Rev. Michael W. Payne, Phd

Oenophiles Listen Up!

2007-11-15T15:51:00.000-06:00

In Blindness Veritas?
Tasting wine blind isn't all it's cracked up to be.

By Mike SteinbergerPosted Wednesday, Nov. 7, 2007, at 12:01 PM ET

Don't drink the label, drink the wine. Among the many (unwritten) rules of wine appreciation, this is easily the most important. It's also the hardest one to follow. Even the most discriminating oenophiles find it difficult not to be influenced by the name on the bottle, particularly if the name is a hallowed one. For this reason, many people believe that the only reliable way to judge wines is to taste them blind—that is, to taste them without knowing who made them. (Indeed, a blind tasting is the one occasion when drinking out of a brown paper bag is not only respectable but a sign of intellectual rigor.) When people don't have the benefit of seeing the label, the argument goes, they have no choice but to judge a wine solely on its merits. But does this approach really make for the best wine criticism? In blindness veritas?
It depends on whom you ask. The Wine Spectator proudly trumpets the fact that its tastings are done blind, presumably as a way of distinguishing itself from Robert Parker, who says only that he tastes blind "when possible." The newest voice in wine criticism, a group of mostly European grape pros called the Grand Jury Européen, always tastes with the bottles hidden from view, and its president, Francois Mauss, is a tireless champion of this method. The GJE specializes in "single-blind" tastings: The tasters know a few details about the wines being poured—the region, or the vintage, or the grapes, or some combination thereof—but don't know the names of the wines (in some instances, they are told the names in advance, but they have no idea which wine is which). In "double-blind" tastings, the participants know nothing about the wines except what they see in the glass. (And yes, scientists would likely scoff at the wine world's loose use of these terms.)
Blind tastings can serve both as rites of passage—the exams for both the Master of Wine and the Master Sommelier degrees include blind tastings—and as ritual hazings. Within wine circles, nothing cements a reputation quite like acing a blind tasting. Years ago, British wine writer Oz Clarke was served a mystery red. After much sniffing and sipping, he said he couldn't decide whether it was the 1982 Paul Jaboulet Hermitage La Chapelle or the 1983. There was a reason he couldn't make up his mind: The glass contained a blend of both. But such triumphs are rare; more often than not, blind tastings yield embarrassment.
In December 2005, I wrote a piece about American sparkling wines in which I claimed that costlier homegrown bubblies were no match for high-end Champagnes. A few days after the article was posted, I received a phone call from Hugh Davies, the owner of Schramsberg Vineyards, one of California's leading sparkling-wine producers. Davies wasn't happy with me, and after several minutes of gentlemanly sparring, he asked if I would do a blind tasting. I couldn't exactly say no, so I told him I'd be game. I quickly forgot the conversation; Davies did not, which is why I found myself, 10 months later, seated in the tasting room of a Manhattan wine shop, nervously eyeing 12 glasses of effervescent yellow liquid. Davies was there, of course, as were several sommeliers and journalists. We weren't told the names of the Champagnes and sparkling wines or the quantities of each, though it stood to reason that at least one Schramsberg wine was on the table. Our task was to rank the wines in order of preference and to identify them by place of origin. My personal mission was to avoid the egg yolks aimed at my face. (I was later told by Schramsberg's PR honcho that the event had been organized for my benefit—which was to say, my humiliation.)
I knew the clues I was looking for: The Champagnes would be taut, mineral-rich wines with brisk acidity, while the sparkling wines would be comparatively plump and exhibit more tropical fruits. But knowing what to look for during a blind tasting and being confident you've found it are two different things. I was pretty sure the fourth glass was the Bollinger Grande Année (a Champagne)—the wine had Bollinger's telltale hazelnut/white-chocolate aroma. Otherwise, though, I was second-guessing myself every sip of the way.
I ended up doing better than I had expected. For one thing, I was right about the Bollinger; it was the '96 Grande Année. More importantly, my two top picks—by some distance—were Champagnes: the 1996 Salon and the Bollinger. I also correctly identified seven of 10 wines by region (I thought two bottles were damaged and didn't venture a guess for either). There was a pair of Schramsbergs in the tasting; I ranked them fifth and sixth, respectively. I couldn't claim complete vindication: I had two sparkling wines, the 1999 Domaine Carneros Le Reve and the 1999 Roederer l'Hermitage, as my third and fourth choices, but they were nowhere close in quality to my top two choices, and that was good enough for me. I took a triumphant stroll across the room to share my results with Hugh Davies, who responded graciously. He didn't ask for a rematch, and I didn't tell him that there was no chance of one.
Salon and Bollinger showed well that morning, but it might have been a very different outcome for them (and me) the next day. Blind tastings are wonderfully democratic, but there is a tendency to overlook the fact that wines and palates are fickle and to read more into the results than is justified. This was certainly true of history's most famous blind tasting, the 1976 Judgment of Paris, when a panel of French experts rated several unheralded American wines superior to a handful of top Bordeauxs and white Burgundies. The Paris tasting demonstrated that the United States was capable of producing great wines; it did not prove, as some suggested, that first-growth Bordeauxs and grand cru Burgundies were overrated.
Celebrated wines often fail to live up to expectations in blind tastings. Earlier this year, I took part in a blind tasting of 1996 Barolos and Barbarescos. A dozen wines were served, among them two Red Label Riservas from Bruno Giacosa. Many people consider Giacosa the finest producer in Italy's Piedmont region, and his 1996 Red Label Riservas had been widely hailed as brilliant. Around 40 people participated in the tasting, and all were asked to pick their top three wines. Amazingly, one of the Giacosas failed to garner a single vote and finished dead last, while the other received just one first-place vote and two second-place votes and came in ninth. People who are convinced that wine experts are full of it and who also believe that expensive wines are never worth the money invariably regard such "upsets" as proof of these general propositions. That's silly. Great wines don't acquire their reputations by accident. Given the unanimity of opinion about the Riservas, and Giacosa's track record, I'm pretty confident we just caught the wines on an off night. All wines evolve in the barrel, the bottle, and the glass, and their timetables don't necessarily accord with ours.
A good showing can also be extrapolated to excess. In London last month, Chateau Pavie finished first in a blind tasting of 150 wines from the 2001 Bordeaux vintage, beating out such eminences as Petrus, Lafleur, Margaux, and Latour. Pavie has aroused lots of controversy in recent years: Many people love it, but others contend that it is now made in a style more evocative of Napa than Saint-Emilion (its appellation). It also has an uncanny knack for performing well in blind tastings of young Bordeauxs. Naturally, Pavie fans do cartwheels every time this happens. But have these results really settled the argument over Pavie, or do they simply prove that Pavie, in its current incarnation, stands out among juvenile, tannic wines? The real test of a Bordeaux is how gracefully it ages; let's see how the Pavie compares with its peers a decade from now.
With blind tasting, it is just you, your retronasal passage, and the juice. The results are often surprising and frequently humbling, and those are good things. But tasting blind doesn't necessarily make for better wine criticism. If you don't know the wine's name, you also don't know its back story—how it was made and how it has tended to evolve in prior vintages. These are important considerations, particularly when appraising younger wines (a point made very persuasively by New York Times wine critic Eric Asimov in a recent post on his blog).
No question, having the bottle in front of you can be a crutch, and there is overwhelming scientific evidence that labels affect how people respond to wines. But with or without knowing the name, a good critic ought to be able to deliver an honest and accurate assessment of a wine's quality. It's not an either-or proposition, of course, and a combination of the two approaches probably yields the most useful information. The truth, ultimately, is in the wine, but tasting blind isn't the only way to get at it.Mike Steinberger is Slate's wine columnist.

