Christianity and Patriotism

The excellent blogger Chris Tilling has begun to add to his duties the co-hosting of a podcast with three other scholars, which, if he continues to contribute to it with the seriousness and learning of his first foray, I intend often to enjoy.

The podcast, a discussion of the place of patriotism for a Christian, can be heard here.

An Epigram, to Senator Obama

Were ours the honeyed lips and tongues of gold
That gracious Mercury dispensed of old,
Well might your rivals warn the people then
Of what seems weighty, but is light within.
But now, when we do scarce the name retain
Of orator, for common men's disdain,
Low speech seduces better, flatters more
Than ever eloquence impressed before.

Surprising News in the Eccentric World of Austin Rivera

It's a proud day when the vanguard of pretension condescends to mention one's little recreations. No, really. The article is a fine general introduction to the world of hobby boardgames, and has of course elicited responses on the message boards of the both the hegemon and the oppressed minority. Boardgaming, if I do say so myself, is in the midst of a sort of golden age for games in both the American and German styles, with many stimulating titles being published each year, and something like the birth of a critical discourse is taking place amidst all the puerilities of its internet community. The premier producer of games in the American style is Fantasy Flight Games, and most of the best European games are distributed in the States by Rio Grande Games (although there are other fine publishers). 'Hobby' or 'Designer' games run the gamut of historical settings from the beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia to its peak in early modern europe on through the industrial revolution to modern politics, and are hardly above the more traditionally geeky realms of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. The premier producer of games in the American style is Fantasy Flight Games, and most of the best European games are distributed in the States by Rio Grande Games, although there are many other fine publishers; take a look at their catalogs.

Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano, as the poet says, and though they do little to help the body, I have no doubt these thinking man's games, even if they lack the hoary head of chess and its like, have much to offer the mind.

Rhetoric at the Democratic Convention

Like many Americans, I will not vote, if I vote, on the issues; if we are to base our government on the undisciplined judgments of laymen, I am of the opinion we should go all the way. But unlike the many who will surely decide from the appearances of debates or the trust of party, any decision I make will be based solely upon a candidate’s skillful execution of the noble art of oratory. Nor is such an emphasis unreasonable when we consider how few are the men of real greatness in our nation’s history who have not possessed great command of words, and with how much contempt our most recent governments have held the power of speech.

In light of these sentiments it should appear as no surprise if the early palm of my estimation were Senator Obama’s. Indeed, one cannot follow this election for a moment without hearing praise of his oratory. It is so good, say some, that the artifice could hardly be that of an honest man; it is so lofty, say some, that he finds no time for policies and plans; so inspiring, say others, that he needs none. Judgment, it seems, has been already passed upon the quality of his rhetoric, and a Vice President of the United States had no shame in comparing him to Lincoln; yet a man of taste must surely find him wanting in those most particular felicities of speech which have always divided competency from eloquence.

It is not so much that Obama is a poor speaker, as that he performs poor speeches; indeed, the dictum of Cicero should be ready among the defenders of today’s rhetoricians, that the greatest part of oratory is performance. The senator has a fine voice and is not prone, as many are today, to stumble like an anxious child when he speaks; yet the words that pair with this talent are hardly of equal stature. So it was that I was often compelled during his great convention speech, when unbecoming motions of patriotism were stirred by the good packaging of drivel, to say, with the seduced Hero of Marlowe’s poem,

“Ay me! such words as these I should abhor,
And yet I like them for the orator.”

The principal deficiencies of Obama’s style are shared with all the orators of our age: a persistent lowness of expression, manifesting itself not only in an avoidance of imagery and metaphor, but also an impoverished vocabulary; a refusal to vary the naturally monotonous syntax of English, and to emphasize a balanced phrase with strong correlatives; and the overuse of the few tired devices of anaphora, asyndeton, and rhetorical question. The first of these flaws will not accept of real examples from the speech, for it is a deficiency of absence, and can be demonstrated only by an examination of the whole; yet I trust that those who examine it with the same eye that I have will find there is no real use of metaphorical language (beyond the commonplace) in the whole performance. As to the second, a brief consideration of any part of the speech will reveal that Senator Obama and his writers are very loathe to interrupt the steady progression from subject to verb to object, never staying too long between any one of them. Only once, in my observation, have I found them daring to delay the verb for any length of time:

“And today, as my call for a time frame to remove our troops from Iraq has been echoed by the Iraqi government and even the Bush Administration, even after we learned that Iraq has a $79 billion surplus while we're wallowing in deficits, John McCain stands alone in his stubborn refusal to end a misguided war.”

The uniformity of the rest produces that unpleasantly homogenous quality of which Pope has written,

“But in such lays as neither ebb nor flow,
Correctly cold, and regularly low,
That shunning faults, one quiet tenor keep,
We cannot blame indeed—but we may sleep.”

The last shortcoming of my enumeration, the reliance upon a few worn techniques of rhetoric, produces a similar effect; in fact it often helps to produce the same effect with greater vehemence. It is not so much that the speech is impoverished by the overuse of a few favorite tropes, for every orator is entitled to his favorites, but that they are very simple and emphatic tropes, useful at moments of great importance, which have been so densely peppered about the speech as to leave an audience as exhausted as they are bored. The paucity of connective words (asyndeton) throughout a speech comprised, as was Obama’s, of so many small and simple sentences, produces an effect of sustained emphasis, as though nearly every point, small or large, were the object of long anticipation. Anaphora, perhaps most memorably, if not most felicitously employed at the Convention in Senator Clinton’s “No way, no how, no McCain,” has a similar effect in its overuse.

Yet it is not only the problems that can be ascribed directly to these tropes at the level of phrases and sentences, but the deeper structural issues intimated by their presence that should concern us. For it is not by an unhappy accident of overzealous verbal art that a speech comes by so many points of great emphasis one after another; the matter of the speech must be distracted to some degree if the style of its presentation is so. Indeed, evidence for a superfluity of subjects is hardly to be hunted for in Senator Obama’s speech, and hardly unexpected in the politics of our age, but when one considers such inclusion oratorically, taking care for the necessary swells and expositions, it ought to be lamented, although he spoke for the interminable (to a modern) time of forty minutes, that he did not speak for more. Like Götterdammerung, though it is long, it really ought to be longer. Many subjects are treated neither in passing nor with adequate development, so that the procession of short subjects, especially in the middle of the speech, surrenders the burden of coherence to the mechanical progress of a list, when, as in all arts, the organic effusion of nature is much to be preferred.

Although it may appear, at this point, that I found nothing to praise in Senator Obama’s speech, I must admit one section caught me as I watched it:

“In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is - you're on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps - even if you don't have boots. You're on your own.
Well it's time for them to own their failure. It's time for us to change America.”

The string of colloquial questions is certainly beneath my approbation, but the play on the word ‘own’ is actually quite ingenious, and shines through even so inelegant a presentation as this one.

Probably the only fine phrase in the whole convention came in President Clinton’s speech:

“Most important, Barack Obama knows that America cannot be strong abroad unless we are strong at home. People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power.”

A forceful specimen of chiasmus in the Kennedian vein, praiseworthy for its expansion of the sense of ‘example’ into something more like ‘exercise’ or ‘employment,’ and soon to be forgiven the plebeian phrase “most important.”

The rarity of such episodes of high rhetoric in today’s politics should be a source of great sadness in the country of Jefferson, Webster, and Lincoln. Even more lamentable is the seriousness with which our statesmen deliver their mediocrities, and the hyperbole with which our most prominent commentators are wont to flatter them. If a candidate is to deliver a speech in the utmost strength and solemnity of purpose and demeanor, it is embarrassing to find in his words the sort of simplicities and informalities no English teacher would allow in formal writing. For this reason I might well say Governor Schweitzer of Montana was the most effective and pleasant speaker of the convention, for the provincial jocundity of his manner accepted all vulgarity of expression.

Perhaps I am too harsh, and am speaking, as Cicero said of Cato, “to the republic of Plato, not the dregs of Rome.” But if Senator Obama is truly to be a great orator, and, more than that, if he is to make good on his pledge to change the tone of political discourse in this country, he must have more than merely ideas: he must have words.

Classical Wisdom for Everyday Use

It is an elegant and most desirable skill in conversation to escape cliche while maintaining simplicity, and conserve the wisdom of the commonplace in a better guise. Among the learned this is easily done with allusions to literature, and is not infelicitous even among the vulgar, so long as they are apt to be impressed. Yet where one's company possesses both the shapely mind of a good education, and an open character that neither marvels nor is haughty, the choicest adornments of an elevated exchange may be found in the words of the ancient writers. Every sentiment is weightier in Latin, nothing glimmers like a touch of Greek. One should therefore always have some phrases ready; I give you some examples.

Cliche: "Don't judge a book by its cover."
Classical Solution: "Nimium ne crede colori" (Vergil, Eclogues II.17; "trust not too much to color.")
Implications to bear in mind among the exceeding learned: The first half of the line is "O formose puer" ("O pretty boy!"); one may therefore deploy the line admonishingly with a subtle grin in the right company.

Common Phrase: "Child Prodigy"
Classical Solution: "Non sine dis animosus infans" (Horace, Odes III.4.20; "An inspired infant, and not without the patronage of heaven.")
Secondary Use: Horace is describing himself as a child, and one could therefore use the line ironically of the self-impressed, although this may lose some sting if the subject, like Horace, is at all worthy of the line.

