Another Fun Quiz

Well, according to this quiz, I should probably read up on Captain Canterbury and find out what he's got besides a famous (and I would assume much misunderstood) proof of God's existence.

Which theologian are you? created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Anselm Anselm is the outstanding theologian of the medieval period.He sees man's primary problem as having failed to render unto God what we owe him, so God becomes man in Christ and gives God what he is due. You should read 'Cur Deus Homo?' Anselm 80% Karl Barth 73% Friedrich Schleiermacher 60% John Calvin 60% Augustine 47% Charles Finney 40% Jürgen Moltmann 40% Martin Luther 40% Paul Tillich 33% Jonathan Edwards 27%

A Thought For Advent

In his sermon this morning, Pastor Brady suggested that there is something very special about God becoming a baby, not only that in becoming a baby the Almighty has become the least powerless of us all, as is often noted, but also that the presence of a baby has a way of bringing people together regardless of other circumstances. I find something excellently charming about this second proposition, for I think it is ratified even by the experience of those of us who are less than thrilled by children. It is a peculiar sort of misanthrope who does not brighten a bit at a calm baby, and feels no compassion for the mother cloud his irritation at the presence of a wailing one. In the case of babies only do people almost universally warm to a stranger, whether at home, in a restaurant, on the street. A baby of any people can indeed be ‘a great joy to all peoples.’ (Luke 2:10) Some might say that this is circumstance of our particular culture—as though that somehow undid the significance of the fact that our Lord was a baby, as though he was not born for us too—; some might say that it is merely a predisposition necessary for the survival of the race, again as though that mitigated things, as though the significance of the Incarnation, which is God-With-Us, can be understood only insofar as we extract it from all its human contexts of history and matter, that is, as God not with us. When God chose to make things clear to us by becoming flesh, does it seem as though He would then demand we understand Him in that state in terms other than our own, when it was His aim to greet us on our own terms, in the flesh?

There is also an interesting way in which our behavior towards babies provides space in the Incarnation for some divine irony. For it is only said that we ‘fawn over’ babies for need of a sillier term; the action is adoration. We adore them and make them an object of our hope and love. How beautiful is it then that out of this little idolatry, this common sin of ours, God has worked actual worship? How beautiful that out of unconscious evil good was brought forth? Make then this occasion for sin a reminder of the good worship we all should aim at, and of the incredible ingenuity of God’s good working.

Jonson's Alchemist

Ben Jonson's play The Alchemist is the ancestor of all con-man movies; it also is an excellent expression of classical aesthetics. The play centers on what happens when a gentleman leaves his residence in London to avoid the plague. In his absence one of his servants sets up shop posing as an alchemist and takes in many deceived customers; an ever-increasingly complicated sequence of hoaxes culminates in the master's return and a frantic salvaging of the situation/getaway. It's all great fun. And since we're dealing with Ben Jonson here, it hardly appeals to the lowest common denominator: the funniest scene in the play involves a prostitute babbling about the book of Daniel.

Some good lines:

Face: By the way, you must eat no cheese, Nab: it breeds melancholy,
And that same melancholy breeds worms. (III.4.110-111)

Dame Pliant: Truly I shall never brook a Spaniard.
Subtle: No?
Dame Pliant: Never sin' eighty-eight could I abide 'em,
And that was some three year afore I was born, in truth. (IV.4.29-32)

Ananias [a puritan]: Thou look'st like Antichrist, in that lewd hat. (IV.7.56)

Lovewit [the master of the house]: Gentlemen, what is the matter? Whom do you seek?
Mammon: The chemical cozener.
Surly: And the captain pandar.
Kastril: The nun my sister.
Mammon: Madam Rabbi.
Ananias: Scorpions, and caterpillars. (V.5.20-23)

Where's the Controversy?

I guess 941 years makes people forget.

*Goes back to thinking how much better the world would be if it had been an arrow through William the Bastard's eye instead*

Hick Etymology

E.G. Withycombe, in her always informative Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names, has this to say about the name Richard (my emphasis): "Richard and Ricard were equally common in the Middle Ages, together with many nicknames and diminutive, such as Rich(ie), Hitch, Rick, Hick, Dick, Dickon, Ricket, Hicket, which in turn gave rise to an immense number of surnames."

The OED, which defines a hick as "an ignorant countryman; a silly fellow, booby. Now chiefly U.S." confirms the etymology: "A familiar by-form of the personal name Richard: cf. Dick, and Hob = Robert, Hodge = Roger."

I hope you will all find time to address someone you know named Richard as "my dear Hick."


Bonus etymology!

Before there were 'hiccups,' says the OED, there were just 'hicks,' a shortened form of 'hicket,' from whose entry we happily learn that onomatopoeia does not preclude etymology:

"One of the earlier forms of hiccup, the other being hickock, both app. with a dim. formative -et, -ock. The echoic stem hick appears also in MDu. hick, Du. hik, LG. hick, Da. hik, Sw. hicka hiccup, MDu. hicken, Du. hikken, Da. hicke, Sw. hicka to hiccup; also Bret. hok, hik (Littré), F. hoquet (15th c.), Walloon hikéte, med.L. hoquetus (Du Cange), hiccup, F. hoqueter (12th c. in Hatz.-Darm.) to hiccup. The Eng. hicket corresponds in formation to the Fr., and is identical with the Walloon. Assuming this to be the earliest form, we have the series hicket, hickot, hickock, hickop, hiccup (hiccough)."

Furthermore, the OED cites Thomas Hobbes' translation of Thucydides for the word hick-yex, used to describe the symptoms of the plague at Athens in Book II: "Most of them had all the hickeyexe which brought with it a strong convulsion." (a modern translation has here "an ineffectual retching which produced violent spasms;" the word must mean more than the OED's mere 'hiccup' if Hobbes was translating correctly). 'Hick-yex' is a combination of 'hick' and the word 'yex' which can mean 'sob' or 'hiccup.' I would surmise that this is the same word which is used under the spelling 'yucks' (cited as an alternate spelling for 'yex') or 'yuks' as a word for laughter, although the OED does not confirm this, saying instead that 'yuck' or 'yuk' is of unknown origin. There are certainly some laughs that sound like hiccups, though, and I don't see why the line isn't plausible, especially with such a slangy word.


Bonus Latin Etymology!

The Latin word for hiccup is 'singultus' which is related to our word 'single.' Thus a hiccup is a single sound, a sound all on its own. Certainly a more interesting way of looking at it than our say-what-it-sounds-like.