Cambridge Theist Responds to 'New' Athiests

2007-11-15T15:37:00.000-06:00

John Polkinghorne (Cambridge Physicist and now Anglican Priest) responds to the spate of new works on Athiesm in his usual erudite manner. Enjoy!

October 31, 2007

The truth in religion

Substituting science for religion is like swapping a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear

John Polkinghorne

John CornwellDARWIN’S ANGELAn angelic riposte to The God Delusion171pp. Profile Books. £10.99978 1 84668 048 9
John HumphrysIN GOD WE DOUBTConfessions of a failed atheist323pp. Hodder and Stoughton. £18.99.978 0 340 95126 2
Religious belief is currently under heavy fire. Books by Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens and others tell us that religion is a corrupting delusion. Despite their assertions of the rationality of atheism, the style of their onslaughts has been strongly polemical and rhetorical, rather than reasonably argued. Historical evidence is selectively surveyed. Attention is focused on inquisitions and crusades, while the significance of Hitler and Stalin is downplayed. Believers in young-earth creationism are presented as if they were typical of religious people in general. The two books under review aim to make a more temperate contribution to the debate.
John Cornwell has hit on the amusing conceit of writing in the persona of Richard Dawkins’s guardian angel, a being, moreover, who had earlier stood in the same relationship to Charles Darwin. The book’s tone is gently ironic and its style that of modest discussion, which all makes for an enlightening read. The twenty-one short chapters each consider some claim made in Dawkins’s book The God Delusion (reviewed in the TLS, January 19) and then subject it to reasoned questioning.
Cornwell begins by pointing out that Dawkins makes no serious attempt to engage with the academic discussion of religious thought and practice. His book is “as innocent of heavy scholarship as it is free from false modesty”. When it asserts that Jesus’ call to love our neighbour referred only to relations between Jews (despite this claim being in clear contradiction to the point of the parable of the Good Samaritan), the only support quoted for this highly questionable statement is a book written by an anaesthesiologist.
Over the centuries, theologians have wrestled with how human language can attempt to speak about the nature of God, emphatically rejecting the idea that the deity is simply an invisible object among the other objects of the world. Yet, as Cornwell points out, the God in whom Dawkins disbelieves is a kind of “Great Science Professor in the Sky”, a simplistic notion that any thinking theist would be quick to reject. We are continually told that theology is no proper academic discipline, a conclusion that could only be reached by someone whose knowledge of the subject was comparable to the scientific knowledge displayed by those who write in green ink that “Einstein was wrong”.
Dawkins is relentlessly rude about religious believers. They are said to be “malevolent, barking mad, mendacious, deluded” and much more. He cannot have the courtesy to take seriously those of us who are both scientists and believers. Religious education of the young is equated with child abuse. Darwin’s angel pertinently asks, “Would you really trade child sexual abuse for being brought up in the religion of your parents?”. The tone of contempt – one might almost say hatred – that characterizes many of the assertions in The God Delusion is one of the most disturbing aspects of the book.
In God We Doubt displays much more even-handedness. John Humphrys is respectful of religious belief and the kind of life that often, but not invariably, issues from it, while emphasizing that he is unable himself to accept such belief. His approach is that of one who remains open and questioning about these matters, as indicated by the subtitle of his book, Confessions of a failed atheist. Humphrys writes in the chirpy colloquial style one might expect from a presenter of the Today programme on Radio 4. In fact, the book originated partly from interviews he conducted with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Chief Rabbi and Tariq Ramadan, a Muslim academic, for the radio, and from the deluge of correspondence that followed.
Humphrys takes very seriously the human experience of conscience, urging us to do some things and to refuse to do others. No doubt, evolutionary thinking offers us some partial understanding of this, with its concepts of kin altruism (protecting the family gene pool) and reciprocal altruism (I’ll help you in the expectation that you will help me). Nevertheless, Humphrys rightly sees that these concepts fail to offer insight into the kind of radical altruism which, to use an example he discusses at some length, led Irena Sendlerova repeatedly to risk her life in saving 2,500 Jewish children who were trapped in the Warsaw ghetto. Humphrys sees ethical intuition as the signal of a transcendent dimension in life, which he values but does not know how to explain from an atheist point of view.
Humphrys believes that the case for God made by the Abrahamic faiths is “riddled with holes”. He fails to acknowledge the subtlety and truth-seeking character of theological thought, or to recognize that the care and discrimination exercised in serious biblical studies carries us well beyond a plodding, crypto-literalist approach to the interpretation of Scripture.
Both Dawkins and Humphrys rightly engage with the challenge to theism that is represented by the existence of a world claimed to be the creation of a good and powerful God, but which nevertheless contains so much evil and suffering. This is surely the greatest difficulty holding people back from religious belief, and it is one that continually troubles religious believers. One could not claim that there is a complete and straightforward answer available to remove the perplexity. Yet there are some arguments, not discussed by either Humphrys or by Dawkins, which offer modest help as theologians struggle with the problems of theodicy. Interestingly, science is of some assistance in this regard. Its understanding of how the world works shows that natural processes are inextricably entangled with each other. They cannot be separated out, so that those with good consequences could have been retained by a competent creator who, at the same time, eliminated those with bad consequences. The integrity of creation is a kind of package deal. For example, the process of genetic mutation produced new forms of life, but it has also resulted in malignancy. You cannot have the one without the other. Humphrys asks why there are not repeated divine interventions to avert evil consequences. Such things could only happen in a magical world, and that kind of world is not this one, because its creator is not a capricious magician. Only a world with sufficient reliability for deeds to have foreseeable consequences could be one in which moral responsibility was exercised. These insights do not dispose of all the anguish and anger that we feel in the face of individual human suffering, but they suggest that it is not simply gratuitous, easily removable by a God who was a bit less callous.
Fundamental to the discussion to which both books are seeking to contribute is the relationship between faith and reason. Too often the two have been pitted against each other, as if they were in necessary contradiction. Religious faith is not a matter of the unquestioning acceptance of unmotivated belief, demanded of us by some overriding authority. Quite the contrary. Faith is a commitment to a form of motivated belief, differing only from scientific reason in the nature of the subject of that belief and the kind of motivations appropriate to it. Science achieves its success by the modesty of its ambition, only considering impersonal experience open to repetition at will. Personal experience, let alone encounter with the transpersonal reality of God, does not fit within this limited protocol. The concept of reality offered by scientism is that of a world of metastable, replicating and information-processing systems, but it has no persons in it. Darwin’s angel criticizes Dawkins for a lack of trust in the power of imagination to explore reality, such as we exercise through poetry. He is said to sound “as though he would substitute a series of case-notes on senile dementia for King Lear”.
No progress will be made in the debate about religious belief unless participants are prepared to recognize that the issue of truth is as important to religion as it is to science. Dawkins invokes Bertrand Russell’s parable of the teapot irrationally claimed to be in unobserved orbit in the solar system. Of course there are no grounds for belief in this piece of celestial crockery, but there are grounds offered for religious belief, though admittedly different people evaluate their persuasiveness differently. Religion does not have access to absolute proof of its beliefs but, on careful analysis, nor does science. In all realms of human inquiry, the interlacing of experience and interpretation introduces a degree of precariousness into the argument. Yet this does not mean that we cannot attain beliefs sufficiently well motivated to be the basis for rational commitment. In his book on the philosophy of science, Personal Knowlege (1964), Michael Polanyi stated that he was writing in order to explain how (scientifically) he could commit himself to what he believed to be true, while knowing it might be false. That is the human epistemic condition. Recognizing this should encourage caution, but not induce intellectual paralysis. It is in this spirit that the dialogue between science and religion needs to be conducted.