Political Opinion: "We ought not to appease, Munich, Chamberlain, etc."
Classical Solution: "...χειροτονήσετε ὦ ἄνδρες ᾿Αθηναῖοι ἴνα μὴ μόνον ἐν τοῖς ψηφίσμασι καὶ ταῖς ἐπιστολαῖς πολεμῆτε Φιλίππῳ ἀλλὰ καὶ ἐν τοῖς ἔργοις." (Demosthenes, 1st Philippic, section 30; "Now vote, O men of Athens, so you may be at war with Philip not only in letters and resolutions, but in your actions as well.")
Problems of Employment: The sentence is elegant if not pithy, and long enough that quotation in the original is rarely to be advised. A more general allusion is preferable: "As Demosthenes said, you must fight tyrants with deeds as well as resolutions."

Poetry and Elitism

Dana Gioia, the current president of the National Endowment for the Arts, is probably the most visible representative of a movement in English poetry of the last few decades dubbed Formalism or New Formalism. The main unifying motive of this rather vague grouping of contemporary poets is the revival of meter and rhyme in serious poetry, certainly a valuable endeavor after all the damage that has been done since Walter the White Man took an ax to the English Muse. In Gioia's eyes, however, one of the main culprits in this has been the inability of contemporary poetry to be popular enough (a rather general expression of this thesis can be found in his 2007 Stanford commencement address). Although Gioia lays some blame on the failure of American education to establish cultured readership, his usual object of declamation is academic elitism.

Now, it may be that I would agree with Mr. Gioia if we broke things down, but it seems to me most unfortunate to associate a current disaster for good literature (the taste of the modern academy) with a necessary precondition of it (elitism). In fact, although serious poets are still a sort of elite within society itself, the problem with their verse is a democratization of aesthetic, whose causes must be found farther back than even the last century. By democratization of aesthetic I mean, essentially an aesthetic that falls easily in line with the dominant ideologies of bourgeois democracy and modern capitalism: self-expression and empowerment (as well as the consequent rejection of tradition and authority), a lack of artifice, and the exaltation of the mundane. Democratization of aesthetic, when taken to extremes, as it has been for about the last century by various avante-garde movements, cannot produce acceptable art; to me, this is a self-evident fact. It should not surprise us then that for a long time artists have had to redefine the critical vocabulary to make their innovations "good," even to the point of institutionalizing redefinition itself as a virtue.

The most interesting consequence of this democratization, however, is that the people (the demo- of democracy) didn't react very well to its first manifestations, and have responded to its establishment with the disinterest Mr. Gioia so often laments. It is this strange twist which has led to the intellectual elite (a social element that will probably always exist) supporting a popular aesthetic, although disliked by the people, solely because the value of that aesthetic are more in line with the generally dominant ideology, itself popular, vulgar, and, to bring in the Greek analogue of those terms, democratic. It can only be with democracy as the ruling ideology that the poets are noble while the poems are base.

Mr. Gioia is fighting an uphill battle in the poetic world, and he seems to have used his time at the NEA well, especially in being vociferous about humanizing public schools which often nowadays lack any real instruction in music or the arts. I admire his efforts, although I think they will eventually change little: the contemporary arts can be revived only by the most minimal compromises with the aesthetics of democracy, and, for all their good intentions, New Formalists like Mr. Gioia aren't really radicals in any direction.

Homosexuality

I have not yet touched the Third Rail of Mainline Protestantism on this blog, nor do I intend to give it any sort of full treatment here; it is a subject I have given much thought to, not least because the many rifts it has caused in the Church are I think symptomatic of the more fundamental differences between the Christian and Modern worldviews. I would like just to post a few observations from a rather typical blog exchange I ran into today.

1. Some of the arguments of the blog entry linked to above rely on a proposition something like this: "Certain aspects of Jesus' teaching are historically bounded, and therefore can be discarded." This is an incredibly dangerous proposition because it hides behind it the great Platonic error, that the true person is bodiless, immaterial, and outside of history. To this the Christian replies that the truest existence, indeed the Existence by which all things exist, became flesh and walked about on the earth. It is perhaps the most important thing theologically to come to terms with the fact of the Incarnation. A human being like us all, Jesus existed in his historical context, spoke the language(s) he spoke, knew the terms he knew, and yet we Christians confess that he, body, historicity and all, was the Word/Reason/Discourse (all meanings of the Greek 'logos') of God, and that it was not through him but in him that God acted. To begin to explain away teachings of Jesus by appealing to the 'true' message buried beneath all the inconvenient materiality is a very tricky, if not altogether pointless, enterprise.

2. Beneath the blogger's 'love ethic' lies another troubling assumption, which he shares with many, if not most, namely, that sin exists only as a series of discrete moments where we made the wrong choice. Even before we would get into the matter of 'something is wrong only if it hurts someone' (or, as I call it, dripping with scorn, Enlightenment Bourgeois Individualism 101), this assertion is problematic. Under this framework, the Christian needs only to make the right decisions to avoid all sin. Put another way, the human being is sovereign over vice and virtue, even if he is rather silly and often makes the wrong choice; the human being, qua human being, is sinless, and spotted only by his mistakes. Yet such a view hardly accounts for the failure and mediocrity that comprises most of human life, or the immediate dissipation that follows hastily upon the glory of the rest. This fundamental inability to the do the right thing, this unreality and impotence of the human condition is the state of being (in Paul's words) 'under sin:' it is the ever present and essential way in which we as human beings fail to be the image of God we were created to be. It is an existence and not a choice.

This opposition is important because I have found one of the central lines against the sinfulness of homosexuality is that being homosexual is an essential part of a person's individuality, that to deny the expression of that essential character would be to deny the full and total existence of that person. But Christianity does not hold that, like a seed, human beings hold all the potential for their right existence within themselves, and require only the proper circumstances to grow, or that a person's innate characteristics are necessarily good. On the contrary, there is poison from the very birth, which is why Jesus taught that we must be born again (John 3:3) and must lose our lives to save them (Matthew 26:24-26; Mark 8:34-37; Luke 9:23-25). The certainty of death, the wages of sin, is not to be underestimated: here is a thing which human being will do, bar none; it is as essential as the breath and the heartbeat. Yet even death, the cap and captain of all the sin that is in us, will be overcome in the end if Christ is with us, and lie discarded like all the other essential parts of our current existence which do not conform to the image of God.

Unsex Me Here!

On the internet are many ways to waste an hour or two, some of them quite innocent, such as The Gender Genie, which purports to divine the sex of an author from their text.

Milton's scores (1667 words from Book 1 of Paradise Lost):
Female Score: 2646
Male Score: 1707

Apparently 'with' is preponderantly both female and Miltonic.

Lady Shakespeare (1806 words from scene 1 of A Midsummer Night's Dream):
Female Score: 2875
Male Score: 1875

Again, lots of points from 'with.'

If we consult a history (1171 words from Henry V.3.1-2) Bill's a man again, if barely:
Female Score: 1579
Male Score: 1620

Tragedy (1016 words from the last scene of Othello):
Female Score: 1448
Male Score: 1316

A woman here (and 'not' overtakes 'with' as the chief point-getter for femininity).

Francis Bacon is safely a man with the 571 words of his essay On Death...
Female Score: 504
Male Score: 1029

...As is Jane Austen, judging from the first 782 words of Pride and Prejudice:
Female Score: 900
Male Score: 1031

Mary Wollestonecraft, too, must have duped us all, if we consult the first 2712 words of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman:
Female Score: 2790
Male Score: 3940

Judging from these results alone, I rather think this site is better for telling what is prose and what is poetry, an hypothesis which I find much more compelling when we consider that...

Walt Whitman (starting from the first 1962 words of 'Starting from Paumanok') is a man!
Female Score: 2394
Male Score: 2767

P.S. To my adoring public I must apologize as much for the cursory matter of this post as the great tardiness with which it has come: being pressed first with finals, then travel, and at last a mild but uncomfortable illness, I am settling only now into what shall, I hope, become a regular summer schedule. I intend no more to try the patience of my esteemed and regular readers, nor leave the visit of an expectant browser unrewarded.

I am thus, as always, your humble servant,
C.A. Rivera, for now, a man
(Words: 325
Female Score: 562
Male Score: 587)

To Ialdabaoth with thee, O National Geographic!

Here's a fascinating article about the Gospel of Judas mess a couple years back (and if you didn't know it was a mess, you really ought to read the article). It's stuff like this that shows the kind of real damage that can come from the pairing of careless scholarship and profit-eyed sponsors, especially when they meet over an area, like the early history of Christianity, where the public is both emotionally interested and severely misinformed.

The hat tip, as they say, goes to Jim West.