UPDATE 12/4:
The word Thucydides uses in the passage above is λυγξ (lunx), which means, you guessed it, 'hiccup;' it is modified by the adjective κενη, which means 'vain' or, as the other translation has it, 'ineffectual.' The lexicon I consulted made no mention of retching, although I see how you could get there from 'ineffectual hiccup.' Like our word, λυγξ is onomatopoetic.

The Wisdom of Bill Walton

Those of you that have ever heard him provide color commentary for an NBA game on ESPN know that Bill Walton is one of the most unintentionally funny figures in television sports. Anyway, this week he is the guest on ESPN.com writer Bill Simmons' podcast. In addition to some fun anecdotes, he provides some rather hilarious moments, such as this brilliant exchange:

Simmons: You have to admit the basketball that was played from Magic and Bird on versus the basketball that was played during the Russell era... I don't think you can really compare the eras, can you?
Walton: Absolutely yes.
Simmons: But the game was much more athletic in the '80s.
Walton: Yes, but...
Simmons: I just feel like you could put the '85 Lakers in 1962 and they would have blown everybody away.
Walton: How could you say that? In 1962 those guys were all eight years old. Playing against Russell and Chamberlain and Jerry West?
Simmons: No, I mean, like, use a time machine.

Which can only be surpassed by my new favorite Bill Walton Cultural Confusion:

"That was like the rock of Gibraltar on which you can build a church on."
(referring to Larry Bird, Robert Parish and Kevin McHale)

My previous favorite instance of this phenomenon was, as he was calling a game in which one of the teams was in danger of giving up a big lead:
"They can't afford to be like Beethoven and leave a symphony unfinished."

Intimations of Quantum Theory from Recollections of Early Indo-European?

I always find things like this amusing.

Old English made similar use of its accusative and dative cases (the dative had absorbed the ablative) when it came to time, and in some more colloquial phrases this usage has stayed in our uninflected modern English. For example:

Accusative of time during: I was there a couple days = I was there for a couple days.

Ablative of time when: I got there Friday = I got there on Friday.

O Tempora! O Mores!

I have titled this post with a famous phrase of Cicero's, from his first speech against Catiline. The modern reader may not understand what it means; the modern reader, after all, doesn't usually know Latin. It is rather difficult to translate the simple force of the Latin into English, and especially to find an adequate rendering of the word 'mores,' which can mean 'manners, customs, traditions," or, of individuals, "morals, or character." I am far from disowning the great difficulty, rather the impossibility, of rendering Cicero's phrase into English. I have recently discovered, however, in an old Penguin translation of some of his speeches, a manner in which it most certainly ought not to be rendered: "What a scandalous commentary on our age and its standards!"

To his credit, our interpreter, Michael Grant, does translate the two substantial words of the phrase ('tempora' and 'mores') with English equivalences that are not wholly off the mark ('age' and 'standards'). 'Standards' is certainly rather weak, given the situation (the thrust of Cicero's argument at this point is that true Roman patriots would have already killed Catiline, and not allowed him to attend the present Senate meeting), but 'age' is a fine translation, semantically speaking, for 'tempora.' What really pushes the translation over the edge is the paraphrasing and vacuous "what a scandalous commentary" that he tacks onto it. Was his goal to trivialize the great statement? I cannot imagine anyone with any command of Latin could be so spiteful of the master. Did he not think his readers would understand something like "O the standards of our age!"? Dear old Tully hardly deserves such patronizing.

It may seem rather mean of me to pick on some poor little classicist from the sixties (the translation was published in 1969). Yet the method of translation which has made itself plain in this sentence is a source of great vexation to me. The chief principle of this method, if I may speak rather broadly, is to bring the text to the reader in all the ways it can, not only across the gulfs of language and of time, but over the obstacles of different of diction, style, and priorities; with great authors this almost always constitutes a downward motion. This method commits all sorts of grave offenses against literature, the gravest being that it convinces readers that all literature sounds like their own, and makes their world for that a little smaller.

Good translation should ideally provide the reader with their author unchanged except in language, as Dryden wrote, in the preface to his translation of the Aeneid: "I have endeavored to make Virgil speak such English as he would himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present age." I for one cannot see the words our translator has given him coming out of Cicero's mouth at any time or in any nation. Yet it strikes me that Mr. Grant's translation of Cicero's phrase does have the feel of something we would hear in the House or Senate, and this thought troubles me greatly, that the greatest orator of ancient Rome would either be mute today, or not himself. What a commentary that is upon the standards of our age.

Just so you know...

Cash Advance Loans

Scattered Reflections on Shakespeare's Richard The Second

The whole play is suffused with two streams of imagery: religious and legal.

As a play it is unified much rather by these threads of diction, and the themes which it treats, than by its plot or even characters. For one cannot name any single action as the defining arc of the play: the rivalry of Bolingbroke and Mowbray but leads to the civil war and deposition of Richard, but this is accomplished midway through; what follows in the fourth and fifth acts is not necessary to this action, and only the fourth may argued for its denouement, while the fifth is concerned with a wholly new action. We may justly call the play plotless for this lack of a single plot. But perhaps this is proper to history, as distinct from tragedy, that the events rather sprawl, while the motions beneath them are made the form of the drama.

Similarly York, although he is a secondary agent in the action of the play, is as full of its problems of right, law, and loyalty as are Richard and Bolingbroke.

Why are we shown Richard's death? His last speech is a fine one, and his death surprises us by making plain the violence that has rumbled in the background of the whole play. Yet it can hardly be claimed merely for a set-piece. Again it may be necessary to the less exacting form of history, that a history of King Richard the Second ought to include his death. Yet even loose history sets its limits, as the revolt of Harry Percy, loyal ally here of Bolingbroke, is the subject of another play, though it would provide a fine or finer thematic balance as the much briefer conspiracy of Aumerle does--yet the revolt is alluded to, when Richard says to Northumberland (surely some of the best and most revealing lines in the play),

"Thou shalt think,
Though he divide the realm and give thee half,
It is too little, helping him to all;
And he shall think that thou, which know'st the way
To plant unrightful kings, wilt know again,
Being ne'er so little urged, another way
To pluck him headlong from the usurped throne." (5.1.59-65)

If the death of Richard cannot merely be a scene necessary by convention, how else does it belong in the play? Is it a strange mix of many of the play's themes, come together suddenly at the last, after even the epilogue of the conspiracy against Bolingbroke, so that Shakespeare effects a sort of double coda (Richard's death and then Bolingbroke's response to it) after the denouement of Aumerle's plot? Much is compressed into the murder of Richard: the flattery of kings, which Exton thinks he acts in, the nobility of Richard in merely being a king, the groom's impotent loyalty to his sometime sovereign, the sanctity of kingship, strangely reinforced by the way Exton's motives make allusion to the murderers of Thomas Beckett:

"Didst thou not mark the king, what words he spake,
'Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?'
Was it not so?" (5.4.1-3).