John Polkinghorne was formerly Professor of Mathematical Physics at Cambridge University, and President of Queens' College. His autobiography From Physicist to Priest was published this year.

Infidel Tales

2007-11-02T11:50:00.000-06:00

October & November 2007Table of Contents
BOOKS:Infidel Tales
By Aaron Mannes

Aaron Mannes on
Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
and
Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror by Nonie Darwish

Ayaan Hirsi Ali.Infidel. Free Press. 353 pages. $26.00
Nonie Darwish.Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror. Sentinel. 272 pages. $23.95

From sources as diverse as Bernard Lewis and the un’s Arab Human Development Report we hear the argument that improving the status of women is essential to reform in the Muslim world. But understanding what this entails demands more than statistics about female literacy rates. The memoirs of two exceptional women, born into very different circumstances in the Muslim world, provide a glimpse into the scale of this problem. Chief among the many virtues of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel and Nonie Darwish’s Now They Call Me Infidel, is that they show the cruelty and banal petty oppression that encircles Muslim women.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, now a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, has become a figure on the international stage and an outspoken critic of radical Islam. In Infidel she tells the dramatic, almost unbelievable, story of her life so far. She was born into a prominent Somali clan, the daughter of a leader in the opposition to Somali dictator Siad Barre and something of a modernizer. Her father instructed that his family break with tradition and not excise the genitals of his daughters. While he was imprisoned his children were in the care of their maternal grandmother, who arranged the procedure. The Islam practiced by the Somalis was relaxed and combined with local traditions, but it remained central to the Somali identity. When political pressure forced the family to leave Somalia, Hirsi Ali’s mother refused at first to go to Ethiopia, both because it was Somalia’s longstanding enemy and because it was a predominantly Christian country. Instead they relocated to Saudi Arabia, where Hirsi Ali endured the difficulties of functioning in a country where women are not permitted out of the home without a male escort. They then moved briefly to Ethiopia, where she saw, first-hand, the impact of clan loyalties on the Somali opposition. Hirsi Ali’s mother, unhappy with barracks life, eventually took her three children to Nairobi, where the family survived on aid from wealthier Somali exiles.
Hirsi Ali grew to adulthood in Nairobi, where she was educated at a Western school and swept up in the rising Islamist tide. As a teenager she was an adherent of the rapidly expanding Muslim Brotherhood. She wore a hijab and attended prayers. But she could not reconcile the internal contradictions of the Muslim Brotherhood’s interpretation of Islam, particularly the inequality between men and women and the vilification of the West and non-Muslims. At the same time, she was going to films, reading English literature and Harlequin romance novels, and even dating surreptitiously. Her friends began to enter arranged marriages. Their descriptions of married life, particularly the passionless sex, horrified her. She put off her own suitors, but her father, though in many ways a liberal modernizer, had three wives himself and ignored his daughter’s objections to an arranged marriage with a prominent clan member. Her prospective husband was in Canada, and in 1992 Hirsi Ali was sent to live with relatives in Germany while she waited for a Canadian visa. Stunned by the order and cleanliness of the West, she also found herself quite able to navigate it. She began plotting her escape: She traveled to the Netherlands under the guise of visiting a family member, hoping to make her way to England. On learning of the lax asylum standards in the Netherlands, she decided to stay there instead. She was accepted as a refugee under false pretenses, having claimed that she was fleeing from Somalia’s civil war and given a false name and birth date.
If the book had ended with Hirsi Ali’s building a new life in the Netherlands, it would have been a fitting end to an amazing story. But the story does not end there. Seeking to discover why some places had governments that worked well and others did not, she obtained a university degree in politics. She also worked as a translator for Dutch police and social services agencies with Somali immigrants, and here she saw the ills of her native society — particularly the abuse of women — being imported into her adopted country. She was disturbed to find the Dutch acquiescing to immigrant demands to establish enclaves, rather than assimilating the immigrants into Dutch society.
Hirsi Ali entered politics as a researcher with a think tank. In the wake of 9/11, as Dutch elites insisted that terrorism was an aberration from Islam, Hirsi Ali argued the opposite — that Islam justified terrorism. As her criticisms of Islam became more pointed, Dutch elites recoiled from her message and Muslims began threatening her life; but she had touched a popular chord. She was elected to the Dutch parliament, where she pressed for Dutch police to track honor killings. With Theo Van Gogh she made the short film, Submission, about the treatment of women under Islam, which scandalized Muslims. In November 2004, Van Gogh was stabbed to death in broad daylight by a young Muslim. Dutch authorities, unprepared for this kind of terrorist threat, whisked Hirsi Ali out of the country and kept her confined under harsh and occasionally surreal conditions in rural locations in the United States and Germany. At the same time, as part of a political power play, there was an effort to strip her of her Dutch citizenship based on the false information she had provided when applying for asylum. Ultimately, seeking time to write and think, and finding the security requirements and constant moving in the Netherlands too onerous, Hirsi Ali resigned from the Dutch parliament and accepted a position at the American Enterprise Institute.
This bare summary does no justice Hirsi Ali’s page-turning memoir. From her harrowing description of her excision, to the details of life in Saudi Arabia, where little boys can turn off their mothers’ television programs, Hirsi Ali’s book illustrates the world of her origin, the values and principles that drive it, and the astounding level of violence that permeates it. Her wide-eyed descriptions of her first encounters with Western life are touching: police who are courteous and helpful, a religion that emphasizes dialogue and love rather than fear and submission, and marriages that are entered voluntarily and consist of two equal partners.
The life of Nonie Darwish, as she chronicles it in Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror, lacks the drama of Hirsi Ali’s experience, though there are many parallels. Darwish’s father was a highly regarded Egyptian military officer who was killed in Gaza by the Israelis just before the 1956 Suez War. (She describes growing up singing songs praising martyrdom in the battle with Israel as the state-controlled press churned out anti-Semitic diatribes.) Born into Egypt’s elite, Darwish was not directly touched by the worst aspects of the oppression of women, but she was not unaware of it. Honor killings were a regular theme in Egyptian literature and cinema, and the family’s maids told terrible stories of being raped by previous employers. A raped woman is considered to have dishonored the family; the only way for the family to restore its honor is to kill her. Darwish’s widowed mother could not remarry — it would have been dishonoring the memory of the shahid (martyr). At the same time, not having a male head of the household left the family vulnerable to rumor. The outgoing Darwish was warned by her mother to watch her behavior; otherwise the family might be suspected of improprieties. Dating and normal mixing between the sexes was simply impossible for young Egyptians, and marriages were arranged. Darwish relates the poignant sight of her mother walking, fully clothed, along the shoreline during beach vacations. Her mother joked about being young again and donning a bathing suit and swimming, but actually doing so would have been scandalous.
