There are relatively few miracles in the Old Testament and they vary in quality in that some are artistically rendered and so provide lasting images, like the Burning Bush, or seem just a trick, like Daniel in the lion’s den, that simply occasioning surprise in that he simply survives rather than the miracle conveying meaning on its own, as happens when Lot’s wife turns to a pillar of salt when she looks back to see the destruction of Sodom, and so indicates that people ought not to turn back on their lives lest they become frozen or transfixed in that reverie rather than move on to new events. That particular miracle is deep, something more than a violation of physical nature. It is about the actuality of social and psychological nature. When Joshua stopped the sun so that his army had time to win the battle, it was a sense that a long and bloody afternoon kept on and on until this battle was done, as if it were that the sun had not been allowed to set. The Bible is replete with this imagery, only some of them considered miracles so as to make a point and also to show that God, one way or another, intervenes in things. It would have been not at all that surprising for a spark to set off a burning bush. Its significance was in that a voice was associated with it and so is in keeping with the very deep Hebraic insight that God appears in voices as a kind of event rather than in other events, like catastrophes or places that are holy in themselves.
Read MoreIn Praise of Dogma
Contemporary sociologists of religion claim that they should develop what they call “real religion” or “informal religion” which discusses the emotions, the situated practices and the personal identities affiliated with religion rather than the liturgies and doctrines concerning religion if they are to get their subject matter right. Susan Nidich argues that the post-Exilic time when Jews returned to Israel and Judah were ripe for development in new religious understandings and literary forms because it was such a time of turmoil, though it seems to me it is difficult to name a time when the history of Israel was without turmoil. Certainly not so was the time of the books of Samuel when Saul and David contested with one another, a time of politics mixed up with dastardly deeds that rival the intrigues and murders of the early Tudors.
Read MoreFolk Metaphysics
There are a set of adages that people offer to explain and organize their lives that go beyond whatever are their doctrines or experiences of their religions or their philosophies. These adages, which are foisted by relatively uneducated people as an alternative to religion and philosophy, nevertheless have a persistence which crosses generations. The point of these adages is to provide a natural justice whereby people, in the nature of things, get their just deserts as well as their opportunities to act freely in life. These adages are often harsh and crude and yet satisfying. I want to point out some of them to give a flavor of this subterranean world of understanding that surfaces whenever any of them are needed to articulate what has to be and whatever has always been.These can be considered as the folk metaphysics which is currently present but which we suspect is of very long duration in that people need a metaphysics even if and in addition to more overt and formalized systems that do exist. These constitute what we might call the implicit beliefs to which people adhere and have adhered, and so make up the social glue that sociologists search to find in community or primitive religion rather than these rational if possibly mistaken views of how the social world works.
Read MoreReligion, Scholarship, and Jesus
Karen King is a professor at the Harvard Divinity School that specializes on the shards that remain of the documents concerning the time of the Gospels that are not considered part of the canonical literature, particularly the one called “The Gospel of Mary'' where Mary Magdalene is treated as a figure that led the Christian community even if that role is attributed to Peter as the one upon which the Church was set. Like Elaine Pagals, just one generation before her, King thinks that these gospels discovered in the last 150 years shows that the well known gospels suppressed the roles of women and perhaps led to a patriarchal sense of Christianity that has persisted ever since. Scholars investigating these non-canonical texts will reveal a very different history for Christianity than is the one with which people are familiar. One of those texts King investigates is a shard that refers to both “Jesus” and “wife”, which would suggest that Jesus rejected a wife or treated the Church as his wife or even had married her. That would be quite a finding.Ariel Sabar’s new book “Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife” tells the story of that discovery within the very rich context of contemporary Biblical scholarship and eventually unravels the fact that this text was a forgery, fooling even the most authoritative of scholars.
