Noctes Kansienses

Of Friendship

2010-09-28T17:26:00.003-05:00

A friend suggested to me today, as she complained of the emptiness of much friendship, that I compose a post for this blog considering the opinions of great thinkers upon the subject. Although I have been commended for the wideness of my reading, I think myself hardly fit to conduct such an undertaking with either the scholarly care or philosophical perspicuity so grave a subject would demand. I do, however, keep often in my mind the remark of Francis Bacon, in his essay Of Followers and Friends, that “there is little friendship in the world, and least of all between equals, which was wont to be magnified. That that is, is between superior and inferior, whose fortunes may comprehend the one the other.” I think we today would do harm neither to our happiness nor our virtue to consider friendship this way. For if Aristotle, the philosopher of optimates, could require that equality of friends which Bacon here dismisses, how much more so do we slaves to the democratic vision find ourselves searching eternally for friends who are our equals?

My grandfather once told me that the greatest difficulty in finding appointments for our clergy couples in the Methodist Church is the inevitable reality that one of the two will be a much better minister than the other; and so, in the best interests of the gospel and of Christ’s holy church, one must put a strain upon an institution pleasing to that same Christ and approved by the same holy gospel—for only among spouses of the humblest and best sort will the advancement of one not engender envy and remorse in the heart of the other left behind—otherwise we must do disservice to our mission by either elevating an unworthy laborer or holding back an excellent one. Yet we who are so ready to sacrifice at the altars of equity and equality would balk at the sacrifice of a spouse who puts their career in the service of their partner’s—and if it be the wife that does so those of us well trained by feminists will either pity her or blame her husband; the man who does so, well, is he not weak and uxorious? And yet who would deny the contribution such a sacrifice can make to matrimonial felicity? Indeed among the many causes of our society’s propensity to divorce may we not name alongside individualism, shamelessness, love-worship, and the contractual idea the fact that it is now equals who marry? When we are rivals with our husbands and wives in not only amatory contests of jealousy real or imagined, but also in the merciless and worldly battlefield of our status and careers, who can expect all barriers to vanish or affection to ground itself in the conversation of wedded souls and not the ambitions of advantageous partnership? And should another or no partnership seem better, by what cords are then the partners bound but those of legal inconvenience?

It is the first great advantage of a friend, says Bacon elsewhere in his essay Of Friendship, that they allow us “ease and discharge of the fullness and swellings of the heart,” that a friend is medicine for stress and sorrow. And yet if we are in constant fear of losing standing before our friends and hesitate to divulge our weaknesses in imagination of their later mocking us or thinking less of us, the medicine shall never be applied; indeed unless our friends are shrewd physicians and diligent confessors (friendship, says Bacon, is “a kind of civil shrift”) they may never detect either our symptoms or our evasions, and keep both absolution and prescription beyond our reach. If our friends are our equals this will always be the case, but if they are so far above us that we could never hope to gain their favor—and yet they may never be so beyond us that we do not think and feel as they do—or if, on the contrary, they are beneath us by such a degree that our livelihoods and happiness do not hang upon their opinions, then we will be freed to unfold before them the tale of all that ails us, and will not hesitate to share with them both relief and anxiety, sadness and joy. To be a peer in sentiment is to be ripe for friendship, but likeness in station is an invitation to rot.

Of Education

2010-09-10T17:00:00.006-05:00

It was the custom of Protagoras to ask his students only for such payment as they felt his teaching worth. I suppose if such a model were adopted today by any institution of higher learning, or indeed if such a framework were imposed upon the tax rates with which our public schools are funded, a great many diligent secretaries and mediocre lecturers would be compelled to seek other employment, not so much because the labor of our educators, poor though it may be, would go so undervalued or unappreciated (though that it would be), but because the spirit of cheapness and of avarice its sister holds such sway within the tempers of our age.

To be recompensed for the exercise of one's intellect and to be paid wages for the impartation to others of one's long-acquired knowledge are ideas both of which I find abhorrent and repulsive. A teacher is not worthy to have gained such knowledge if they demand some payment to divulge it, just as that student is a base and illiberal learner who cares for either grades or degrees. The student that desires something other than to become a man of learning and the teacher who desires more reward than to be one are both worthy of pity for the same reasons, if not in the same degree; for student may merely be ignorant, but the teacher has drunk of truth without feeling the refreshment of virtue. And those societies which fail to support such as are indeed seekers after truth deserve a harsher condemnation than even these. Boswell relates a story of Dr. Johnson that, when he learned the last surviving granddaughter of Milton was compelled by necessity to maintain herself as a shopkeeper, he considered it a grave injustice and a point of national shame and immediately went about lobbying the influential men of his acquaintance to see if they could provide her with a pension from the crown. Yet today we expect that even the poets themselves should work.

We might ask what can be done, and wonder whether a society of wage labor can ever again accept more aristocratic modes of sustaining our intellectuals. Indeed, even the institution we possess which is closest in spirit to the benefices and pensions of our forebears, the tenured professorship, is today adulterated with quantifiable standards and requirements and nonetheless remains relentlessly and constantly besieged. Yet it is better to ask another question: why must the university remain the model for higher education? After all the university itself displaced the monastery; why should the monastery not again return to the fore? The monks have their gardens and the alms of their benefactors; they have no need to demand a wage for teaching. And the initiate also is hardly pursuing advancement, but rather binding himself to a life dedicated to the highest ideals, a life which neither asks nor expects remuneration in this world. From teachers the expectation to publish would be thankfully removed and the vain and dangerous idol of advancing or expanding knowledge expunged from our world of thought. A world of such scholars would make Protagoras seem the greedy man.

On Speaking the Language

2010-09-03T15:39:00.010-05:00

Caleb Crain is a blogger, but, unlike the rest of us, one who is often actually worth reading. His training, and to a great degree his interests, are in American literature, a fact for which, as a horribly unfashionable exponent of High Classicism, I will not so much blame as pity him, and which, despite all my expectation to the contrary, seems to have left the sharpness of his intellect all but untouched; only a favorable disposition towards Freudianism reveals him. This Caleb Crain then, possessed of no small amount of both sagacity and taste, and yet hardly accustomed, as we shall see, to think within the constructs of earlier civilization, has taken upon himself to read "desultorily, and with no ambitions for speed or even completion," the Faerie Queene of Edmund Spenser. It is a pleasure I would recommend to all. After commenting first upon the archaism of his diction, Mr. Crain passes this evocative judgment on the allegorical world of Spenser's poem:

"In principle I don't mind it that one character stands for virtue, another for virginity, etc., but many of Spenser's characters represent their ideas so impartially that they don't quite come across as people. Add in the poem's resort to fantastical and sometimes gruesome imagery, and the reader sometimes feels as if he is trapped in another person's unconscious, prey to mysterious forces incarnated as monsters, elves, and beauties, all lacking the sort of personal self that might in a pinch be negotiated with."

The rest of the post continues with a discussion of the episode with Redcrosse and Despair, and its relevance to psychoanalytic discussions of suicide, which, if such things hold your interest, would certainly be worth reading. What more attracts me in Mr. Crain's comment is all the many things it says about how a reader raised on the novel has been taught to enjoy a text, and what a scholar trained in the last two centuries has been taught to find, indeed also what such readers cannot find and cannot enjoy--and his comments show he is certainly aware of this fact. Whatever I may say on this point has in all likelihood already been said, and more eloquently, by C.S. Lewis in one or other of his scholarly publications, to which I would direct the interested reader, especially his The Allegory of Love and The Discarded Image.

Mr. Crain's first observation, and the problem he has with Spenser as a reader of novels, is that the allegorical characters of the poem are not "believable," in his words, "don't quite come across as people." I assume we all know what is meant by "people," but it is worth parsing the statement out. Mr. Crain, I would wager, does not mean primarily things like the monstrosity of Duessa when she is uncovered by Arthur and revealed to be not a person but demon, or Occasion with her grotesque forelock. Such characters certainly do not come across as "people," but in the same way the giant Orgoglio, or for that matter the Rivers and Months that parade at various points in the poem, do not come across as "people": they are something other than people to begin with, and in that are well portrayed. What Crain means, rather, is that the human characters of the poem do not possess the depth of psychological complication one expects from the great novelists or may easily see in the great dramatists. One has, instead, people who are not "people," but rather move more comfortably in a world populated by Venus and Diana in their allegorical modes, and who have names like Braggadocchio.

What is it about such writing that troubles the modern reader? Does Spenser's method so offend against verisimilitude as to render his text unreadable because implausible? Or is it merely uncomfortable to find human beings who are not the complex individuals we often wish ourselves to be, who are "mere" instantiations of a transcendent ideal. For a man of Spenser's philosophical predilections, of course, such an instantiation is more "realistic" than the jumbles of quirk and nuance that our novelists portray. Yet we easily enjoy the writing of those whom we dissent from philosophically, and so in the case of Crain's dissatisfaction with Spenser I think one may more justly point to the long shadow cast by novelistic aims and procedures over all our current conceptions of literature, and narrative literature most of all. Unless one has become steeped in pre-modern literature, and done so in a way that is critical and attentive, any narrative piece will have the appearance of a failed novel. And I should perhaps say that, for someone who has somewhat become so steeped, the best novels too begin in their turn to take on the aspect of a failure.

Since we have spoken already of Lewis, it will perhaps first do to point out that Mr. Crain's second observation, that there is an aspect of Spenser that speaks to the mysterious and irrepressible power of the unconscious, has a certain resonance with the comments of that great critic. As he says, in The Allegory of Love, comparing Spenserian profundity with the elegance and charm of Ariosto, one of Spenser's "real concerns" is

"the primitive and instinctive mind, with all its terrors and ecstasies--that part in the mind of each of us which we should never dream of showing to a man of the world like Ariosto."

While Professor Lewis emphasizes what we might perhaps call the shame of those deep chords that Spenser touches, for Crain the problem is that they cannot "be negotiated with." There are many things, of course, other than our unconscious selves and desires that cannot be negotiated with, and among them is another of Spenser's "real concerns": the nature of the universe. And here we come to a very important question, for the greater part of Spenser's allegories display for us "the way things are." The Cantos of Mutabilitie do this most explicitly and profoundly, but one may also point to the Seven Deadly Sins in Book I, Alma's castle in Book II, or the Temple of Venus in Book IV, with Spenser's fine adaptation of some beautiful verses by another poet who wrote on "the way things are," Lucretius (Stanzas 44 following of Canto X of Book IV reproduce the opening lines of De Rerum Natura). What does it mean to transfer these non-negotiable realities from the order of an external world to the chaos of an internal one? This, it seems, is what Mr. Crain has done almost by accident, or perhaps it is better to say, by second nature.

The self is, after all, what we have been told literature is best employed in interrogating. To the natural sciences belong the discourses of physical reality and the metaphysical reality (or its absence) is a project for philosophers. The self, however, remains for us a field of inquiry in which literature has lost little prominence as a means of communicating knowledge. And yet it remains an empirical inquiry like the others, one in which its authority, like its pleasure, as we have seen above, derives in some sense or another from a reproduction of the psychological reality that is faithful in a very particular way. To approach literature like Spenser's expecting the "meaning" to be in some sense primarily a descriptive account of the self is only natural for a person of our age, but it is also only natural that such an endeavor will produce the sense of flatness which Mr. Crain identifies in the poem's allegory; it is precisely the sort of flatness one would find in Henry James if one were looking for the moral and philosophical heft of Dante's Commedia.

I suppose what most catches me about Mr. Crain's reaction is that it is not at all how I reacted to Spenser's poem when I first read it. To me, beyond the sheer consistent volume of the poetry--Spenser is closer to Homer in this regard than any other poet we have--what was most striking about the Faerie Queene was the clarity and texture of its allegorical representations. Before modern democracy or the modern sciences had even arisen, Spenser's narrative of Artegall's encounter with the Giant (Book V, Canto II) had already laid bare with precision and charm both the unity and the absurdity of those two powerful ideologies; the Cantos of Mutabilitie already mentioned give an account of reality which no philosopher could surpass and only the best might even equal for either propriety or presentation. Not once, however, did I long that Sir Guyon might become a "believable" character and cease to represent the virtue of temperance, nor did I ever suspect that the Bower of Bliss was primarily a fantasy of Spenser's eros (though it would not of course have portrayed what he intended it to portray if it did not touch those erotic chords within us). We are faced once again with the simple fact that learning to understand a poet's language amounts to far more than Mr. Crain's amusing trips to the OED. It requires rather a philologist's submission to the idiom of the poet, both in content and in the key to content, form.

Video Games Are Not Art

2010-07-07T09:55:00.005-05:00

Roger Ebert has a fine piece on the subject, part retraction, part withholding of judgment. I think he is right, but does not give good reasons. Partly, he still speaks with the same grammar of 'experience' that the proponents of video games employ. Partly, as he makes abundantly clear, he probably does not care to think the subject through completely at his age; a true critic, he knows intuitively what is art, and does not really see the need to explain it. Here are some of my thoughts on the subject.

I. The pleasure of games is libidinous, erotic: games function because of our desire to win and to have more. The pleasure we derive from the things normally considered art (music, drama, sculpture, poetry, etc.) is not derived from desire; we desire the pleasure, but the pleasure itself does not lie in the desiring. The basic aesthetic parameter of a game is determined by our desire to win it, or, in the case of something like World of Warcraft, to possess more and more of it. It is very plainly an erotic aesthetic; the pleasure derives from the state of desire, and often diminishes when there is no more to desire: hence the complaint with games that are too short. Yet the pleasure we derive from art is pleasure in the presence of the beautiful. When Mozart gives us a development section like that in the 40th Symphony’s first movement, it functions for the audience (those experiencing it) because they are able to hear the beauty of it; a person with no taste, but definition, will get nothing from Mozart. A game of Halo, on the other hand, functions well when the players (those experiencing it) want to win; if they aren’t trying to win, it becomes a joke. In fact, when players aren’t playing to win, the effect can often be similar to that of absurdist and avant-garde art, in which the artist is not trying to be beautiful. The pleasure we take from games is more like the pleasure we take in debating politics or being hopelessly in love than it is like the pleasure we take in a painting of Titian’s or a play by Shakespeare. One should also note that this erotic pleasure is also the principle artlessness of many contemporary manifestations of the traditional arts, such as mystery novels (or any “page-turner”). Catharsis is not unrelated to consummation, and anything, mystery novel, game, or unrequited love, whose pleasure derives from a sustained desire and diminishes with the attainment of that desire, is something of an altogether different sort than tragedy or marriage, in which the pleasure derives from consummation, achievement, and wholeness.