What is remarkable about Darwish’s narrative is that by the 1950s Egypt had been attempting to modernize for nearly a century and a half, and Nasser, who crushed the Muslim Brotherhood, was supposedly a great progressive figure. Yet, even at the very apex of Egypt’s secular elite society, the heavy hand of tradition trapped women. At the same time, while few Egyptians were devout, no one would criticize Islam. Darwish gives a sense of the extent to which Islam and tribal traditions saturate Muslim societies with most of the region’s ostensibly secular political movements and politicians, including Fatah, the Baath Party, and Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, emerging from this milieu.
Like Hirsi Ali, Darwish possessed an innate sense that allowed her to see through her society’s shibboleths. As a young woman she found Egyptian bravado prior to the Six Day War unbelievable and was unsurprised when Nasser’s adventure ended in a tragic defeat. And she realized early that she needed to leave Egypt, though her exodus in 1978 was more prosaic: She followed her Copt boyfriend, who had family in Los Angeles, to the United States. She was impressed by the general order and cleanliness she found there, and equally so in the message of love and tolerance she heard in Christianity. Still, like Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, Darwish found that the Middle East had followed her to the West. Not a regular mosque-goer, when she did attend she was surprised by the vitriol and dogmatism. She noticed more and more Muslim women at malls and on campuses in full hijab.
On a visit to Egypt more than two decades later, Darwish was shocked by the poverty and anger (particularly at the United States), and the growing religious extremism. She was grateful when her plane landed in Los Angeles. It was September 10, 2001.
She was doubly shocked when the responses of her friends and relatives in Egypt vacillated between denying that Arabs had perpetrated 9/11 and assertions that the United States had had it coming. She began writing and speaking, trying to warn Americans of the nature of the terrorist threat and providing a different Arab perspective. She was even moved to defend Israel, and came to understand that it was Nasser and the mad ideologies that dominated the Muslim world that took her father’s life, not Israel.
Hirsi Ali’s chronicle of her first encounters with Western life is touching: a religion emphasizing love rather than fear and submission, and marriages entered voluntarily.
While Hirsi Ali hews closely to her life story, Darwish addresses the broader impact of the traditions and restrictions that bind Muslim women. She explains how the tradition of polygamy reduces the status of Muslim women, by making husbands masters over their wives. A husband can easily, under the law, take a second wife if his first one displeases him, and she will have no legal recourse. This creates unhealthy alliances between mothers and sons, as mothers rely on their sons to protect them and advance their fortunes. Darwish points out that Arab men also suffer under this system. They are deprived of the joys and emotional depth of the voluntary monogamous marriage, which has been a cornerstone of western civilization. Of course, many Muslim couples love each other and remain monogamous, but this is not a central value of many of the societies of the greater Middle East.
Many of the worst customs prevailing in the Muslim world (honor killings, female genital mutilation, polygamy), as well as the general practice of restricting the sphere of activity of women, existed before Islam and are characteristics of tribalism. Although this social structure evolved as a response to the requirements of desert life, aspects of it have remained strong and it continues to define settled life in towns and rural areas throughout the greater Middle East and parts of Africa. The overwhelming centrality of extended family in daily life defines politics and has stifled the growth of civil society and entrepreneurial commerce. Hirsi Ali describes her relief at life in the Netherlands, where clan affiliation does not matter.
Westernized Muslims may reach into Muslim tradition and craft a modern Islam that is in accord with liberal democratic values. Alternately, tribal societies may develop mechanisms to change in the face of modernity. But Islam fused with tribalism creates an all-encompassing worldview and provides a theological framework reinforcing ancient customs. Islam permits, but does not require, female circumcision. Nevertheless, in communities where it is prevalent, most people, including local religious authorities, believe the procedure is required. This presumed fusion of Islam and tribalism was exemplified during a parliamentary debate in Jordan over establishing harsher sentences for men who killed female relatives who had violated family honor, when one Senator argued, “whether we like it or not, women are not equal to men in Islam. Adulterous women are much worse than adulterous men because women determine the lineage.”
In What Went Wrong Bernard Lewis writes that when buying Western weapons was insufficient to reverse Middle Eastern military decline, Middle Eastern nations adopted Western uniforms and martial music. But the systems and principles underpinning Western success were not imported. Women’s rights may follow a similar path. Some Muslim nations may be adopting reforms on behalf of women’s rights, but without changing the underlying value system. Egypt has made strides against female genital mutilation, and polygamy has been outlawed in several Muslim nations and is being redefined as socially unacceptable in others. Some states, responding to international pressure against them over egregious acts against women in the name of family honor, have begun to take steps against honor killings. These reforms, welcome though they are, are enacted under Western pressure and to maintain a veneer of modernity. It is not clear that the underlying principles of equality and personal liberty are also being adopted. Efforts to expand women’s education in the Muslim world appear more promising, although considering the generally poor quality of education in the region this initiative may also have a limited impact.
Muslim societies, trapped between religion and culture, have changed only slowly over centuries. But the lives of Darwish and Hirsi Ali offer a few possibilities for change. Both women were educated at Western schools, giving them the skills, particularly fluency in English, they needed to fend for themselves in a modern society. Darwish worked for a U.S. company, helping her achieve a certain measure of financial independence. Improving the educational and economic opportunities open to women, along with the attendant legal reforms, would give women greater autonomy. But the economies of the greater Middle East have been essentially stagnant for decades, and deeper changes will be necessary.
Other possibilities lie in the realm of ideas. Western literature and films, and even romance novels, inspired both women. These stories fostered a longing for romance and planted the seeds of individualism. In discussing reform, Hirsi Ali claims that Islam needs a Voltaire, and Darwish observes that creating the freedom to leave Islam is essential — only then, she says, will Islam be forced to compete equally for adherents. Today an individual who openly leaves Islam is an apostate and, as Hirsi Ali can attest, marked for death.
Fostering reform in the Muslim world is the great challenge of this century. But it is a challenge that cannot be evaded. Both Darwish and Hirsi Ali give warning that radical Islam is on the rise within the West itself and that immigrant communities are bringing tribal social structures with them. But their books are more than jeremiads. They are both also love stories of a sort: Two impressive, able women from backgrounds that squelched their talents came to the West and fell in love with the values espoused by Western societies and the opportunities and freedoms they provide. This message is also vital. If the West is to aid efforts to reform the Muslim world, it will need to believe in itself first. Darwish and Hirsi Ali provide a timely reminder, from people intimately familiar with the alternative, that Western societies and liberal democratic values are good and worth defending.

