Foreword by Roger Scruton |
Christopher S. Morrissey is a professor of Philosophy at Redeemer Pacific College, the Catholic liberal arts college at Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, where he also teaches courses in the Latin language and in Greek and Roman history. He studied Greek and Latin at the University of British Columbia and has taught courses in these languages and in other classical subjects at Simon Fraser University. Morrissey specializes in philosophical theology and his recent focus has been on its genesis in the monotheistic speculations of Hesiod and Plato. He has also published on the mediaeval Latin philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his commentatorial tradition, which includes John Poinsot ("John of St. Thomas"), from whom we may trace a foundational doctrine of signs for the interdisciplinary field of semiotics. Morrissey’s current research explores how Eric Havelock's and Marshall McLuhan's understanding of the formal causality operative in orality and literacy, and Eric Voegelin’s philosophical studies of the historical processes of symbolization, complement the pioneering interdisciplinary work by the semiotician and linguist Thomas Albert Sebeok towards a global semiotics. |
Dr.
C. S. Morrissey "Ascraeumque cano Romana per oppida carmen" (Verg., G. ii.176) Associate Professor of Philosophy, Managing Editor, |
Interview with C.S. Morrissey in BC BookWorld (Summer 2012)
"My favorite book of the year was, without a doubt, Canadian philosopher Chris Morrissey’s new translation of Hesiod’s Theogony and Works and Days (Talon). Morrissey has provided a spectacular and poetic read of one of the greats of antiquity. The profundity of Hesiod’s language as well as his mythopoetic vision shine forth in this new translation."—Bradley J. Birzer, "The Best Books I Read in 2012", Catholic World Report.
"All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendancy over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided. We live by myth. ‘Myth’ is not falsehood; on the contrary, the great and ancient myths are profoundly true. The myth of Prometheus will always be a high poetic representation of an ineluctable truth, and so will the myth of Pandora. A myth may grow out of an actual event almost lost in the remote past, but it comes to transcend the particular circumstances of its origin, assuming a significance universal and abiding. Nor is a myth simply a work of fancy: true myth is only represented, never created, by a poet. Prometheus and Pandora were not invented by the solitary imagination of Hesiod. Real myths are the product of the moral experience of a people, groping toward divine love and wisdom—implanted in a people’s consciousness, before the dawn of history, by a power and a means we never have been able to describe in terms of mundane knowledge."-- Russell Kirk, “The Dissolution of Liberalism,” Commonweal (January 7, 1955), 374.