All of these are brought in with the new metaphor for the state which Richard has conceived, and which accounts for its unity in his single body and its fracturedness in the ephemerality of his thoughts.
Yet even this I think is insufficient wholly to satisfy the question.

The three women of the play are all characters most worthy of pity; I think Richard's Queen has many great lines. Yet the wives of Gloucester and York are also moving in their pleas for familial loyalty.

The wider grounds for Bolingbroke's usurpation, that is, Richard's mismanagement and over-taxation of the kingdom, which Northumberland, Ross, and Willoughby express, are never brought to the fore by Bolingbroke, but he rather makes his outward cause personal, and hides the patriotic cause beneath it; he never portrays his seizure of the crown as other than vengeance for a personal affront. Indeed it is intrinsic to monarchic or aristocratic government that the state is comprised in a few people; as in the play we are closely privy to the motives of these people, Shakespeare can show us how it is not that reasons of personal enmity mask realities of wealth and power, but rather that those broader issues are impressed into serving the desires of powerful men.

As he is accustomed, Shakespeare's gives us a great balance of characters to view, as there are many sets of sons and fathers we may compare.

The play certainly possesses a greater singleness of action than many of Shakespeare's plays. Yet is it better to say, if this play is indeed still unified rather by the complete balance of its parts within themselves, as the continual threads of imagery, the many-times repeated relations between characters, the similar situations, that the drama ought not to be considered as a thing in motion, as we must see the headlong thrusts Sophocles and his countrymen, but rather as a static presentation? Has the Bard been here more a painter than a musician?

Some few lines that struck me:
Richard: Uncle, even in the glasses of thine eyes
I see thy grieved heart: thy sad aspect
Hath from the number of his banish'd years
Pluck'd four away. (1.3.208-211)

York: Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity--
So it be new, there's no respect how vile--
That is not quickly buzzed into his ears? (2.1.24-26)

Queen: ...yet again, methinks,
Some unborn sorrow, ripe in fortune's womb,
Is coming towards me, and my inward soul
With nothing trembles... (2.2.9-12)

Richard: Mine eyes are full of tears, I cannot see... (4.1.244)

Fun Website

Tired of feeling guilty for wasting hours on stupid websites? Well now The Internet has brought you a site that lets you both improve yourself and help others. Free Rice is a site where you can test your vocabulary and donate rice to poorer parts of the world at the same time. Lots of fun, rather addictive (especially for those of us with an ego in the ring), and yet isn't an unproductive blight on mankind like, say, YouTube.

Enjoy!

A Reflection in Quotes of the Week Past

What I encountered in my reading during the week of October 7th.

The Noble (Beowulf 440-441):

Ðær gelyfan sceal
Dryhtnes dome se þe hine deað nimeð.

(Then he that death takes must trust the judgment of the Lord)

The Practical (Horace, Ars Poetica 268-269):

Vos exemplaria Graeca
Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna.

(Turn over the Greek examples in your hand by night, turn them over by day)

A Victorian Witticism (James Kirkland’s 1893 commentary to Ars Poetica 270):

“Horace turns aside to give Plautus another punch.”

The Cryptic (Socrates’ last words in Plato, Phaedo 118a):

“Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius.”

The Scriptural (Isaiah 14:7-10, describing the downfall of the King of Babylon; NRSV):

The whole earth is at rest and quiet;
They break forth into singing.
The cypresses exult over you,
The cedars of Lebanon, saying,
“Since you were laid low,
No one comes to cut us down.”
Sheol beneath is stirred up
To meet you when you come;
It rouses the shades to greet you,
All who were leaders of the earth;
It raises from their thrones
All who were kings of the nations.
All of them will speak
And say to you:
“You have become as weak as we!
You have become like us!”

William Tyndale

I know it has been a long time since I posted last, and it vexes me somewhat, although it may be quite proper, to return with a memorial post itself a few days late. On October 6, 1536 William Tyndale was martyred in Brussels. He retained some of the authorities' respect for being a learned man, and so was strangled before they burnt him at the stake. The main achievement of his life was the translation of the scriptures, for the first time, from Greek and Hebrew into English, although he was unable to translate all of the Old Testament before he was arrested. His work exerted principal influence on all the English translations of the following century, and through its influence on the King James Bible, all English translations of the Bible thereafter. His modern scholarly partisans portray him as a key progenitor of literary English, and make all the stunning Elizabethan edifices stand on his foundation. But such an appraisal is merely an attempt ingratiate Tyndale to modern followers of the cult of genius and salvific art. Tyndale certainly held a bit of cultural patriotism about him in his work as a translator-- he writes, in The Obedience of a Christian Man, his most important non-translation work, "They will say it [the Bible] cannot be translated into our tongue it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin. And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. The manner of speaking is both one, so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English word for word when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shalt have much work to translate it well favoredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin, as it hath in the Hebrew. A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English than into the Latin."--but such flashes appear only in his continual fervor to bring scriptural, apostolic religion to the people of England, his countrymen; he must surely have taken deep personal meaning from Paul's words in Romans 9 about, as he translated it, the "great heaviness and continual sorrow in [his] heart...for [his] kinsmen and brethren as pertaining to the flesh."

He is to be admired more for his work and witness, but even in those whose worship knows other objects than Tyndale's Master I think his vigorous prose ought to find a healthy applause. I give you then his biting and certainly Christian critique of higher education, again from The Obedience of a Christian Man:

First they nosel them in sophistry and in benefundatum[1]. And there corrupt they their judgments with apparent arguments and with alleging unto them texts of logic, of natural philautia[2], of metaphysic and moral philosophy and of all manner books of Aristotle and of all manner doctors which they yet never saw. Moreover one holdeth this, another that. One is a Real, another a Nominal. What wonderful dreams they have of their predicaments, universals, second intentions, quiddities, haecceities, and relatives! And whether species fundata in chimera be vera species[3]. And whether this proposition be true, "non ens est aliquid."[4] Whether ens be equivocum or univocum[5]. Ens is a voice only say some. Ens in univocum saith another, and descendeth into ens creatum and into ens increatum per modos intrinsecos[6]. When they have this wise brawled eight, ten or twelve or more years, and after that their judgments are utterly corrupt, then they beginneth their Divinity. Not at the scriptures, but every man taketh a sundry doctor, which doctors are as sundry and as diverse, the one contrary unto the other, as there are diversifications and monstrous shapes, none like another, among our sects of religion. Every religion, every university and almost every man hath a sundry divinity. Now whatsoever opinions every man findeth with his doctor, that is his gospel and that only is true with him and that holdeth he all his life long, and every man to maintain his doctor withal corrupteth the scripture and fashioneth it after his own imagination as a potter doth his clay. Of what text thou provest hell, will another prove purgatory, another limbo patrum[7], and another shall prove of the same text that an ape hath a tail. And of what text the greyfriar proveth that Our Lady was without original sin, of the same shall the blackfriar prove that she was conceived with original sin. And all of this do they with apparent reasons, with false similitudes and likenesses, and with arguments and persuasions of man's wisdom. Now there is no other division or heresy in the world save man's wisdom and when man's foolish wisdom interpreteth the scripture. Man's wisdom scattereth, divideth, and maketh sects, while the wisdom of one is that a white coat is best to serve God in, and another saith a black, another a grey, another a blue; and while one saith that God will hear your prayer in this place, another saith in that place; and while saith this place is holier, and another that place is holier, and this religion is holier than that, and this saint is greater with God than that and a hundred thousand like things. Man's wisdom is plain idolatry, neither is there any other idolatry than to imagine of God after man's wisdom. God is not man's imagination, but that only which he saith of himself. God is nothing but his law and his promises, that is to say, that which he biddeth thee to do, and that which he biddeth thee believe and hope. God is but his word; as Christ saith (John 8) "I am that I say unto you," --that is to say, that which I preach am I-- "My words are spirit and life."[8] God is that only which he testifieth of himself, and to imagine any other thing of God than that is damnable idolatry.

[1] A good foundation
[2] Self love
[3] Whether a form made into a monster (i.e. imaginary) is a true form
[4] "A not being is something"
[5] Whether "being" is of ambiguous meaning or a single meaning.
[6] "being into single meaning" "created being" "being increate through intrinsic means"
[7] The Limbo of the Fathers, where the righteous who died before Christ would dwell
[8] From John's gospel, but chapter 6, whereas the first quote is from chapter 8.

An Observation

It occurred to me, as I stood in the shower this morning, that all achievements of human genius can be split into two groups: the 'Jupiter' Symphony and the Iliad, and everything else. Sometimes things are just so clear in the morning.

Shavin' Billy

Wise words, courtesy of the great Jim West.

Words That Mean Only Themselves: Docile

It is my experience that the word ‘docile’ is one belonging primarily to animals. Its most common usage is the phrase ‘a docile creature,’ and when I, at least, use the word of people instead of animals, it operates by analogy of this sense, not independently, and applies animal characteristics to a human being. To me the word ‘docile’ suggests tameness and moreover a gentleness bordering almost on indifference. It is not so moral as 'lazy' nor so cold as 'inactive:' it is an animal word. That this meaning I have inherited is at odds with etymology does not surprise me; that I found it absent from every dictionary I have consulted does.

‘Docile’ is a direct borrowing of the Latin docilis, which means, quite literally, ‘teachable;’ it is an adjective formed from the verb docere, 'teach,' the same Latin root which gives us doctor, doctrine, and docent, among other words. If you look up ‘docile’ in an English dictionary, you will not find a definition far removed from this origin: the standard definition, which I have found in roughly the same form in several sources, contains two meanings, first, "willing to be taught or teachable," and second, "yielding to instruction, obedient, or tractable." I was surprised to encounter the first meaning, with which I am not at all familiar, because it was so exactly close to the Latin; the second gave me pause for being so slightly derived, and for maintaining a similar distance from what I would have made the current meaning. And in neither did I find even the slightest "esp. of animals" to vindicate me.

Yet it is not hard to see the shift from the Latin meaning of ‘docile’ to the one that is now colloquial. An animal which could be described as docile would probably also be described as tame or gentle, and if one were exposed only to phrases combining 'docile' with such words, it would make sense to take it for their synonym—and how else is meaning diluted but through the ingrained formulas of this process?—. Were I pressed, I would guess it began as something of a technical veterinarian or taxonomist’s term, perhaps even in its Latin original, and gained only later a new generality out of that specific use. What I find the last irony is that a word which had so humane a meaning, a word about learning and education, has become a word passing almost for an inborn quality in beasts. I leave you, then, with this dictum of Quintilian, from the second book of his Institutio Oratoria (“Oratorical Education”), a memory of the old docile: Nam ut illorum officium est docere, sic horum praebere se dociles, “For as it is the duty of instructors to teach, so it is the duty of students to prove themselves easily taught.”

Milton, Dryden, and The Devil

I do not know if I should take it as a blemish upon his art, or, as would be the vulgar opinion, as a commendation to his originality, that the greatest and most common misunderstanding of Milton’s epic was taken to by even his own contemporaries. For John Dryden writes, in an essay on Vergil’s Aeneid, as he takes stock of the whole body of epic literature, having named Homer and Vergil, and after them Tasso, as the only great epic poets, this brief appraisal of the flaws of Paradise Lost:

“And Milton [would have been a great poet], if the Devil had not been his hero, instead of Adam; if the giant had not foiled the knight, and driven him out of his stronghold, to wander through the world with his lady errant; and if there had not been more machining persons than human in his poem.”

Mr. Dryden’s last observation is an interesting one that I shall have to think on further. His second cuts to the very core of the poem, and I will suffice to answer that it was not on a whim that Milton began “Of man’s first disobedience…” and not “Of arms and a man,” although this objection is due a rather lengthier refutation. It is his third, however, that I shall answer here at length, for it is a view commonly held by careless readers of Milton, and is as erroneous as it is seductive.

