Tag Archives: Thomas Cahill

How Jesus Talked

08 Tuesday Dec 2015

Posted by in Religion, Speeches

≈ Comments Off on How Jesus Talked

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The_Calling_of_Saint_Matthew-Caravaggo_(1599-1600)

“Biblical Hebrew developed as a desert language, and it exhibits the economy of desert people. The very opposite of Victorian English, which never uses fewer words if it can use more, Hebrew will not use three words if two will do. It will not use two words if one will do. If it can get away with silence instead of words, it will do so — and much of the meaning of the Hebrew Bible is to be found in its silences. This is because in the desert every movement is dehydrating; and desert people learn to think before they move and think before they speak. They are elegant conservers of energy.

When Amos, the great prophet of the Northern Kingdom, tries to move the people to abandon their trivial pursuit of economic status and to take account of the poor, he says most beautifully:

Ve-yigal ka-maim mishpat, ve-tsedaka k’nachal eytahn,

which I would translate, ‘Let your justice flow like water, and your compassion like a never-failing stream.’ The English takes twenty syllables, the Hebrew only fifteen — and this is Hebrew at its most expansive…

If the misplaced reverence of translators can make the people of the Bible sound as they never did in life, no one brings on attacks of reverence more often than Jesus, who was actually humorous, affectionate, and down-to-earth, who spoke to his friends and followers in a clear and bracing manner, was often blunt, sometimes vulgar, and always arresting. Never did he employ the dreary, self-righteous, even priggish sound that some of his admirers would wish for him. Despite the popularity of the King James Version, Jesus was not a 17th-century Englishman…

In Mark’s Gospel, the most primitive of the four gospels, the first words that Jesus speaks are: ‘The Time has come. The Kingdom of God draws near…’ The next word is almost always translated as ‘repent’ or ‘convert’ — which makes Jesus sound like a sidewalk freak with a placard in his hands. But the word Mark uses is metanoiete, which means literally in Greek ‘change your minds.’ For the Greeks, the mind was considerably more than it is for us. It was the core of the person, the center of his being. The word we would use is ‘heart.’ So… I have translated the Greek as ‘Open your hearts’ — a far cry from ‘repent!'”

__________

Excerpted from Thomas Cahill’s speech “Close Encounters with the People of the Past”.

Cahill, who has written some of the most enjoyable and broadly accessible popular history out there, has published a few books that hover around the ancient Greeks and early Christian church. I recommend starting with Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

The image: a section of Caravaggio’s 1599 masterpiece The Calling of Saint Matthew.

Related reading:

Advertisements

Does the Beauty of the Gospel Story Attest to Its Truth? (Einstein, C.S. Lewis, and Others Answer)

18 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in Religion

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio

Does the aesthetic splendor of the four Gospels, when considered like works of literature, emit the ineffable whiff of something genuine? Is there a patina of truth — truth endorsed by beauty — coating the Biblical account of the Nazarene? Cahill explained the concept; Einstein flirted with the idea; C.S. Lewis, through his buddy Tolkien, was converted by it; and Julian Barnes paid it some provocative thoughts. You can decide for yourself.

From the pen of Thomas Cahill, writing in his even-handed historical survey The Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus:

What especially makes the gospels — from a literary point of view — works like no others is that they are about a good human being. As every writer knows, such a creature is all but impossible to capture on the page, and there are exceedingly few figures in all literature who are both good and memorable. Yet the evangelists, who left no juvenilia behind them — no failed novels, rhythmless poems, or other early works by which we might judge their progress as writers — whose Greek was often odd or imprecise, and who were not practiced writers of any sort, these four succeeded where almost all others have failed. To a writer’s eyes, this feat is a miracle just short of raising the dead.

As retold in Walter Isaacson’s biography, Albert Einstein had grappled with the question, too:

Shortly after his fiftieth birthday, Einstein gave a remarkable interview in which he was more revealing than he had ever been about his religious thinking. It was with a pompous but ingratiating poet and propagandist named George Sylvester Viereck… For reasons not quite clear, Einstein assumed Viereck was Jewish…

Viereck began by asking Einstein whether he considered himself a German or a Jew. ‘It’s possible to be both,’ replied Einstein. ‘Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.’

Should Jews try to assimilate? ‘We Jews have been too eager to sacrifice our idiosyncrasies in order to conform.’

To what extent are you influenced by Christianity? ‘As a child I received instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.’

You accept the historical existence of Jesus? ‘Unquestionably! No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.’