Update: You can read a response to this article from National Geographic here. (thanks again to Jim West)

Lord Macaulay and Political Rhetoric

I recently came across this excellent passage, written by Macaulay in 1839 in a review of William Gladstone's book The State in its Relations with the Church, in a collection of his essays. It seems to me a fine characterization of political rhetoric, although the circumstances of politics have changed greatly since Macaulay's day, even if the bare structures of legislature have not. In an era when statesmen speak to broadcast cameras before their colleagues and the debates of any body aim rather to flatter the commonest voter than convince their abler representative, even the showman's eloquence that Macaulay here describes is lost to us. For this reason the faults he cites have been greatly and unfortunately magnified, so that the orators who seemed to wed vacuity to eloquence in his day have found a style as ugly and as stumbling as their arguments in ours. But these are my thoughts; here are Macaulay's:

"There is little danger that people engaged in the conflicts of active life will be too much addicted to general speculation. The opposite vice is that which most easily besets them. The times and tides of business and debate tarry for no man. A politician must often talk and act before he has thought and read. He may be very ill informed respecting a question; all his notions about it may be vague and inaccurate; but speak he must; and if he is a man of ability, of tact, and of intrepidity, he soon finds that, even under such circumstances, it is possible to speak successfully. He finds that there is a great difference between the effect of written words, which are perused and reperused in the stillness of the closet, and the effect of spoken words which, set off by the graces of utterance and gestures vibrate for a single moment on the ear. He finds that he may blunder without much chance of being detected, that he may reason sophistically, and escape unrefuted. He finds that, even on knotty questions of trade and legislation, he can, without reading ten pages, or thinking ten minutes, draw forth loud plaudits, and sit down with the credit of having made an excellent speech.
Lysias, says Plutarch, wrote a defence for a man who was to be tried before one of the Athenian tribunals. Long before the defendant had learned the speech by heart, he became so much dissatisfied with it that he went in great distress to the author. "I was delighted with your speech the first time I read it; but I liked it less the second time, and still less the third time; and now it seems to me to be no defence at all." "My good friend," says Lysias, "you quite forget that the judges are to hear it only once." The case is the same in the English Parliament. It would be as idle in an orator to waste deep meditation and long research on his speeches, as it would be in the manager of a theatre to adorn all the crowd of courtiers and ladies who cross over the stage in a procession with real pearls and diamonds. It is not by accuracy or profundity that men become the masters of great assemblies. And why b e at the charge of providing logic of the best quality, when a very inferior article will be equally acceptable? Why go as deep into a question as Burke, only in order to be, like Burke, coughed down, or left speaking to green benches and red boxes? This has long appeared to us to be the most serious of the evils which are to be set off against the many blessings of popular government.
It is a fine and true saying of Bacon, that reading makes a full man, talking a ready man, and writing an exact man. The tendency of institutions like those of England is to encourage readiness in public men, at the expense both of fulness and of exactness. The keenest and most vigorous minds of every generation, minds often admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and pointed language. The habit of discussing questions in this way necessarily reacts on the intellects of our ablest men, particularly of those who are introduced into parliament at a very early age, before their minds have expanded to full maturity. The talent for debate is developed in such men to a degree which, to the multitude, seems as marvellous as the performance of an Italian Improvisatore. But they are fortunate indeed if they retain unimpaired the faculties which are required for close reasoning or for enlarged speculation. Indeed we should sooner expect a great original work on political science, such a work, for example, as the Wealth of Nations, from an apothecary in a country town, or from a minister in the Hebrides, than from a statesmen who, ever since he was one-and-twenty, had been a distinguished debater in the House of Commons."

Quotes to be Attributed to Me in My Fame

"It was Jonson's view that Donne's meter merited hanging, and I am generally much in favor of following his advice with modern poets. Unfortunately, the state of affairs is such that we would soon run out of rope in applying that principle today."

"I find it hard to respect a poet who has no command of the classical languages. He had better be Shakespeare or he had better stop trying."

Interlocutor: "But surely you would agree that Poe's jingling is as bad as Whitman's formlessness?"
Rivera: "I certainly would not! Poe's verse is merely bad; Whitman does violence with his poems."

Eagerly Awaiting the Barkley Administration

Any fan of the NBA knows, either from more or less established sources, that Charles Barkley intends to enter the political arena, possibly this year, when the mayorship of his hometown of Leeds, Alabama, is up for election. I heartily approve of such an endeavor ending ultimately at the White House, and not only because of the Hellenic precedent, but also because Mr. Barkley's charm and competitive nature would undoubtedly prove excellent diplomatic instruments.

A high profile campaign from The Round Mound would also probably mean this gem hits the airwaves more often, which, for my taxpaying money, is hardly a bad thing.

Narrative in the Mainstream

Some academic preoccupations never make it to the mainstream of society; in fact, they never used to until fairly recently. I'd like to blame the nineteenth century for it, but the truth is that the Reformers were probably the first to attempt something like a popularization of intellectual culture. In any case, an academic term that seems slowly to be seeping into popular journalism is "narrative." I first noticed this several months back in an opinion piece (I forget the author now), which detailed the struggle between Clinton and Obama to stamp their lives with positive "narratives," the most popular of which is of course the story of the kid that dreamed big and beat the odds to have a chance, even though there were so many obstacles, to be president. The article (if I remember correctly) contended that the 2004 campaign was decided when the Bush campaign was able to redefine the "narrative" of Kerry's life from war hero to political opportunist.

The term seems now to have made its way even into the sports page, if this article by Yahoo Sports' Adrian [why didn't this get changed at Ellis Island?] is any indication. We encounter the term near the end of the article:

"LeBron James has done a masterful job of setting the stage for the Celtics series, conspiring with his coach, Mike Brown, to make the world believe he had been pummeled in the Washington Wizards series. The Wizards rate as one of the softest defensive teams in the Eastern Conference, but between James’ bellyaching and Brown pounding podiums, the Cavs had referees and league officials treating the Wiz like the Bad Boy Pistons.

For them, it’ll be fascinating to see if they can carry that narrative into the Eastern Conference semifinals. This was effective against the Wiz and privately the Celtics wonder if the precious treatment of the Cavaliers’ superstar gets transferred to them now."

Post-modernity seems now to have convinced sportswriters that rhetoric is actually winning basketball games. Of course, time will only tell if Lebron James' discourse of the hard foul is a sufficient technology of power to control the Celtics, or if he'll need to make some shots as well.

The Wisdom of the Ancients, and the wit / Of Modern Man

"'Gnothi seauton [know thyself],' despite Socrates' creative use of the phrase, simply means 'I'm a god, you're not.'"
-James Redfield, alluding to the famous inscription on Apollo's temple at Delphi in response to a question on the sentiment of Iliad V.440-442,which, for those of you with "less Greek," Pope has thus:

"O son of Tydeus, cease! be wise and see
How vast the difference of the Gods and thee!
Distance immense! between the pow'rs that shine
Above, eternal, deathless, and divine,
And mortal man! a wretch of humble birth,
A short-lived reptile in the dust of earth."

When asked whether any ancient Greek was known to have climbed the actual Mount Olympus in order to find out if there were really any gods up there, my professor answered thusly:
"The Greeks didn't climb mountains; they were much more sensible than that."

...et multi pseudoprophetae sugent

It is unfortunately more often sobering than inspiring to peer as a learned Christian into the world of common spirituality; and yet we must guard our reactions from despair with the knowledge that the lowly ones of every age have always been more susceptible to the seductions of folly, just as the enticements of knowledge have been more often injurious to the high. From the very beginnings of the church, as the letters of Paul attest, Christian communities have felt the pull of strange gospels, laced by their charismatic preachers with both worldliness and exoticism, and we would be vain to think that in our western world, where the heirs of the apostolic witness, if we may not call them any longer witnesses themselves to that gospel, have grown slothful, and where the one use of the Christianized state, which is the tighter control of all preaching contrary to the gospel, has given way to the triumphant banners of secularism; in this world of ours, we would be vain to think ourselves unsullied, and the uninhibited spread and undeserving influence of false Christianities of various kinds should not alarm us with the shock of surprise, but rather the terrible recognition of disaster. For my part, I do not think I am enough exposed to these things; my eyes are too often turned down upon the page to look about me. Yet even the humble scholar does not remain forever aloof, although he feel the pains of the age more as pinches than an oppressive burden's weight. I felt such a pinch over my spring break, when, as I talked with a younger cousin of mine, she said offhand, though she could not recall the details, that her youth pastor had told them that the world was going to end in a few years, and given them details of the ending; I am remorseful still that I did not write a little note for her to give him, saying only "Matthew 24:36." Of such a teacher is it truly spoken, --or if he is a helpless fool, the teachers teacher-- "It cannot be avoided that there will be cause for stumbling. But woe to him through whom such causes come. It would be better for him if a millstone were hung about his neck, and he were cast into the sea, than that he should cause one of these little ones to stumble." (Luke 27:1-3).

Similarly today, following a link from the inestimable Jim West, I was led to this blog post, and the lengthy, but I think worthwhile, article it discusses. I think it will be obvious to those of you who take the time to read it why the ruminations of a secular journalist should have inspired such fierce declamation from this page --until I have some pulpit I shall be restrained to such inspired impotences as these. But I found it more unsettling as I read that the self-assured detachment of cynicism which the author expressed was far more near to me than utterances of his subjects, who all felt they were Christians. Let us credit him some for his rhetoric, however much I might loathe the aesthetic that governs such pieces, and remember that he writes for Rolling Stone; but let it also warn all of us who are of a class with the author and Christians as well, that if it is true that both we ourselves and the people he described are indeed new creatures in Christ, we ought neither to find them so alien to us, nor feel the comfort of kinship more easily in a thing bound by death.

