Writing Worth Reading
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Writing Worth Reading
Nieremberg is taking St Augustine to the extreme and saying that, rather than time being meaningful, it is non-existent compared to the eternal. This is a very Catholic, 17th-century point of view. For him it is all about preparing yourself for eternity and, in true Catholic style, how you fare in your eternal life depends on how you lived your time on earth.
How does your next book tackle the question of The Difference between Temporal and Eternal? This is the book by Juan Eusebio Nieremberg.
This was written in the 17th century. Nieremberg was a Jesuit priest and his parents were Austrian and part of the Habsburg court in Spain. The book is a very lengthy meditation and one of the most depressing and scary tomes anyone could ever read! He is taking Augustine to the extreme and saying that, rather than time being meaningful, it is non-existent compared to the eternal. This is a very Catholic, 17th century point of view. For him it is all about preparing yourself for eternity and, in true Catholic style, how you fare in your eternal life depends on how you lived your time on earth.
It is really a book about the connection between your time on earth and eternity, which comes down to ethics. Some of the meditations on the temporal and the eternal show up in James Joyce’s Ulysses, because the Catholic clergy kept referring to him in their sermons.
But, there is a flipside which I think is the one thing that kept it going for so long. And that is that these sermons and meditations were one of the few places that the clergy could preach to the wealthy and the powerful and tell them it was time to share their goods. There are meditations in there about rich people and their cool cellars which keep them comfortable in the hot summers. But there is this idea that they will get their roasting later in hell!
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Professor Eire, who received his PhD from Yale in 1979, specialises in the social, intellectual, religious, and cultural history of late medieval and early modern Europe, with a focus on the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the history of popular piety, and the history of death. He is currently writing a survey history of the Reformation and researching attitudes toward miracles in the 16th and 17th centuries.