Indeed, if it were not so common, I would dismiss Mr. Dryden’s criticism as quickly and confidently as any man of passable taste dismisses his equally absurd opinion (expressed in the Preface to his Fables) that the “Knight’s Tale” of Chaucer is “not much inferior” to the Iliad and the Aeneid. Unfortunately, it is an opinion which has hounded Milton’s poem in various forms. Among the Romantics, some embraced a brand of this foolishness (Shelley wrote that “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is…far superior to his God”), and others apologized for the poet (Blake wrote that Milton’s poem found its better parts among the devils than among the angels because he “was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.”). The chief assumption in this error is that the most eloquent parts of a poem must represent the author’s own views, or at least the truth. Satan is surely a charismatic character, a passionate and eventually torn rebel, true to himself and loyal, as he says, to his comrades; his demand of freedom makes Patrick Henry a monarchist and his speeches, especially at the very beginning of the poem, stand alone as the most powerful pieces of poetical rhetoric in English. All of this is almost enough (as we see, wholly enough for some) to make us forget that this is Satan. Indeed the voice of the narrator and his angelic and divine characters are constantly reminding us of this fact: the first simile of the entire book gives us Satan as Leviathan, the seeming island that is in truth a monster (1.203-208). That simile is completed with these words:

“So stretched out huge in length the Arch-fiend lay
Chained on the burning lake, nor ever thence
Had ris’n or heaved his head, but that the will
And high permission of all-ruling Heaven
Left him at large to his own dark designs…” (1.209-213)

Some 30 lines later, Beelzebub and Satan are free of their chains,

“Both glorying to have ‘scaped the Stygian flood
As gods, and by their own recovered strength,
Not by the sufferance of supernal pow’r.” (1.239-241)

Surely the lies under which Satan and his minions operate are clear from this comparison; and there are many other instances throughout the poem of his manipulative and deceptive nature. Yet many still choose to listen to his voice, as Eve did, when she found his words “impregned / With reason, to her seeming, and with truth.” (9.737-738).

I have gone astray, however, in dealing with the more recently common manifestation of Dryden’s malady rather than the disease he bore himself. For, although he is also caught up in an inability to realize that the devil is the devil, he does not go so far as to call him good, but rather calls him the hero of the poem. Coming as this does in a discussion of the Aeneid, we cannot be surprised that Dryden finds it hard to judge Milton’s poem under extra-Homeric criteria, and to make sense of the world of post-Vergilian epic except by the lens of his Mantuan master. Yet Milton serves a master higher than Vergil, higher even than the whole inheritance of antiquity, which he Satanizes throughout the poem, from the “Dorian mood” the Devils’ “perfect phalanx” moves to (1.550), to the games of the their hellish leisure (2.528-532), to Satan convincing Eve as “some Orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome” (9.670-671). Dryden has missed the point as much as Shelley or Blake; a different point, but a point no less central to the poem (did Dryden even make it to the opening of Book IX?), although more historical, cultural, and literary than ethical. When Dryden saw Satan giving inspiring speeches to his dispirited men on the shores of hell, he found him a hero because he followed the example of Aeneas, and must not have thought for a moment that Milton’s obvious parallel was meant rather to cast a dubious light upon the Trojan than endow the Devil with heroism.

The Unequaled Dr. Johnson

I have found it the surest tonic, whenever I begin to embrace the prose style of any author as excellent beyond all others, to take a little time with Samuel Johnson. I have greeted the seductions of William Tyndale, Francis Bacon, Jane Austen, even our own American Cicero Daniel Webster; yet it requires but a few drops of the antidote to dispel even these most staying poisons. If there are those among you who are unfamiliar with Dr. Johnson, I advise you in all earnestness and confidence to get hold of some of him: he is the most eloquent man the English language has produced. Shakespeare may be the Homer, Milton the Pindar of our tongue, yet as the firmer perfections of Hellenic speech were reserved to Demosthenes their later peer, so stands Johnson among the English authors. No author's diction is more pure, nor their balance more artless, and where some might approach or even attain, for a breath, the loftiest peak of elegance, there are none that can so long and so consistently persevere in that reverie as Dr. Johnson does.

I give you here an example from the preface to his dictionary, chosen because it was near at hand, although it testifies adequately enough to the excellence of his style in some of the nobler of his sentiments.

"To have attempted much is always laudable, even when the enterprise is above the strength that undertakes it: to rest below his own aim is incident to every one whose fancy is active, and whose views are comprehensive; nor is any man satisfied with himself because he has done much, but because he can conceive little. When first I engaged in this work, I resolved to leave neither words nor things unexamined, and pleased myself with a prospect of the hours which I should revel away in feasts of literature, with the obscure recesses of northern learning, which I should enter and ransack, the treasures with which I expected every search into those neglected mines to reward my labor, and the triumph with which I should display my acquisitions to mankind. When I had thus inquired into the original of words, I resolved to show likewise my attention to things; to pierce deep into every science, to inquire the nature of every substance of which I inserted the name, to limit every idea by definition strictly logical, and exhibit every production of art or nature in an accurate description, that my book might be in place of all other dictionaries whether appellative or technical. But these were the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer. I soon found that it is too late to look for instruments, when the work calls for execution, and that whatever abilities I brought to my task, with those I must finally perform it. To deliberate whenever I doubted, to inquire whenever I was ignorant, would have protracted the undertaking without end, and, perhaps, without much improvement; for I did not find by my first experiments, that what I had not of my own was easily to be obtained: I saw that one inquiry only gave occasion to another, that book referred to book, that to search was not always to find, and to find was not always to be informed; and that thus to pursue perfection was, like the first inhabitants of Arcadia, to chase the sun, which, when they had reached the hill where he seemed to rest, was still beheld at the same distance from them."

Unity, Genre, and the Last Movement of Beethoven's Ninth

I have been known, from time to time, to mount a most energetic defense of Beethoven’s symphonies against those who would dare to detract from them, and to praise them most vocally among those who admire them. Yet as I recently listened to the last movement of his ninth symphony played on the radio, I heard something quite different than my cherished image of the piece: I heard a succession and not a unity. What I mean by this is that, in a way they never had before, the sections of the piece appeared distant from one another, contained within themselves, and joined together in that they proceeded after one another, and not out of one another. In itself each section retained the individual force of that sublimity I remembered, but I found the whole diminished; where I remembered an unceasing motion forward, I heard only so many pauses.

I do not mean to appear to say I fell sick to the music. The reformulation and recombination of themes that I have long admired was still there, and there are few passages as at once forceful and elegant as when the four soloists combine. I even discovered something new to admire, and to consider: I heard, as I never had before, the alternation with which Beethoven employs his voices (by which I mean soloist, soloists, chorus, orchestra) while retaining the same tone. These elements were varied so as to alternate between the broad strength of orchestral or choral primacy and the precision of the soloist or quartet’s. This sort of alternation is curious here, for it is primarily a narrative virtue, and not a musical one, and music, in itself, hardly ever succeeds when it narrates.

Yet the last movement of Beethoven’s ninth is hardly music in itself. It is, and I do not think I had ever realized the significance of this, a poem set to music, with all the considerations that entails. All poetry is, of course, narrative, and if one is to combine poetry with music it would hardly do to leave off narrative virtues, lest the words become but another sound. And if that were the case the whole enterprise would be undertaken in futility; for the sound of men’s words cannot compare with their music. For this reason it is more often than not the needs of music that are conformed to the needs of words in such pieces. Yet Beethoven was not setting this poem to music on its own, but including it in a much larger, much more strictly musical work. His music could not support the words as it would have in a set piece: it had other obligations to fulfill. When Handel composed his Messiah he had access to all the tools of narrative variety and pacing, because his words had the primacy, yet Beethoven’s generic concerns gave that to his music. He could not compose a piece of music without wasting his words, and could not freely set his poem to music without weakening the bonds that bound his symphony together.