Read MoreMelodrama is a Major Genre
Melodrama is usually thought of as an inferior genre. It pits bad people against good ones, as if it were not a simplification to separate people in that way. Melodrama also has exaggerated emotions which people dwell on for much too long and present themselves as victims rather than as active participants in their own lives, and so lose or lessen their dignity. Moreover, melodramatic plots are resolved by arbitrary intrusions of coincidence or derring do, when what ordinarily happens is that people work their way through circumstances and character. “The Count of Monte Cristo” is melodrama because his escape allows his hero to engage in a passion for revenge so as to exquisitely appreciate the suffering inflicted to make up for the suffering that has been caused, everyone drowning in their bad feelings, everyone, including the protagonist, a victim and also malevolent. This is the set of feelings that settle into the Nineteenth Century, supposedly because a more popular audience was not well enough educated to consider finer feelings, though one wonders whether the audiences for Greek tragedy were as elevated as the spectacles to which they attended.
Read MoreThe Liturgy in "Revelations"
The older way to read the Bible is to take the text apart and show the various sources from which it was compiled. The Anchor Bible of the Seventies represented a kind of final step in what was known as the Higher Criticism. The editor of its edition of “The Book of Revelations” suggests that the material in the book comes largely from Jewish apocalypses although some other material is added on. That tells you that what separates “Revelations” from the rest of the New Testament is its ties to “Ezekiel”. It is not tied to the non-apocalyptic tone which pervades most of the Gospels, at least if you conceive Jesus and his followers, a few remarks to the contrary, to be in for the long haul of reconstructing mankind, which is what salvation is really about.
The newer way to read the Bible is to put the text together again by seeing it as a literary construction made up of a variety of materials whose final text, the one we have inherited for two thousand years or so, has a coherent meaning. The meanings in the New Testament are typological or allegorical. “Revelations”, by this light, can be interpreted, as it is, for one, by Bruce J. Malina in his still very useful 1983 book “The New Testament World: Insights from Cultural Anthropology”, as using the visions of sky gods that are available to the Mediterranean world at the time of its composition as the basis for conceiving what a city of god would be like. What separates “Revelations” from the rest of the New Testament, in this case, is its adoption of astrological imagery.
Read MoreJohnson's "Stoicism"
Samuel Johnson was an essayist rather than a philosopher, but he was given to the contemplation of moral issues, and so perhaps thought that essays on morality were akin to what he said about pastoral poetry, which was that such poetry was the most primitive and natural because it was the result of rural people reflecting on their surroundings, and so moral essays might be considered the natural outlet for people concerned about how to live their lives and so not like what is produced by philosophers, who are concerned about the status of moral language rather than the fruits of moral speculation. Let us consider the short essay “Stoicism”, from his early periodical work in the Rambler series, in that light, while setting aside questions concerning how such taut and terse arguments would have found favor with the reading public. I don’t think the Atlantic or Harper’s would publish them today, so demanding are they of the reader.
Read MoreThe Free Will of Balaam's Ass
Naive readers often claim that story tellers should just summarize the point they want to make in a few sentences rather than dress it up in a story where the reader has to do the work of extracting meaning. The answer to that is that most of the time writers are doing other things than making particular points. They are describing the customs of a society or giving you a sense of a particular character or showing how dialogue advances or impedes people understanding one another. They are rarely making philosophical points and the ones who do, like Saul Bellow or other writers of the midcentury, will simply pause in the story to tell the reader what is on his or her mind. For the most part, writers will use their learning to give their descriptions greater detail rather than the other way around, use the detail to help make an abstract point. That was certainly true of Thomas Mann’s masterpiece, “Joseph and His Brothers”. Mann was steeped in all the Biblical scholarship of his time and that allowed him to create a story where the reader is enveloped in the ritualistic culture of the ancient Middle East and sees striking characters in actions detailed enough so that the reader gets a sense of how their minds work and the reader can draw from that the observation that in some ways all people whatever the age think alike while also thinking differently. That moral is drawn by the reader as a way to organize the material in hand rather than the purpose of the author, which is to describe what life is like. But there are exceptions, times when authors are indeed trying to give you a handle on a philosophical question. One of these is the story of Balaam and his ass, told in the Book of Numbers 21-23, where the author seems intent on resolving a philosophical dilemma, which is the nature of free will, even though, for the most part, the Old Testament is not given over to metaphysical speculation but, rather, avoids it.