II. The presence of other arts in the game does not make the game art. Because a game like Grand Theft Auto contains a narrative which some find appealing, or because any number of games present the eye with striking images, does not make the games art. Take, for example, an edition of Paradise Lost with the Gustave Dore illustrations. We would say the book Paradise Lost is a work of art, and we would say the illustrations by Dore are works of art (and that their whole, as a set of illustrations, is a work of art), we would say that the edition of Milton was a fine book. But we would not call Paradise Lost a fine book because it contained (in this instance) illustrations by Gustave Dore. We would probably rather have a Paradise Lost with Gustave Dore illustrations than the standard Penguin paperback—but then again, we would sometimes derive greater pleasure form Milton by having the notes in the Penguin than the illustrations of Dore. Likewise, one enjoys chess when played with plastic pieces, but more when played with fine ivory pieces; yet chess is not a good game because of the fine ivory pieces.

III. Games believe in free will, art believes in fate. This is perhaps the only really good point Ebert makes, that there is something about the inevitability of art that gives it its power. This is of course related to the types of pleasures they give us, as discussed above, but it is also the key element in their ability to teach about life. A game has great difficulty teaching about life because there is no stability to it. If I set out to teach that 2+2=4, but it turns out than my students can learn just as easily from my lesson that 2+4=2, they will learn very little math. Now a game may teach practical lessons (a math game for children, for example, would not let you go on to the next level without showing that you know that 2+2=4 and not 2+4=2) but they cannot teach moral, spiritual, or philosophical lessons, because games teach on the basis of “this works,” not on the basis of “this is fitting.” I may learn some military strategy through playing Starcraft, but I would not learn how to inspire loyalty in my soldiers, or for that matter how to take prisoners or treat them in a civilized manner, although these things are just as important, if not more important, to the proper and fitting conduct of war. Yet if I read the Iliad or the Aeneid I will learn about all these things. I can also learn form them how to lose my wife or husband; can something that teaches you how to win possibly offer anything like the ghost of Creusa or Hector and Andromache upon the walls of Troy?

IV. Video Games do not establish the identity of a cultural elite. Before Romantic theorists of art (and their Renaissance predecessors), things like painting and sculpture, music, and poetry were not generally grouped together. Painting and sculpture were the realm of artisans, music was a branch of mathematics, and poetry was merely a special form of writing. All of these, however, were joined together in their functions of expressing the beautiful and in establishing both elite culture and the elevation of that elite over the rest of the populace. The way people speak and the sorts of things they read is still a good indication of class, and literature is an implementation of this. Likewise think of common people attending High Mass in a Gothic Cathedral, circa, let us say, 1450. The beauty of the architecture, stained-glass windows, paintings and sculptures all around them, as well as the singing of the cathedral choir serve to emphasize that they are in the presence of something much more important and powerful than they. Games are inescapably democratic on a number of levels. Most important, however, is the fact that the enjoyment of a game depends on equality. Games are unfair and unenjoyable if one player simply much better than all the others, and single-player games which are either too easy or too hard are equally bad games. Games (and this of course applies beyond videogames) employ handicaps and difficulty levels to enable players of different skill levels to compete together enjoyably. The relation to democratic endeavors such as the welfare state and affirmative action is almost too obvious; capitalism is, after all, a wagering game. There is no sense in which the people attending that High Mass needed to be balanced equally before they could enjoy the beauty of the music and the architecture; some would get much more than others, many would get nothing at all, but all would be experiencing the art. The fact that an ignorant peasant cannot understand the Latin, or really get the symbolism of the cathedral’s architectural design would not prevent the educated man from taking his pleasure in those things. But if we sit down to play Madden Football and you beat me 72-0, I doubt either one of us will take much pleasure. Likewise, an educated man’s ability to enjoy art sets him apart and above the vulgar and tasteless masses, but a pimpled teenager’s superior skill at Video Games rather notoriously gets him nowhere in life.

Taking up the Pen

2010-06-16T08:43:00.004-05:00

It is among the most salutary uses of history to expose those faults and inclinations in ourselves to which we would otherwise be blind. Just as it is only in a mirror that we may look upon our own faces, so without the aid of past voices we will never hear our own. Although she claims to be ruled by documents of antiquity, the church of our day would do well to learn that there is real use in a sympathetic engagement with the past. When the United Methodist Council of Bishops last year published a pastoral letter on the state of world affairs, they expressed thusly their reasons for writing:

"We, the Bishops of the United Methodist Church, cannot remain silent while God's people and God's planet suffer."

A statement which appears doctrinally innocuous, even if the limp triteness of "cannot remain silent" is offensive to taste, but compare it with the reasons Thomas Cranmer gives in the introduction to his A Defense of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of our Savior Christ (via Jim West):

"I, not knowing otherwise how to excuse myself at the last day..."

And later on,

"Moved by the duty, office, and place whereunto it hath pleased God to call me..."

If we wished to be charitable, we might say that our bishops could have given Cranmer's second reason, had they possessed the English language in its first youthful vigor and not the aching limp of its declining middle age, for the sentiment is very close. The bishops say they cannot remain silent, we may infer, because of their shepherdly duty; Cranmer says the same. The difference in phrasing, however, is not merely a difference in eloquence, although it is also that (and where is this thing mere eloquence?); the different phrasings betray different pictures of the episcopal vocation.

The bishops today conceive of themselves as apart from the arena of God's activity: they can either speak or remain silent while they view the suffering of God's creation. They themselves are affected only by the inner movements of compassion, or, more precisely, remorse. Their stance, put another way, is of precisely the same sort as God's in the time of Noah: they are sorry to have made the universe a certain way. They are themselves unaffected by the calamity they witness, but, because they consider themselves the authors of it, they feel responsible to set it right. God has apparently had no hand in the administration of his created world; it seems to be God's in the same way property may belong to someone who never sees it and lives thousands of miles away. Although we must bear in mind that this metaphor can be defended by scripture (Mark 12:1-12), we should also ask ourselves who these "Bishops of the United Methodist Church" are in relation to this God who possesses a people and a planet. They do not themselves appear to be God's property in the same way, as the grammar and tone of the sentence alike make clear. Perhaps they are hired overseers, and it is in their contract to take action in a situation such as this; perhaps their retirement benefits are at stake if they don't shape up. But if they are hired administrators, and not themselves part of God's property, what prevents them from being, as the parable says, "hirelings, that care not for the sheep?" (John 10:1-18).

Cranmer is clear that he writes as a servant under God's power. He does not invoke the name 'bishop,' but says only that he is compelled to live in accordance with the calling which God has placed upon his life. It is not as a hired hand, as a free laborer, that Cranmer is compelled to pluck up by the roots the doctrinal weeds in his Lord's garden, but as a serf whose life is tied inextricably to that garden, who is indeed a part of his master's garden. And as a serf, he of course has no rights before his Lord, and so writes "not knowing otherwise how to excuse himself at the last day." Cranmer writes in full humility, and in the firm knowledge that he is God's just as surely as the church and world he has been appointed especially to serve.

One could protest that of course the bishops intend themselves to be included among God's people, but I am not interested in how they would reinterpret their document to meet these objections. What concerns me is the lazy choice of words which not only allows but fosters a decidedly unchristian rhetoric of detached compassion, remorse, and problem-solving, when what is needed are the somber tones of humility. Cranmer knows that his office as bishop is something to which God has elevated him by gracious favor, not hired him for on account of merit. He knows this all the more easily because the immediate and worldly cause of his ordination was the command of a king and not the votes of a Jurisdictional Conference. Most of all, he acts not out of some high-minded compassion, but out of a fervent and pious desire to work out the salvation of his own soul--Wesley would be proud. For Cranmer knows that his "duty, office, and place" carry with them a profound responsibility, a terrifying responsibility, were God not his comfort. "Not many of you should become teachers, my brothers and sisters," writes James (3:1), "for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness." Every Christian in authority should know well also the words of Ezekiel: "As I live, says the Lord God, because my sheep have become a prey, and my sheep have become food for all the wild animals, since there was no shepherd; and because my shepherds have not searched for my sheep, but the shepherds have fed themselves, and have not fed my sheep; therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: Thus says the Lord God, I am against the shepherds; and I will demand my sheep at their hand, and put a stop to their feeding the sheep; no longer shall the shepherds feed themselves. I will rescue my sheep from their mouths, so that they may not be food for them." (Ezekiel 34:8-10). The bishop, like any other Christian, who does not weigh his actions with an eye to the last judgment has neither read his Bible with the proper seriousness, nor wholly comprehended the weight of his office.

Beatus Vir?

2010-06-03T10:31:00.005-05:00

I am generally more opposed to gender-neutral language as a philologist and a partisan for words than I am as a theologian; in matters of biblical translation, I am even more firmly of this opinion. The NRSV, although very responsible, I find, in the Old Testament, is often a little too enthusiastic with its removal of gender in the New. Whenever these arguments arise, there are generally two philological points that are made in favor of use gender-neutral terms where older translations had generally used "brothers/brethren" or the generic "man." The first is that, in Greek, a plural which designates a mixed group will always be masculine (there are historical-linguistic as well as social reasons for this; historically speaking, the feminine gender is a later development of the masculine); the second centers on the Greek word ἄνθρωπος, which can denote a person of either gender. Both arguments to me seem to drag Greek into an English problem (something to be expected in translation), which is the shift the word "man" has undergone in its meaning, and the political interests which have attached themselves to the shift.

My main aim here, however, is merely to note one of the many cases of over-enthusiasm on the part of the NRSV translators: James 1:12. In the Greek, the first part of this verse reads

Μακάριος ἀνὴρ ὅς ὑπομένει πειρασμὸν

which might be very literally translated:

"Blessed man, who endures temptation."

The NRSV, however, translates

"Blessed is anyone who endures temptation."

To someone with a smattering of Greek who reads that translation, knowing that the translators of the NRSV pay careful heed to render terms which in the Greek are neutral as to gender with correspondingly neutral terms in English, would probably assume that the Greek here underlying "anyone" is ἄνθρωπος, not ἀνήρ. It is possible that in this case the translation committee chose to follow one of the minority readings: two codices, one of them from the fifth century, do have ἄνθρωπος instead of ἀνήρ. It seems more likely, however, that they felt the translation "blessed the man" would be read so as to imply to a modern reader than only men are blessed in enduring temptation, and it is here that we run into dangerous territory. I shall try to be brief.

Such interpretation misunderstands the way language operates in male-dominated societies, assuming that a word, like ἀνήρ or the Latin vir, which denominates a masculine human being, cannot stand for humanity in general, or that a supposedly neutral term, such as ἄνθρωπος or the Latin homo, really imagines humanity as equally as we today would like. Any man writing in the ancient world would not think twice of the idea that the male stands for humanity as a whole; we may now be hesitant about submitting to the subtle ramifications of such an assumption, but they would not have questioned it. When James uses ἀνήρ, he no more means to exclude from blessing those women who endure temptation than the author of the first psalm, rendered in the Septuagint Μακάριος ἀνήρ, meant to exclude from blessing those women who "walk not in the counsel of the ungodly." In the minds of these authors the priority of the male does not annihilate all human kinship between the sexes.

An excellent example of this inclusive but not equalizing use of the masculine may be found in the second chorus of Sophocles' Antigone. The chorus begins

πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλει.

Many are the things wondrous and fearful, none more than ἀνθρώπος.

A world in which the word ἀνθρώπος denominates the human being without any sense of gender would not allow him to continue in the next strophe, as he goes on the describe humanity's conquest of nature, and call this οὕ ούδεν δεινότερον, this thing than which nothing is more fearful, περιφραδὴς ἀνήρ, "man most cunning." It is clear in this passage that, for Sophocles, although he was certainly aware of their different resonances, being as he was poet of the first rank, both ἀνθρώπος and ἀνήρ may stand for all of humanity.

Although we may be uneasy at the implicit hierarchy in this view of things, we should also be conscious that our zealous division of the sexes, while we undertake it in the name (so sacred to our ears!) of equality, is only a different way of skewing our perceptions. I do not know to whom it would not be readily apparent that the instances of this 'inclusive masculine' which I have cited apply to all human beings. Indeed, a language that cannot perceive that the first Psalm, "Blessed is the man," does not exclude the greater half of the human race, or that the praises of Proverbs 31 ("She considereth a field and buyeth it...She openeth her mouth with wisdom: and in her tongue is the law of kindness") are not applicable to women alone, is a language as incapable of figurative speech as it is of profound reflection. Perhaps there is a problem with the historical relation between the sexes, but it will not be solved by pretending than neither one is completely human.

Tanning and Pastoral

2010-05-28T08:58:00.005-05:00

We are often told that ideas of beauty have changed over the years (the figures of Rubens are of course the classic example), but our modern taste for tanned skin is an especially peculiar deviation from the western norm. There is, to start with, Homer's "white armed Hera," and I recently ran across this passage in Mantuan's First Eclogue:

Farra legens ibat mea per vestigia virgo
Nuda pedem, discincta sinum, spoliata lacertos,
Ut decet aestatem quae solibus ardet iniquis
Tecta caput fronde intorta, quia sole perusta
Fusca fit et voto facies non servit amantum.

She came upon my steps plucking the grain,
With naked feet, a bosom loosely robed,
And arms uncovered. For the summer sun
She clothed her head, for by the sun once burnt
She darkens, and no lover’s prayer obliges.

There is also the testimony of sacred pastoral that this is not merely a phenomenon of the Hellenistic tradition:

I am black, but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem,
as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.
Look not upon me, because I am black,
because the sun hath looked upon me:
My mother's children were angry with me;
they made me the keeper of the vineyards;
but mine own vineyard have I not kept. (Song of Songs 1:5-6)

It would be interesting to hear some speculation as to why we began to prefer tanned to fair skin. I would throw my lot in with changing views towards work and class, but I would probably be liable to speculate in that direction on most social phenomena; perhaps it has something to do with tanned skin being now more rare, with more people working inside, whereas earlier only a few would spent most of their days indoors. Whatever its causes, it is a trend, vampires notwithstanding, which shows no signs of passing out of fashion, however at odds it may be with historical tastes.

Adorno and Cultural Elites

2010-05-15T11:25:00.003-05:00

I have fallen into the habit with this blog of either posting something quite long or going quite a long time without posting anything. Other demands being what they are, I would perhaps be better served posting something brief rather more frequently. I do often have ideas occur to me which would be good material for a blog post, but I always find myself working them out in too great detail and come to the point where I inevitably lack the time to be satisfied with my production. This summer we shall see if I can train myself for more frequent short posts.