This may well be the central tension of the symphony (or at least its last movement). For all art stands and falls according the success with which it solves its formal problems; once you have found a way to say something, you have said it. Matter follows upon manner, and one cannot say something important without saying it well. The successive nature which I detected in Beethoven’s music was his accommodation of the aesthetic necessities of poetry; the interwoven reformulation and recombination of themes in his execution of this succession was his accommodation of those of music. One can see, as it were, the plan. But was it properly carried out? I have always assumed Beethoven’s Ninth was a successful work of art, but, then again, I had never heard the words. In point of strict fact, I still haven’t: I know no German. And, as I hope I have made clear, it is impossible to judge this work—or any work—without giving full justice to all those parts which contribute to its crisis of form (the proposition may also be worth considering that if a crisis of form is present, the work cannot be successful, but that is another argument for another day). For now I must recuse myself from this criticism on grounds of lingual deficiency, and shall have recourse only to enjoyment until such time as I have gained the German tongue.

Thoughts After Dinner at Wendy's

At Wendy's they are advertising a new sandwich; it is called 'The Baconator' and is essentially a double cheeseburger garnished with a mound of bacon. The tagline for this sandwich is "Careful, it can sense fear." The audience for the sandwich, obviously, is the young male. I did not partake, but it did cause me to wonder, what does it say about a society that masculinity is asserted by eating a certain sort of sandwich. Wendy's' advertising tactics have even taken this idea to a new place. For it was not long ago, if I remember correctly, that a similar sandwich at Burger King was advertised merely as "Meat and cheese, cheese and meat," a satisfying chiasmus that cut straight to the point, as it seemed. But Wendy's has gone further, and, even more than presenting its sandwich as a challenge to masculinity, as is also often done, has portrayed it a beast of sorts to be hunted. In eating this sandwich, says Wendy's, a man has not only asserted his masculinity by showing he consumes something with the proper cultural resonances, but has ritually acted out a sort of hunt and struggle, and emerged triumphant on his strength, the original man, the pure man of the jungle.

This all led me to wonder at what point in history masculinity in our culture began to be asserted in the sort of food one eats (one could also ask what has elevated the sort of animalistic baseness described above to masculinity, but that is probably a far far more complicated question). Food has always been linked to culture, of course: only a barbarian would drink beer and use butter where a civilized man would had his wine and olive oil in the ancient world. It is also probably true that, as men are on the whole larger and stronger than women, it is a cross-cultural phenomenon that men generally eat more than women. Yet Wendy's is not appealing to biology, but rather to a sense of masculinity that recommends a sort of primal force and vigor; furthermore the man who eats the sandwich has no more to do than eat it. He pays for it, it is prepared for him, he consumes it. Somewhere there he has become more manly, and nowhere there has he done much of anything.

It seems to me this all comes quite easily down to the capitalistic system; many things do. After all, the man is spending his money to construct his identity. He does not participate in civic ritual to gain it, he does not come into it by right of birth, does not create it in action, neither forms it under tutelage; he buys it. 'The Baconator' is one of those things that practically screams commodity fetish. However, I have not taken the time to research this fully; it would be interesting to see how the eating of meat, or of other things, for that matter, has been viewed in other cultures as an indicator of masculinity.

In any case, I just wanted to make your next fast food experience that much more complicated.

Enjoy.

Mark 10:28-30

Peter began to say to him, "Look, we have left everything and followed you." Jesus said, "Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or fields, for my sake and for the sake of the good news, who will not receive a hundredfold now in this age--houses, brothers and sisters, mothers and children, and fields with persecutions--and in the age to come eternal life." (Mark 10:28-30)

I was today stirred by this passage as I read it because it speaks firmly to the community and unity of the body of Christ, the way in which the Christian is linked to his fellows. For Christian is joined to Christian in a way that merely naming cannot capture. We are one with one another because we are one in the same Lord; “You are all one in Christ Jesus” says St. Paul (Galatians 3:28). For when we leave the family that is ours by the laws of flesh for the sake of Christ we come into a greater family by the Spirit wherein God adopts us as his own (Romans 8:15). However many siblings we had in the flesh, there are more and truer in Christ; however loving a mother, there is no care as that of many Christians; however good a father, there is none good but God (Mark 10:18).

If the Christian has indeed laid aside all that ties him to the systems of the world for the sake of the one who was sent from heaven and the word he was sent to preach, he has but chosen to dedicate himself to that only which is worthy of dedication. Yet because God is a gift-giver beyond all accounting, he requites even this good loss with a greater gain in the same kind. The Christian has left behind him a house, but every house that will receive his peace is open to him (Luke 10:5-7). The Christian has lost a brother, a sister, a mother, perhaps children. He has gained for his brother and sister every Christian around the world, and by a better bond than ever human blood or human custom could provide; for it is the love of God and not the tradition of man that effects it. His mother is every Christian which nurtures him and cherishes him and consoles him, and his children are all the Christians that he nurtures, cherishes, and consoles in turn. Perhaps he has left behind land, but the whole world belongs to his Master.

As to persecutions, by which all these things shall come, or which shall come along with them (the Greek accepts either reading), we have the assurance that we are blessed in them (Matthew 5:10), and we perceive that they are a natural result of such loss for the gospel’s sake. For whoever would cast off all that the world values to serve a man executed under due process of the law cannot long continue without the scorn of that world; and what part shall not scorn him shall stand perplexed, so that they will either harden in their hearts and become persecutors in their turn, or search out the Power that has so confounded them; and they shall find him if they seek him. So is this dedication to Christ the source of many blessings and various, both for the one who comes to follow and the followers he joins, to the ones that receive him, and the ones that see him go.