Athanasius, Napoleon, Milton

Brant Pitre posted on his blog Singing in the Reign the other day a long quote from none other than Napoleon concerning Christ's supremacy over all earthly rulers. It's quite worth reading, and certainly seems as unusual an opinion of the Christian faith as Napoleon is an unusual figure among great men. Yet upon reading it I was reminded of two passages, one from Athanasius, and one from Milton. The passage of Milton's, which only came to my mind because I am liable to be reminded of Milton by the loosest of connections, is from the sixth book of Paradise Lost, lines 746-779, and describes the Son as he finally takes action against the rebelling angels, and in the chariot out of Ezekiel no less; it is probably the finest poetic expression of the victorious Christ, albeit here victorious before the creation of the world rather than at its end:

"So said, he o'er his scepter bowing rose
From the right hand of Glory where he sat,
And the third sacred morn began to shine
Dawning through Heav'n; forth rushed with whirlwind sound
The chariot of Paternal Deity,
Flashing thick flames, wheel within wheel undrawn,
Itself instinct with Spirit, but convoyed
By four Cherubic shapes; four faces each
Had wondrous; as with stars their bodies all
And wings were set with eyes, with eyes the wheels
Of beryl, and careering fires between;
Over their heads a crystal firmament
Whereon a sapphire throne, inlaid with pure
Amber, and colors of the show'ry arch.
He in celestial panoply all armed
Of radiant Urim, work divinely wrought,
Ascended; at his right hand Victory
Sat eagle-winged; beside him hung his bow
And quiver with three-bolted thunder stored,
And from about him fierce effusion rolled
Of smoke and bick'ring flame and sparkles dire;
Attended with ten thousand thousand saints
He onward came, far off his coming shone,
And twenty thousand (I their number heard)
Chariots of God, half on each hand, were seen:
He on the wings of Cherub rode sublime
On the crystalline sky in sapphire throned.
Illustrious far and wide but by his own
First seen; them unexpected joy surprised,
When the great ensign of Messiah blazed
Aloft by angels borne, his sign in Heav'n.
Under whose conduct Michael soon reduced
His army, circumfused on either wing,
Under the Head embodied all in one."

The other passage Mr. Pitre's post reminded me of, from Athanasius' De Incarnatione, a book I would recommend to all for its lucid profundity, is rather closer to the point. In refuting various objections of the pagans, the Alexandrian bishop rises to rather lofty rhetoric in describing the acheivement of Christ as opposed to others whom a non-Christian might propose to be like him (from De Incarnatione, section 50):

"Many before him have been kings and tyrants of the earth; history tells also of many among the Chaldeans and Egyptians and Indians who were wise men and magicians. But which of those, I do not say after his death, but while yet in this life, was ever able so far to prevail as to fill the whole world with his teaching and retrieve so great a multitude from the craven fear of idols, as many as our Savior has won over from idols to Himself? The Greek philosophers have compiled many works with persuasiveness and much skill in words; but what fruit have they to show for this such as has the cross of Christ? Their wise thoughts were persuasive enough until they died; yet even in their lifetime their seeming influence was counterbalanced by their rivalry with one another, for they were a jealous company and declaimed against each other. But the Word of God, by strangest paradox, teaching in meaner language, has put the choicest sophists in the shade, and by confounding their teachings and drawing all men to Himself He has filled His own assemblies. Moreover, and this is the marvelous thing, by going down as Man to death He has confounded all the sounding utterances of the wise men about the idols. For whose death ever drove out demons, or whose death did ever demons fear, save that of Christ? For where the Savior is named, there every demon is driven out. Again, who has ever so rid men of their natural passions that fornicators become chaste and murderers no longer wield the sword and those who formerly were craven cowards now bravely play the man? In a word, what persuaded the barbarians and heathen folk in every place to drop their madness and give heed to peace, save the faith of Christ and the sign of the cross?"

Bart Ehrman and the Trustworthiness of the Ancients

I would direct you, gentle reader, although to my shame, to today's article in my hometown paper about a certain popular writer, of whom I would rather not confess that "we were nursed upon the selfsame hill." Although I can claim no personal experience with his writing, his general attitude towards orthodox Christianity, or more specifically, the earliest histories of it, which I have gleaned from various secondary encounters, is one of those persistent maladies of the contemporary mind whose popularity far outstrips the credence it is due. The insistent and oftentimes outrageous skepticism which has become the common attitude towards earliest Christianity not only among many scholarly circles (among whom I must say Mr. Ehrman is a legitimate figure), but more influentially among certain well-known instances of popular literature, is not only such a poison upon the modern popular conception but a misrepresentation of scholarly consensus as well. I am neither ready nor credentialed to give any great defense of my views or to critique another's, but I will say that, from what I have read on the subject, broadly defined, the question of with what sincerity the teaching of the New Testament as we have it now should be considered to reflect the teaching of Jesus is answered today either with the shouts of an overly critical skepticism or the plea of a reasoned credulity. I am no great scholar, but these seem to me to be the way the lines are drawn up, and I would hope always to support mediocritas before frenzy.

This opposition, in fact, is not a phenomenon confined only to early Christianity's small though vociferous corner of ancient scholarship. I read not too long ago a portion of a book (I have forgotten both the title and the author) which took up the debate of the veracity of Livy's narratives against certain scholars who suggested and more than suggested that most of his stories were his own inventions or at the very least those of his earlier sources like Fabius Pictor, whose history we have now lost. Now, although we most certainly cannot say confidently with Dante "Livio... che non erra," this author pointed out that the idea of any ancient historian simply making up whole stories does not work in traditionally oriented societies, which hold very strongly to certain memories of the past. Whether these memories actually reflect the past or not, the efforts of an historian whose narrative told an entirely different story would certainly encounter difficulty and opposition on these points. From the embellishment of stories, a common feature of nearly all the ancient literature we group together as 'history,' to their invention is a step far more easily presumed by the modern than executed by an ancient.

Even in poetry (with the exception of comedy) the invention of entire stories is rare, if not impossible, although it was a sort of slogan among philosophers that poets necessarily lie. The modern reader, who is accustomed to imagine every author like one of our novelists, has a great deal of trouble with the idea Sophocles did not come up with Oedipus, or that the story of the Odyssey, whoever wrote it, is in no way a sequel to the Iliad, although the poem may be usefully thought of that way, so long as one removes from their mind all thought of a public clamor to 'know what happened to all their favorite characters from the Iliad.' When so much of our modern literature, performed and otherwise, is dependent on 'interesting characters' and 'original stories' it should not at all surprise us that the ancient world, which assigned a far more circumscribed place to the virtue of originality, should perplex a modern sensibility in this way.

Although these broader concerns about the place of originality and factuality in the ancient world are certainly part of the same general debate, Bart Ehrman's popular books seem to be, from what I have picked up about him, less concerned with the broad view of things as the microscopic. His popular book Misquoting Jesus is a book about text criticism, one of the great homes of idle speculation in biblical studies since the nineteenth century, although it has also produced much of great value, and as such deals not so much with whether the New Testament reflects the teaching of Jesus but whether, in fact, we even have the real New Testament at our disposal. The success of books like these has far more to do with the ignorance of layfolk than any real scholarly debate. For example, as mentioned in this account of a debate between Ehrman and evangelical scholar Dan Wallace, one of Ehrman's real shock points for popular audiences seems to be that story of the woman caught in adultery in John's Gospel (7:53-8:11) is not found in the oldest manuscripts. The status of this story is nothing new to scholars, and by nothing new I mean that John Calvin mentions in his commentary on John; nor does its apocryphal status suddenly make the story irrelevant, anymore than something wise said in Sunday's sermon is irrelevant. Yet the idea that, so to speak, 'things aren't like they told you when you were a kid,' has a great pull on our modern society for whatever reason. David Wray, my professor this quarter in two classes on Vergil's poetry, commented the other day that one finds American literary scholars far more than those of other nations concerned with unreliable narrators in literature, and speculated that the idea of lies from a position of power plays a special anxiety in the American soul; he tied this anecdotally to things like Watergate. In any case I would say the same cultural anxiety, whatever its sources, lies at the heart of the popularity of books by people like Ehrman and Elaine Pagels. I will not meditate too long on this feature of our life today, although I find it more and more curious and distressing the more I think about it, but I do think it answers well why this sort of overzealous skepticism finds such a welcome ear in an American public whose tastes are normally quite traditional.

Sports and the Poet

From my tutor: not to become a Green or a Blue at the races, or to side with the Light-armored or Heavy-armored in the amphitheatre.

-Marcus Aurelius, Mediations I.5

Marcus Aurelius might not have approved of rooting for sports teams, and in a man who could see the wars by which he preserved Rome as so many vanities it is perhaps not unsurprising to find so dismissive a view of athletic fanhood. Certainly anyone who has seen me or any other deeply invested fan rooting for their team knows that it has the tendency to upset the equanimity of one's mind. Yet not all the ancients were Stoics like the somber Antonine, and many of them, especially the Greeks, found something very meaningful in athletic competition. In part this was because all the major Greek games were both international competitions, in that there were athletes from different city states competing against each other, and domestic competitions, in that only Greeks took part in major festivals like the Olympic, Nemean, or Pythian games, and so became an important unifying element in the culture of Greekness (Hellenism/Hellenicity). The games were also important religious festivals. Poets like Pindar and Bacchylides, the most distinguished writers of their day, were commissioned to celebrate the victors of these games in complex odes.