I picked up Adorno again yesterday, having dipped into Benjamin the day before, and came across this excellent gem in his essay "How to Look at Television":

"The increasing strength of modern mass culture is further enhanced by changes in the sociological structure of the audience. The old cultural elite does not exist anymore; the modern intelligentsia only partially corresponds to it. At the same time, huge strata of the population formerly unacquainted with art have become cultural 'consumers'. Modern audiences, although less capable of the artistic sublimation bred by tradition, have become shrewder in their demands for perfection of technique and for reliability of information, as well as their desire for 'services'; and they have become more convinced of the consumer's potential power over the producer, no matter whether the power is actually wielded."

(A form like 'wielded' always grates on my ear; had a few things turned out just slightly more fortunately in October of 1066 we would have a good strong form like 'wolden' or 'welden.')

Adorno points something out in this paragraph which is both immediately obvious and widely ignored, that the current relation between popular and elite culture is an entirely different relation than that of previous ages. It is as equally misleading to compare Mozart to Philip Glass as it is to compare him to Paul McCartney, although both may appear fitting in different situations. Our 'elite' artists of today (and indeed our cultural elites in general) are far more esoteric and far less intimate with the structures of political power than cultural elites of Mozart's day were. The arguments that align Philip Glass with Mozart will be either aesthetic or social. The aesthetic arguments will inevitably appeal to vague categories, all of them inevitably either Romantic (profundity, feeling) or counter-Romantic (complexity, technique), in an attempt to ignore the obvious disparity in beauty and sophistication between the music of Mozart's era and our own. The social arguments will point out that, like Glass, Mozart really only appealed to a small elite within society, but the facts are rather clearly against this, from the packed opera houses of Prague and Vienna to the pianos of every drawing room in Europe. On the failure of these comparisons, one might perhaps attempt a genealogical justification, tracing a line of teachers and performances between Mozart and Philip Glass, and claiming merely that the profession has changed; but we should remember that in the development of species the new breed after a certain point cannot produce offspring with the old, and is therefore treated as something different.

The comparison with a popular musician like Paul McCartney is just as tenuous, treating popularity as though it overcame all the aesthetic obstacles, and refusing to accept those aesthetic objections for reasons perhaps sometimes more grounded but as a rule less persuasive than those which would defend someone like Philip Glass. Mozart did not string together three minute ditties with his friends and expect to be applauded for it as an artist. That a group like the Beatles should be considered to have produced cultural artifacts worthy of preservation for any reason other than curiosity is as much a political victory for democratic baseness as an aesthetic one, and should alert us of precisely the reasons why our current cultural elite only partially corresponds to the cultural elite of an aristocratic period like Mozart's. In almost every way besides the praises they are effusively afforded popular musicians of our day resemble folk singers and not court composers; that these two breeds should be somewhat alike in popularity is a testimony to radical economic, political, and cultural changes and not aesthetic kinship.

I have gotten somewhat away from Adorno at this point, driven, as are we all when we write without direction, by the goads of my own preoccupations and propensities. We must always keep in mind the important differences between the social situation of our cultural elite today and that of the past. And I have come to the end and this is no particularly short post; perhaps next time.

The Blasphemy Against the Holy Spirit

2010-04-23T18:51:00.002-05:00

This is a sermon written for my New Testament intro course.

The Text: Matthew 12:22-32

“Therefore I tell you, people will be forgiven for every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age, or in the age to come.” I know any of you who were paying attention when the gospel was read will have had some sort of reaction to these verses. You might have started a bit at the words “will not be forgiven,” and at the words “blasphemy against the Spirit” you were probably a little puzzled as to what exactly Jesus meant. This combination of a vague crime and a strict punishment certainly gives the imagination a lot of room; and where we are so free to imagine the crime we are also all the more dangerously liable to suppose that we ourselves are guilty of its commission and so worthy of its punishment. Terrible fear and doubt has been engendered by these verses in the Christian hearts of all ages, such terrible fear that I might even wish the authors of sacred scripture, when they sat down to record the sayings of Jesus, had left this one out. For they certainly did not record everything he did: these authors were selective in what they preserved, and preserved what they selected to help us grow in faith and understanding, and yet Matthew, along with Mark and Luke, thought it important to include in his gospel this troubling saying, this harshest verdict of the law of God.

Listen to these verses again, listen carefully: “People will be forgiven every sin and blasphemy, but blasphemy against Spirit will not be forgiven.” I want first to note one thing: there is incredible hope in this passage. Perhaps it does not seem so at first glance. But how great an occasion for faith and trust in Jesus Christ, how powerful and comforting a testimony it is to the grace and mercy of our God that Jesus here singles out only one from the many thousands of sins we could envision for an irrevocable and inescapable condemnation. If you have murdered, Jesus is saying, if you have stolen, there is forgiveness for you. If you have hurt those you love out of jealousy or greed, there is forgiveness for you. If you have allowed a father or a sister or a friend to slip into the clutches of death while enmity still reigned between you, there is forgiveness for that as well, from God your heavenly Father already in this age, and, if we may hope in Christ, from that loved one themselves in the age to come. Remember always the abundance of this forgiveness.

So from this Teacher of mercy we hear that of all sin and blasphemy only blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven. And what, then, is this ‘blasphemy’? I think for us the way this word is often thrown around these days does something to dull its meaning. Don’t we hear, for example, a fierce and empassioned partisan of some musician or actor pronounce it (albeit jokingly) “blasphemy” to criticize their work? Or, more to the point, will we not hear that insufferable race of political commentators assert that in certain circles it is ‘practically blasphemy’ to express support for the health care bill, or, on the other side, ‘practically blasphemy’ to have qualms about supporting it? Now what does blasphemy appear to be if we are led by the way it is used in our popular culture and our everyday language? It seems to have something to do with holding opinions, doesn’t it? It seems as though blasphemy is merely a stronger word for an opinion of yours that is contrary to someone else’s strongly held conviction.

Is that at all that blasphemy means here in the Bible? If that’s what we mean by blasphemy, how can there be blasphemy against someone? That is what Jesus says here, blasphemy against the Spirit. Can I hold an opinion against you? You might disagree with an opinion of mine, but ask yourself how I could be said to hold it against you. But in the Bible, in this verse, blasphemy is something we commit against someone. And it is really a term about respect, about honoring what is worthy of honor. The Greek word blasphemia has a variety of senses, but one of them is slander—something you can commit against someone. This especially applies to the slander of someone of high standing, of great eminence or dignity. And so, since there is no personage on earth or in heaven whose worth and authority and eminence can be equaled or even compared with God’s, the term came more strictly to mean slander against God.

Blasphemy, then, against the Spirit is an affront to the Spirit’s dignity, a disregard for the honor that is due him, a flagrant disrespect of his person. It is to treat him disparagingly, to insult him, to place him in contempt. But of what comfort is this definition to us poor sinners? When there is not one of our sins which does not in some respect insult God or misrepresent him, how can it be that but one sin is blasphemy against the Spirit, who himself is also God? But Jesus goes on a little more, as we heard, so as to be clear on exactly what he means: “Whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man will be forgiven, but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit will not be forgiven, either in this age, or in the age to come.”

Hold on to that contrast between the Son of Man and the Holy Spirit, we’ll come to that. But to speak a word against someone, what does that mean? It does not strike me as a phrase we use particularly often. “At the meeting she spoke against the ballot measure.” This is how we usually employ the phrase, am I right, in political contexts, in matters of debate. But what about speaking against a person? “Last week in Bible study, Pastor spoke against John Spong.” This is closer to the Biblical usage, but I’m still talking about positions, opinions, sides, am I not? This is the problem we had earlier with the word blasphemy: the way we usually use the word is not quite the same as the way the Bible uses it. It is very close, and I don’t want to give you the impression that you need some secret knowledge to understand your Bible: 99 times out of 100 you can read your Bible carefully in English and understand what it is saying. But there is that one percent—and in a verse like this it is terribly important that we know what Jesus means and what he doesn’t mean.

In Greek, to speak against someone is much more personal that it usually is in English—it is a phrase you use when you take someone to court, or if you are otherwise feuding or in controversy with them, and it comes out in words. It is not something mainly about their opinions, but their person. This is not the sense in which a congressman speaks against a legislative measure; there is animosity in speaking against someone. It is not their opinion, but their person, and it is not about them, but to them that you say these things. That is the sense the Greek language has of speaking against someone, a sense of accusing them, of a verbal attack on their person, of invective, of this direct form of insult and disrespect. And it is this phrase that Jesus uses to characterize that fearful and terrible thing for which we will not be forgiven.

So what then is this blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? How is it that we could speak against the Holy Spirit in this personal and aggressive way? So we have a definition of this sin, of speaking against the Holy Spirit, but the definition is not much less vague than what we started with: “pastor, all you’ve done is to give us more room to imagine and fear.” If you want an evidence of the devil’s subtlest tricks, how he uses our weaknesses against us, how he uses our strengths against us, look to your imagination. Here is a hard teaching from the Lord, but as we contemplate it, as we take time carefully to think upon it, up come thoughts and images that suggest our condemnation, up come the wildest fantasies of how me may have sinned this unforgiveable sin. And this is rightly terrifying. It is rightly terrifying to consider the prospect of an eternal separation from God, in whom is all light and all life and all love, to consider the pain of an eternal punishment for this one temporal transgression. And so we who do yearn—and if you are here this morning there is at least some part of you that yearns—for the face of God, who strive to be called blest because we hunger and thirst for righteousness, we who want to walk as children of the light, we are rightly and justly solicitous to learn what is this sin which in an instant would destroy all those desires sought to gain.

Do not let that easily tempted imagination get the better of you, do not let Satan have his way with your anxiety. There is good news in this commandment, remember, for every transgression under heaven but one. There is forgiveness for all those tangible sins in your life, forgiveness from God and forgiveness for one another. But there is good news for us also in the hardness of the commandment: listen and see if you can hear it. Listen with the ear of your heart for the whispers that the Spirit is sending you, for that Spirit we are here so fretfully and piously endeavoring to never offend is the very same Spirit that blows where it listeth, the Spirit that searches our hearts and carries up to heaven our most intimate and unutterable sighs. It knows us better than we know ourselves, and we feel its power and comfort in us in those moments when we do not feel so dried of our baptismal waters, when in the bread and the juice we feel our Lord most nearly present, when the Word pierces our soul like an arrow. Who of us in such a moment of rapturous power would even think to speak against the very Spirit that endued that memory or that morsel or that message with such power? When in the flesh and sinews of our worship, in the hymns and the prayers, the sermon and the sacraments, we can feel an inexpressible vivacity, there is the Holy Spirit of God—and having met him, we do not condemn him or insult him or dishonor him; I do not know that we are capable of summoning any other feeling than love and wonder. Or in the sinews of our lives, which seem so often weak or straining, when the Spirit of the living God breaks through our mornings or our evenings, our commute or our last thoughts before we sleep, and suddenly Jesus is there and saying “peace be with you”—when that unexpected joy is in you you will not be moved to do the Spirit wrong, to attack him with your words, to speak against him. And yet this is what it would be to speak against the Holy Spirit, for he is not constrained to be ever before us, to always be visible to us, but the Spirit blows where he listeth, and when he does so choose to present himself to us his goodness is overpowering and his joy is irresistible.

But, sisters and brothers, does not the Psalmist cry “take not thy Holy Spirit from me?” Do we not most of us consider ourselves immeasurably blest at all to feel those motions of the Spirit? Those sinews of worship in which the Spirit moves can just as often seem the sinews of a corpse, and the movements of a hymn as lifeless. And those sinews of our daily lives, are they not all too often the most lifeless labors of all? And when in all those things we feel a sickness with our life that passes hour by hour so often without meaning or accomplishment, then are we tempted and do often succumb to a kind of blasphemy, to a kind of accusation against God. But we do not speak against the Holy Spirit there but against the Son of Man; no light matter, yet one for which the merciful Father of our Lord has nevertheless an inexhaustible treasury of forgiveness. For remember how Jesus appeared to the world in his earthly ministry, in every one of his born days even up to those hours of his passion, even up to the hour of his burial. When Joseph of Arimathea had his men roll down the stone into place to seal the tomb, they were burying a man like any other, indeed they were burying the man of whom Isaiah had said in him “there is no beauty that we should desire him.” This was the Lord of all, but who saw it? This eternal Son of the everliving Father in heaven, who saw him? He was a mere son of man, a human being like us all, and when we behold this everyday man with our everyday eyes it is all too easy to forget what we saw in him when the Spirit was shining from him and upon him. And when we see this God at work in what seems like tedium to us, we imagine him to be a tedious God; when we accept his providence over the details, we tend to take issue with how he handles them; when we do not get from every turn a new and blinding revelation, then we accuse him and we speak against this Son of Man, this God who is everyday. In him there is no beauty that we should desire him, but he too is God; he too is worthy of all honor and yet we subject him to all blasphemy—though such blasphemy, alleluia, as God has promised to forgive. Yet to blaspheme this humble Son of Man in those very moments when the Spirit so shines forth from him that in this Son of Man we see the Son of God?—I cannot imagine it. And yet because I cannot imagine it I can grasp its ultimate seriousness; because we cannot comprehend this sin, we may understand why such an enormity could not be pardoned.

Did these Pharisees who prompted Jesus’ words blaspheme against the Spirit? They had not actually seen the miracle that Jesus did, they were not there when the demon was cast out, when the strong man was bound by someone stronger—Matthew says they had heard about it. And isn’t that where we so often are. In all my life as a Christian I have never seen the Spirit go forth in power to heal someone physically, but I have heard of such things. And I confess that I have often responded with the skepticism or even the hostility of the Pharisees and not the love and trust that I owe my Christian brother. But when I am mindful of when I have known the Spirit’s power, if less dramatically than that, I am less liable to speak against the Son of Man, and to remember that behind his everyday appearance is a glory that is brilliantly new every morning. But to see the Spirit accomplish its great act—ask someone who has seen it, and they will not tell you that they doubted in that moment. So it seems to me here, in this story, that the Pharisees blasphemed the Son of Man, but did not blaspheme the Holy Spirit.

Yet I do not think Jesus would have uttered these words if he did not think that there were those who have spoken against his Holy Spirit—and he knows the hearts of us all. But hear this word of comfort: if you have ever felt the Spirit move in you as power and love and joy there is neither force nor compulsion strong enough to change that disposition of your heart to one of blasphemy. If you strive at all for the kingdom, if there is any desire in your heart to be conformed to the image of Christ, and to imitate his life, then know that you have not been put beyond hope by committing this blasphemy. God does not abandon those whom he has drawn to himself. Remember what a treasury of forgiveness these verses promise us for all our offenses, and know that whosoever earnestly seeks forgiveness in his other sins, will not ever be the one to make himself in this sin unforgiveable. Amen.

