Date/Time
Date(s) - 5 May 2017
7:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Location
Room 9204, CUNY GC
Category(ies) No Categories
Please join the Medieval Club of New York for our final talk of Spring 2017, from Valerie Allen (John Jay College, CUNY) on “The Algebra of Atonement.”
It will be on Friday, May 5th, at 7:30, and please note that it will be in Room 9204 at the CUNY Graduate Center (365 5th Ave, between 34th and 35th). Refreshments will be served after the talk.
Persian mathematician al-Khwarizmi’s Algebra (c.830) and St. Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, (c.1098) have just about nothing in common. The latter was composed some fifty years prior to the earliest translation into Latin of the former, and the two texts address very different topics: calculation of business transactions on the one hand and, on the other, Christian salvation. Yet algebra developed in part out of the need to divide estates according to Islamic law and was motivated by the need to satisfy entitlement and debt. Understood thus, it addresses concerns not dissimilar to the problem Anselm confronts of how to make satisfaction of the debt owed God. In this talk I connect the texts as two methods for achieving equivalence between incommensurables. I consider what models of equality inform both al-Khwarizmi’s algebraic and Anselm’s salvation equations, and what theological implications follow from Anselm’s logical method.