Tag Archives: the Bible

The Morality of Abraham

15 Sunday Feb 2015

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion

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Jacques Derrida

“A secret always makes you tremble… A quiver can of course manifest fear, anguish, apprehension of death; as when one quivers in advance, in anticipation of what is to come. But it can be slight, on the surface of the skin, like a quiver that announces the arrival of pleasure…

Abraham is thus at the same time the most moral and the most immoral, the most responsible and the most irresponsible of men… because he responds absolutely to absolute duty, disinterestedly and without hoping for a reward, without knowing why yet keeping it secret; answering to God and before God. He recognizes neither debt nor duty to his fellows because he is in a relationship to God — a relationship without relation because God is absolutely transcendent, hidden, and secret, not giving any reason he can share in exchange for this doubly given death, not sharing anything in this dissymmetrical alliance. Abraham considers himself to be all square. He acts as if he were discharged of his duty towards his fellows, his son, and humankind; but he continues to love them. He must love them and also owe them everything in order to be able to sacrifice them. Without being so, then, he nevertheless feels absolved of his duty towards his family, towards the human species and the generality of the ethical, absolved by the absolute of a unique duty that binds him to God the one. Absolute duty absolves him of every debt and releases him from every duty. Absolute absolution.

Abraham says nothing, but his last words, those that respond to Isaac’s question, have been recorded: ‘God himself will provide the lamb for the holocaust, my son.’ If he had said ‘There is a lamb, I have one’ or ‘I don’t know, I have no idea where to find the lamb,’ he would have been lying, speaking in order to speak falsehood. By speaking without lying, he responds without responding. This is a strange responsibility that consists neither of responding nor of not responding. Is one responsible for what one says in an unintelligible language, in the language of the other? But besides that, mustn’t responsibility always be expressed in a language that is foreign to what the community can already hear or understand only too well? ‘So he does not speak an untruth, but neither does he say anything, for he is speaking in a strange tongue’.

Whereas the tragic hero is great, admired, and legendary from generation to generation, Abraham, in remaining faithful to his singular love for every other, is never considered a hero. He doesn’t make us shed tears and doesn’t inspire admiration: rather stupefied horror, a terror that is also secret. For it is a terror that brings us close to the absolute secret, a secret that we share without sharing it, a secret between someone else, Abraham as the other, and another, God as the other, as wholly other. Abraham himself is in secret, cut off both from man and from God.

Our faith is not assured, because faith can never be, it must never be a certainty. We share with Abraham what cannot be shared, a secret we know nothing about, neither him nor us.”

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Jacques Derrida, writing in the opening of part three of his study of religion and the limits of rationality, The Gift of Death.
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Starting with Scattered Shepherd Tribes

28 Tuesday Oct 2014

Posted by in Literature

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Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

“I had from childhood the singular habit of always learning by heart the beginnings of books, and the divisions of a work, first of the five books of Moses, and then of the Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses… If an ever busy imagination, of which that tale may bear witness, led me hither and thither, if the medley of fable and history, mythology and religion, threatened to bewilder me, I readily fled to those oriental regions, plunged into the first books of Moses, and there, amid the scattered shepherd tribes, found myself at once in the greatest solitude and the greatest society.”

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From Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s autobiographical novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.

The Christian Worldview Versus the Greek

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion

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Raphael's School of Athens

“The worldview that underlay the New Testament was so different from that of the Greeks and the Romans as to be almost its opposite. It was a worldview that stressed not excellence of public achievement but the adventure of a personal journey with God, a lifetime journey in which a human being was invited to unite himself to God by imitating God’s justice and mercy. It was far more individualized than anything the Greeks had ever come up with and stressed the experience of a call, a personal vocation, a unique destiny for each human being. The one God of the Jews had created the world and everyone in it, and God would bring the world to its end. There was no eternal cosmos, circling round and round. Time is real, not cyclical; it does not repeat itself but proceeds forward inexorably, which makes each moment—and the decisions I make each moment—precious. I am not merely an instance of Man, I am this particular, unrepeatable man, who never existed before and will never exist again. I create a real future in the present by what I do now. Whereas fate was central to Greeks and Romans, hope is central to Jews and Christians. Anyone who doubts the great gulf between these two worldviews has only to reread the speeches Hector makes to Andromache (in Chapter I) and to realize the impossibility of putting such speeches on the lips of any believing Jew or Christian:

And fate? No one alive has ever escaped it,
neither brave man nor coward, I tell you—
it’s born with us the day that we are born.”

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From chapter 7 of Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.

Any loyal visitor to this blog will be aware that much of my reading over the past year has orbited around the intersection of Athens and Jerusalem. Fideism, which has been the most compelling idea I have encountered in that time, explicitly locates itself in the murky terrain between — or above — faith and reason. I’ve not forgotten that I’m past deadline on some paragraphs about this subject and the other central themes of the past year, and I can only excuse my laziness by saying that part of my distraction has come in the form of Cahill’s incredible book.