The Night in Which He Was Betrayed

2010-04-01T18:52:00.005-05:00

It is partly by my lot and station and partly by the season and week we now are in that I today came across not one, but two different speculative reconstructions of the trial and execution of our Lord. The first, E.P. Sanders' conviction that Jesus was condemned by the Jewish authorities not for the blasphemy of claiming to be the Son of God or to hold other messianic titles, but for his turning over the money-changers' tables in the temple, I encountered while poking around in his book Jewish Law from Jesus to the Mishnah; he apparently discusses it more in-depth in some of his other works. The argument is not terribly far-fetched (Sanders appeals to the difference in Jewish law between blasphemy and false prophecy, and the sense of these messianic titles in pre-Christian usage) but it does come down to suspicion of the gospels on a point where they do not greatly disagree. Suspicion may well be warranted for the historian on a point where the gospels narrate events in markedly different ways, but this is not such a point.

The second account, and by far the more fanciful one, I encountered in a brief essay by Gary Greenberg, arguing that the tradition of Judas' betrayal of Jesus does not correspond to the historical reality. I will not rehearse his argument, since the essay is easily accessible by the link above, but only point out the sort of evidence he is using.

1. An argument from silence in Paul.
2. An argument from "Q Material" which assumes first, that Q exists, of course, second, that in this particular passage Matthew represents the older tradition (the fidelity of Matthew's version to the Q original is argued on the basis of Luke's attempting to re-interpret the Judas tradition, that is to say, Greenberg has very bumblingly begged the question here), and, finally, that the passage in question is to be read in a crudely literal sense and not symbolically.
3. An argument from a non-canonical gospel which Greenberg has given an incredibly early date (pre-Mark!), acknowledging 'controversy' but providing to evidence, save a citation of that universally esteemed scholar, John Crossan.
4. An argument from the semantics of paradidomi.

This claim merits further attention. Paradidomi is the verb your New Testament will translate 'betray' in the passion contexts, but Greenberg claims that it in fact never means 'betray,' but only the more neutral 'hand over' appealing to the work of William Klassen, Judas: Betrayer or Friend of Jesus, which is available on Google Books. It is first of all unclear to me how much different the meanings of 'hand over' and 'betray' would be in the situation as the gospels describe it (for Greenberg's putative reconstruction of history it does make some difference); what we have here is purely the combat of psychologizations. Second, I have it on the authority of a New Testament scholar that many New Testament scholars are unfortunately often not as careful as they should be when appealing to evidence in Classical Greek, especially that the Liddell-Scott-Jones Lexicon, certainly the authoritative record of the Greek language, is not always treated as critically as it ought to be in matters of classical usage. Klassen's argument is a case in point, as he addresses the three citations given in LSJ and a couple uses in papyri; this is not a thorough word study, and there is no excuse not to do a thorough word study in a language as well-attested as Classical Greek if you wish to contest a generally-held meaning.

There are more important problems with Klassen's criticism of LSJ. First of all, he has misunderstood what the lexicon is actually saying about paradidomi. Klassen claims that LSJ gives the meaning "to give a city or a person into another's hands, esp. as a hostage or an enemy with the collational notion of 'treachery, betray.'" (Klassen 47) What LSJ says is "to give a city or a person into another's hands...esp. as a hostage or to an enemy, deliver up, surrender...with collat. notion of treachery, betray..." (LSJ 1308) The words in italics indicate English words with which LSJ suggests you translate paradidomi, and the ellipses indicate examples cited from Greek literature for the given sense. It is unclear why Klassen chose to paraphrase the Lexicon entry instead of quoting it, but his paraphrase gives the impression that LSJ considers this second sense always to have the "collational notion of 'treachery, betray.'" There are a few problems with this. First, when reading an entry in a lexicon, the first meaning given is the general one, and subsequent meanings, separated by semicola, are shades of that general meaning. So when LSJ states "with collat. notion of treachery, betray," it is not stating that paradidomi in this sense always may be translated as 'betray,' but that, when it carries this "collat. notion of treachery" a proper English translation may be 'betray' instead of something more neutral. Second, there is the matter of what "collat." stands for. Klassen takes it as standing for 'collational,' as we have seen, "of or pertaining to collation," according the OED, which appears, from the citations given there, to be a word closely confined to how one presents text-critical information on the printed page; there is no hint of the lexicographical sense Klassen appears to see. On the other hand, the LSJ itself tells us that "collat.= collateral" (LSJ xliii), presumably in the sense (OED 2a) "accompanying, attendant, concomitant." (It is not my intent merely to make Klassen look like a fool; we all make mistakes. A mistake such as this, however, does seem to indicate some careless scholarship) Thus the LSJ is saying that when paradidomi, normally translated "give into another's hands," has a collateral or accompanying notion of treachery, it may be translated "betray" in order to bring out this collateral sense or overtone. A scholar familiar with the tool would not be confused here.

Second of all, he claims that all three of the citations in LSJ make no sense if we translate paradidomi as 'betray.' I confess I have not looked closely at the context of the three passages cited by the Lexicon, but the first two seem to clearly have overtones of treachery or betrayal: guards being intimidated and persuaded to hand over their fortresses (Cyropaedia 5.4.51), Antiope handing over the fortified area to Hercules because of her love for Theseus (Pausanias 1.2.1). On the third (Cyropaedia 5.1.28), I do agree with Klassen that it does not quite seem to fit, at least to my brief glance ("handing over weapons"). People may disagree on these nuances, I suppose. Klassen, however, does nothing to persuade us to trust his sense of the Greek over that of Liddell et al. when he cites the Loeb translations of the passages in question to corroborate his position (Klassen 47, notes on 59). It is an argument of absolutely no weight in questions of semantic nuance to appeal to a translation, which will necessarily pick up on some nuances and not others; translations are useful as illustrations, not as evidence. Even if Klassen's is a popular book (I am not sure of its intended audience) such an argument is unacceptable. It really does give the impression that the author merely flipped open his Loeb and looked over to the facing-page English instead of thinking through the Greek, but that certainly could not be the case.

Third, Klassen's general attitude is accusatory and there seems no reason for this. "Any lexicon," he says, "that suggests otherwise [than that paradidomi can never mean "betray"] is guilty of theologizing" (remember all this bears on the character of Judas) "than assisting us to find the meaning of Greek words through usage." (Klassen 48). I would wager it is this aggression that has prevented Klassen from treating the evidence with the proper care. Such a situation is ironic, since the evidence from LSJ, properly understood, does help his case a bit. LSJ commits only to paradidomi having overtones of betrayal or treachery, not to those concepts being central or important to it. Perhaps even the acknowledgment of an overtone is enough to render them part of the vast anti-Judas conspiracy.

As to all these speculations about 'what actually happened' in those last days that our Lord bore for us the old Adam, I find them tiresome, and threatening only insofar as they have shone great power to seduce my weaker brethren from firm faith in the God of Abraham. There are not many other fields where facts verified by many early sources would be interrogated so antagonistically. Some scholars practice such interrogation responsibly, and I only wish they would exercise themselves in soil more suited for the gospel seed, while others seem eager to propose the most fanciful reevaluations of the events. Surely such fascinations confess the power of Jesus' name. He indeed draws all people to himself, but some upon approaching the light have chosen to close their eyes and employ the imaginations, whether for fear of the heat or to feed their fantasizing vanity, I do not know. It is that light which shines from the God who is a consuming fire and not the light which he created that I will more trust to guide my footsteps. Those who testify to the former light are evangelists, those who point to the latter are historians, speculative and sound alike. To evoke the Philosopher: history I love, but I love the Church more.

From My Reading

2010-01-09T13:22:00.003-06:00

It was my intention over the break to turn the energies of my reading and writing to secular matters, having been so totally occupied at seminary with Biblical and Theological exercises. The reading, for what it was, proved pleasurable, but the writing bore nothing full-formed for all its travail. I present you, therefore, gentle reader, some quotations from my holiday studies, with occasional commentary.

"The serf belongs to the land and turns over to the owner of the land the fruits thereof. The free labourer, on the other hand, sells himself and, indeed, sells himself piecemeal. He sells at auction eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his life, day after day, to the highest bidder, to the owner of the raw materials, instruments of labour and means of subsistence, that is, to the capitalist. The worker belongs neither to an owner nor to the land, but eight, ten, twelve, fifteen hours of his daily life belong to him who buys them. The worker leaves the capitalist to whom he hires himself whenever he likes, and the capitalist discharges him whenever he thinks fit, as soon as he no longer gets any profit out of him, or not the anticipated profit. But the worker, whose sole source of livelihood is the sale of his labour power, cannot leave the whole class of purchases, that is, the capitalist class, without renouncing his existence. He belongs not to this or that capitalist but to the capitalist class, and, moreover, it is his business to dispose of himself, that is, to find a purchaser within this capitalist class."
-Karl Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital"

Notice how Marx accurately describes the worker's refusing to participate in capitalist production as renouncing his existence--"Whosoever will come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the same shall save it." (Mark 8:34-35)
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Are the growth of productive capital and the rise of wages really so inseparably connected as the bourgeois economists maintain? We must not take their word for it. We must not even believe them when they say that the fatter capital is, the better will its slave be fed. The bourgeoisie is too enlightened, it calculates too well, to share the prejudices of the feudal lord who makes a display by the brilliance of his retinue. The the bourgeoisie's conditions of existence compel it to calculate.
-Ibid.
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I would express the whole industry [the historical criticism of Beowulf] in yet another allegory. A man inherited a field in which was an accumulation of old stone, part of an older hall. Of the old stone some had already been used in building the house in which he actually lived, not far from the old house of his fathers. Of the rest he took some and built a tower. But his friends coming perceived at once (without troubling to climb the steps) that these stones had formerly belonged to a more ancient building. So they pushed the tower over, with no little labour, in order to look for hidden carvings and inscriptions, or to discover whence the man’s distant forefathers had obtained their building material. Some suspecting a deposit of coal beneath the soil began to dig for it, and forgot even the stones. They all said: ‘This tower is most interesting.’ But they also said (after pushing it over): ‘What a muddle it is in.’ And even the man’s own descendants, who might have been expected to consider what he had been about, were heard to murmur: ‘He is such an odd fellow! Imagine his using these old stones just to build a nonsensical tower! Why did not he restore the old house? He had no sense of proportion.’ But from the top of that tower the man had been able to look out upon the sea.
-J.R.R. Tolkien, "The Monsters and the Critics"

What Tolkien says here is certainly applicable to all instances of historical criticism, that of scripture not least.
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And you, do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them; for I am going to bring disaster upon all flesh, says the LORD; but I will give you your life as a prize of war in every place to which you may go.
-Jeremiah 45:5

It strikes me that this verse contains in many ways the heart of the gospel.
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Being in company with a gentleman who thought fit to maintain Dr. Berkeley’s ingenious philosophy that nothing exists but as perceived by some mind; when the gentleman was going away, Johnson said to him, “Pray, Sir, don’t leave us; for we may perhaps forget to think of you, and then you will cease to exist.”
-From the Langton Johnsoniana in Boswell's Life of Johnson

A sentiment with which our next author would certainly agree.
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“At that word we both thought of him.” Let us assume that each of us said the same words to himself—and how can it mean MORE than that?—But wouldn’t even those words be only a germ? They must surely belong to a language and to a context, in order really to be the expression of the thought of the man.

If God had looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of.
-Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations II.xi

Wittgenstein's plainness is as often an obstruction to his clarity as it is an aid. But it is the peppering of his philosophy with oracular utterances such as this that allows him to be read with pleasure.
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'Tis not a freedom, that where all command;
Nor tyranny, where one does them withstand:
But who of both the bounders knows to lay,
Him as their father must the state obey.
-Andrew Marvell, "The First Anniversary of the Government under his Highness the Lord Protector"

The second couplet has not the ease of the first, and may be paraphrased thus: "But the state must obey as a father the man who knows to put limits on both the one and the many."
---
If America ever approached (for however brief a time) that lofty pinnacle of glory to which the proud imagination of its inhabitants is wont to point, it was at this solemn moment[the framing of the Constitution], when the national power abdicated, as it were, its authority. All ages have furnished the spectacle of a people struggling with energy to win its independence, and the efforts of the Americans in throwing off the English yoke have been considerably exaggerated. Separated from their enemies by three thousand miles of ocean, and backed by a powerful ally, the United States owed their victory much more to their geographical position than to the valor of their armies or the patriotism of their citizens. It would be ridiculous to compare the American war to the wars of the French Revolution, or the efforts of the Americans to those of the French when France, attacked by the whole of Europe, without money, without credit, without allies, threw forward a twentieth part of her population to meet her enemies and with one hand carried the torch of revolution beyond the frontiers, while she stifled with the other a flame that was devouring the country within. But it is new in the history of society to see a great people turn a calm and scrutinizing eye upon itself when apprised by the legislature that the wheels of its government are stopped, to see it carefully examine the extent of the evil, and patiently wait two whole years until a remedy is discovered, to which it voluntarily submitted without its costing a tear or a drop of blood from mankind.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America I.I.VIII

A just appraisal. America has never seen a nobler generation than that which founded her. The outrage of lawless insurrection will always hang over them, but it is a testament to their character that a group of men which gained power so basely, and who therefore treated the guides of civil society with utmost contempt, should have governed on the highest principles of virtue.

A Sermon for the Season

2009-12-09T13:14:00.003-06:00

Once I have finished with my finals here at Duke it is my earnest intention to resume furnishing this blog with posts that are both original to it and of a less exclusively theological nature. Until that time, however, here is a Christmas Eve sermon that was part of the final project in my preaching class. This sermon was conceived as the culmination of an Advent sermon series on the theme "Learning to Long for Jesus;" each Sunday's sermon was titled by a different line from "O Come O Come Immanuel," and each service would include a reading from the Song of Songs. If I have not disgusted Origen I have done well.

“Rejoice! Rejoice!”

Song of Songs 8:1-2, 6-7; Luke 2:1-20

Here at First UMC we have been learning this season of Advent how to long for Jesus and every week in these four Sundays of waiting for the birth of Christ we have read from the Song of Solomon, the Song of Songs. As you heard me say when I read the scripture, the poetry of this book has been always understood in the tradition of the church to speak of the love between God and his people. These are the words we can turn to as models for our own love of God and as assurances of his love for us, as testaments to its richness and passion. For it is not a love that is measured or restrained or controlled or a love that holds anything back. And likewise the love of the Bride, our model, whose words we heard read this evening, is neither lukewarm nor cautious, but gives recklessly of itself all it has to her Husband, our God.

Yet the love of the Bride is a love that we so often, all too often cannot feel. The love of this Song of Songs is a love we all would choose, a love we would all receive eagerly, and a love we would all happily, joyously give if we could only feel it truly in our hearts. For it is the love we know would quench that longing at the foundation of all our longings, the longing to love God and the longing to be loved by him. The love of God—how we long to have it! How we long to be able to give him our love! How we long to know surely that he loves us!

