. He writes, "Aristotle's Ethics is somehow Aristotle at work, Aristotle in energeia. Aristotle is at work in the Ethics, his book is at work on us, hence Aristotle is at-work on and in us." Just beneath the surface of his observations about Aristotle, Kass is talking about his friend, Mera Flaumenhaft, who is at-work on and in her friends and students.

Perhaps the most interesting essay of the volume is that written by Harvey Flaumenhaft on George Washington. Somehow the immediacy of Washington's greatness and of the enormous and virtually unanimous respect he commanded in his day does not easily communicate to twenty-first-century Americans in the way, for example, that Lincoln's genius does and despite the contentiousness that surrounded Lincoln. Washington is a kind of anti-Alcibiades, showing up unexpectedly at the end of this collection.

Washington had remarkable gifts, but his greatness lay not in those gifts but in his ability, in his insight, in his power of the will to set...

pdf

Share