Sunday, October 22, 2006
(11:29 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
My Penance
Although my suffering as a PhD student has not yet reached Scott Eric Kaufman's level, this weekend I started to push the limits of my endurance, plowing through the Discourses of Symeon the New Theologian. Yesterday I reached what I now believe to be the maximum possible number of pages I can read in a day; today I finished the book in the morning and will soon begin work on the notes that have become my custom as I go through my Epic Directed Studies in Historical Theology.I can't say that reading Symeon wasn't interesting and informative, but I also can't say that it was enjoyable. That's why I'm baffled at how I started taking mental inventory of what I would have to read in order to put Symeon in perspective, etc. (I still can't figure out exactly why he's called "The New Theologian.")
The hurry on this stemmed from the fact that I'm going to be teaching over Eastern Orthodoxy next week -- as a result of this and a previous lecture, I'm now a little over a third of the way through the medieval directed reading. It's too bad that the course is so fast-paced (we're done with the medieval period in one more week), or I might be able to pull off the unprecedented feat of finishing a directed reading within the actual semester. Friends have told me that teaching is a great way to learn stuff you might otherwise never have gotten around to, and I'm starting to believe it (his example was that teaching intro to philosophy got him to sit down and read Leibniz, something he'd never have done on his own). The thought of teaching my own course is still pretty intimidating, though by this time next year I imagine I'll have a pretty firm basis for teaching History of Christian Thought, after TAing in a Systematic Theology course based on reading through Calvin's Institutes, studying for exams, etc.
Anyway, after Tuesday, the directed reading is going back on the shelf for a few weeks, as I will have to catch up on my Marx reading, grade all the papers for History of Christian Thought, write my AAR/SBL papers, actually go to AAR/SBL, etc., etc. Plus at some point I have to get back on track with the 20th Century stuff, which has gone absolutely nowhere since the semester starts. But once I start working on it again, I may turn either to Tertullian (a straggler from the Patristics study), John Scotus Erigena, or Joachim of Fiore. Does anyone know what is best to read of Joachim (aside from the commentary on Revelation) and Erigena? Is Erigena even worth the effort now that I've gone through Dionysius?