For it seems to us, doesn’t it, that there could be no love between this God and us. The differences are too vast, we are so small, our troubles are so small, our needs, our wants, our hopes, joys, disappointments are so small and he is God, the Maker of all that is, the Ruler of all that is, the One, so we are told, to whom the prayers of all the world go up. What time would he have to love us? What compassion could he have for people who go through commutes and reports and e-mails, who take the kids to piano lessons and then sit down for a basketball game at night, when he holds the galaxies in his right hand and all infinity in his left? What place could there be in that lofty heart for the love of us? And how could we love him? What joys would we share with one who is beyond all joy, what would we talk about with one who is ineffably beyond all we could ever think or say or do?

It is a convenient and helpful disappointment when we console ourselves and say that God is so far, so infinitely far above us and beyond us that there could never be love between us. It is a convenient disappointment because it rationalizes our distress, builds a cage in our minds for our longing so that it cannot disturb us or trouble the smooth schedule of our lives. And once we have decided there is no hope of sharing love with God, once we have squared ourselves (as we think) to the reality of things, it is so easy to pretend that old desire is no longer there, that it has gone off, that it has faded from our hearts. It is easy to pretend we have reached maturity, when we learn to say and think that God could never love us, that it would not be prudent for us to fall in love with God. We learn to live effectively, if not well, by assuring ourselves every hour that the distance is too great and the difference is too great, that God is up there and I am down here and love cannot pass the breadth of our separation.

It is a denial the mind can make easily, but which the heart will always resent. Could there be some way, we will always ask. God, we say, could there be some way? Or, like this:
“O that you were like a brother to me,
Who nursed at my mother’s breast!
If I met you outside I would kiss you,
And no one would despise me.
I would lead you and bring you
Into the house of my mother,
And into the chamber of the one who bore me.
I would give you spiced wine to drink,
The juice of my pomegranates.”

They would deride me on the street if I ran up to him and kissed him, if I embraced the God of all like that I would be laughed at. They would say to me “Don’t you know who he is?” And I fear that I would say it too, even to myself. But O that were my brother! O then I would run up to him and kiss him and embrace him and there would be not a whisper of disapproval, then I could be with him and no one would think a thing of it. Then love between us would be easy and natural; then I could love him and not feel as though I shouldn’t. Then I could give him the gifts that I have always wanted to give him, then I would bring him into my mother’s house—O that he were my brother! O that there was a way that I could love him, that all the boundaries and distances and differences could fall away and I could feel his love and feel within myself real love for him.

O that he were my brother! It is a wish we never lose no matter how we try to cloak it and deny it, no matter how we try to keep it hidden away where others cannot see it, where we ourselves may sometimes forget that it is there. And how else could we live with this desire smoldering within forever within us if we did not try by every means to smother it with resignation and the set jaw of despair? So we teach ourselves and we are taught that he can never be our brother, that the love we want so fiercely could never be. We train ourselves to stop longing for that love, to stop longing for his love, to stop longing to be able to love him. “O that he were my brother!” No, no, we learn to laugh that off. “O that I could kiss him in the street, that I could bring him into my mother’s house!” But no, I cannot do that. There is too much distance between my heart and God’s—I have never heard him really say he loved me, and I, however much I want to love him I cannot. O that he were my brother! O that he were my brother!

And if he were our brother, would we even know how to kiss him? If we suddenly found that all this crippling distance were collapsed, could we bring ourselves to lead him to our mother’s house, would we be ready to offer him the juice of our pomegranates? Or would we let him pass, and convince ourselves that it was nothing more than our imagination? And if we, in a moment of surprising courage, had the strength to embrace him when we saw him, had the strength to ignore our long-developed reflexes of denial, would it even then be long before old habits took up their places again, and we turned ourselves to a new effort of forgetting and denying? But O that he were my brother! O that he were!

I hardly think the shepherds expected they would see their God or that a chorus of angels would announce especially to them that a Savior had been born in Bethlehem of Judah. For surely the announcements of God are not given to shepherds, to men whose labor is among the beasts. No, surely if God would speak to anyone, he would speak to the men who work with armies and not animals, the men who balance the wealth of nations and whose voices are heard in the Senates and Parliaments of the earth. There could be no message from an angel to a shepherd because what could God say to a shepherd, what could God feel for a shepherd? And what would a shepherd do with God? All he knows are sheep. But the angels spoke and they said to the shepherds “These are glad tidings!” And the shepherds could not say otherwise, for they ran into town and they found the child and told his parents all the angel had said. And Mary, who had loved the child nine months, treasured all of it in her heart, the Bible tells us. For those hours the shepherds had forgotten it was foolish to think you could love God or that God could extend his love to you. Maybe one of them forgot so well that he took the baby in his arms awhile, while Mary stood there by him all full of love, love for her child, her son, and love for that foolish shepherd because he too, in that moment, loved her child.

But the shepherds left. The shepherds left and Luke tells us that they praised God for what they had seen and heard. For a night in December they allowed themselves to think they could have love for God, and for that evening they did not chide themselves when they felt that God loved them. But soon they were back to assuring themselves that such feelings are more wishes than reality, that the distance between a shepherd and God cannot be bridged, that he is so far from us that there is no way we could really love him, that we are so different from him that he would never love us ever in return. Perhaps some thirty years later one of the shepherds would let this wishful longing get the better of him again, and he would go to see a man who was healing the sick and preaching the kingdom of God. Perhaps another put his longing up forever and shouted with the crowd to crucify that man who dared to claim he was God’s Son. But most of them, I guess, like most of us, went on about their lives and only sometimes, when their guard was down, would find themselves crying “O that he were my brother!” O that he were a person I could love! O that I were to him and he to me that there could be love between us! O that he were my brother and I would embrace him and eat with him in my mother’s house! Then I could make him a part of my life and he would make me a part of his—O that he were my brother! O that there could be love between us! I would give anything that I could love him, and if a man offered me all the wealth of his house for that love I would utterly scorn him.

O that he were my brother! O that he were my son! He was Mary’s son. And when she felt him stirring about inside her, she loved him, and she loved him, O how she loved him when she held him in her arms that first time, her child, her son. And there was nothing feigned about that love, nothing false, nothing inauthentic or insincere about that mother’s love for her baby and her God. And Joseph loved him when he first put his hand upon the belly of his beloved, and he loved him when he set him in the manger, the son of the one whom he loved and the Son of his God. Here was God and nothing could stop Joseph and Mary from loving him; here was love from God and no one could have convinced them what they felt was not true.

And what is the distance of a thousand years or a thousand miles when the distance has been bridged between the ineffable majesty of God and those first coughs and cries of a newborn infant? And what does it matter that he is not here to shake your hand when you know that his face was once a face that human eyes could see, and that his face will be seen again? Why shall we not greet him in the streets of our lives with the kisses of our souls, why shall we not take him into our homes to treat him lovingly? O that he were my brother!—we have cried it, we have shouted it and wept it, but he is! He is our brother and he is ours to love and he has for us a love which is strong as death, as fierce as the grave, many waters cannot quench his love, nor can floods drown it. He is our brother and he calls from us that love we have been hiding all our lives, that love we were taught was foolish. But he is born among us and he is here for love, and though I cannot promise if you love him there will not still be those who think you are foolish, I can tell you they will only think so because they do not know what we know, that he is our brother, that we may love him, and he may love us. We know he is our brother because we have all heard tonight the story of Mary’s boy in Bethlehem! We know he is our brother and let us take him into our mother’s house and cherish him this Christmas, for we know that the Man who was born of Mary is a God that we may love. Rejoice! Rejoice! These are good tidings of great joy. Amen.

Theses on Scripture

2009-11-20T15:25:00.005-06:00

1. Scripture is Scripture because it testifies to to the God who is in Jesus Christ. In this way the Old and New Testaments are the same.

2. The New Testament, in testifying to Jesus Christ, testifies also that the Old Testament is holy scripture, given for our instruction and encouragement. Nothing in Scripture testifies that the New Testament is scripture. Thus it would appear that the Old Testament is more authoritative than the New Testament, because the New Testament defers to the Old in making its testimony about Jesus, while the Old Testament makes its testimony without deferring to the New.

3. Yet the New Testament is generally considered normative for how we are to understand the Old Testament. It would then appear that the New Testament has priority, since we cannot grasp the meaning of the Old Testament without it.

4. The best way of understanding the relation between the Testaments is to think of the Transfiguration. Jesus is seen speaking with Moses and Elijah, that is, conversing with the Law and the Prophets, which are the Old Testament. Peter, James, and John, the New Testament, see this and are amazed.

5. In the Transfiguration, Jesus is also revealed in his glory. Conversation with Moses and Elijah is the truth of Jesus' life. The life of God on earth is lived in the company of the Old Testament. The New Testament only witnesses this, it is not an active part of it.

6. Yet precisely because the Old Testament is more intimate with Jesus it is less able to show us what that intimacy means. Moses and Elijah cannot stand outside of themselves to tell us about the conversation they are having with Jesus, but the Apostles, who are outside the conversation, can tell us about it. Yet the fact remains that it is Moses and Elijah who speak with Jesus and not the Apostles.

7. If the Old Testament is taken without the New, we hear all that Moses and Elijah say, but cannot tell who they are talking with. When the New Testament is taken without the Old, we hear the disciples speak very enthusiastically about something we cannot see.

8. Think of it this way: Jesus never engages with the New Testament, only with the Old Testament. But the New Testament recounts what he said when he engaged it.

9. If the New Testament has greater authority, it is because it gives us the words of Jesus; if the Old Testament has greater authority, it is because it was there that Jesus got his words.

A Sermon for Ash Wednesday

2009-11-07T15:04:00.003-06:00

Why a sermon for Ash Wednesday, you ask? Well, because that's what I was assigned in my preaching class.

A Sermon for Ash Wednesday (Judges 11:29-40)

And Jephthah made a vow to the Lord, and said, “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then whoever comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, to be offered up by me as a burnt offering.”

There’s hard stuff in scripture. You heard Joel tell you earlier to rend your hearts and not your garments; and is there anything that rends hearts and this story does not rend hearts? For whom shall we rend them? For the daughter, cut off in the prime of youth? For the father, who has found himself bound by honor and piety to commit an abomination against nature? For God? For God who alone is holy, who alone is just, and who must yet receive this sickening sacrifice? For whom shall we rend our hearts; for at these words they surely must be rent.

Or perhaps we shall not rend them. Perhaps this story does not grieve you, does not move the emotions of sadness in your soul. Perhaps you are not sorrowful; perhaps you are indignant. Perhaps you are disgusted that the church which serves a God of love would present the murderer of his own child as a hero in its scriptures; that such a God would allow and accept such a sacrifice. “With what shall I come before the Lord?” cries the prophet. “Shall I give my firstborn for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, o man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” Can the God who delivered the only son of Abraham be the God who left the only child of Jephthah to her death?

Perhaps you were not grieved. After all, you came to church tonight to enter prayerfully into a season of repentance, a season that is hard, but a season that you know, that is comfortable and expected and familiar. You came to church tonight to prepare; the house has been cleansed of its chocolate, the television, perhaps, is unplugged—or maybe the remote has just been hidden away. You have pledged not to pick up a tabloid as you check out there at the grocery and there’s a post-it on your computer: “No Solitaire.” You have given something up because it is a season of self-denial. You came because you were ready for Lent, maybe you welcomed it, maybe you welcomed the excuse to reject something, to shun a little bit of what has power over you in this world. Or maybe you came to church without any of these plans or feelings, but you came because you knew you needed Lent and knew you wouldn’t do it on your own. But you came to church, all of you to be encouraged in these weeks of penitence and self-denial, you came to be prepared for them in solemn tones, with the dimness of candles and the mark of the ash.

But where is Jephthah’s sacrifice in all of this? You didn’t come for the book of Judges; you didn’t come for a story that was hard to comprehend, even if you came for words that are hard to follow. Preacher, you say, I came to be told about my sin; I didn’t come to hear about a man sacrificing his daughter. Preacher, I came to hear about self-denial; I didn’t come to hear about some poor girl having to give up her life like this. Preacher, I came to be warned about practicing my piety before others—I know I needed that word; my husband and my friends and my children don’t really take this season seriously, and I get holier-than-thou with them. But preacher, this is a story about a man who prays in secret and is rewarded with his daughter’s blood. Preacher! I came to be told that I am dust—I did not come to see a young woman turned to ash on an altar by her father.

And the girl has no name! She has no name, the scriptures give her no name, the author of Judges has no name for her; her father never calls her by name. How she suffered! And yet we have no name for the memory, no name to put to the face. And yet we can all see that face—we may imagine it differently—but we can all see that young daughter’s face when she said to her father, “Do to me as you said you would. If we do not keep our pledges to God, what can we keep?” But she has no name, and her mother has no name. What can we say of her lineage, but that she is Jephthah’s daughter, and that Jephthah was born in Gilead to a whore? Who can tell her generation? She has no name that we can see; and yet for her a name has been written that she alone can read. To us she has no name; we can only call her suffering, a woman of sorrows and a companion, a nameless companion of grief.

Let me tell you her name, brothers and sisters, for it is a name that is above all names, a name before which every knee shall bow on earth and in heaven and in the depths below.

Consider another story of a father who sent his child to their death. There was a man baptizing Jews in the Jordan. To all that came he said “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand. Put on sackcloth and remember your sin; cover yourselves in ashes and rend your hearts.” And a man of Galilee came to this baptizer; and he baptized him. And the heavens opened over him and a dove more radiant than the angels shine came down upon his head and a voice like power and majesty itself proclaimed, “This is my son, my dear son, my only son, whom I love, Jesus, in whom I delight.” And Jesus said, “O Father, I have vowed. Let me do according to the Word that has gone out of your mouth.” And the Spirit that was a dove became a fire, and it burned in him and drove him into the wilderness and he was tempted forty days. And it drove him out among the people and he taught and he healed. And it drove him down to Jerusalem, and he was tortured and beaten and taunted and he suffered and was crucified and died and was buried.