To purchase Infidel: http://www.amazon.com/Infidel-Ayaan-Hirsi-Ali/dp/0743289684/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2333309-8190458?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194130103&sr=1-1

To purchase Now They Call Me Infidel: http://www.amazon.com/Now-They-Call-Infidel-Renounced/dp/B000W8WSGY/ref=sr_1_1/002-2333309-8190458?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194130264&sr=1-1

Aaron Mannes (http://www.aaronmannes.com/), author of Profiles in Terror: The Guide to Middle East Terrorist Organizations (Rowman & Littlefield 2004), is a researcher at the University of Maryland’s Laboratory of Computational Cultural Dynamics and a doctoral student at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

What Happened to Opera?

2007-11-02T10:29:00.000-06:00

The Abduction of Opera
Can the Met stand firm against the trashy productions of trendy nihilists?
Heather Mac Donald
Summer 2007
City Journal

Mozart’s lighthearted opera The Abduction from the Seraglio does not call for a prostitute’s nipples to be sliced off and presented to the lead soprano. Nor does it include masturbation, urination as foreplay, or forced oral sex. Europe’s new breed of opera directors, however, know better than Mozart what an opera should contain. So not only does the Abduction at Berlin’s Komische Oper feature the aforementioned activities; it also replaces Mozart’s graceful ending with a Quentin Tarantino–esque bloodbath and the promise of future perversion.
Welcome to Regietheater (German for “director’s theater”), the style of opera direction now prevalent in Europe. Regietheater embodies the belief that a director’s interpretation of an opera is as important as what the composer intended, if not more so. By an odd coincidence, many cutting-edge directors working in Europe today just happen to discover the identical lode of sex, violence, and opportunity for hackneyed political “critique” in operas ranging from the early Baroque era to that of late Romanticism.
Until now, New York’s Metropolitan Opera has stood resolutely against Regietheater decadence. In fact, its greatest gift to the world at the present moment is to mount productions—whether sleekly abstract or richly realistic—that allow the beauty of some of the most powerful music ever written to shine forth.
The question now is whether that musical gift will continue.
The Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb, hit Lincoln Center last year like a comet, promising to attract new audiences by injecting more “theatrical excitement” into the house. Predicting what that would ultimately mean was difficult enough before another bombshell exploded this February: New York City Opera, the smaller company across the plaza from the Met, announced that it had hired Europe’s most prominent exponent of Regietheater as its next general manager. The shock waves at Lincoln Center still reverberate.
This time of critical transition is an opportune moment both to celebrate the Met’s role in preserving a central glory of Western culture, and to consider the great opera house’s future. To see how much is at stake, one need only glance across the Atlantic and, increasingly, at other opera companies here in the United States.
The reign of Regietheater in Europe is one of the most depressing artistic developments of our time; it suggests a culture that cannot tolerate its own legacy of beauty and nobility. Singers, orchestra members, and conductors know how shameful the most self-indulgent opera productions are, and yet they are powerless to stop them. Buoyed with government subsidies, and maintained by an informal alliance of government-appointed arts bureaucrats and critics, the phenomenon thrives, even when audiences stay away in disgust.
The injury that Regietheater does to Mozart, Handel, and other benefactors of humanity is heartbreaking enough. But it also hurts the public, by denying new audiences the unimpeded experience of an art form of unparalleled sublimity. The seventeenth-century Florentines who created the first operas sought to recover the power of Greek tragedy, which united drama and song. Since then, opera has expressed a limitless range of human emotions, set to music of sometimes unbearable exquisiteness. Initially devoted to the exploits of kings and gods, opera by the end of the nineteenth century had conferred on the passions of workers and shopkeepers an equal grandeur, worthy of the majestic resources of the symphony orchestra.
The trajectory of the Komische Oper’s Abduction from the Seraglio—from the object of an in-house revolt to a sold-out triumph—is a fitting introduction to the decadence of Europe’s present musical culture. The episode presents a depressing variant on Mel Brooks’s The Producers: whereas Max Bialystok knew that his Springtime for Hitler was garbage and expected failure, the director of this Abduction, Calixto Bieito, assumed that his travesty would be a success—and it was.
Bieito is the most offensive director working in Europe today. Accordingly, he is in high demand; he has mauled Verdi, Puccini, Mozart, and Richard Strauss in London, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Hanover, and numerous other venues. Like many Regietheater directors, the Catalan Bieito piously claims to take his cues from the music itself. “I think I am very loyal to Mozart,” he notes. “There is nothing more to say.”
Actually, there is a lot more to say. The Abduction from the Seraglio is a humorous tale of the capture of a group of Europeans by a Turkish pasha, who tries to win the love of one of them; Mozart lavishes joyful, driving rhythms—led by piccolo, triangle, and cymbals—on its Turkish themes, and adds a rich lode of elegant solos, particularly for tenor. Bieito transferred the Abduction to a contemporary Eastern European brothel and translated the dignified pasha of Mozart’s sadly irrelevant tale into the brothel’s sick pimp overseer. To give the production’s explicit sadomasochistic sex an even greater frisson of realism, Bieito hired real prostitutes off the streets of Berlin to perform onstage. Needless to say, neither the streetwalkers nor the whippings, masturbation, and transvestite bondage are anywhere suggested in Mozart’s opera. In one representative moment, the leading soprano, Constanze—who has already suffered digital violation during a poignant lament—is beaten and then held down and forced to watch as the pasha’s servant, Osmin, first forces a prostitute to perform fellatio on him and then gags the prostitute and slashes her to death. Osmin hands the prostitute’s trophy nipples to Constanze, who by then is retching.
The episode perfectly illustrates the opportunistic literalism typical of culturally ignorant—and musically deaf—contemporary directors. It takes place as Constanze is singing one of the most difficult arias in the soprano literature, “Martern aller Arten” (“Tortures of Every Kind”). “Martern” is an obstacle course of leaps and trills accompanied by melting winds and propulsive harmonies, all meant to convey Constanze’s nobility in refusing the pasha’s demands for her love. It belongs in the long literary tradition of tragic rhetoric; its mention of torture is not a stage direction. Mozart immediately follows the number with a buoyant aria by Constanze’s maid and a return to the lightest farce—making clear that nothing untoward has happened to Constanze or to anyone else in the opera. But Bieito seizes on the torture reference, stripped of its musical and dramatic context, to justify his pornographic mayhem.
Like all Regietheater directors, Bieito has little tolerance for happy endings—or for any set of values at odds with his own clichéd worldview. In the conclusion to Mozart’s opera, the four European captives sing a hymn of praise to the pasha for granting them liberty and for renouncing revenge for a cruelty done to the pasha by a captive’s father long ago. Such celebrations of enlightened rule, even by a Muslim, were standard in Baroque and Classical operas; there is no reason to think that Mozart didn’t fully embrace the sentiments behind the convention.
Bieito doesn’t, however. In the finale of his Abduction, after a gruesome massacre of the writhing prostitutes, Constanze shoots first the pasha and then herself. So the concluding chorus of “long live the pasha” is mystifyingly directed at a dead man. No matter. Better to make nonsense of Mozart’s libretto than to allow such outdated sentiments as forgiveness, gratitude, and nobility to show up on an opera stage.
The orgies and boorish behavior that Bieito demands of his characters do violence to the music above all, so it was fitting that the Komische Oper’s orchestra members were the first to rebel. The musicians nearly mutinied during rehearsals for the 2004 premiere, according to the online magazine Klassik in Berlin, and backed down from a threatened walkout only after angry negotiations with Bieito and the musical director. Opera staff observing a late rehearsal stormed out of the house, and a palpable depression settled over the chorus. “Such a thing does not deserve to be seen on our stage . . . on any stage,” one chorus member said. The opening-night audience shared the musicians’ dismay. “Mozart didn’t intend this!” shouted protesters. But audience sentiment has little purchase in Europe’s subsidized opera houses. At the cast party after the premiere, Berlin’s top corporate and political leaders rubbed shoulders with strippers and whores, resulting in one of the most scintillating events in years, reported Klassik in Berlin.