Read MoreReligious Heroism
Heroism, so I have been told by real heroes, such as Medal of Honor winners, is neither planned nor done out of an excess of courage, but seems either a fluke or inevitable, people only doing what they do naturally, and so the title of “hero” is worn begrudgingly. I want to call attention to a minor form of heroism of my own, one that did not put my life but only my soul at risk, which happened when I was a teenager, and so at a time when I would be wont to take risks for no reason, only later to understand the reasons why. It was my youthful religious rebellion, which is a time honored story and my own might seem a naive one to people with better religious training than I had acquired at the time.
Read MoreHarmless Pleasures
“Harmless pleasures” is a conventional phrase for the description of activities that are satisfying without imposing any harm on anyone. Hobbies such as stamp collecting or raising roses or following the fortunes of a baseball team are considered harmless pleasures, that taken as a term of praise given how many awful things happen in the world. Harmless pleasures are to be indulged because human action could also be malicious and destructive. Its companion term is “guilty pleasures” which are also for the most part minor but do carry at least some threat of doing some damage, probably in the long run, to the person indulging in them. Examples of these would be eating chocolates, which make you fat and raise your cholesterol levels but taste so good; enjoying pornography, which appeals to the male desire to look at naked female bodies but may weaken one’s appreciation for the personhood behind the body; or following gossip columns so as to be in the know about celebrities but also encourage a disrespect for the privacy of a person. Guilty pleasures won’t do much damage to your soul or your body but they address an indulgent side of yourself and so are, in some way, sinful. Smoking, however, has been moved in the past fifty years from being a guilty pleasure to being an out and out evil in that the practice is very highly correlated with the development of lung cancer and other diseases. The tricky issue are those cases where it is not at all clear whether a pleasure is harmless or guilty or downright bad. Clarifying the status of some test cases will allow elaborating what are the criteria by which a harmless or guilty pleasure turns into something else, something downright unacceptable. What are the additional circumstances which turn a harmless or guilty pleasure into something more momentous: a tragedy or a comedy or a history or a romance, to use Shakespeare’s categories?
Read MoreThe Question of Pilate's Guilt
Sometimes questions you had not thought to ask just leap out at you and sometimes they are prompted by the reading of a text new to you. That happened with me this week with regard to the question of what it meant that Pontius Pilate washed his hands of responsibility for the execution of Jesus. Washing your hands of a matter meant to me that the person doing the washing was unconcerned about the collateral damage that might result from a bargain fulfilled. Pilate did what the Elders wanted so as to maintain their political support and so was indifferent to whether Jesus was especially holy or even the Messiah. How could he be indifferent to that? The event is a metaphor for the utmost cynicism. I had become so used to thinking of the event as a metaphor, that I had not focussed on the act itself until I came across a reference, in Bart Erdman’s "Lost Christianities", to an apocryphal gospel, "The Gospel of Peter", where Pilate washes his hands but the Jewish elders who met with him refused to. What could this mean? So let us engage in a bit of speculation about the significance of Pilate’s action.
Read MoreCompassion
Virtues and vices are supposed to be universal, which means that they apply at all times and in all circumstances. That is what Kant meant when he spoke of honesty. You are supposed to tell the truth even if a policeman is at the door asking you for the whereabouts of a friend. You never know but that the inquiry is harmless. I guess Kant never met a Nazi stormtrooper but the point that Kant was trying to make was that a virtue applies even in hard cases. The same is true of what the Catholics call the seven deadly sins. Gluttony is bad even if everybody has to eat to keep alive because gluttony refers to an obsession with eating and so would apply to present day people who let themselves go as well as to Saint Thomas Aquinas, who had a weight problem. In similar fashion, lust is and always was a vice in that it doesn’t refer to appetites fulfilled within marriage so long as the conjugal relation is clothed in modesty and darkness; it applies, rather, to people who have no respect for custom and are insatiable, whether that is cloaked by marriage or not. As a sociologist, however, I am uncomfortable with such categorical assertions. I look to make comparisons of situations in which a virtue or a vice seems to be that as opposed to situations in which a virtue or a vice appears to be the opposite of what it is usually taken to be. I want to consider the virtue of compassion in that light. What are the circumstances under which it makes sense to feel compassion and what are the circumstances under which compassion changes from being a virtue into being a vice? A lot of morality, as well as the central question of Christian theology, which is the status of Jesus, hangs on what compassion is.