It would seem absurd today to establish so firm a link between athletics and the arts; since athletics is, at its essence, an exercise of the body, a society as insistently dualistic as our own has troubling admitting it to the life of the mind. After all, although Spike Lee might be seen at Knicks games, the enthusiasm of any artist or intellectual for sports is commonly portrayed more as a quirk of character or a humanizing element than as a genuine interest. Perhaps it is a residual puritanism to regard such affairs as petty amusements, perhaps it is the manufactured nature of sports in a capitalist-consumerist society. Yet the Greek Olympics were every bit as much an expression of their ruling class and ideology as our own Super Bowls and World Cups; one might hazard that their artists and intellectuals did not feel the same mad compulsion to rebel that ours do. In any case, it seems unfortunate that in a society where the importance of sports is as central as in any since the Greeks both the language and the poetic class lack the capability to produce that special delight, the Epinician (Victory) Ode. And yet...

Sketch for the first stanza of a Epinician Ode on the Jayhawks' Victory in the NCAA Tournament:

Like rain is Time to soak the firmness out
From godly grandeur, but the memory
Lives like slow fire in the mind of age,
Sprung from a hazy instant--near to me
The Muses wait with tinder, and more sage
Than all the rest, Apollo, crowned
With laurel; laurel too
Embrows you, Jayhawks, and it summons you
Above the humor of applauding sound,
--If Helicon permit me--and the shout
Gone up for adoration, out of time
Upon the current of my lofty rhyme.


Epinician Odes normally follow their introductory sentiments with a description of the victor, proceed to recount some myth, which more often than not is germane somehow to the victor or his city or family, and close with sentiments similar in bearing to those that opened the poem (here's a link to a serviceable translation of Pindar's most famous Olympian Ode) . Many English poets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Abraham Cowley most notably, wrote Odes in the style of Pindar, but none of them (so far as I know) wrote for actual athletic victors; I honestly don't even know what sort of organized athletic contest there was in England in that period. In any case, if English poetry is to be saved from the dungheap it seems content at present to reside in, why not start from a central feature of modern society which can cleanly and satisfyingly be patched onto an ancient and unquestionably classical tradition? I think I just might.

Beowulf for Everyday Use

It is not the sole nature of memorable and famous lines to compress profundity or give space to the sublime, although it is as equally no vicissitude of taste alone which is the foundation of fame. Yet there do remain many lines whose reputations have been raised beyond their due by the excellence of their authors, and which have been granted currency among the well-read on this account. All cultures have their classics, which the learned plunder with care for those unassuming phrases whose sentiment, though neither weighty nor lofty, may yet be made the gilt of conversation.

It may well be the misfortune of Beowulf never to have attained such a status, for it is a poem whose style lends greatly to quotation. The treasury of classical and Shakespearean letters from which we draw is certainly neither poor nor wanting, but it is an amusing exercise to wonder which phrases from the nameless Bard might stand beside arcades ambo, carpe diem and their brethren. I present a few offerings, and some advice for usage:

"Þæt wæs god cyning!" (line 11; "That was a good king!"). Rather straightforward and hardly to be limited to politics.

"Wæs þu, Hroðgar, hal!" (line 407; "Good health to you, Hrothgar!") Beowulf's greeting to Hrothgar and an all-purpose word of greeting in learned and friendly company. Combine with "It is I, Hamlet the Dane," to casually insinuate the peculiarity with which Denmark has fired the English genius.

"Đa wæs swigra secg sunu Ecglafes" (line 980; "Then was the son of Ecglaf a more silent man.") So the poet describes Unferth, who had questioned and mocked Beowulf's capabilities, after the defeat of Grendel; useful after anyone has been shown up, but especially to be applied to the more vain and pompous among us.

Some Wit of Dr. Johnson's

As I am busy with finals, I can only provide you, dear reader, with the fruit of another man's mind.

Samuel Johnson on Rousseau (from Boswell's Life):

Boswell: My dear sir, you don't call Rousseau bad company. Do you really think him a bad man?
Johnson: Sir, if you are talking jestingly of this, I don't talk with you. If you mean to be serious, I think him one of the worst of men; a rascal, who ought to be hunted out of society, as he has been. Three or four nations have expelled him; and it is a shame that he is protected in this country.
Boswell: I don't deny, sir, but that his novel may, perhaps, do harm; but I cannot think his intention was bad.
Johnson: Sir, that will not do. We cannot prove any man's intention to be bad. You may shoot a man through the head, and say you intended to miss him; but the judge will order you to be hanged. An alleged want of intention, when evil is committed, will not be allowed in a court of justice. Rousseau, sir, is a very bad man. I would sooner sign a sentence for his transportation than that of any felon who has gone from the Old Bailey these many years. Yes, I should like to have him work in the plantations.
Boswell: Sir, do you think him as bad a man as Voltaire?
Johnson: Why, sir, it is difficult to settle the proportion of iniquity between them.

On Swift

Swift having been mentioned, Johnson, as usual, treated him with little respect as an author. Some of us endeavored to support the Dean of St. Patrick's, by various arguments. One in particular praised his "Conduct of the Allies." Johnson: "Sir, his 'Conduct of the Allies' is a performance of very little ability." "Surely, sir (said Dr. Douglas), you must allow it has strong facts." Johnson: "Why, yes, sir; but what is that to the merit of the composition? In the Sessions-paper of the Old Bailey there are strong facts. Housebreaking is a strong fact; robbery is a strong fact; and murder is a mighty strong fact; but is great praise due to the historian to those strong facts? No, sir; Swift has told what he had to tell, distinctly enough, but that is all. He had to count ten, and he has counted it right." Then, recollecting that Mr. Davies, by acting as an informer, had been the occasion of his talking somewhat too harshly to his friend Dr. Percy [the sting of Johnson's wit, given an opening by a comment of Mr. Davies, had compelled Dr. Percy to leave the dinner], for which, probably, when the first ebullition was over, he felt some compunction, he took an opportunity to give him a hit: so added, with a preparatory laugh, "Why, sir, Tom Davies might have written 'The Conduct of the Allies.'" Poor Tom being thus suddenly dragged into ludicrous notice in presence of the Scottish Doctors, to whom he was ambitious of appearing to advantage, was grievously mortified. Nor did his punishment rest here; for upon subsequent occasions, whenever he, "statesman all over," assumed a strutting importance, I used to hail him "the Author of the Conduct of the Allies."

When I called upon Dr. Johnson the next morning, I found him highly satisfied with his colloquial prowess the preceding evening. "Well (said he), we had good talk. Boswell: "Yes, sir; you tossed and gored several persons."

Billy Graham

Courtesy of Kevin Davis over at After Existentialism, Light, here's a good piece from Time magazine a few months ago about Billy Graham. The article is mainly a response to some rather ugly comments by Christopher Hitchens but nonetheless does a good job of showing how Billy Graham cannot at all be likened to Pat Robertson, Joel Osteen, or similar antichrists, an unfortunate mistake made by so many of the religiously illiterate.

To My Querimonious Peers

The hours, you say, that sound the course of night
Yield up their rest in rend'ring products right;
Those too that stretch the sun across the day
Exhaust themselves in studying, you say.
But say, my friend, when time's so wisely spent,
How can the spender be so ignorant?

Locus Classicus?

This is called Classicism. It is the enemy, we're trying to annihilate it.
-James Redfield, Professor of Classics, University of Chicago, on the idea that learning Greek through Homer ill prepares the student to read "real Greek"

It was the opinion of Ben Jonson that Spenser, in his liberal employments of archaism and coinage, far from enriching their native English, "wrote no language at all." Samuel Johnson similarly chided Milton in his Life, and pointed out quite accurately that the same Latinism which so often elevates the noblest sentiments of Paradise Lost renders the great poet's prose almost unreadable. On the other hand, Addison, speaking also of Milton, felt that high style was unachievable without the intervention of a foreign tongue, citing the Latin poets' borrowings from Greek, and the many different dialects that enriched the voice of Homer. Perhaps the most famous treatment of the issue is that of Horace:

Si forte necesse est
Indiciis monstrare recentibus abdita reurm,
Fingere cinctutis non exaudita Cethegis
Continget, dabiturque licentia sumpta pudenter.
Et nova fictaque nuper habebunt verba fidem, si
Graeco fonte cadent parce detorta. Quid autem
Caecilio Plautoque dabit Romanus, ademptum
Virgilio Varioque? Ego cur, acquirere pauca
Si possum, invideor, cum lingua Catonis et Enni
Sermonem patrium ditaverit et nova rerum
Nomina protulerit. Licuit semperque licebit
Signatum praesente nota producere nomen. (Ars Poetica, 48-59)

Jonson translated these lines thus:
Yet if by chance, in uttering things abstruse,
Thou need new terms, thou may'st without excuse,
Feign words, unheard of to the well-trussed race
Of the Cethegi; and all men will grace,
And give, being taken modestly, this leave,
And those thy new, and late-coined words receive,
So they fall gently from the Grecian spring
And come not too much wrested. What's the thing
A Roman to Caecilius will allow,
Or Plautus, and in Vergil disavow,
Or Varius? Why am I now envied so,
If I can give some small increase? when, lo,
Cato's and Ennius' tongues have lent much worth
And wealth unto our language, and brought forth
New names of things. It hath been ever free,
And ever will, to utter terms that be
Stamped to the time.