Then a DaimlerChrysler official said that he didn’t think that the company should support such work with its grant money, guaranteeing the production’s success by conferring on it the exalted status of victim of corporate censorship. (Private support for Berlin’s three opera houses is still marginal compared with government funding, though.) Defending the importance of Bieito’s production, Berlin’s culture senator—a bureaucrat who dispenses government arts subsidies—argued that its “description of blood, sex, and violence is a true reflection of social phenomena.” Perhaps the senator was unaware that there are no such “social phenomena” in Mozart’s Abduction. Or perhaps it no longer matters.
DaimlerChrysler, facing a public-relations fiasco, recanted penitently. The production sold out for the remainder of its run and has been twice revived. Any first-time listener who came away with the slightest intimation of the charm of Mozart’s Singspiel must have had an extraordinary ability to rise above squalor in pursuit of the sublime.
Other Regietheater directors may not yet have achieved the sheer volume of gratuitous perversion and bloodletting that Bieito managed to cram into his Abduction—but their aesthetic obeys the same impulse. Gérard Mortier, City Opera’s incoming general manager and the current head of the Paris Opera, staged a Fledermaus at the Salzburg Festival that dragooned Johann Strauss’s delightful confection into service as a cocaine-, violence-, and sex-drenched left-wing “critique” of contemporary Austrian politics. An American tenor working in Germany remembers another Fledermaus with a large pink vagina in the center of the stage into which the singers dived. The innocent sea captain’s daughter, Senta, in the Vienna State Opera’s Flying Dutchman has posters of Che and Martin Luther King in her bedroom instead of a picture of the mysterious Dutchman, and burns herself to death with gasoline rather than jumping into the sea to meet her phantom beloved. Don Giovanni is almost invariably an offensive slob who masturbates and stuffs himself with junk food and drugs, surrounded by equally repellent psychotics, perverts, and sluts. (Operagoers can thank American director Peter Sellars for this tired convention.) Handel’s Romans and nobles come accessorized with machine guns, sunglasses, and video cameras, while jerking like rappers to delicate Baroque melodies.
The world at large got a glimpse of Regietheater last year, thanks to the furor over the Deutsche Oper Berlin’s Idomeneo; unfortunately, the controversy focused on the wrong issue. The real outrage was not that the company considered canceling the show for fear of a Muslim backlash but that the potential provocation of that backlash—Mohammed’s severed head perched jauntily on a straight-backed chair—had absolutely nothing to do with Mozart’s opera. Director Hans Neuenfels had injected Mohammed’s and other religious figures’ heads into the classical Greek story simply to register his personal dislike of religion. Neuenfels’s next project: a Magic Flute with a large penis for the flute.
The list of tone-deaf self-indulgences could be extended indefinitely. Their trashy sex and disjunctive settings are just the symptom, however, of a deeper malady. The most insidious problem with Regietheater is the directors’ hatred of Enlightenment values. Where a composer writes lightness and joy, they find a “subtext” of darkness. A recent modernized version of The Marriage of Figaro at the Salzburg Festival showed Figaro angrily slashing the page Cherubino’s arm and smearing him with blood during the jaunty aria “Non più andrai.” That aria, in which Figaro teases the young dandy about his upcoming banishment to the army, is gently mocking, not dark and violent. But in a transgressive director’s hands, humor, reconciliation, happiness, and above all else, grandeur must be exposed as mere fronts for despair, resentment, and the basest instincts. No positive sentiment can appear without a heavy overlay of irony.
Just because our age regards grand ideals with cynicism, however, that does not license us to write them out of the great works of the past. Doing so only impoverishes us. “There is considerable intellectual laziness in the idea that the past must be problematized and that older works must be ‘rescued’ from their ideological presuppositions,” says New Yorker critic Alex Ross. “Looking at the extraordinary mess the world is in, you might suppose that it’s our ideological presuppositions that are inherently flawed, and that we can actually draw useful moral lessons from the past.”
Regietheater directors undoubtedly think of themselves as sophisticated when they unmask courtly decorum as just a cover for fornication. The demystifiers’ awareness of desire is so crude that they cannot hear that the barely perceptible darkening of a voice or the constricted suffusion of breath into a note can be a thousand times more erotic than a frenzy of pelvic thrustings. And they rage against aesthetic conventions whose complexity challenges their simplistic understanding of human experience. Peter Sellars created one of Regietheater’s most horrifying images in his production of The Marriage of Figaro, set in Trump Tower: Cherubino, clad in hockey uniform, humping a mattress like a crazed poodle during the breathless aria “Non so più cosa son.” In the aria, Cherubino sings of his confusion in the presence of women and his compulsion to speak about love—“waking, dreaming, to water, to shadows, to the mountains.” “I know, it’s all just about sex!” giggles Sellars, like some 12-year-old with his first Playboy. Well, no, actually, it’s not. This sexual dumb show is inimical to the delicacy and innocence of the aria, whose beauty consists in part of sublimating desire into the artifice of pastoral poetry. Sellars’s staging belongs with a Snoop Dogg rap rant, not with Mozart and his librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte.
Europe is cursed with critics just as musically insensate and aesthetically illiterate as the directors whom they promote. Lydia Steier of Klassik in Berlin applauded the Bieito Abduction for “cut[ting] through any sentimental membrane protecting the opera from the stomach-churning brutality of such modern phenomena as human trafficking and snuff films.” This statement may well be the stupidest ever offered in defense of Regietheater. There is no “sentimental membrane” protecting Mozart from snuff films; there is not even the remotest connection between the two. The Guardian’s opera reviewer, Charlotte Higgins, was mystified that Bieito’s production of Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera at the English National Opera garnered “furious headlines.” By Higgins’s own account, it contained the usual “transvestites, masturbation, simulated sex, nudity and, in the opening scene, a row of men sitting on toilets.” So what’s the big deal? asked Higgins. “The fact that you can get all that and more on TV every night seemed not to deter the carpers, presumably because opera is supposed to be respectable,” she sneered. But serious operagoers aren’t protesting transvestites or masturbation per se, only the minor detail that they have nothing to do with the sound world of Verdi.
Singers generally detest transgressive productions, but have little clout. No one wants to acquire a reputation for being obstructionist. Even the great American baritone Sherrill Milnes felt that he had to compromise on an outrageous demand during a German production of Verdi’s Otello. During the third-act duet in which Otello accuses Desdemona of being a whore, a “well-known stage director,” as Milnes describes him, wanted Milnes’s Iago to crawl on his belly across the stage. And then, says Milnes, “he wanted me to jerk off and have an orgasm.”
Milnes was astounded. “I won’t do it, it’s wrong on every front,” he remembers responding. “At the very least, it’s rude to interrupt the focal point of the scene between Desdemona and Otello. It’s not about Iago’s reaction.” (In fact, Iago is not even supposed to be onstage.) “No way I’ll put my hand on my crotch; it’s embarrassing for Sherrill Milnes and it’s embarrassing for Sherrill Milnes as Iago.” But Milnes gave ground: “I came on the stage, but not as long as the director wanted, breathed a little hard and exited.”
A few singers have walked out on productions, but more often they grit their teeth and just try to get through them. Diana Damrau, a rapidly rising German soprano, draws herself up with icy haughtiness when asked about her participation in the infamous Bavarian State Opera Rigoletto, set on the Planet of the Apes. “I fulfilled my contract,” she says scornfully. “This was superficial rubbish. You try to prepare yourself for a production, you read secondary literature and mythology. Here, we had to watch Star Wars movies and different versions of The Planet of the Apes. . . . This was just . . . noise.”
Well into the twentieth century, conductors controlled opera staging, and in theory they could still beat back Regietheater today. But they, no less than singers, worry about jeopardizing their careers. “You need courage to oppose it,” says Pinchas Steinberg, former chief conductor of the Vienna Radio Symphony and former principal guest conductor of the Vienna State Opera. “People start to say: ‘You can’t work with this guy, he creates problems.’?” Conductor Yuri Temirkanov did quit a production of Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the Opéra de Lyon in 2003. “I wouldn’t be able to live with my conscience if I conducted that [garbage],” he told the general director. Such showdowns are rare, however.