Shocking New Discovery

One of the many sharp exegetes of the biblioblogosphere has recently brought to light this reading of a text central to many Christians; he may well prevail against the very foundations of the Church.

http://scotteriology.wordpress.com/2007/07/19/shocking-new-biblical-discovery/

How I Waste My Time

There are, of course, many ways, but one of them is online quizzes, which I find quite amusing. Here's one that's been going around the 'biblioblogs' (as they call themselves):

http://www.okcupid.com/tests/13609056050722629996/Which-Ancient-Language-Are-You

I tested as Linear A, the more mysterious of the two systems of writing which preceded the Greek alphabet in the Bronze Age Aegean . Linear A's younger brother, Linear B, which seems to have been current in mainland Greece and parts of the Aegean such as Crete in the 13th century BC, has been deciphered, but Linear A, which appears to have been in use on Crete from roughly 1800-1450 BC, remains unknown. Linear B was used to write a very ancient dialect of Greek using a mix of ideograms (idea-pictures) or logograms (word-pictures), which, according to the Oxford Classical Dictionary ("pre-alphabetic scripts (Greece)") were "in origin pictorial, but often [developed] into unrecognizable patterns," and syllabic symbols. From what we can tell, Linear A seems to have operated in a similar fashion, but, as we do not know that language that matches the script, it is impossible to do more that conjecture.

Words That Mean Only Themselves: Asbestos

This is the first installment in what I hope shall become an intermittent series for this blog. The title refers to that class of words which both have a very tightly circumscribed meaning, and have been brought into English from other languages. Such words do not present the English speaker with their component parts, but rather arrive as a single unit, and therefore, to the uneducated take on a sort of mystical status in their meanings.

Take for example, the words ‘stance’ and ‘standing;’ both are formed in the same way from the verbs (identical in basic meaning) stare and stand, respectively. However, since ‘stance’ is a word adapted to English use from Latin (through Italian and French), the presence of this link in meaning to the whole system of ‘stand’ words is not as obvious as it is in ‘standing,’ which is an English word. ‘Stance’ and words like it are as slippery as they are untethered: we cannot grasp them because their meanings are so inflexible and fixed and we cannot identify their place within the bounds of our language because they did not spring out of it; they have only specific and complex meanings, and not simple or intuitive ones, because they are not native to English, and therefore must always exist, to some degree, as jargon. For these reasons I have identified them in the title of this post as meaning only themselves. I hope I will not be alone in finding it a fascinating and edifying task to uncover the etymology of such words.

I encountered today’s word, asbestos, in reading the Gospel of Matthew, 3:12, where the chaff will be burnt πυρι ασβεστω, with unquenchable fire. The Greek ασβεστος is formed from the root of the verb σβεννυμι, quench, and the Greek equivalent of un-, what grammarians call the Alpha Privative, or “The A That Takes Away,” which English speakers will be familiar with from words like 'atypical.' It therefore means, quite simply, unquenchable (Liddell and Scott says “of fire and laughter etc”). The modern meaning that you’ll find in the dictionary is derived from its application to certain minerals. Yet because of popular knowledge of the dangerous effects of those minerals, asbestos has come, in colloquial language, to be almost exclusively associated with poisoning, a turn which seems unfortunate for what was once such a fine poetic word in its original tongue: my Greek lexicon cites a beautiful phrase of Aeschylus, ασβεστος πορος οκεανου, “Ocean’s inextinguishable passage.”

What Jeremiah Said to the Enlightenment

Reading tonight from the prophet Jeremiah I was struck by his description of false prophets (23.16-17): Thus says the LORD of hosts: Do not listen to the words of the prophets who prophesy to you; they are deluding you. They speak visions of their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD. They keep saying to those who despise the word of the LORD, “It shall be well with you;” and to all who stubbornly follow their own stubborn hearts, they say, “No calamity shall come upon you.”

This false prophecy is surely the wisdom of our world, the wisdom of religious tolerance, that smiling sickness that bids us rather respect our neighbors than love them, that sets the revealed Word of God beside the vain imaginations of men, and the Creator among his creatures. And I know that I not least among many Christians of this age remain chained to these destructive worldly habits, and do but lend justice to God’s wrath in my every abstinence of exhortation and evangelism. And like the ancient Israelites, reproved and repentant, I still come back to Baal, as these words testify which I wrote some while ago upon this very subject.

The first part of the poem (which is hardly presentable as yet) described all the outward signs of a pious man; the silent watchman is from Ezekiel 33:1-9, and the burning tongues from Luke 16:19-31.

Thankful of Grace he is no means of Grace
To others: he will not upset the weights
That keep him in his comfort. How shall fare
This silent watchman when his righteous God
Descends from heav’n to judge the wanting earth?
Drenched in his fellows’ blood, his trembling knees
Shall scarce support his suppliance; all the words
He left unsaid, each brother unconsoled,
Untended, unrebuked, each one unloved
Shall cry to him “But wet our burning tongues!”
And he shall weep that he within him held
The cup of all Salvation and the spring
Of life eternal, and in all his time
Did never think to bring it to their lips.

God have mercy on us all.

Two Hours' Traffic

Last night I had the pleasure of attending a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival in Kansas City, and although I know I am not alone in finding the great many flaws of this play at odds with its popularity and reputation, it would be dishonest of me to claim that its mixed genres and sudden narrative undo the excellence of its poetry or the good painting of its characters. This production was far from perfect. Yet if it lacked much in Romeo’s part it boasted a fine Mercutio and a passable Juliet; Tybalt was more senseless but the Friar more sympathetic than usual; Paris was restrained rather than empty or caricatured, and the nurse was not so bad as she often is. Indeed there was much to like about the production, but I have a few things I would like to comment upon especially.

There is a common tendency among performers of Shakespeare, I feel, to rush their lines. I have observed this in amateur as well as professional productions, and therefore I judge that it is not so much a sign of poor acting as an aesthetic choice. Now I have heard generally two defenses of this method: first, that the lines were meant to be spoken quickly, after the manner of the time, and, second, that it is more realistic for the characters to speak quickly and less formally, and makes the play fresher for the audience. As to the first, it would be quite a valid point if the audience were accustomed, as the Elizabethans would have been, to take in sometimes complicated poetry by hearing it; suffice it to say that this is not true, on the whole, of the modern audience. The second justification has its merits, I think especially in dusting off bookishness from the plays, yet it imposes a sort of realism on the Shakespearean stage that it did not know. Blank verse is a very flexible instrument, but I feel it sometimes escapes the notice of actors full of base modern prose that the verse these characters are speaking in is not, by its very nature, realistic or colloquial, and that in this it is not merely different, but higher than everyday speech. Naturally this is truer of some characters than others.

A character of whom this is especially true is Juliet, and it was therefore most unfortunate to find this production’s Juliet quite the line-rusher. Juliet is a partner in the play’s best exchanges and the speaker of its best (and most poetic) speeches. Indeed the finest speech in the whole play belongs to her as she prepares to take the Friar’s potion (IV.iii); when she says “Here’s drink,” the audience should look on in chill terror. Yet if Juliet has rushed the unsettling imagery of the speech that gives that little line great power, it will hardly have weighed upon the audience with its foreboding, and there will be no stares and shivers. In this particular scene our Juliet’s line-rushing appeared to try to capture a frantic state of mind; yet this simply cannot be done in a poetic speech of some forty lines, if the audience is to get something from the words and not merely how they are said.