In Alistair McGrath’s biography of C.S. Lewis, there is an account of how, ultimately, the great medievalist don was swayed after studying the Gospels according to J.R.R. Tolkien’s conception of them as “True Myths”.

To understand how Lewis passed from theism to Christianity, we need to reflect further on the ideas of J. R. R. Tolkien. For it was he, more than anyone else, who helped Lewis along in the final stage of what the medieval writer Bonaventure of Bagnoregio describes as the ‘journey of the mind to God.’…

Tolkien argued that Lewis ought to approach the New Testament with the same sense of imaginative openness and expectation that he brought to the reading of pagan myths in his professional studies. But, as Tolkien emphasized, there was a decisive difference. As Lewis expressed in his second letter to Greeves, ‘The story of Christ is simply a true myth: a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.‘

The reader must appreciate that the word myth is not being used here in the loose sense of a ‘fairy tale’ or the pejorative sense of a ‘deliberate lie told in order to deceive.’… For Tolkien, a myth is a story that conveys ‘fundamental things’—in other words, that tries to tell us about the deeper structure of things. The best myths, he argues, are not deliberately constructed falsehoods, but are rather tales woven by people to capture the echoes of deeper truths. They are like splintered fragments of the true light…

In his somberly comic study of mortality, Nothing to Be Frighted Of, Julian Barnes imagines a moment in which some unnamed future generation could look back and evaluate the history of the now-disappeared Christian religion:

It lasted also because it was a beautiful story, because the characters, the plot, the various coups de théâtre, the over-arching struggle between Good and Evil, made up a great novel. The story of Jesus—high-minded mission, facing-down of the oppressor, persecution, betrayal, execution, resurrection—is the perfect example of that formula Hollywood famously and furiously seeks: a tragedy with a happy ending. Reading the Bible as ‘literature,’ as that puckish old schoolmaster was trying to point out to us, is not a patch on reading the Bible as truth, the truth endorsed by beauty.

__________

The painting is Caravaggio’s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas (1602).

Explore on:

  • Eric Metaxas answers the droll question – Would Jesus be a Republican or a Democrat?
  • Lewis, Wittgenstein, and Updike address whether we can assume the existence of God
  • Cahill contrasts the Greek and Christian worldviews

The Christian Worldview Versus the Greek

15 Wednesday Jan 2014

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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.”

__________

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

Partying with the Greeks

14 Saturday Dec 2013

Posted by in History

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Greek Symposia

“Banquets of like-minded friends were called symposia. (The singular, symposium—the Greek original is symposion—means ‘a drinking together,’ that is, a drinking party.)…

There was plenty of tension in Greek life, since the Greeks, however many parties they threw, became as time went on even more bellicose than they had been in Homer’s day. These symposia may have been, as much as anything, occasions to release the pent-up anxieties of a society always at war—’the father of all, the king of all,’ ‘always existing by nature,’ as the Greek philosophers expressed it. Enough wine and one could forget about the war of the moment or, if not forget, reduce its importance at least temporarily. Thus this ditty attributed to Theognis, an early-sixth-century songwriter of airy facility who believed in good breeding, great parties, and lively romance, the Cole Porter of ancient Greece:

Strike the sacred strings and let us drink,
and so disport ourselves ’mid sounding reeds
that our libations gratify the gods—
and who gives a shit about war with the Medes

But as tends to be the case when drunkenness substitutes for thoughtfulness, the hilarity often ended badly… There’s sadness beneath the merriment. It is as if, no matter how much these revelers sing, dance, howl, recite their jokes, and screw one another, a constant, authoritative note of pessimistic pain sounds beyond all their frantic attempts not to hear it. Even Archilochus, a sensational athlete in his time and a master of the revels if ever there was one, cannot deny that none of these nighttime activities makes good sense. In his most thoughtful lines, he seems to remove the mask, denuding himself of his gruff and rollicking persona, and to counsel himself in the clear light of day not to excess but to sobriety—to balance, modesty, and even resignation:

O heart, my heart, no public leaping when you win;
no solitude nor weeping when you fail to prove.
Rejoice at simple things; and be but vexed by sin
and evil slightly. Know the tides through which we move.

The last sentence is quietly ominous. The tides through which we move—the highs and the lows, the peaks and the troughs—tell us repeatedly that nothing lasts… Let us temper our excitement and agitation, whether for the ecstasy of battle or the ecstasy of sex, whether over great achievement or great loss, and admit to ourselves that all things have their moment… If we live according to this sober knowledge, we will live as well as we can.”

Archilochus

__________

From the closing of chapter 3 of Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter.