That leaves the audience as the final bulwark against the trashing of opera. But even when audiences stay away in droves—and “sometimes in those productions you could shoot ducks in the auditorium and not hit anyone,” says Milnes—the managerial commitment to Regietheater usually remains firm.
None of the conventional explanations for the rise of Regietheater in opera is fully convincing. Certainly the prevalence of massive state subsidies allows European opera managers to shrug off paltry box-office numbers. And to justify those subsidies, opera houses currently feel compelled to prove that they are not “elitist” institutions, observes Alex Ross. “Alleged critiques of the bourgeois order, the conservative establishment, etc. fit the bill.”
But while subsidies may be a necessary condition for Regietheater, they are not a sufficient one. European opera has been subsidized to varying degrees throughout its centuries-long history without generating the musical abuse that is now so common. And Regietheater productions are creeping into the U.S., where opera relies overwhelmingly on private support. The Spoleto Festival USA, for example, has presented the usual masturbating Don Giovanni; a recent Rossini Cenerentola (Cinderella) in Philadelphia featured a motorcycle and large TV screens projecting the characters’ supposed thoughts; City Opera mounted a Traviata in the 1990s that ended in an AIDS ward. Manager Pamela Rosenberg tried to make the San Francisco Opera a premier venue for European-style directing in the early 2000s, but she is gone now, after losing thousands of subscribers. The market provided the necessary corrective in San Francisco, but other managers, seeking elite acclaim, will make similar attempts in the future.
Germany’s postwar reaction to Nazism also undoubtedly contributed to the emergence of transgressive stagings there in the 1970s, yet more as a pretext than as an actual cause. The most radical reaction to Nazism in the opera world to date had nothing to do with today’s trashing impulse. When the Bayreuth Festival, Richard Wagner’s shrine, reopened in 1951, Wagner’s grandson, Wieland Wagner, discarded Richard’s own naturalistic sets and replaced them with light alone. Jettisoning Richard Wagner’s picturesque realism, which had come to be associated with National Socialism, was revolutionary, but it did not arise from any assumption on Wieland’s part that he was licensed to “deconstruct” his grandfather’s works. Today’s bad boys of German opera may puff themselves up with the belief that they are contributing to denazification, but nothing in that project compels their aesthetic choices. Nor does anti-Nazism explain the attraction of Regietheater outside Germany.
The current transgressive style of opera production is better understood as a manifestation of the triumph of adolescent culture, which began with the violent student movement of the 1960s. Even as West Germany forged ahead economically, its intellectuals, students, and artists became infatuated with the prosperity-killing Marxism practiced in stumbling East Germany. West German opera houses began inviting East Berlin directors to bring their heavy-handed critiques of capitalism, staged on the backs of Wagner and other composers, to Western venues. The situation was the same across Europe. “Student dissatisfaction with materialism . . . echoed in the theaters, notably in repertory and styles of production that were critical of bourgeois values and the status quo,” writes Patrick Carnegy in Wagner and the Art of the Theatre. In Paris in the late 1960s, City Opera manager-in-waiting Gérard Mortier led a group of student provocateurs who loudly disrupted opera productions that they considered too traditional.
The defining characteristic of the sixties generation and its cultural progeny is solipsism. Convinced of their superior moral understanding, and commanding wealth never before available to average teenagers and young adults, the baby boomers decided that the world revolved around them. They forged an adolescent aesthetic—one that held that the wisdom of the past could not possibly live up to their own insights—and have never outgrown it. In an opera house, that outlook requires that works of the past be twisted to mirror our far more interesting selves back to ourselves. Michael Gielen, the most influential proponent of Regietheater and head of the Frankfurt Opera in the late seventies and eighties, declared that “what Handel wanted” in his operas was irrelevant; more important was “what interests us . . . what we want.”
Nicholas Payne, former general director of the English National Opera and champion of Calixto Bieito, echoes this devaluing of the past. “Director’s theater or whatever you want to call it is an attempt to grab the material and make it speak to the spirit of today’s times, isn’t it?” he says. “I’m not saying that the only way to do [Monteverdi’s] Poppea is to make Nero the son of the chief guy in North Korea. Nevertheless, if you’re bothering to reproduce Poppea, it has to have some way of speaking to people now.” It’s hard to know whom that statement insults more—contemporary audiences or Monteverdi. Payne assumes that Monteverdi’s works are so musically and dramatically limited that they cannot speak to us today on their own terms, and that audiences so lack imagination that they cannot find meaning in something not literally about them.
The dirty little secret of Regietheater is this: its practitioners know that no one will bother to show up for their drearily conventional political cant unless they ride parasitically on the backs of geniuses. Bieito has said that his purpose in staging The Abduction from the Seraglio was to highlight abuses in the contemporary sex trade. Let’s pretend for a moment that Bieito actually cares about the fate of “sex workers.” His path is clear: keep his grubby mitts off Mozart and write his own damn opera. But without Mozart or Verdi, the Regietheater director is nothing; he cannot even hope for third-rate avant-garde status. In a world where displaying bodily fluids in jars, performing sex acts in public, or trampling religious symbols will land you a gig at the Venice Biennale and a government grant, the only source of outrage still available to the would-be scourge of propriety is to desecrate great works of art.
Occasionally, Regietheater proponents admit to their aspirations to shock. More often, however, they package themselves as the saviors of art. Gérard Mortier says that in updating operas, he seeks to “transform a work dated in a certain era so it communicates something fresh today.” He has it exactly backward. There is nothing less “fresh” than the tired rock-video iconography, the consumer detritus of beer cans and burgers, or the anti-imperialist, anti-sexist messages that Regietheater directors graft on to operas to make them “relevant.” What is actually “fresh” about a Mozart opera, besides its terrible beauty, is that it comes from a world that no longer exists. And it is, above all, the music that bodies forth that difference. The Baroque and Classical styles in particular convey an entire mode of being, one that values grace and artifice over supposed authenticity and untrammeled self-expression.
Regietheater directors are infallibly deaf to the dramatic imperatives in the music that they stage. Bieito says that he hears in Don Giovanni, that work of unbearable grandeur, the “nihilism of the modern world”—a confession that should have disqualified him even from buying an opera CD. Nicholas Payne, who brought Bieito’s Don Giovanni to the English National Opera, says that he is particularly fond of the moment in the Bieito production when Don Giovanni sings his canzonetta to Donna Elvira’s maid, “Deh, vieni alla finestra,” into a phone, instead of serenading her underneath her window with his mandolin. “There’s something a little bit twee about getting out that lute, isn’t there?” Payne asks. Suggestion to directors: if the troubadour tradition embarrasses you, you should not be in the business of producing opera.
The real problem with Payne’s admiration for Bieito’s canzonetta setting, however, is that it completely misjudges the music. Bieito makes the scene yet another depressing episode in the “nihilism of the modern world”: Don Giovanni is sitting alone in an empty bar strewn with the refuse of heavy partying. After singing the serenade, weighed down with despair, he drops the phone—there is no indication that anyone is on the other end—and lays his head on the table in front of him. This tableau has nothing to do with the music or text. The sinuous “Deh, vieni alla finestra,” far from being a moment of morbid paralysis, is the very emblem of the Don’s irrepressible will. Though he has recently been caught out and denounced as a hell-bound libertine by his fellow nobles, he is happily back at his conquests, pouring seductive power into the crescendos of the canzonetta. Bieito’s listless Giovanni could not possibly sing the music that Mozart has given him.