Is this a story of fewer tears? And yet we tell it and we cling to it and hold it. And shall Jephthah’s daughter remain unknown to us, when in the face of that child of Israel we may see the sorrow of the son of Mary? Surely Jephthah should have suffered death, when he himself desired the death and the subjection and the plunder of his neighbors, and not his innocent daughter, a virgin young and pure of heart, without deceit or dissimulation in her spirit. And surely Man should bear the punishment of heaven, man the devourer of riches and races, man who prays death for his Ammonites and gives his children to destruction to appease his own desires; surely Man should bear the punishment, and not the Son of Man, a lamb without blemish, spotless and pure; in him no sin was found. Yet God gave the Ammonites into Jephthah’s hand. But in return God desired of Jephthah a soul that was already his, a child of obedience and love who was according to the flesh the daughter of Jephthah. And what wrong was there that the one who is holy should take to himself a holy child of Israel, that the one who gave the wicked Ammonites into the hand of wicked Jephthah should draw close to his bosom the daughter who said, “Do according to the word that has gone out of your mouth. Father, give God what you have promised him, even if it is my life.”

The verse says Jephthah was brought very low by his daughter; he fell to the ground, to the dust and the ashes, and cried out “Ah! My daughter, you have brought me very low. I have vowed to the Lord and I cannot go back. I vowed that I would sacrifice to my God out of thanks for my victory, for I have many things that I could give him. But he has chosen the one thing which I love before all others and said ‘give me this.’” And his daughter said, “If you have vowed, you must do it; I am ready to give up my life to the Lord. But allow me two months, for me to go into the wilderness with my companions to mourn for my youth and my purity.” And Jephthah wept and granted her those months, just more than forty days to mourn.

Tonight we are compelled as her companions to put on ashes and mourn; we go into the wilderness with the daughter of Jephthah. We mourn for ourselves, for we are of the house of Jephthah and we feel his sins upon us, the sin always lurking in our hearts that demands and asks of God and yet is fearful to give him what he asks of us; for he is asking for our lives, he is asking that what we desire most be his, and we are brought very low when he asks for it, to dust and ashes. But more than all of that we mourn for the daughter of Jephthah, for the purity of her heart and her spotless obedience, an obedience unto death. For her we mourn, that she will be led to the knife and the fire, so innocent and undeserving of death. We put on ashes to be like her in her death, her death which should by any right be ours, her death to which she freely goes, a lamb of God, a sacrifice of thanksgiving, a child of sinners giving up for them the blood of their sin. Fix your eyes upon this lamb as you mourn; as you fast and as you deny yourself this Lent, take care that in all of it the eyes of your heart are fixed upon this lamb. For it is for the lamb that we go mourning into the wilderness these months of Lent, for the lamb that we dress our faces with the ash of death, for the lamb that we keep these traditions; for there arose a custom in Israel, that every year they would remember and mourn the daughter of Jephthah. Amen.

Quotes on Textual Criticism

2009-10-17T20:07:00.006-05:00

As something of a companion to my post last week I present here four quotes from men of acknowledged acuity on the subject of textual criticism. The first quote, from St. Jerome's commentary on Isaiah may appear a bit opaque (and I apologize for any shortcomings in my rather hurried translation), but what I find interesting about it is the highly theological methodology he applies to a problem of textual criticism. The second quote, from John Calvin, addresses directly the problem of the story of the woman caught in adultery, and consequently other passages of scripture whose provenance we may be inclined to believe is unauthentic. The last two quotes, from medievalist Frederick Klaeber and novelist James Joyce, consider, each in their own way, what the psychology must be of those who delight in cutting ancient texts up into various strata of authorship and redaction.

1. St. Jerome (commenting on Isaiah 2:22)

Rest therefore from the man whose breath is in his nostrils: for he has been considered exalted. This the Septuagint has left out and in the Greek exemplars there has been added from Origen (in Aquila's edition) with asterixes what we read in the Hebrew...Where we have said "he has been considered exalted," Aquila has translated it "in which he has been considered." The Hebrew word Bama, is either ὒψωμα, that is, "exalted," which we read both in the book of Kings and Ezekiel, or perhaps "in which," which is written with the same letters Beth (B), Mem (M), and He (H). As to the nature of their arrangement, if we wanted to read "in which," we write Bamma; if rather "exalted" or "exaltedness," we read Bama. Therefore the Jews, because they do understand it to be a prophecy of Christ, have taken the worse reading, so that it appears not to praise Christ, but to have no real force. For what is the purpose of the words, and what logic or sense is there, if we say, when these circumstances were so, and the day of the Lord was to come, in which the whose state of Judea is to be overturned, and all things ground underfoot, "I warn and instruct you, that you rest from the man, who breathes and lives just as we humans do, because he is to be reckoned as nothing"? Who would praise any person in such a way, and say "Beware lest you offend him, who is altogether nothing."? Therefore it must be understood in the opposite way: "When these things are all to come upon you and are proclaimed by the spirit of prophecy, I warn and instruct you to rest from him who, although he is a manaccording to the flesh, and has a soul, and breathes and draws breath from his nostrils as we humans breathe and live, yet according to his divine majesty is also exalted and considered so and believed to be so. I rack my mind and I cannot find a reason why the Septuagint did not wish to translate so clear a prophecy of Christ into Greek. Now the others who translated it but drew the ambiguous phrase into an impious sense, it is no wonder why they interpreted badly, and did not want to say anything about the glory of Christ, in whom they do not believe, I mean the Jews and Semi-Jews, that is, the Ebionites. Yet because Christ is "highly exalted" or "the Most High," who is in another phrase called Elyon among the Hebrews, we read in the 86th [87th] Psalm "Shall not Zion say 'one man and another were born in her, and the Most High himself founded her.'" And in the Gospel "And you, O child, will be called prophet of the Most High." And, so that I don't draw too much line (for in the exposition of Holy Scripture we ought to follow truth and not controversy) Bama in this place is not read as "exalted" among the Hebrews, but "exaltedness," that is, "heighth" or "loftiness," as if we were to say of someone that he is not "divine," but "divinity," not the "creek," but the "spring," not a "human" but "humanity." Origen interpreted the passage in the following way: Because it speaks in the singular about one man, it can be referred also to our Lord the Savior. Thus the Prophet orders that they should rest from him who has been considered in some great matter, although he appears for the present to be a human being and to have breath in his nostrils, just as other human beings breathe.

2. John Calvin (commenting on John 8)

It is plain enough that this passage was unknown anciently to the Greek Churches; and some conjecture that it has been brought from some other place and inserted here. But as it has always been received by the Latin Churches, and is found in many old Greek manuscripts, and contains nothing unworthy of an Apostolic Spirit, there is no reason why we should refuse to apply it to our advantage.

3. Frederick Klaeber (Introduction to his edition of Beowulf)

It has been the fate of Beowulf to be subjected to the theory of multiple authorship, the number of its conjectural 'makers' ranging up to six or more. At the outset, in this line of investigation, the wish was no doubt father to the thought.

4. James Joyce (Chapter 4 of Finnegan's Wake)

Naysayers we know. To conclude purely negatively from the positive absence of political odia and monetary requests that its page cannot ever have been a penproduct of a man or woman of that period or those parts is only one more unlookedfor conclusion leaped at, being tantamount to inferring from the nonpresence of inverted commas (sometimes called quotation marks) on any page that its author was always constitutionally incapable of misappropriating the spoken words of others.

Ineunte Anno Aetatis XXIV

2009-10-13T20:01:00.003-05:00

How soon hath Time, the subtle thief of youth,
Stol'n on his wing my three and twentieth year!
My hasting days fly on with full career,
But my late spring no bud or blossom shew'th.
Perhaps my semblance might deceive the truth,
That I to manhood am arrived so near,
And inward ripeness doth much less appear,
That some more timely-happy spirits endu'th.
Yet be it less or more, or soon or slow,
It shall be still in strictest measure even
To that same lot, however mean or high,
Toward which Time leads me, and the will of Heaven;
All is, if I have grace to use it so,
As ever in my great Task-master's eye.

Thoughts on Textual Variants in Scripture

2009-10-10T19:32:00.004-05:00

Talking over lunch with a friend the other day, the topic came up of textual criticism in the Bible, as it of course often does in seminaries and nowhere else. She commented to me that it had taken her aback when she first found out that some things, like the story in John of the woman caught in adultery, "weren't supposed to be in the Bible." My tongue was slow and my politeness ready so I didn't jump on this statement the way I might have in a more argumentative mood. It has given me food for reflection, however. What do we mean when we say such things about those parts of the Biblical canon which are not represented in the oldest and best manuscripts? What does it mean to say that they aren't supposed to be in the Bible? There seem to me to be two main presuppositions behind such a statement and I think both of them are wrong. The first is a historical-literary idea, that the "original" form of a text is the only valuable form of it. The second is a theological offshoot of the same sentiment, that the Bible was inspired by God only at the moment it was written down.

Both these propositions are concerned with essence or nature of the Bible and like all ideologies concerned with essence, they are very insistent that the essence be unique. If I tell them that the Bible may or may not contain the episode of the woman caught in adultery and still be the Bible, they will say that that is impossible, since a Bible with the passage and a Bible without the passage are two different things and the Bible is one thing. They have trouble understanding that both are the Bible even though they are not each other.

Let us take an example. The Bible has been translated into many languages. The one I read most often contains the word "God" quite a lot. If I were to pick up a Latin Bible, however, I would read that word not once. Both of these things are the Bible but they are not each other. Or would you say that anyone reading a translation is not reading the Bible? You might say something like "they're not really reading the Bible," but what you would mean by that would be that they weren't really getting the full sense of it and might be developing mistaken ideas about what certain words or phrases mean. But a poor student of Greek or Hebrew might very well read the Bible in the original language and make just those same sorts of mistakes. If people aren't really reading the Bible because they're reading a translation, then many people who do know Greek and Hebrew aren't really reading the Bible for the same reasons. But we say of all these situations that it is someone reading the Bible, and rightly so. The things read are different but they are all the Bible.

Another example perhaps more pertinent to the idea of privileging the "original text." If St. Paul were asked what books were contained in the Bible, he would respond with a list much shorter than the one we would give. We might even ask him, as he sat down to write a letter to those troubled Christians in Corinth whether what he was writing was the Bible. He would most certainly say "No. I'm writing just writing a letter to the Corinthians. You don't write the Bible, your read it." Would Paul merely be mistaken? Did he just not know that what he was writing was the Bible? Or would it be better to say that what he wrote to the Corinthians was a letter but to us the Bible? You might say that Paul did not intend it to be the Bible and thus we shouldn't read it as the Bible. But what books were written to be the Bible? If the author had to intend for his work to be the Bible for it to really be the Bible, then it seems the Bible doesn't actually exist. But I've got it here on my desk; people refer to it all the time and have for centuries. And if the intent of the author doesn't make something the Bible, it shouldn't trouble us when something like the story of the woman caught in adultery is in the Bible even if it wasn't in John's final manuscript of his gospel.

Another way of expressing this attitude towards scripture would be to say that we can only trust the Bible if it is without change, if it has always been the same down to the letter, the way Muslims claim the Qu'ran has remained the same since it was uttered by Mohammad. In other words there is something about the sort of thing the Bible is which gives it authority and truth. Let us indulge our Thomistic streak a little and work this premise out.

1. The Bible is true and authoritative because of the sort of thing it is.
2. Created things can be true and authoritative, but are not always and necessarily so; by their nature they are not always and necessarily anything, but always changeable. They can therefore be true and authoritative potentially but not essentially; they are not true and authoritative because of the sort of thing that they are.
3. God is the only thing which is uncreated.
4. Therefore, because a created thing cannot be true and authoritative because of the sort of thing it is, anything which is essentially true and authoritative must be uncreated.
5. Therefore the Bible is God (the Bible is Divine).

I am no specialist, but again, similar moves are made, to my knowledge, regarding the Qu'ran in Islam and also the Torah in mystical Judaism. For Christians, however, the Bible does not occupy such a position. For Christians, the Bible is for us, not forever. It is for our edification and inspiration, that is to say, it is true and authoritative for us, not absolutely and essentially true and authoritative; God alone is that. But if that God dwells in us, we will see how surely and singularly the Bible points towards him, and we will return to it again and again and joyfully obey it and submit ourselves to its truth and authority.

Scripture is a thing ordained by God to be a guide and comfort to his people on their way to him. Any explanation, therefore, of its authority ought to begin not with the nature of scripture in se, but the nature of God's action in scripture. Hence the presupposition I spoke about earlier, which asserts that God inspired scripture only at the moment it was written, is properly theological. It begins with the action of God as a way of establishing authority and truth for scripture, as though he infused those qualities into certain texts and then left them alone to operate in the world with their special qualities. This view demands that the texts remain exactly the same, because it was in their original shape that God graced them with authority and truth.

It is easy to see how this theology moves in the direction of asserting those things which we have refuted above, and it is for this reason that I have called it an offshoot of the secular proposition: it shares the same basic assumptions about what scripture must be in terms of uniqueness and immutability. Any book which is not precisely the same as the texts which God inspired is not scripture, or at the least is corrupted scripture, and therefore not really authoritative. Yet the experience of the church resists these ideas about the essential authority and truth of scripture. Many Christians throughout the centuries have heard the Word of God in different, often differing words of scripture. Many secular scholars today have an impressive mastery of the Bible's original language and contexts, but for all that they have far more trouble hearing God's words there than the simplest pious Christian using his dinosaur of a King James and some prayer. As Jesus said to some Jews who were disputing with him, you cannot understand how the scriptures are true if the truth of God is not in you (John 5:37-39).

Is is thus necessary on the witness of the church to say that, although the scriptures were certainly inspired as they were written, they were not inspired only then. For if the truth they impart to us were tied to a particular form they once took, we would not be able to receive that truth if we encountered them in another form. The inspiration of the scriptures is not the infusion of grace into certain texts but rather God's promise to speak to us in those texts, a promise he makes good on to his faithful every hour. If we understand the inspiration of the scriptures in this way, that, like the creation of the world, it is not a one-time act, but, rather, like all God's faithfulness, is 'new every morning,' these textual problems which can deeply trouble a certain conception of scripture have no hold over us. If God be for us, who can be against us? Certainly not textual variants.

A Confession

2009-10-02T13:55:00.002-05:00

God does not give the Spirit to the Son, nor does he measure it, for God is not measured by God.
-Gregory

O Father, you sent forth your Word and your Spirit moved upon the face of the waters; by your power, O Spirit, was the Son made one of us, and we saw the Father; on our supper is the Father’s Spirit poured out and yet we taste your flesh, O Son. What is there on earth or in heaven that does not depend on you? What is there that exists that is not one? What is there that is one that does not draw from Oneness? And yet what is there that exists that does not exist in your Threeness, O One in whom we live and move and have our being?

Where was the Spirit when the Father said to his Son “I have begotten thee?” Where was the Son when the Father gave forth his Spirit? Where is the time when these things were not so? It is no time, it cannot be found; the mind of God cannot search it out, nor can the imagination of the world’s Creator envision it. Where is the place where we shall meet our God? In a tabernacle of darkness where my Lord has made his dwelling place.