The idea of a fixed language, dropped perfectly from the lips of Gabriel, is not without a long heritage, nor a certain seduction. I myself am hardly unaffected by its charms, and although the arguments on either side have their compelling points, and I have already found a professor of mine against it, I must admit my own adherence to a sort of Classicism of language. Many have heard my opinions on the subject, and know that I hold our modern brand of English in very low esteem, especially for its use of foreign words. On that particular I am soundly convinced and eager to win converts, but my purpose here is rather to lay out what can be meant by the very idea of judging periods of language against one another, which the kind allowances of modern canonicity cannot fathom, though the common experience of taste assures us it is there.

I should first point out, perhaps, that I am speaking of something a little different than the learned litany above: their concern, as I have quoted them, is the proper use of foreign words and syntax in formal poetry. This is a more specific concern within the broader question of good poetic diction, which is itself within the scope of my present concern. Although his concept is closer, Professor Redfield is also speaking of something a little different, namely, an Ideal Greek Language, from which all others, in true Platonic fashion, would be but emanations or derivations. All language is of course bound to history and emerges from it, and the boundaries of what is English and what is Greek are fixed only with the usage of the time. What we speak now would not be English to Aelfric or Bede, and the boundaries of style are no different than the boundaries of the language itself, as the very idea of archaism demonstrates.

If language then, which is the shape and means of expression, takes different shapes at different times, it seems natural to assume that the language of some periods will be able to express things that the language of another time could not. Concrete examples prove the soundness of this intuition on a basic level: when Shakespeare writes "thy most worst" (Winter's Tale III.ii.177), he says something that a modern English speaker, in a very real sense, cannot say, or at least cannot say without explicit appropriation of the Elizabethan idiom. As with simple gestures so with great ones: it is no coincidence that languages of literary merit can point to periods crowded with excellent writers. Such coteries are often labeled the product of political circumstances, but the usual broadness of a period of literary greatness in a language defies such logic. English poetry, for example, comprehended a broad spectrum of political states from Spenser to Pope, and yet who could deny that for the space of nearly two centuries there was consistenly good poetry in the English language? Similarly, Latin speakers experienced a Republic, its violent collapse, the establishment of monarchy, and its institutionalization all between Lucretius and Juvenal and yet found great writers consistently springing up while the language retained its vigor.

I accept that I have done very little in so short a space to prove any grand claims, and perhaps only muddled the forthright clarity of my opening statements. It is a subject worth far more attention than can grace a blog. I shall close by asking only whether anyone in good conscience can hold today's Atlantic Monthly in one hand and an issue of the Spectator in the other and affirm that our modern speech carries the day.

Hauerwas' Marital Misconceptions

It may appear as somewhat of a presumption to announce a guest posting for a blog so little traveled as this one. Yet I do not think I would be right in withholding the perceptive opinions, upon a subject so recently treated on this site, of none other than my dear and only mother, Cynthia Rivera, enthusiast and sometime scholar of medieval Iceland. Without further ado, then, I present a recent exchange of e-mails between us concerning some statements of Stanley Hauerwas' which I quoted in an earlier post.


Initial Objections to Hauerwas (mother):

I'm sure people have lots of different answers to the question "what
drives you crazy about the way people discuss religion and
homosexuality?" Mine is: will people please read up on the history of
Christian marriage before they start talking about it ?!?! I have heard
more mistakes than I can count--and they come from both sides :(

I'd like to know when and where Dr. Hauerwas thinks "For centuries,
Christians married people who didn't know one another until the marriage
ceremony." Not any time or place I know of. Certainly not in Western
Europe in ancient or medieval times, or at least not often. I'm not even
sure how that would work when most people married within the same small
geographic area--and by the middle ages were required to announce their
betrothal in public well in advance of the wedding.

I'm sure he knows theology, but I wonder how much he really knows about
the history of marriage (a subject about which lots of people assume
they know more than they do). I'm no expert either, but I can say that
within the past three or four years I have read (all or the first half)
of every significant book-length study of the history of Christian
marriage (in English and skimmed some in French and German) and lots of
articles as well. And I never saw anything like this. In fact, one of
the recurring battlegrounds between the church and older legal/kinship
systems was the church's insistence that a true marriage required free
and informed consent--something not absolutely incompatible with
marrying a stranger but certainly a problematic requirement under those
circs.

I wonder if he's just extrapolating from having read accounts of royal
marriages. It's a fairly common fallacy of people reading about a time
or place with which they are unfamiliar to focus on the top of society.
See, for example, the absolutely unshakable belief lots of people have
that in medieval and renaissance Europe people married very young. This
was true only of the very highest levels of the aristocracy and even
there such marriages often remained unconsummated for years afterwards
(medieval people weren't stupid--they knew just as well as we do that 14
years old girls seldom produce robust babies, which is sort of the point
of marriage among the landed ;)

Another theory, based on your comment, is that he picked it up from
Lewis who was a literature not history person and has been known to
overgeneralize about sexual matters in the middle ages.

Anyway, that's my rant. Put it down as the sort of ranting people often
send to blogs :)

Response (son)

Hauerwas does fire in all directions.  I was already a little
suspicious of the reality of his comment about people
returning from war being barred from communion (I think I
mentioned this in the post), as opposed to it being something
theologians said should happen.

If I remember the C.S. Lewis passage correctly, his emphasis
was on the fact that modern conceptions of marriage put almost
exclusive weight on the romantic love of the two parties, and
therefore lead to lots of divorces when that element
disappears and there is no sense of obligation/vow to fall
back on.  I believe (though my memory is less certain here)
that he also said something to the effect of "people didn't
fall in love and then get married, but rather got married and
then fell in love."  Now that you point it out, Hauerwas'
"they didn't know each other" does seem rather absurd.  But,
and you obviously would know better than I, to what degree
would lower class marriages be arranged as opposed to for love
(as if that's an either/or, right;)?

Come to think of it, Tyndale talks about this at the beginning
of the Obedience, and this may be better clue to why people
like C.S. Lewis and Stanley Hauerwas might disagree with
medieval Icelandic churchmen on this, since Tyndale is
criticizing the Roman church on its marriage practices when he
writes, in the context of the obedience of children to
parents, "See we not daily three or four calling one woman
before the commissary or official, of which not one hath the
consent of her father or mother?  Yet he that hath most money,
hath best right and shall have her in the despite of all her
friends and in defiance of God's ordinances."  Obviously this
is complicated by the implied bribery and/or prostitution
(well, the prostitution is not implied, since he says, in the
sentence previous, "the weddings of our virgins (shame it is
to speak it) are more like unto the saute of a bitch than the
marriage of a reasonable creature."["saute" must mean
something like sale or auction, although my edition's note
says it means "leap," which not only makes no sense, but
cannot be, as the OED first instance of that word, which is
from the French, is 1948, while a word spelled the same but
differently derived is current with Tyndale meaning "ransom
for manslaughter;" that's just poor scholarship on David
Daniell's part]). In any case, the idea of marriage,
presumably for love, sanctioned by the church but disapproved
of by the parents is there in the background in the early
sixteenth century, even if Tyndale attacks the more obviously
deplorable practice.

This definitely is a subject where people like to make stuff
up under the guise of historicism.  I've heard the claim often
trotted out (although as often denied by those well read
enough to have encountered such obscure texts as Plato's
Symposium) that devoted, lifelong romantic love is a medieval
development that didn't really exist in the ancient world.
Certainly overly zealous embrace of historical peculiarity is
just as bad as ignorant acceptance of modern views as universal.

Counter-Examples Expressly Stated (mother):

Hi--Here's my promised thoughts on the history of marriage stuff. I
think what Lewis says, as paraphrased by you (and that sounds right), is
fairly accurate. It would be even more accurate if it were something
like "people fell in love and then got married less often than today,
and got married and then fell in love more often." That is, he's
describing the majority of people but not by any means everybody.
Interesting that Lewis also tied it to modern divorce, because I was in
a conversation with friends just recently about how we know almost
nobody (hard to be sure :) who married for entirely non-romantic
reasons, but tons of women our age who have stayed married for what
would have been "reasons to get married" in another time: children,
family businesses, the wishes of their parents, religious teachings,
stability of a community, etc.

Sounds like you think Hauerwas may just have been carelessly
exaggerating something he'd read by talking about strangers. Makes
sense. I think three very distinct concepts get thrown together by those
who aren't careful: stranger marriage, arranged marriage, and marriage
for practical reasons. They can overlap and all three can be contrasted
with marriage because of love or attraction. But they are very different
from each other.

Let me give you a couple of made-up examples of arranged or practical
marriages which are the farthest thing possible from stranger marriages.
Say two farmers who live a few miles apart and are old friends decide
their children should marry each other: that's an arranged marriage, but
the couple have known each other all their lives--probably played
together as babies. Or say a young woman who is the only child of a
harness-maker decides to marry her father's most skillful apprentice: a
very practical marriage but the couple have lived under the same roof
and possibly eaten at the same table since childhood. Both are farther
from stranger marriages than a modern couple who marry after knowing
each other socially for a year or two :)

If I had to summarize what society's attitude toward marriage was in
pre-modern, Christian, Western Europe it would be something like this:
marriage is a practical (economic, political, business, whatever)
arrangement between two families (and therefore as a practical matter
the main decision-making power lies with the parents or their
surrogates). However, (A) the church will not bless a marriage not
entered into freely (B) everybody knows that everything will go more
smoothly if the couple get along and (C) things will go even better if
there is affection between the man and woman. (Nobody wants to live next
door to, or be in an extended family with, people who are fighting all
the time; everybody wants lots of children raised in the best possible
environment.)

