Jesus seems to appear only in two places: (1) as the source of the Golden Rule and the love commandments, which are frequently touted as the basic axioms of the natural law; and (2) as the author and example of the ‘counsels of perfection,’ applicable mainly (though not only) to vowed religious.

I’d like to see the same idea extended to classical thinkers. Especially for the medievals, but so too with many of the fathers, the secondary literature that does exist tends to be smothered in a certain kind of late modern piety that obscures more than it reveals. Franciscans write on Franciscans, Dominicans write on Dominicans, Cistercians write on Cistercians (the seculars falling almost entirely by the wayside), and their work is invariably a blend of exposition and veneration. As a result, rigorous critical conversation with these figures only appears in those few contemporary thinkers bold, intelligent, and eccentric enough to dive into these old, obscure, often untranslated bodies of work and create their own critical purchase ex nihilo–like Agamben himself, or a few from the Radox crowd.

A few good critical introductions along these lines would go a long way, I think. They could situate the stray tidbits of information batted around in popular academic conversation within a much more careful account of a thinker’s whole body of work. John Duns Scotus: A Critical Introduction could lay to rest an enormous amount of more or less ignorant squabbling about ‘the univocity of being’; Peter Abelard: A Critical Introduction could, if Adam Kotsko is right, rein in the superficial readings he’s so often given in atonement conversation. I’ve thought for a while that I myself would enjoy taking up such a project on Bonaventure.

(Postscript. Besides being good introductions to the thinkers, these volumes would do an enormous service just by indicating where the hell to find their texts, in the original and, if they exist, in good modern language translation.)