O Father how was it to your Son that you said “I have begotten thee,” when that very Speech is the Son of your begetting? Almighty Word, what is your own, when even your breath is the Breath of another? O Giver of Life, how long life have you received to proceed from two infinities?

But you, O Lord, do not measure your Spirit, nor does God measure God, for what do we measure, but what we do not know? Does a man know his stature till he has measured it? Does a man know he is 'tall' till he has lain the word along himself and found it fitting? So we measure by what is not ourselves that which we do not know of ourselves. Yet what is of yourself unless all knowledge? And with what shall you measure yourself? For what is like yourself, as a chart has height like a child, which is not yourself? Or what is God that is not You, what is divine that you are not? Or shall we sunder God from God to measure God?

But Lord, I say to my hand, you have five fingers, I have measured you out, proportioned you and counted your members; shall you not say to your Son “I have begotten thee” and measure him by your Word? Yet what measurement is it to say I am as tall as I am? So it is for the Word to speak of himself. Was not God in Jesus Christ, reconciling the world to himself? Let us measure him. And what, shall we tell God that we have measured him? But God of all men knows the stature and the going out and the coming in and of the man he was not least.

Ourselves we cannot see without a mirror, but your ways are not our ways, O Lord. By our thoughts alone we can conceive of who we are, but your thoughts are not our thoughts, O Lord. You that are One and do not divide in being Three, shall you divide to know yourself? Shall you set apart the Son to measure the Spirit, shall you reckon without your Reason and breathe without your Breath? Or can what is from the beginning be no more? Shall you dissect the One that has no parts, shall the knife of your Reason measure out the portion of the Father, and the law of your decree specify the property of the Son? Shall the Spirit be poured into jars until the God gives out? And shall we then count the jars, that have contained what contains all? How shall we make these jars, when the Maker of the world shall be their contents? Where shall we put these jars, when the resting place of eternity will rest in them? From whom shall we buy these jars, which are the words of truth, the measure of God? To whom shall we go, O Lord? You alone have the words of truth.

Theses on Church and State in Protestantism

2009-09-18T21:27:00.005-05:00

1. In rejecting the sacrament of order and preaching a priesthood of all believers, the Reformation rejects the division of labor within a community; with this, the Reformation rejects the the essential principle of modern society.

2. The modern insists that religion is a private affair; his world has therefore two authorities. The word of the Reformation is solus: it has but one God.

3. In the medieval and modern divisions of public and private, church and state, Christ's body is arrayed against itself and the individual believer is compelled to serve two masters. In the church of the Reformation, the body of Christ is one and the individual renders nothing unto Caesar.

4. In this way the Reformation is fundamentally opposed to the separation of Church and State. For Protestants, the paradigmatic moment on this issue is Constantine convening the Council of Nicaea, in which the Christian prince uses his political power for the good of the Church in the same way any other Christian would make use of his skills and position. For Romanists, it is Ambrose refusing communion to Theodosius, where the Christian prince, as a layman, submits to ecclesial authority. The Modern prefers the Roman picture, so long as Ambrose and Theodosius never speak.

5. Thus we may say that for the Reformation the Christian State is in the Church; for Rome, that State is under the Church.

6. For the Reformation, the church is thus totalitarian; this is a monastic impulse.

7. This totalitarian church of the Reformation is the martyrs' church of the first centuries. Tertullian argued for tolerance from the pagans and rigorism among the Christians; Augustine approved of the persecution of heretics and preached grace for all sinners in the church. Their mind was one and the same.

8. That this totalitarian church appears as a state church in a Christian society is a tautology; that it appears as counterculture in a godless society is inevitable.

9. We have need of a martyrs' church amongst the wreckage of the Reformation state, but we insist on thinking like Romanists and Moderns. We live in such wreckage because the Reformers 'gave, expecting nothing in return.'

A Sermon

2009-09-11T18:47:00.004-05:00

Whether that can be rightly called a sermon which was neither given in the context of worship nor delivered to any real congregation may be honestly debated. Though the circumstances of this performance were those of the classroom, its genre, I hope, is undoubtedly homiletic.

The Scripture: Psalm 4

1Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness: thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress; have mercy upon me, and hear my prayer.

2O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? how long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing? Selah.

3But know that the LORD hath set apart him that is godly for himself: the LORD will hear when I call unto him.

4Stand in awe, and sin not: commune with your own heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah.

5Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the LORD.

6There be many that say, Who will shew us any good? LORD, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us.

7Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the time that their corn and their wine increased.

8I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, LORD, only makest me dwell in safety.

The Sermon:

Success is an object of our desire. Not because we feel success will bring to us the pleasures of health or wealth, make our lives easier, or augment our happiness. O we often think that, but if we dig down deeper we will see that we human beings desire success because in success we find a certain empowering satisfaction. “A job well-done is its own reward;” this we know, just like we know the pleasure we feel when we admire ourselves in the mirror. To have done something is to feel alive. It is this self-esteem that keeps people dusting their cabinets and mowing their lawns. Because we’ve all stood on that summit, we’ve all looked out across the land beneath us with a victor’s eye. And O how we would like it if the delight of that victorious exertion never left us, O we can imagine what a bliss we would live out from that perpetual achievement. So hunger for this satisfaction drives us on, we seek and aspire to new accomplishments and new success. We would be conquerors forever.

But the world does not allow such things, now does it? In the boldness of my youth it may yet seem that life can only ascend, that on every triumph of mine another will be built and grander than the first. But there are others in this room who would restrain my eager heart, who would take down volumes from the study of their experience and show me: “Here, another passed me by. Here, my joys began to pale. Here, I could go no farther.” And even I, if I am honest with the memories of my heart and not its aspirations only, even I will know from the few but sunny pages of my youth that I have often, often cried “O ye sons of men, how long will ye turn my glory into shame? How long will ye love vanity and seek after lies?”

This shout from the Psalmist is not the cry of the abject and the downtrodden. This is not the cry of the man who cannot feed his family, of the mother who has lost daughters or the father who has lost sons. It is those who have had glory who can cry out when it is turned to shame. It is those who have friends who can cry out when their friendships fail them. It is a cry that people like us tend to make. This is the cry of a promotion which has inspired jealousy among the people who were merely once your co-workers. It is the cry of a long-awaited opportunity which our family had hoped we would never get. It is the cry of a romance that has severed the closeness of old acquaintance. “How long will ye turn my glory into shame?” we cry to those who trouble us. How long will you season my happiness with hatred? How long will you answer my success with your failure? How long will your sarcasm return my earnest joy? Can’t you let me take pleasure in what I have achieved, what I have earned for myself?

And when these words have done nothing—if we even spoke them at all—we take the complaint to God. I’m sure that everyone in here would have brought their joy to the Lord as well, but those people out there, well, they’re going to come to God with anger and it’ll have been a long time since they spoke. But us, the ones who pray, we who know we have boldness to approach the throne of our Lord Jesus through his blood, we who know that “the Lord hath set apart him that is godly for himself,” we who know that “the Lord will hear when I call unto him,” we have a right to expect some justice when we bring our indignations to the Lord. So we say “God, why can’t I just be happy? Why must I suffer sorrow with my joy? Life, I know, will have its pains, but Lord, why can’t they come in their own time? Why can’t I just love and be happy and successful right now for a while and after that let sadness wait its turn?”

And how does the Lord answer us, how does the God of Love, how does the one whom we call Father answer us? Does he cradle us indulgently? Do his words console the weeping child by affirming what they cry for?

“Stand in awe, and sin not;
Commune with your own heart upon your bed and be still.
Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your trust in the Lord.”

“Stand in awe of me,” says the Lord, “and you will not sin.” Kneel, and you shall not fall. For I know, says the Lord, that your desires are the children of your fears. But it is not by raising yourself to the heights that you will never sink to the depths, it is by acknowledging the depths of God that he will raise you to the heights of his blessedness. Look deep into yourself, look deep into yourself and you will find no cause to doubt the Lord’s direction of your life. Drop down an anchor into the waters of your soul, and you will nevermore be troubled by the tempests, for at the bottom of that sea is the strength of your God. For when you have communed, as the Psalmist says, with your heart upon your bed, when you have filed past all the agitations of the day, when you have laid down all the troubles that you found within your heart at the feet of Jesus Christ, then, then, and only then you will be still and you will know that he is God and you will look for nothing further. When you have said to the demons that drive you all your hours, demons like pride and desire, demons like jealousy and fear, demons we call friendship, demons called duty, demons called success…when you have said to them all “Be gone!” and you have wept and you have sobbed at the pain of their leaving, when you have weathered all the whirlwinds and the earthquakes and the scorching flames of fire, then with a still, small voice, if you are still enough to hear him like Elijah, he will whisper to you softly “I am God. Put your trust in me, just trust me, and all with you shall be righteous and right. But put your heart in mine and never bitterness shall bite upon the sweet, for I shall be yours and I am the fullness of joy.”

There are many who say “who will show us any good?” They have looked at the pain that hounds all the achievements of this world and they say there is no pleasure on the earth. But for them we say “Lord lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us, for in thy light shall we see light! Lord, thou hast put gladness in my heart more than in the time that their corn and their wine increased. I will both lay me down in peace and sleep in security, for thou O Lord only makest me dwell in safety.” We say to them you can only see pain in this world because you have only seen this world, you can only see sorrow because you do not look for Joy, you cannot love life because you have not attended to the life that was lived in Love. You have yearned for sweet nectars from a rock, when the orchards of the Gardener stood ripening all around you.

O Lord, lift up the light of your countenance upon us! Let us see your face! For there indeed do we know we shall have gladness without measure and joy without end, a pleasure without interruption. Then our joy will surpass the happiness of prosperity and the contentment of health, the thrills of achievement and the glory of success. For in the light of your face they slip thoughtlessly from our clutches and we look for them no more. And when we have this gladness in our heart, when we have the faith of Jesus Christ, the love of our heavenly Father, and the comfort of his Holy Spirit, then we will lie down on that bed, that bed of tears where we communed with our own hearts and found the stillness of the Lord, and we will stretch out there our bodies in his peace and sleep with the contentment of a child, for we shall know and we shall know it in our heart, and we shall know it in our bones, that the Lord alone is our success, that the Lord alone makes us to dwell in safety. Amen.

9-5 Theses

2009-09-05T15:57:00.005-05:00

1. We ought to treasure everything we hear about Jesus in our innermost hearts, as Mary did. This is why God forbids us to use his name in vain.

2. Robin Goodfellow in Milton's "L'Allegro" and Frere Jacques in Mahler's 'Titan' model the same process whereby the common may be made acceptable matter for art.

3. Ideas of known authorship can never be profound without idolatry. When the author is known, we know the idea is a fiction, a thing made. But when the author is unknown, there is the sense of something unmade and eternal.

4. The modern state is a monarch. As such it can only remain in power by exciting antagonisms between the rich and the poor, and restricting the freedom of the rich to exercise their own power.

Of the Making of Many Books...

2009-08-29T18:46:00.003-05:00

As some of you may know, I have just recently gotten settled in Durham, North Carolina to begin attending Duke Divinity School. In the course of moving I had to take stock of my books, which are numerous. Nothing, I think, gives so much satisfaction to the true humanist than admiring his own library, for it is no less than a concrete expression of his character, the quality of which he surely supposes to be very high. In such a spirit of self approval, I present to you, dear reader, some statistics on my library.

Most Represented Book: The Bible
9 copies on shelf, 2 in everyday use: 2 Greek Testaments, 1 Hebrew Bible, 2 Modern Study Bibles, 4 Older Translations (1 King James Bible, 1 King James Psalms/Proverbs/New Testament, 1 1560 Geneva Bible facsimile, 1 Tyndale New Testament), 2 Modern Translations (1 New Revised Standard Version, 1 Robert Alter Genesis).

Most Represented Language in Reference: Greek
6 Lexica (1 Full Liddell-Scott, 1 Intermediate Liddell-Scott, 1 Classical Greek Basic Vocabulary, 1 Bauer-Danker New Testament Lexicon, 2 Short New Testament Lexica), 3 Grammar References (1 Introductory Grammar/Textbook, 1 Greek Grammar by Smyth, 1 Reference on Greek Verbs)

Most Represented Authors

1. Martin Luther
7 Books: 5 Volumes of Biblical Commentary, 1 Volume of Treatises, 1 Freedom of a Christian.

2. Virgil
6 Books: 2 Latin Editions of the Eclogues, 1 of the Eclogues and Georgics, a 2-volume Latin Edition of the Aeneid, 1 Dryden Aeneid.

2. Cicero
6 Books: 1 De Re Publica/De Legibus, 1 De Officiis, 2 Volumes of Speeches (in Latin), 1 Volume of Speeches (in English), 1 Student text of the Pro Caelio.

4. Herodotus
4 Books: 2 English Translations, 1 Student text of Book III, 1 Greek Edition of Book VIII.

Number of Non-Western Books: 2 (1 Book of Alaska Native Folklore, 1 Tale of Genji)

Obscure Books:
Guido of Pisa's Commentary on the Inferno (in pretty decent medieval Latin).
Giles of Rome's De Ecclesiastica Potestate (in offensively inelegant medieval Latin).
A French School text of Oedipus Rex (or Oedipe Roi) from 1889.

Three Remedies for Modernity, Part 1

2009-08-08T00:13:00.004-05:00

...veluti pueris apsinthia taetra medentes
Cum dare conantur, prius oras pocula circum
Contingunt mellis dulci flavoque liquore…
-Lucretius

Modernity is a condition of mind into which all of us are born and bred. It is a cage, say some, from which we cannot hope to escape. I prefer rather to think of it as a disease congenital with our era, a birth defect exacerbated by unfortunate but unavoidable habits of environment, upbringing, and education. For such diseases the treatment is simplest and most effective in the early stages of development, painful and dangerous in later life.

Although the essential causes and principal characteristics of modernity may be much debated, the remedies I offer here are directed mainly at the belief in progress, the idea that advances in knowledge and technology so fundamentally improve the human condition that any other solution to our peculiar situation appears primitive and barbaric. An absolute faith in the salvation we shall gain through our increasing mastery of the universe is a prime tenet of the modern creed, and it instills in its adherents as zealous a disregard for the beliefs of others as any fanatical sect. It appears convincing to many not only because it benefits from a grand consensus of the cultural and political powers, but because it is a fact beyond dispute that the progressing technologies and techniques of the modern world have greatly varied and increased the sensual pleasures and material comforts enjoyed by humankind. Against those of us who are wont to long aloud for the condition of some civilization past these benefits are often objected, and the modern assures himself that a long life lived with running water and instantaneous communication is preferable by far to a shorter one endured with simplicity and purpose. It is an important step in the treatment of this condition to expose the vanity of such an attitude.