Don't know much about the war/communion thing although I do know there
were a couple of periods during the medieval era when the institutional
church (leading intellectuals and/or the papacy) was big on legalistic
pacifism. Not sure of the details, but this could relate to that.

The Tyndale quote is intriguing and I'd like to know more about what
he's talking about--I'm not strong on the period when a lot of things
about the medieval church are collapsing and/or getting corrupt, but I'd
bet they included local marriage practices.

Conclusion (son):

I was thinking about the War/Communion thing, and I think I recall
reading somewhere an argument that claimed the Crusades were so
successful because it allowed all the violent and restless Frankish
noblemen to go off to war without suffering religious consequences.  So
Hauerwas may be closer to the truth there.

As for Tyndale, you can read the passage I'm referring to on Google
Books (just search for The Obedience of a Christian Man; it's the first
one that comes up, starting on the bottom of page 32).  It seems fairly
clear what he's saying, although, given the importance money plays in
all of it, we're probably dealing with burgher-level people at least and
not common folk.  He doesn't say much about reasons to marry in this
passage, or in the Obedience at all, but is more strictly concerned with
the marriage receiving the approbation of "father and mother" and "the
consent of all thy friends," as well as being "[an oath] sworn to God
before his holy congregation."  For the attacks he makes at the end of
the section concerning men getting out of marriages by becoming monks
there seems to be a clear scriptural precedent at Matthew 15:1-9, and
I'm surprised he doesn't cite it.

Anyway, I've probably forced Tyndale into this discussion far enough.
Thanks for pointing these things out to me.  I think in zeal for his
basic conclusion, that marriage ought not to be only or even primarily
about romantic love, as well as in scholarly sympathy for the trope of
the past's complete difference from us, I completely missed the fact
that Hauerwas was making a claim that was patently absurd, and not only
to common sense, but, as you pointed out, the conditions most human
society has existed under would be far less amenable to the marriage of
strangers than the jumbled and fluid modern west.

Genap Under Nihthelm

"Ovidii Medea videtur mihi ostendere quantum ille vir praestare potuerit si ingenio suo temperare quam induglere maluisset." -Quintilian, X.I.XCVIII

("To me Ovid's Medea seems to show what that man could accomplish when he preferred to discipline his genius rather than indulge it.")

It is certainly regretful that works like Ovid's tragedy are lost to us, but this pain is often tempered by the fact that we know almost nothing of the character of what we have lost. How sudden, then, is the redoubling of the smart when we come upon a line such as this, wrapped though it is in the haughty judgment of a refined critic, that gives some glimpse of the quality of what has been taken from us. I cannot say I am the greatest partisan of Ovid's, but he is a supremely enjoyable poet even when he does coddle his fancy, and a very fine one in his better moments; to have lost the judged exemplar of his maturity is a loss indeed. All we can offer are the words of an anonymous Anglo-Saxon: genap under nihthelm, swa heo no waere "They are clouded under the hood of night as though they never were."

Is Data or Aren't They?

I haven't posted in a while on account of my midterms (which continue through next week) among other things, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to briefly comment on something which consistently irks me, namely, the mistaken notion that the collective noun "data" is grammatically plural. This is a widely spread notion and provides for that ugly but nonetheless far too common collocation "the data are," as, for example, on this page from the Wake Forest University Department of Biology. The roots of this misconception lie in the Latin analogue of our English word, which is a neuter plural past participle of the word for "give." In Latin, "data" are "givens," and thus, until actually quite recently, "data" was employed as a plural and meant "axioms." The OED cites the earliest usage of this sense from 1646. This, however, as any speaker of English will tell you, is not the most common meaning of the word "data."

The common modern meaning, which the OED sets as "Facts, esp. numerical facts, collected together for reference or information," shows up first in 1899. As it first came into usage, it may indeed have remained a plural in this sense; after all, people still learned Latin in those days. But after a century in the service of illiberally educated scientists, I can say with absolute certainty that in genuine usage the word is grammatically singular and plural only under the duress of pretension. I find no authority in the argument that the Latin word is plural: Latinitas non Anglice dicit, "Good Latin doesn't speak English." We have borrowed, for example, the Spanish word "siesta," which is grammatically feminine in Spanish, into our language. Should we then be saying "I approve of the siesta, it is a fine institution," or "I approve of the siesta, she is a fine institution." Obviously the latter is a little awkward, since only the biologically female are grammatically feminine in contemporary English.

Let us assume, however, that number is a different case from gender, since gender really only affects the personal pronouns, and take no note of the fact that number only affects present indicative verbs, and the preterite of "be." If we apply this steadfast principle of faithful Latinity to the whole language the results really become quite strange. Compare, for example, the verbs "translate" and "transfer." In Latin they are derived from different 'principle parts,' as they are called, of the same verb, the former being the perfect participle and the latter the present stem; the third 'principle part,' the perfect finite verb, transtuli, has not found its way into English. But if it had, what sentences we could make! "After that, Mr. Jones transtuled the works of Horace into English, having translated Ovid already. 'It is a goal of mine,' he said, 'to transfer all the great Latin poets into English.'"

The answer to this more absurd proposition, of course, is that different senses of a single Latin verb came into English by way of different stems. Now that they have become English, it is beyond silly to try to re-Latinize them. I fail to see how the case of "data" is much different. The sense of the word is undoubtedly plural, but in a collective way, which is hardly rare in English: navy, furniture, etc. The fact that the easiest synonym for "data" is "information" goes a long way, I think, towards showing the common sense of implementing it as a grammatical singular. English has simply used the word differently than Latin.

I will pass over the fact that neuter plurals always take singular verbs in Greek.

History and the Boardgame

It has been my privilege this quarter to take a class on the historiography of the Reformation with Constantin Fasolt. The class, he has said, is to be a class not so much about the Reformation per se, but about knowledge of the Reformation. To this end we have begun the quarter reading various classic treatments of the Reformation from the nineteenth century, and attending specifically to their methodologies and theoretical frameworks rather than particular factual information. Having dispensed with the Idealist Hegel and the Positivist Ranke, we turned most recently to Engels, for whom both of the other writers suffered from the same problem:

"These ideologists are so gullible that they accept unquestioningly all the illusions that an epoch makes about itself or that ideologists of an epoch make about that epoch...To this day our ideologists have hardly any idea of the class struggles fought out in these upheavals, of which the political slogan on the banner is every time a bare expression..."(Frederick Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, pp. 12-13)

That is to say, that historians who look to tell the story of the past solely in terms of the decisions, opinions, and ambitions of individuals have crafted the shallowest of histories, and sketched only a brief outline, where they ought to have laid bare the mechanisms of events. For Engels, of course, the actual mechanisms of history are economic, and the interests of their social class will dominate individuals, if unconsciously, to the point that it is far clearer to look at history in terms of the struggles between these classes than in terms of the struggles between individuals or nations.

It is not the aim of this post simply to hold forth on the relative merits of the various schools of history, as I am neither qualified nor able to make any meaningful statement on them, but rather to offer a brief observation of the way in which such frameworks influence the design of historical boardgames; for it occurred to me, turning over Professor Fasolt's comments on Engels' separation of himself from these other sorts of history, and indeed the way in which the practice of history includes today many more subjects of inquiry than it once did, that this difference of approaches could be observed, if inexactly, in two boardgames with which I am familiar, Diplomacy and Antike. I say inexactly, because the history practiced in board games is very much like the history practiced in poetry, or in painting, for, being like them an art which is principally pleasing and edifying at its best (as opposed to history proper, which is principally edifying and pleasing at its best), it is constrained by the intents of its enterprise to offer only vague and adapted notions of history. Yet merely because one turns more confidently to the Commentaries of Caesar than the Pharsalia of Lucan for a history of the Roman Civil War does not mean that Lucan contains neither history nor a historical point of view. Similarly, although neither one tells us anything historically useful about the periods they claim ostensibly to cover, Antike and Diplomacy nonetheless offer differing perspectives about the mechanisms of history.

Diplomacy is a game about individual ingenuity in the exercise of military power. The game contains an economic element, in that certain spaces on the board ('supply centers') allow players to produce new military units, and others do not, but, as only this brief description makes apparent, there is no use for wealth other than war; in fact, it may be better to dispense altogether with the idea of an economic element to the game, and view 'supply centers' rather as armies in potentia, than any sort of wealth, as they can do nothing but produce military units. But this is not the place for any theoretical strategy. In any case, the object of the game is to achieve absolute supremacy, that is, to have more than half of the supply centers on the board. This is achieved by negotiation with other players, and combat between the players' forces; but again, since negotiations are conducted only gain assurances concerning military matters, it may be better said that victory is achieved through purely military means. The only actual action in the game is the movement and conflict of armies and fleets; victory, consequently, is entirely dependent on these factors.