Read MorePeter Brown's Christianity
A sociologist looks at a great historian.
That extraordinary scholar Peter Brown’s latest book “Through the Eye of a Needle” is a magisterial account of the social, economic and theological structure of the late Roman Empire. His guiding thesis as he states it in his introduction is that as a result of that great outpouring of theological genius in the later part of the Fourth Century the Church came from regarding wealth as a sin, which it was in the Gospels, to regarding contributions to the Church as justifying great wealth. Wealth was good when it went to the Church, and that explains the prevalence of the Church in the Middle Ages. I think this thesis basically wrong, first of all, because, as Brown himself shows in an early chapter, contributions of mosaics and other church naming occasions were already part of Church life right after Constantine converted to Christianity and, indeed, I might add, are part of every religion known to mankind, whether that means putting up a cathedral or getting a seat in a synagogue named after a deceased family member.
More important, the thesis is wrong because Brown imposes his thesis upon a description of social life where economic motivation is taken for granted as the reason for doing things, while the idea that people can earn favor with God by making contributions provides a motivation of the sort envisioned by Max Weber when he spoke of the decisive importance of the Protestant Ethic in liberating Europe to become capitalist, while Brown imagines that religious motivation for the accumulation of wealth results in the economic stagnation of medieval times, when it ought, by his logic, have led to capitalism in the Sixth and Seventh Centuries.
Most of all, why is it necessary to reconcile the remark about the camel and the needle with the practices of rich members of the Church? People join and support churches for a variety of reasons. They like the liturgy or they like feeling part of the community of respectable people. They can take theology or leave it. The New Testament has a great many passages that are in spirit contradictory. You are supposed to welcome the prodigal son, which is supposedly a tribute to the idea and feelings of family as well as an allegory for dealing with believers who stray, and yet Jesus also came to separate sisters from brothers. Which is it? A believer can live with the admonition about rich people because what he likes about Christianity is that it offers salvation to everyone, even including rich people, and maybe in a particular believer’s case, a depth of conviction must surely make up for the fact that the person is rich. Moreover, maybe the remark about rich people came from the looney or radical fringe of the movement-- though that is an insight that would come to a modern mind, one less trusting to texts than the great Fathers of the Church. At any rate, there is no need to pose this as a crucial matter, as Brown does, unless there is reason to think a doctrinal point is not only central but fraught with consequences, which is what Weber did when he said that a belief in good works was key to Protestant Christianity even if predestination ruled out those good works being the cause of salvation. Practice rather than meaning has consequences.
A Seventh Century capitalism did not happen. What did happen, according to Brown’s brilliant interpretation, The Church had accumulated wealth and that made it powerful with a soft power that could counter the power of the state, which was the power of the various kingdoms that had arisen after the fall of Rome. It invoked this power in the name of the poor, which is to be taken to mean not only those in poverty but all those well into the middle class who were not part of the aristocracy or the wealthy. So the Church had a constituency to be looked after and its wealth made that possible, and that is what made it the dominant institution of the Middle Ages. That is very different from saying that the Church was the progenitor of a kind of capitalism, though this claim could indeed be made in that monasticism, which depended on generous contributions from the wealthy, did see the origins of a countryside based capitalism that did not survive for more than a few centuries before efficient economic activity was eventually moved from the countryside to the city in part due to the efforts of Pope Innocent III in the early Thirteenth Century.
There are structural consequences when the clergy become the repositories of wealth. They have to become part of what Brown calls “the otherness” of the clergy, as was symbolized by their adoption of the tonsure and of celibacy, something Brown thinks was something desired by the laity and only then enforced by the clergy. Celibacy was necessary because the priests were the people who handled the Holy Eucharist, and so had to remain pure. (Brown does not deal with the prior question of why sexual chastity is more pure than an occasional romp in the hay.) In these and in other ways, Christianity was transformed less by its organizational skills and its growing monopoly of learning than by the responsibilities imposed on it by its wealth. Other religions also create liturgy and a heightened sense of the holiness of their clergy, but the Catholic Church did all of this so well that it dominated the Europe until the Reformation. To Brown offers up a panorama of late Antiquity, something about which he seems to know everything. The reader is rewarded with a rich feel for the Late Roman Church. Brown explains how St. Augustine went down to meet the crowds that attended his sermons; he explains how barbarian armies were merely mercenaries recruited to deal with civil wars breaking out within the empire and these armies set up courts which local aristocrats found they could deal with as well as when Rome was in charge.