I find this particular section pretty intriguing, and though I’ve been mulling it over for the past few days, am not exactly sure what to make of it. In the context of Cahill’s entire narrative it takes on some added shadows and contours, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll merely supplement it with a selection from Arthur Schlesinger’s biography of Robert Kennedy, in which he writes the following about Robert’s spiritual response to his brother’s death:

As John Kennedy’s sense of the Greeks was colored by his own innate joy in existence, Robert’s was directed by an abiding melancholy…

The fact that [Robert] found primary solace in Greek impressions of character and fate did not make him less faithful a Catholic. Still, at the time of truth, Catholic writers did not give him precisely what he needed. And his tragic sense was, to use Auden’s distinction, Greek rather than Christian—the tragedy of necessity rather than the tragedy of possibility; ‘What a pity it had to be this way,’ rather than, ‘What a pity it was this way when it might have been otherwise.’

Hence, the Greek emphasis on fate, which was the foundation of Robert’s reflexive view of the world, absorbed tragedy as an unavoidable consequence of the unchangeable cards one is dealt in life. On the contrary, the Christian perspective, with its emphasis on hope (and its cousin possibility), assessed negative events with an eye to past decisions and potential future choices: not only could it have been different, but I now can choose how to react.

Read another fragment from Cahill’s book:

Greek SymposiaPartying with the Greeks

There Is a Season

07 Sunday Jul 2013

Posted by in Religion

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Ireland 2005 2352

To everything there is a season,
A time for every purpose under heaven:

A time to be born,
And a time to die;
A time to plant,
And a time to pluck what is planted;
A time to kill,
And a time to heal;
A time to break down,
And a time to build up;
A time to weep,
And a time to laugh;
A time to mourn,
And a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones,
And a time to gather stones;
A time to embrace,
And a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to gain,
And a time to lose;
A time to keep,
And a time to throw away;
A time to tear,
And a time to sew;
A time to keep silence,
And a time to speak;
A time to love,
And a time to hate;
A time of war,
And a time of peace.

What profit has the worker from that in which he labors? I have seen the God-given task with which the sons of men are to be occupied. He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.

I know that nothing is better for them than to rejoice, and to do good in their lives, and also that every man should eat and drink and enjoy the good of all his labor—it is the gift of God.

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From the book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 3, verses 1 through 13.

As the New York Times war correspondent Chris Hedges says, “…reading Ecclesiastes is like reading Beckett.”

This is from the New King James translation, the only version of the Good Book that I’ll pick up. Peter Hitchens defended the KJV (over other versions) like this:

Peter Hitchens London David LeveneBy David Levene15/10/12The King James Bible Versus the Sid James Bible

“…We have now had two generations brought up to believe that nobody and nothing has the right to tell them what to do, or to restrict or restrain themselves – especially in what they regard as their private life.

And they can tell within minutes of encountering the Authorised Version of the Bible, that it is their enemy’s weapon. This is because it is not simply a translation, but a poetic translation, written to be read out loud to country people in large buildings without loudspeakers, to be remembered, to lodge in the mind and to disturb the temporal with the haunting sound of the eternal. In this it is very effective…

As for ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ and ‘ye’, these remind the reader or listener that they are in a poetic and eternal context, not reading Harry Potter or listening to the radio news.”

Read his brother’s similar and equally spirited defense of the NKJV below:

Charles Bridge, Prague

New Bibles for a New Babel

“To seek restlessly to update The Bible or make it ‘relevant’ is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare.

‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter?”

The picture above was taken on Inch Beach in Ireland.

The Greatest Gift

26 Monday Nov 2012

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Wailing Wall1 Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8 Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part. 10 But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.

11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love.

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The 13th chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians.

The picture was taken at a place where I’ve seen — on several occasions — both real love as well as some very, very clamorous cymbals: the Western “Wailing” Wall of Solomon’s Temple.

Just as I took this particular shot, a black cowled Hasidim whispered for me to put my camera away, as the sun was just fading over the wall, and Shabat — a time which forbids ‘work’ like clicking a camera shutter — was beginning.

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent

09 Friday Nov 2012

Posted by in Religion

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John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, least he returning chide,
‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: ‘God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best, His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’re Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.’

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“On His Blindness” by John Milton.

In 1652, just a few days shy of his forty-fourth birthday, John Milton’s world went black. Struck with glaucoma, and lacking a cure, the great writer experienced the gradual loss of his vision — the onset of optic nerve pressure, the steady contraction of his field of view, the dimming of his sight, and the final eclipse of darkness that left him permanently blind. “That one talent,” Milton lamented, “lodg’d with me useless.”

“On His Blindness” is one of the most celebrated poems in English. The work, which was written — or rather dictated — by Milton in 1655, is a meditation on what God demands of men, blind or seeing. Milton begins with a simple premise: When I consider how my light is spent. In this, the poem is a work of epistemic philosophy, very logical in its force, for it posits a simple fact and then moves to deduce others from it.