I wrote some comments about the above bust of Archilochus in a post yesterday. Check it out, as well as the sources (brought to my attention by Ted Rey) of the lines from Archilochus cited above.

Know the Tides

13 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by in History

≈ 9 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Archilochus

O heart, my heart, no public leaping when you win;
no solitude nor weeping when you fail to prove.
Rejoice at simple things; and be but vexed by sin
and evil slightly. Know the tides through which we move.

__________

Words by Archilochus, the celebrated Greek poet who wrote and lived in the seventh century BC.

I just came across these lines in Thomas Cahill’s Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea, and though I’ve tried to track them down on the internet, am still yet to find their original source. Send me a message or post a comment if you happen to know.

The above bust is of Archilochus. It is a first or second century AD marble sculpture based on an original dating from the late third century BC.

The ivy crown adorning his head signifies he is a poet, while the berries symbolize the gifts of Dionysus. Art historians believe this to be Archilochus due to the similarities it shares with four other Roman copies as well as a silver coin from Paros, which shows the poet seated, holding a lyre. Though he began his adult life as a mercenary, Archilochus eventually became one of the most famous lyric poets of Antiquity. His poems, of which only fragments of remnants remain, principally concern love, war, and the revelries of the table.

Sometime this weekend I’ll post the context in which Cahill quotes this verse. It’s pretty unexpected. Pick up the book here if you can’t wait.

*Update: This morning, reader Ted Rey responded to my question and found the source of the above quote from Archilochus. Ted writes:

“It seems to be an alternate translation for Fragment 67, as translated by R. Lattimore

Heart, my heart, so battered with misfortune far beyond your strength,
up, and face the men who hate us. Bare your chest to the assault
of the enemy, and fight them off. Stand fast among the beamlike spears.
Give no ground; and if you beat them, do not brag in open show,
nor, if they beat you, run home and lie down on your bed and cry.
Keep some measure in the joy you take in luck, and the degree you
give way to sorrow. All our life is up-and-down like this.

The war motif has been bypassed. I like the more generalized message that emerges.

Another translation is:

Soul, my soul, don’t let them break you,
all these troubles. Never yield:
though their force is overwhelming,
up! attack them shield to shield…

Take the joy and bear the sorrow,
looking past your hopes and fears:
learn to recognize the measured
dance that orders all our years.

Archilochus: To His Soul : A Fragment, as translated from the Greek by Jon Corelis”

Thanks for that, Ted. Much appreciated.

The Man Who Cried ‘I’

06 Friday Dec 2013

Posted by in Biography, History, Psychology, Religion

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

St. Augustine

“‘To Carthage I came,’ recalled Augustine later, ‘where there sang all around me in my ears a cauldron of unholy loves. As yet I loved no one, yet I loved to love, and out of a deep-seated need, I hated myself for not being needy. I pursued whoever—whatever might be lovable, in love with love. Safety I hated—and any course without danger. For within me was a famine.’…

When in the classical period we reach the first works to be designated as autobiographies, we can only be confounded by their impersonal tone…

Then we reach Augustine, who tells us everything–his jealousies in infancy, his thieving as a boy, his stormy relationship with his over-bearing mother (the ever-certain Monica), his years of philandering, his breakdowns, his shameful love for an unnamed peasant woman, whom he finally sends away. His self-loathing is as modern as that of a character in Camus or Beckett—and as concrete: ‘I carried inside of me a cut and a bleeding soul, and how to get rid of it I just didn’t know. I sought every pleasure–the countryside, sports, fooling around, the peace of a garden, friends and good company, sex, reading. My soul floundered in the void—and came back upon me. For where could my heart flee from my heart? Where could I escape from myself?’

No one had ever talked this way before. If we page quickly through world literature from its beginnings to the advent of Augustine, we realize that with Augustine human consciousness takes a quantum leap forward—and becomes self-consciousness. Here for the first time is a man consistently observing himself not as Man but as this singular man—Augustine. From this point on, true autobiography becomes possible, and so does its near relative, subjective and autobiographical fiction. Fiction had always been there, in the form of storytelling. But now for the first time there glimmers the possibility of psychological fiction: the subjective story, the story of a soul. Though the cry of Augustine—the Man Who Cried ‘I’—will seldom be heard again in full force until the early modern period, he is the father not only of the autobiography but of the modern novel. He is also a distinguished forebear of the modern science of psychology.”

__________

From part one of Thomas Cahill’s very accessible and illuminating How the Irish Saved Civilization.

Saint Augustine