The three remedies I offer here are all literary, although they differ very greatly from one another beyond that simple category. The first is science fiction, a short story (almost a novella) written in the 1930s. The second is a work of history from the early 1960s. The last is part of an epic poem written in the 1590s. They all address themselves in different ways to some of these important symptoms of modernity.

First Remedy:
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shadow Out of Time”

Most of H.P. Lovecraft’s best work is at least in part a critique of modern assumptions, usually our typically inflated view of humanity’s place in the cosmos. The general drift of his attitude towards the expansion of human knowledge may be intuited from the justly famous sentence which opens “The Call of Cthulhu:” “The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.” For Lovecraft, as for the modern, knowledge is the decisive factor in human existence. Yet in spite of all his atheism, in stories like “The Call of Cthulhu” he shares something in his attitude towards complete knowledge with the author of Genesis: knowledge here is ruinous and destructive, not life-giving and liberating.

“The Shadow Out of Time,” one of his last stories, is a profound and multi-layered exploration of the ultimate emptiness inherent in the promise of scientific advancement and indeed all hopes of transcendence through knowledge. The plot centers on a university professor—most of Lovecraft’s heroes are intellectuals of one sort or another—who suffers from amnesia of several years of his life during which he acted somewhat bizarrely and conducted strange researches. As he begins to look into what happened to him, he pieces together clues from his own actions with a series of vivid and recurring dreams to discover that he had in fact exchanged minds with a being of the distant past. This researcher of the so-called “Great Race” had used the professor to acquire certain information available in his own day, and the professor in turn, while he inhabited the other’s body, had written a history of his own times for the archives of the Great Race. The ability of the Great Race to transfer their consciousnesses through time means that, in a way, their civilization never dies: by the time in which the professor encounters them, Earth’s distant past, they had already lived out the lives of many previous species, moving their consciousnesses each time into a new host civilization in the future. However, the Great Race also knew that the horrible creatures called Elder Things, which they had subdued when they first transported themselves to Earth, would eventually awake and overthrow them, forcing them to migrate their consciousnesses into the future once more, to a time when the Elder Things will no longer threaten them.

Having pieced this story together, but still fearing himself to be mad or deluded, the professor convinces some colleagues to join him in an archaeological expedition in the Australian Outback to discover the city of the Great Race. Wandering alone at night in the desert, the professor finds the city and the archives from his dreams and memories, but also awakens the Elder Things, which chase him from the ruins utterly terrified. The next day, he tries to rediscover the site, but the desert has swallowed it.

Lovecraft attacks the possibility of transcendence through knowledge from three principal angles in “The Shadow Out of Time.” First, he tauntingly suggests the impotence of the contemporary sciences in the form of the doctors and psychologists who try to convince the professor he has merely had a mental breakdown. This strand, however, does not critique the principle behind the belief in scientific progress, for one might easily respond that our knowledge, although it is insufficient now, will eventually be perfected. The principle of all-powerful knowledge is the object of Lovecraft’s second critique, which operates from the example of the Great Race itself, a civilization so advanced that they had conquered those two forces which seem to make us mortal and therefore form the substance of our problems, time and matter. But it becomes all too clear in the tragic story of the Great Race that this mastery does little to actually change the limitations of creaturely, bounded existence: they are merely capable of fleeing from one set of material and temporal problems to another. Finally, Lovecraft rejects even the idea of attaining some level of transcendence through self-knowledge in the character of the professor, whose quest to find out about himself results only in greater despair when he finds the truth: “If that abyss and what it held were real, there is no hope. Then, all too truly, there lies upon this world of man a mocking and incredible shadow out of time.” In this moment of cosmic despair, the professor’s only comfort is that he has no hard proof of the reality of it all: the best knowledge is faulty knowledge.

Whether the “shadow out of time” is a shadow that emerges from time and is cast by time, or is a shadow cast from outside of time, it lies over all that is bound by time, and it cannot be escaped except by truly transcending that limit—and for the efforts of creatures defined by that limit such transcendence is impossible. Against this metaphysical wall every presumption and ambition of enlightened science will be dashed.

In the story, this metaphysical shadow is personified by the sinister Elder Things, whose presence preceded the Great Race and continues to inhabit their ruins, whose eventual triumph proved inevitable. The Great Race is described as living always with the fear of these Elder Things in the back of their minds, for they knew they could not defeat them. As an object of knowledge, the Elder Things may be recognized, but not mastered.

For atheists such as Lovecraft and his protagonist the situation must indeed look very bleak. With the universe so laid bare, the innate human desire to transcend our mortal limits certainly appears to be mocked by the very principles of existence, and the Great Race, for all its achievements, proves merely to be a stronger creature chained in the same mortal limits. For a Christian, however, things look much different, for God, who becomes man in Jesus Christ, is a light out of time which shines in the darkness: this God throws no shadow over the world of man, as if to smother it, but casts light onto it, as if to reveal its place in the presence of something better. And this light does not merely uncover the tantalizing prospect of something unattainable, for over The Man Who is God death and all the attendant forces of the universe have no power, and in his true mastery over these forces he opens a way to true transcendence for all those who have their being in him. In the Bible (e.g. Hebrews 4) and in Church Fathers such as Augustine and Maximus the Confessor this transcendence is described as rest from the labor and motion of our existence, a characterization we may well apply to the Great Race and its tragic, eternal migrations, doomed, like all things set in motion, never to cease but by the power of another.

A Returning Reflection

2009-07-31T11:11:00.002-05:00

I hope soon to take up posting with some regularity. The strains and commitments of my senior year and Divinity school applications proved unfortunately too great to allow me the kind of reflective time necessary to write.

As I contemplate the church and world which God is preparing me to serve, the challenge seems often too much and I wonder if I might do better in withdrawal and study. I confess I come too slowly to my own chastisement in these moments and content myself too readily with the feeble faith they evidence. Yet it is for these weaknesses that God has given us the church, and to the church such ministers as turn us out from ourselves, whether we are there satisfied or discontented, to the better destiny God has appointed for each one of us. My grandfather is one such minister, and I had this past Sunday the blessing of hearing him preach a simple undiluted word to the mostly oblivious tenants of an Illinois nursing home; this indeed is 'folly to the Jews and a stumblingblock to Gentiles.' I can thank God that my resident cynicism was crushed for that short space beneath the foolishness of the Gospel, and I pray him constantly that it may be so every hour.

Bishop William Willimon is another such minister, whom I encountered first in his books coauthored with Stanley Hauerwas. I leave you with a recent talk of his on the theology of John Wesley. It ought to be an admonishing and inspiring voice to every Christian, and especially to those of us who are readily enticed to merely think about the faith, not live it.

http://willimon.blogspot.com/2007/08/what-if-wesley-was-right.html

Christianity and Patriotism

2008-10-01T21:07:00.002-05:00

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

2008-09-13T15:41:00.003-05:00

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

2008-09-01T14:14:00.005-05:00

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

2008-08-30T12:19:00.004-05:00

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

2008-08-25T22:26:00.005-05:00

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

2008-08-02T14:53:00.003-05:00

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

2008-07-07T19:56:00.003-05:00

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!

2008-06-29T23:18:00.005-05:00

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!

2008-05-28T23:17:00.007-05:00

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

2008-05-27T20:58:00.004-05:00

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

2008-05-13T18:57:00.004-05:00

"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

2008-05-08T19:53:00.003-05:00

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

2008-05-05T18:30:00.004-05:00

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

2008-04-30T19:38:00.009-05:00

"'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

2008-04-26T17:35:00.005-05:00

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

2008-04-16T18:20:00.003-05:00

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

2008-04-12T16:56:00.002-05:00

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

2008-04-09T18:03:00.004-05:00

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

2008-03-31T22:41:00.002-05:00

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

2008-03-17T18:40:00.004-05:00

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

2008-03-10T22:35:00.003-05:00

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

2008-03-06T18:03:00.001-06:00

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?

2008-02-29T17:47:00.003-06:00

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

2008-02-21T19:02:00.005-06:00

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

2008-02-13T19:19:00.003-06:00

"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?

2008-02-09T16:22:00.000-06:00

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

2008-01-29T18:57:00.000-06:00

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...

2008-01-24T19:23:00.000-06:00

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...

2008-01-16T21:22:00.000-06:00

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.

Some Links

2008-01-11T21:40:00.000-06:00

A strange basketball oddity.

An even stranger basketball oddity (read the story).

High Comedy.

An Amen! (practical)

An Amen! (theoretical)

Something Refreshing.

Genesis in Geneva

2008-01-02T16:34:00.000-06:00

I feel as though I should take it for some sort of significance that the most prize of all my Christmas gifts this year was a facsimile of the 1560 Geneva Bible. The Geneva Bible, which was the first translation of the whole Bible into English from Hebrew and Greek, was the work of expatriate scholars in Calvin's Geneva who had been driven out of England under the reign of Mary. Their translation quickly became the most widely used English version of the Bible, and sustained this position for a century, until the 1660 Restoration jettisoned it for its Calvinist notes and began the process of turning the King James translation, which had dwelt in relative unpopularity since its first publication in 1611, into The Bible. The Geneva Bible was the familiar Bible of Shakespeare, Milton, and the whole litany of great Elizabethan and Jacobean writers; even King James' translators in the very preface of their new translation quote the Geneva version.

In any case, I took some time last night to read through the first few chapters of Genesis in my brand-new old Bible, enjoying especially the notes. For example, observe this sequence in the last few verses of Genesis 2 (The Geneva Bible was also the first English Bible to employ verse divisions, certainly an inheritance of mixed benefit):

Verse 23: "She shall be called woman, because she was taken out of man."
Note to 'woman:' "Or, Mannet [little man], because she cometh of man; for in Ebr [Hebrew] Ish is man and Ishah the woman."
You'll find a similar note in any modern Bible.

Verse 24: "Therefore shall man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave to his wife, and they shall be one flesh."
Note to 'leave:' "So that marriage requireth a greater duty of us toward our wives than otherwise we are bound to show to our parents."
An interesting thought, once you get past the knee-jerk sexism assumed in "our wives."

Verse 25: "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed."
Note to 'not ashamed:' "For before sin entered all things were honest and comely."
An innocuous comment on the surface, but its placement with this particular verse certainly takes sides on the age old speculative question, "was their sex in Eden?"

The note which particularly caught my attention, however, was this one:

Chapter 3, verse 22: "And the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil. Now, lest he put forth his hand and take also of the tree of life and eat and live forever..."
Note to 'behold:' "By this derision he reproacheth Adam's misery, whereinto he was fallen by ambition."

Having always assumed that God was talking to himself in this verse, I have often been troubled by such an apparent proof of the common portrayal of the petty God begrudging his creatures knowledge and life. But this interpretation, besides being more amenable, follows more sensically from the previous verse where God has "made them coats of skins and clothed them." God's words take on the character of a mock presentation, saying sarcastically to Adam and Eve "How impressive this new man and woman are! Now that you have this little bit of knowledge, you're pretty much the same as I am!"

I am reminded of this older post on Chris Heard's blog about the comical and childlike characteristics of Adam and Eve. The tone of the story of the Fall is something that I think modern scholars have increasingly questioned, opting against the solemnity that bears the aura of the received interpretation. I am usually skeptical of modern positions which encourage a satirical or comic reading of texts traditionally considered serious; they seem so often no more than echoes of that careless irreverence which typifies our age. But if the somber scholars of Calvin's Geneva had room for a sarcastic, scolding God, perhaps I ought to be more reserved in my judgment, just as the promoters of such positions ought to accept that they may not be offering much that's radically new.

Another Fun Quiz

2007-12-30T23:06:00.000-06:00

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

Which theologian are you?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Anselm

Anselm is the outstanding theologian of the medieval period.He sees man's primary problem as having failed to render unto God what we owe him, so God becomes man in Christ and gives God what he is due. You should read 'Cur Deus Homo?'

Anselm

80%

Karl Barth

73%

Friedrich Schleiermacher

60%

John Calvin

60%

Augustine

47%

Charles Finney

40%

Jürgen Moltmann

40%

Martin Luther

40%

Paul Tillich

33%

Jonathan Edwards

27%

A Thought For Advent

2007-12-16T23:12:00.000-06:00

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

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

Jonson's Alchemist

2007-12-10T12:36:00.000-06:00

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

Some good lines:

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

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

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

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

Where's the Controversy?

2007-12-05T18:05:00.000-06:00

I guess 941 years makes people forget.

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

Hick Etymology

2007-12-03T19:25:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

Bonus etymology!

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

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

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

Bonus Latin Etymology!

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

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

The Wisdom of Bill Walton

2007-11-27T19:17:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

2007-11-18T23:34:00.000-06:00

I always find things like this amusing.

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

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

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

O Tempora! O Mores!

2007-11-11T00:03:00.000-06:00

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

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

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

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

Just so you know...

2007-11-06T20:11:00.000-06:00

Cash Advance Loans

Scattered Reflections on Shakespeare's Richard The Second

2007-11-02T23:35:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fun Website

2007-10-27T18:34:00.000-05:00

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

Enjoy!

A Reflection in Quotes of the Week Past

2007-10-14T20:29:00.000-05:00

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

The Noble (Beowulf 440-441):

Ðær gelyfan sceal
Dryhtnes dome se þe hine deað nimeð.

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

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

Vos exemplaria Graeca
Nocturna versate manu, versate diurna.

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

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

“Horace turns aside to give Plautus another punch.”

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

“Crito, we owe a cock to Asclepius.”

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

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

William Tyndale

2007-10-08T17:55:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

An Observation

2007-09-19T17:02:00.000-05:00

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

Shavin' Billy

2007-09-06T00:48:00.000-05:00

Wise words, courtesy of the great Jim West.

Words That Mean Only Themselves: Docile

2007-08-30T23:26:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

Milton, Dryden, and The Devil

2007-08-21T00:44:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unequaled Dr. Johnson

2007-08-09T22:56:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

2007-08-05T20:29:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

Thoughts After Dinner at Wendy's

2007-07-31T19:15:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

Enjoy.

Mark 10:28-30

2007-07-26T00:24:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

Shocking New Discovery

2007-07-21T16:30:00.000-05:00

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

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

How I Waste My Time

2007-07-17T00:13:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

Words That Mean Only Themselves: Asbestos

2007-07-11T23:42:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

What Jeremiah Said to the Enlightenment

2007-07-04T00:21:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

God have mercy on us all.

Two Hours' Traffic

2007-07-02T01:53:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

Aulus Gellius and the Preservation of Archaic Latin Poetry

2007-06-29T12:06:00.000-05:00

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts on Matthew 1 and Joseph

2007-06-28T00:42:00.000-05:00

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

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