The Mercutio of this production was a fine balance to this, especially in his Queen Mab speech, which he delivered at a refreshingly measured pace. Now the Mab speech holds hardly half the complexity of conceit that Juliet’s major speeches do, and it is perhaps so popular as a set piece precisely because it is far easier to get at its progress of descriptions than the extended metaphors that Juliet runs in. In any case, our Mercutio either felt no need or resisted the urge to put some sort of character interpretation ahead of the audience's understanding of his lines; and in doing so the scene as a whole maintained a much greater coherence than it had in some other productions I have seen over the years, in which the speech becomes a set piece for the actor and not the poet.

This production also repeated the common error of forcing an intermission into the play when the real plot has just begun, at the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, and so doing damage to an already interrupted tragic momentum. As I commented to my mother after the play, Shakespeare keeps the Aristotelian unities loosely enough as it is; we should hardly encourage him with an intermission.

Aulus Gellius and the Preservation of Archaic Latin Poetry

In the eyes of most classicists today the chief merit of Aulus Gellius, a Latin author of the Second Century AD, lies in the many fragments of lost authors he preserves, especially older Latin poets. Now I find Gellius an immensely charming and interesting writer myself, and I feel that one need not find historical excuses to read him and enjoy him. Yet apparently he was not oblivious of his role as a preserver of antiquities, for he writes in Noctes Atticae I.24.1:

Trium poetarum inlustrium epigrammata, Cn. Naevii, Plauti, M. Pacuvii, quae ipsi fecerunt et incidenda sepulcro suo reliquerunt, nobilitatis eorum gratia et venustatis scribenda in his commentariis esse duxi.

“I have judged that the epigrams of three famous poets, Cnaeus Naevius, Plautus, and Marcus Pacuvius, which they wrote and left to be engraved on their tombs, ought to be written down in my commentaries by reason of the excellence and antiquity of their authors.”

Now it may be that “gratia venustatis” merely reminds us that Gellius prefers old things to new ones, and that he would hardly record the epitaphs of his contemporaries; yet he must surely be thinking also of readers like himself, who, although they matched Gellius in their wide-ranging interest, yet might not be willing to take the same effort to track down these older writers. And if we prefer the more archaic meaning (never out of the question with Gellius) of “nobilitas,” that of famousness rather than excellence, then it becomes even more likely that our author had some thought of historical preservation when he wrote this.

The first epitaph is that of Cnaeus Naevius, an author of comedy, tragedy, and even epic in the later third and early second centuries BC; Gellius says that it is full of Campanian arrogance.

inmortales mortales si foret fas flere,
flerent divae Camenae Naevium poetam.
itaque postquam est Orcho traditus thesauro,
obliti sunt Romae loquier lingua Latina.

If it be right for Gods to weep for Men,
Let th’holy Muses weep for Naevius then,
For after Orcus gained him for her treasure
The men at Rome forgot their Latin measure.

Gellius doubts whether the second one, attributed to the famous comic playwright Plautus, may have in fact been an invention of Marcus Varro, a distinguished Roman scholar of the first century BC, for his De Poetis “On Poets.”

postquam est mortem aptus Plautus, Comoedia luget,
scaena est deserta, dein Risus, Ludus Iocusque
et Numeri innumeri simul omnes conlacrimarunt.

Comedy mourned when that her Plautus died:
The stage was empty, Smile and Joke both cried,
And countless others still lie weeping by her side.

The last epitaph is that of Marcus Pacuvius, a dramatist and painter of the second century BC, whose tragedies were much admired by Cicero and his contemporaries. Gellius describes this epitaph as “most modest, most clean, and worthy of his most elegant gravity.”

Adulescens, tam etsi properas, hoc te saxulum
Rogat ut te aspicias, deinde quod scriptum est, legas.
Hic sunt poetae Pacuvii Marci sita
Ossa. Hoc volebam, nescius ne esses. Vale.

Although you rush, young man, this stone will plead
“Look to yourself, and what is written, read.”
Here Pacuvius’ poet’s bones do dwell.
This only would I have you know. Farewell.

I confess that I had quite a bit of trouble translating the last epigram, and I fear I have left it little of its “elegantissima gravitas.” I have drawn out the meaning in the last line especially, which is far more subtle in the Latin, literally, “I wanted this, that you would not be ignorant.”

In Naevius’ epitaph, the last line literally means “Those at Rome have forgotten to speak with a/the Latin tongue.”

Thoughts on Matthew 1 and Joseph

Having been very anxious after I decided to take up blogging how to begin, it occurred to me that some thoughts I had written down at the outset of another of my summer projects, reading the Gospel of Matthew in Greek, were wholly appropriate, proper to a beginning in context and content, however much they may want for eloquence and insight.

In reading the first chapter of Matthew I was struck at what the specific mission given to Joseph by the angel was; it was to name Jesus. This task is twice balanced with Mary’s role, which is to bear a son (verse 21 “τεξεται δε υιον και καλεσεις το ονομα αυτου Ιησουν…” and verse 25 “ετεκεν υιον και εκαλεσεν το ονομα αυτου Ιησουν.”) In this seemingly simple, and, as I recall the many Advent sermons I have heard, seemingly often overlooked task Joseph becomes the first person to proclaim the Gospel standing at the heart of the New Testament, indeed, of all scripture, that God is with us and is our savior from sin. This the angel makes clear: “you will name him Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.” (verse 21). And the name Jesus means “Yahweh saves,” that the God of Israel saves. Thus, in saying that his name will be Jesus because he will save his people from their sins, the angel has hinted, if darkly, that the child bearing this name will be the God of Israel. The angel makes this clearer when he offers Joseph the words of Isaiah “they will call his name Emmanuel, God-With-Us.” (verse 23). When Joseph, with a single act of obedience, names his child Jesus, he has proclaimed, albeit to a world (himself probably included) which cannot fully understand, the very core of the Gospel; he has said “this child, born of a young woman, I name God Saves, for this child will save his people from their sins; and in him will Isaiah’s prophecy be fulfilled, for he will be called God-With-Us.” To those of us who have the whole story, the meaning is obvious; to Joseph it must have appeared wondrous and cloudy. Yet Joseph preached the Gospel and confessed the glory of God’s great act without knowing he did so, and by his obedience and not so much his knowledge became a sure instrument in the hand of God to his glory.