But the brilliance of Milton is not merely a matter of his logic. “Spent” here also establishes an extended metaphor. Milton is overlaying the Biblical “Parable of the Talents” onto his own struggle to cope with the desire to work in the face of debilitating blindness. Thus “talent” in the third line is a double-entendre — it refers to the talent of sight as well as the talents, which are units of monetary measure, in the New Testament allegory. Those who have read Matthew 25 will know the significance of talents in the parable, for they are the treasures left by a master to his three servants as he leaves for an extended period. The master entrusts them with this bounty so that they may use their talents for good while he is gone. However, upon his return, the master finds that only the first two servants have turned their talents into a profit. The third servant merely hid his treasure, burying it in the ground.

Milton regards himself as that third servant. His talent — death’s to hide — has been spent.

The parable of the talents also provides the origin of what many Christians view as the salutary pronouncement which will be uttered upon their entrance to heaven. “Well done, good and faithful servant,” says the master to the first two men, “You have been faithful over a few things, I will set you over many things. Enter into the joy of your lord.” (Matthew 25:23) Hence, the word “account” is also a double-entendre, which applies to both sides of the extended metaphor. The account given by each of the servants, which describes how he used his treasure, mirrors Milton’s “true account”: the justification he must offer for what he has done with his allotted talents and time on earth.

Yet from this legalistic view of a vengeful Maker, Milton asks, ‘Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?’ The answer he finds is ultimately freeing. ‘God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts (the talents God bestows in us)’.

They also serve who only stand and wait.

Milton died on this day, 338 years ago.

New Bibles for a New Babel

23 Tuesday Oct 2012

Posted by in History, Photography, Religion

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Charles Bridge, Prague

“Four hundred years ago, just as William Shakespeare was reaching the height of his powers and showing the new scope and variety of the English language, and just as ‘England’ itself was becoming more of a nation-state and less an offshore dependency of Europe, an extraordinary committee of clergymen and scholars completed the task of rendering the Old and New Testaments into English, and claimed that the result was the ‘Authorized’ or ‘King James’ version. This was a fairly conservative attempt to stabilize the Crown and the kingdom, heal the breach between competing English and Scottish Christian sects, and bind the majesty of the King to his devout people. ‘The powers that be,’ it had Saint Paul saying in his Epistle to the Romans, ‘are ordained of God.’ This and other phrasings, not all of them so authoritarian and conformist, continue to echo in our language: ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child’; ‘Eat, drink, and be merry’; ‘From strength to strength’; ‘Grind the faces of the poor’; ‘salt of the earth’; ‘Our Father, which art in heaven.’ It’s near impossible to imagine our idiom and vernacular, let alone our liturgy, without them. Not many committees in history have come up with such crystalline prose…

A culture that does not possess this common store of image and allegory will be a perilously thin one. To seek restlessly to update it [The Bible] or make it “relevant” is to miss the point, like yearning for a hip-hop Shakespeare. ‘Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward,’ says the Book of Job. Want to try to improve that for Twitter? And so bleak and spare and fatalistic—almost non-religious—are the closing verses of Ecclesiastes that they were read at the Church of England funeral service the unbeliever George Orwell had requested in his will: ‘Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and the almond tree shall flourish, and the grasshopper shall be a burden, and desire shall fail: because man goeth to his long home. … Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern. / Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was.’

Charles Bridge, PragueAt my father’s funeral I chose to read a similarly non-sermonizing part of the New Testament, this time an injunction from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians: ‘Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.’

As much philosophical as spiritual, with its conditional and speculative ‘ifs’ and its closing advice—always italicized in my mind since first I heard it—to think and reflect on such matters: this passage was the labor of men who had wrought deeply with ideas and concepts. I now pluck down from my shelf the American Bible Society’s ‘Contemporary English Version,’ which I picked up at an evangelical ‘Promise Keepers’ rally on the Mall in Washington in 1997. Claiming to be faithful to the spirit of the King James translation, it keeps its promise in this way: ‘Finally, my friends, keep your minds on whatever is true, pure, right, holy, friendly and proper. Don’t ever stop thinking about what is truly worthwhile and worthy of praise.’

Pancake-flat: suited perhaps to a basement meeting of A.A., these words could not hope to penetrate the torpid, resistant fog in the mind of a 16-year-old boy, as their original had done for me. There’s perhaps a slightly ingratiating obeisance to gender neutrality in the substitution of ‘my friends’ for ‘brethren,’ but to suggest that Saint Paul, of all people, was gender-neutral is to re-write the history as well as to rinse out the prose. When the Church of England effectively dropped King James, in the 1960s, and issued what would become the ‘New English Bible,’ T. S. Eliot commented that the result was astonishing ‘in its combination of the vulgar, the trivial and the pedantic.’ (Not surprising from the author of For Lancelot Andrewes.) This has been true of every other stilted, patronizing, literal-minded attempt to shift the translation’s emphasis from plangent poetry to utilitarian prose…”

Charles Bridge, Prague

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From Christopher Hitchens’s essay about the beauty of the King James Bible and the triviality of so many modern Biblical translations. When the King Saved God: a recommended read for anyone with an interest in Christianity, literature, history, words, language, or the church.

The photographs were taken on the Charles Bridge in Prague.