Antike, on the other hand, is a game in which the military level is only one of many. Like Diplomacy, there are armies and fleets, but there are also cities, temples, and technologies. Instead of an economic level which offers only a third type of military unit, the potential one, Antike has three different resources, gold, iron, and marble, which appear on different spaces on the board, and can each be spent to purchase a specific thing. Victory is achieved in gathering points for achieving various goals, such has having a certain number of cities, temples, or fleets, or developing new technologies or destroying an opponent's temple. Although this variety of paths to victory might make it appear than Antike lacks the single-mindedness of Diplomacy, it becomes clear when playing the game that it is principally economic. The production and consumption of resources drives all the other aspects of the game, and, although no points are awarded for the possession of wealth, all the things for which points are awarded are purchased by it, so that the points may be seen as results of the player's economic policy.

It should be somewhat apparent from these brief descriptions that Diplomacy and Antike offer quite divergent historical frameworks. In the former, not only is everything ultimately decided by military power, but military power is also, quite literally, the only thing to talk about in the game: The narrative of a game of Diplomacy is one of military campaigns and alliances, in which the deployment of armies is alone important. Antike, on the other hand, although it gives appearances of being a slightly more nuanced portrayal of the same military situations as Diplomacy, actually rests on patterns of the exercise, production, and deployment of wealth, and not military power. The terms of victory in either game, that is to say, what really matters in the worlds these games present to us, likewise complement these views. A player is victorious in Diplomacy when he has such military power as no one can stop him; a player wins Antike by acquiring points from various sources, some military, some cultural (such as the game portrays them), and some commercial, but all of which grow out of the resources and wealth of the player's nation.

I would certainly go too far if I were to claim that Diplomacy is a perfect analogue to the history of politics and personages, or that Antike is the sort of game Engels would have made. Yet I do not think these associations are without value. Although there is absolutely no class struggle in Antike ("What about the people building those temples for the clerical-aristocratic interests?"), the game does offer something far closer to social and economic history than the maneuvers of Diplomacy. And the absence of any ideological level from Diplomacy (if such an level could even exist in a board game), does not diminish the fact that the game gives us war without any framework to make sense of it beyond itself, that is, precisely the sort surface history we saw Engels at odds with earlier.

Although I could say much more about these very interesting games, I will leave this essay here, and happily take them up another time.

Well, it's new to me...

I posted a link a couple weeks ago to an address given by Stanley Hauerwas in 1991. A few Google searches later, and I have found, courtesy of this blog, something slightly more recent, from 2002. It's always encouraging to find a voice saying things one oft has thought, whether it expresses them so well or so-so. Some highlights:

(Asked generally about September 11)

" People say that September 11 forever changed the world. That is false. The year 33 A.D. forever changed the world. September 11 is just one other terrible event in the world's continuing rejection of the peace God made present through the Resurrection."

"American Christians simply lack the disciplines necessary to discover how being Christian might make them different. For example, after the Gulf War, people rightly wanted to welcome the troops home, so they put yellow ribbons everywhere including the churches. Yet if the Gulf War was a "just war," that kind of celebration was inappropriate. In the past when Christians killed in a just war, it was understood they should be in mourning. They had sacrificed their unwillingness to kill. Black, not yellow, was the appropriate color. Indeed, in the past when Christian soldiers returned from a just war, they were expected to do penance for three years before being restored to the Eucharist. That we now find that to be unimaginable is but an indication how hard it is for us to imagine what it might mean for us to be Christian."

It would be interesting to know what period of history he's talking about, although I would assume it has to be sometime in the Middle Ages.

(Asked about homosexuality)

"The problem with debates about homosexuality is they have been devoid of any linguistic discipline that might give you some indication what is at stake. Methodism, for example, is more concerned with being inclusive than being the church. We do not have the slightest idea what we mean by being inclusive other than some vague idea that inclusivity has something to do with being accepting and loving. Inclusivity is, of course, a necessary strategy for survival in what is religiously a buyers' market. Even worse, the inclusive church is captured by romantic notions of marriage. Combine inclusivity and romanticism and you have no reason to deny marriage between gay people.

When couples come to ministers to talk about their marriage ceremonies, ministers think it's interesting to ask if they love one another. What a stupid question! How would they know? A Christian marriage isn't about whether you're in love...

The difficulty, therefore, is that Christians, when they approach this issue, no longer know what marriage is. For centuries, Christians married people who didn't know one another until the marriage ceremony, and we knew they were going to have sex that night. They didn't know one another. Where does all this love stuff come from? They could have sex because they were married."

I remember C.S. Lewis saying something similar about marriage in Mere Christianity.

Hauerwas also (on the bottom of the first page) uses the word "image" as verb in the sense of "imagine," a usage I first encountered in Sharon Howell, my pastor throughout high school, who, like Hauerwas, grew up in rural Texas. The OED does list such a use of the verb "image" and even dates its first use all the way back to 1440! So I guess it's legitmate and no provincial innovation (or at the very least a rather old one). But I've still only ever encountered it in these two Texans.

The Blood of the Martyrs...

Jim West, always colorful, always prodigious, posted a link yesterday to this website, the online presence of a group which seeks to alleviate discrimination against Christians in Europe. That their 'About Us' statement feels obligated to make the claim that their cause "by no means disregards or devalues the dramatic persecution of Christians in several countries of the world, but rather supplements this worldwide concern," is I think enough to demonstrate that there exists even on the part of its architects an anxiety about this project; that those same architects appear either oblivious to the good reasons for such an anxiety or unwilling to heed them should excite disapproval in the conscious Christian. It is one thing to appropriate the discourse of this world to advance the Gospel; it is quite another to allow that frame of mind to shape the Christian.

It is precisely that worse alternative which seems to have informed the program of this site. This fact is in view from every angle: the clinical calmness of the description of "Christianophobia," the validating citation of a non-Christian scholar who coined the term, the ugly term itself, a faux Hellenism crafted carefully to invoke the authority of Science. Christianophobia, we are told, is "a negative categorical bias," a "prejudice," "a form of religious intolerance," that "may lead to stereotyping or discrimination." One need not have any sharp perception of style to understand that all these terms have been chosen and accumulated for their shock value only, and that the only statement in them, bereft as they are made in their close proximity of any real meaning, is that this sort of thing is something society really rather disapproves of. There is not a theological appeal, that I can find, in the whole page; to the bogeymen of liberal democracy, there are many.

Such cheap rhetoric should be disappointing to any thinking person, but to the Christian it should be a source of deep dismay. For such labels and terminologies are not only not Christian in any positive sense, but, far from being even neutral, promote a decidedly anti-Christian view of the world. Let us take an example from the front page of the site, where the call is sent out for "victims" to share their stories; we must first move beyond the reverberations of that language in the popular sphere, which has been discussed above. What suffering Christian has ever or could ever be properly called a "victim?" Did not our Lord "suffer under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried?" Did he not thereby, far from suffering as a victim, arise in triumph over the last enemy to be destroyed, which is death? (1 Corinthians 15:26). Had not this same victorious Lord exhorted his followers to "rejoice and be glad" in the experience of all ranges of persecution (Matthew 5:11-12), knowing that through his love they would be "more than conquerors" and under all catastrophes and duress inseparable from the single source and object of their being (Romans 8:36ff). Are any of those properly called victims to whom the apostle says "if any of you suffers as a Christian, do not consider it a disgrace, but glorify God because you bear this name?" (1 Peter 4:16) All Christians must suffer at the hands of this world for their Master's sake (John 16:33), but in this suffering no Christian is belittled or made less. On the contrary, in that he shares however meanly in the life and the suffering of Christ, who was "despised and rejected" (Isaiah 53:3), the Christian has a share in that which is highest, truest, and best. Such a one is no victim of the world, but rather a victor in Christ.

The authors of the site are correct in insisting that their statements in no way lessen the real and far worse persecution of Christians occurring now in many parts of the world. Indeed how could they or anyone else do so: it is Christ the Lord who stands by those who suffer for his name and elevates them to the prize of an imperishable crown (1Corinthians 9:25). The authors are no less correct in pointing out that there is a casual but explicit antipathy to the Christian faith in some influential segments of the West, among intellectuals (as they are called) especially. Yet in their tone and mindset they are so terribly gone wrong and appeal so feebly to the powers of this world, that they can serve as no aid to the Christian but that of a cautionary example.

Ignatius of Antioch, one of the so-called "Apostolic Fathers," who lived at the beginning of the 2nd Century AD, when he had been brought to Rome to face trial for his life, pleaded with the more influential members of the Christian community there not to interfere with his case, and to allow him the victory of a martyr's death. Roughly a century later, with Christianity still very much illegal in the Roman world, writers such as Tertullian and Origen could lament the fact that the Church had not kept the mentality of martyrdom. I do not know what they would say to these things. Tertullian certainly wrote with great eloquence and passion against the anti-Christian bigotries of his time in his Apologia, and it is perhaps in this same apologetic vein that these exposers of "Christianophobia" wish to operate. But I cannot help but feel from the language they employ that they truly do seek and desire merely those worldly comforts of privilege and law which are the idols of our age. And this no Christian should do. No Christian should ever take his cares and his complaints to the state, to have them heard, and to have them satisfied. For our citizenship is in heaven (Philippians 3:20): Christ was on the cross for our cares, and it is to him that we should take them. We have in him a better advocate before a truer judgment than any worldly court can provide.