The original thesis about religious ideology changing the Church so that it is in favor of wealth is, therefore, not Brown’s true thesis. The true thesis is one that he never overtly identifies, perhaps because he thinks that it is too obvious. That thesis, which makes much more sense and is far more significant, is that structural considerations are enough to explain the evolution of spiritual experience of the Church, an experience which would stretch to the end of the Middle Ages. This is a profound insight into the way Christianity and all other religions operate: that they are subject to the give and take of economic and political forces and it takes no ghost come from the grave, whether that be religious ideology or religious emotion, to call it into being. Religion operates as do all other institutions.
As a sociologist, I have certain quibbles with Brown about his use of historical evidence. Early on, in his presentation of the economic and social situation in the early Fourth Century Roman Empire, he uses a farmer who eventually earned himself a position on the city council as illustrating the fact that power explained wealth rather than the other way around, though that is not what the instance he cites would support. You can’t be that loose. Moreover, as with most historians, Brown engages in anecdotal proof, however wide ranging and how many histories of particular communities he may draw upon. What is the basis for his generalizations other than that there are some places, even a great many, where what he says holds true? Now that may be the best evidence available, but it is not conclusive. But be that as it may, there is no gainsaying Brown’s mastery of and his deep insight into his material. This book stands as a worthy rejoinder to those, like me, who take the role of ideas as very important in expressing, creating and propagating new versions of old or eternal religious emotions, and who also think that the Protestant Ethic had always been there, latent in Christianity, and waiting upon events to bring it forward.
Christian Compassion
“The Stone” is a column run in the New York Times that asks professional philosophers to contribute to the continuing cultural discourse. The June 19th column was “Is Your God Dead?”. It was written by George Yancy, a Professor of Philosophy at Emory University who wanted to make the point that the essence of the three great monotheistic religions was the emotion of compassion as that was recognized by Christians like himself who avert their gaze from the homeless and the destitute and therefore show themselves to be failed Christians in that they have not lived up to their religion. Commenters on the article said that atheists as well as followers of religion can appreciate the centrality of compassion, which is a point well taken if religion is reduced to the evocation of one or another of the human emotions that are available to all people rather than an esoteric emotion, such as faith, which is available only to the faithful. I want to make a more radical point, which is that compassion is, as moral virtues go, a relatively minor one because it largely has to do with people you don’t know who don’t impact on your life while other emotions and virtues do have a significant impact on your life.
Read MoreHow God Behaves
The Book of Genesis tells stories that concern a time before the existential events that make up the Book of Exodus where, among other things, the idea of law as providing guidance for how people are to conduct themselves makes its entrance. The Book of the Covenant had indeed provided a kind of international compact whereby families that resembled those of the patriarchs were supposed to regulate their relations with one another through establishing rules of compensation for damages, but the editors of the Five Books of Moses chose to include this passage in Exodus, as if to indicate that the Book of Genesis was to be truly prior to the concept of law. But if that were the case, how were the people of the Book of Genesis “supposed” to behave, that term itself rushing us to impose the imperative of law--”should”-- on the pre-legal condition. Was it supposed to be that mere custom and godly edict would be enough to explain how people behaved and behaved themselves? Not so, because the pre-legal people of Genesis used their minds to consider their interests, however difficult it may be not to assume that they were making legal type judgments. When Jacob learns that his sons had killed the people who had offered to circumcise themselves as well as intermarry with Jacob’s tribe because one of them had taken one of their sisters for a wife, Jacob does not excoriate his sons for having been vengeful or otherwise done evil, but simply concludes that the tribe will have to move on now rather than settle there. That can be taken as an ironic understatement, meant to foretell that those descended from the Old Testament families would always, sooner or later, have to move on, or that Jacob was making a silent judgment about their actions-- though I have done so myself in an earlier reading of this story of the rape of Dinah-- but, rather, that Jacob was simply not given to the moral reasoning that would come with the arrival of law.
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