A while ago I went to JS's presentation of his new book, at Columbia. It was very interesting, and a lively discussion followed. I participated, but I wasn't yet able to put into words what I was thinking. Hence this post.

— I was troubled by the way that the word "ahistorical" was used as if it were a bad word. The philosophical foundations of human rights are "ahistorical." So they are, and isn't it in the nature of ideals to be ahistorical? Ideals can be bad and they can be good, and historicism is a poor standard by which to judge them. And: why not say, instead of "ahistorical," "timeless"? I know that's a word that people are embarrassed to use, but why? It's an embarrassment that should be interrogated.
[J once pointed out that academic critics' fondness for the word "interrogate" betrays their adversarial stance toward literature. Yes, although it's also a word that translates poorly from romance languages — in Italy teachers interrogate their students, and I suppose there's something adversarial in the exercise, but not as much as in a police interrogation!]

The flip side: I recently read Perry Miller's essays in Errand into the Wilderness, on the first few decades of Calvinism in America. He shows very convincingly that this tremendously unstable Calvinist edifice [J's talk was all about the deep contradictions in pure Calvinism] began to buckle under pressure from reality very soon — by the 1660s Boston reverends were already engaging in casuistry, and surely they knew what they were doing. Isn't there a danger in treating Calvinism in America as something that never evolved — a danger of being ahistorical?