Jonathan Miller seethes with contempt for American audiences in general and the Metropolitan Opera in particular, which he accuses of mounting “kitschy” and “vulgar” productions. Yet at New York City Opera this season, he set Donizetti’s pastoral comedy L’Elisir d’Amore in a 1950s American diner, complete with gum-chewing Elvis fans and Jimmy Dean iconography—as hackneyed a set of visuals as any in the Regietheater director’s puny bag of tricks. Asked if Donizetti’s poignant melodies really match the sock-hop antics on stage, Miller responds defensively: “The music works perfectly well with my setting; it’s a witty transformation, that’s all. It’s as good as those staid pieces of rusticity which satisfy Met audiences because they want sedentary tourism.” But doesn’t music provide a check on how a work can be staged? “Music doesn’t have any checks in it,” he insists. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Moreover, when directors yank operas out of their historical contexts, they close a precious window into the past. Most operas’ assumptions about nobility, virtue, and the duties of rulers and subjects, as well as of parents and children, could not be more alien to our modern experience. If we refuse to take such values seriously, not only do we render the plots incomprehensible; we also cut ourselves off from a greater understanding of what human life has been and, by contrast, is now. Update Don Giovanni to a contemporary setting where a mandate of premarital chastity is unthinkable, for example, and make the peasant girl Zerlina and the noblewomen Donna Anna and Donna Elvira all aggressively promiscuous—as is the case in virtually every modernized version since Peter Sellars’s Spanish Harlem travesty—and Zerlina’s cries of desperation when Don Giovanni hustles her off for a conquest become absurd, as does the nobles’ response of “Soccorriamo l’innocente” (“Let us rescue the innocent girl!”). And the avenging triumvirate’s subsequent warnings to Don Giovanni that retribution awaits him are meaningless in the amoral universe in which Regietheater directors inevitably set the opera.
Regietheater promoters imply that following a composer’s intentions in staging a work is easy; genius lies in modernizing it. Mortier has even coyly suggested that his updating project gives him an affinity with Mozart. “You couldn’t name one great composer—not that I want to compare myself to them—who did not have to fight,” he says. “Think of Mozart selling his silverware to go to Frankfurt when the emperor could have given him a commission for his coronation.” In fact, finding a visual language to convey the meaning of the music and the world it represents is where directing makes its claim to greatness. Stephen Wadsworth, for example, is one of the most historically sensitive directors working today; his understated productions of Handel’s Rodelinda and Xerxes and of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito at the Metropolitan Opera and New York City Opera are among those houses’ treasures. The slightest gesture of a hand in a Wadsworth staging can convey the refinement and melancholy of the Baroque. Such details are part of what he calls the “vernacular” of the past.
Wadsworth unapologetically embraces one of the most toxic words in the operatic lexicon today: “curating.” The last thing a solipsistic director wants to be accused of is lovingly preserving and transmitting the works of the past. Wadsworth, however, accepts the charge. Those given responsibility for an opera production are akin to those given responsibility for great paintings, he believes. “It is not our job to repaint them. We should only be concerned with: Where to hang it? How to light it? In what context? How do we present it to the public in a way that the public can appreciate what it is, perhaps even contextualize it in terms of that painter’s body of work or some other trend or school or idea? The list of curatorial concerns and responsibilities is long. And I think that a lot of productions that we see simply fail to meet them.”
In a few decades, Regietheater opera has destroyed what took centuries to develop. Long before Wagner called for the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art), opera composers sought to enforce in the productions of their works a unity of music and dramatic action. Arrayed against this synthesis were singers, who treated opera as simply a platform for virtuoso recitals, and stage designers, who tried to cram as many awe-inspiring but irrelevant special effects onto the stage as their arsenal of fireworks and machinery would allow.
By the twentieth century, however, a revolution in attitudes toward the music of the past was under way—fueled, no doubt, by the recognition that no more pieces like those wonders were coming along. Gone was the carefree mutilation of scores by publishers, conductors, and performers that had been standard throughout Western musical history. In its place, an unprecedented reverence for the composer’s work rose up. Singers reined in self-indulgences, and directors worked to unleash the music’s dramatic potential. A profile of the German director Carl Ebert in a 1950 issue of Opera magazine underscored the new standard: “For Ebert, the music dictates how the actor should move, should look, how the scenery should be planned in shape as well as in color. Ebert achieves with his singers something like visible music for the listener.”
Regietheater has reversed that revolution, producing a disjuncture between the music and the visual and dramatic aspects of a production that is unprecedented in operatic history. Even as every other aspect of the music business continues on the path of greater professionalization and devotion to authenticity, opera directors have received the license to ignore the basic mandates of a score and libretto. This bifurcation results in such weird pairings as a period-instrument ensemble in the orchestra pit, sawing away at Baroque instruments in the hope of sounding just like Prince Esterhazy’s court orchestra, while onstage, singers in baggy sweat pants, torn T-shirts, and baseball caps slouch through twenty-first-century cultural blight.
Standing against such disintegration is the Metropolitan Opera, regarded by the transcontinental opera establishment either with condescension or admiration as the last bastion of faithful production. The Met has always presented great singers and, more sporadically, renowned maestri, but for much of its existence the caliber of its stagings lagged behind that of its musical talent. This deficiency was due in large part to the woefully ill-designed backstage area of the opulent old opera house on West 39th Street, which housed the Met from its birth in 1883 until its move to Lincoln Center in 1966. When a taxi driver told Sir Thomas Beecham during World War II that he couldn’t take him to the Met because gas restrictions banned rides to places of entertainment, the conductor replied: “The Metropolitan Opera is not a place of entertainment, but a place of penance.” Stage discipline was often weak; some of the Met’s most famous singers simply refused to rehearse.
But despite the limitations of the old house, the Met’s greatest leaders progressively made the “sights . . . more harmonious with the sounds,” as Rudolf Bing, the aristocratic general manager from 1950 to 1972, promised upon taking over. Indeed, Peter Gelb often sounds as though he is channeling Sir Rudolf, who brought the best stage and film directors of his time to work at the Met. Bing’s theatrical ambitions were aided by a growing circle of donors, who paid for new productions, sometimes single-handedly, when the board was unwilling to front the money. Charismatic philanthropists like Mrs. August Belmont created novel mechanisms for harvesting private support, including the first women’s opera auxiliary guild. Even during the troubled 1960s and 1970s, when the Met struggled with union protests and severe budget problems, it forged ahead artistically, aided by the superb technical capacities of the new Lincoln Center facility.
The Met’s role as the guardian of opera integrity emerged in the 1980s and 1990s. As the abuse of composers’ intentions became more flagrant in Germany and then the rest of Europe, general manager Joseph Volpe deliberately separated the Met from the trend. “There was a conscious effort to avoid” Regietheater, says Joe Clark, the Met’s peerless technical manager. “The idea was to get the best possible director with the best musical sense. We weren’t always looking for traditional and realistic settings, but rather a realization that was musical and would show something appropriate to the opera.” Robert Wilson’s minimalist Lohengrin met that criterion as much as Zeffirelli’s opulent Turandot. Conductor James Levine, the most important music director in the Met’s history, is equally committed to fidelity to the music. “It is inspiring to work with a man who wants to put [an opera] on stage as the composer meant it,” Levine said recently, praising director Jack O’Brien’s staging of Puccini’s Il Trittico.
Regietheater advocates caricature the Met as addicted to lavish, overblown scenery, associated—again, in caricature—with such masters of realism as Franco Zeffirelli and Otto Schenk. In fact, no competing house can boast such a variety of production styles, says critic Charles Michener. But what really makes the Met stand out today is language like the following, from theater director Bart Sher, who mounted an energetic Barber of Seville this season. The Met is unique “among our many great institutions of public art and life,” Sher says, in its “capacity for creating beauty beyond the heart to hold. You sit there and go: ‘Western culture’s an incredible thing.’ ” It is unimaginable that the directors who create the most buzz in Europe today would use such language. Asked about a director’s responsibility to the beauty of a piece, Jonathan Miller responds: “To hell with beauty, it’s a kitsch notion; I don’t feel this business of being overwhelmed by it.” And Miller, unlike the most violative directors working today, actually has created productions of great delicacy, such as his 1990 Marriage of Figaro at Vienna’s Theater an der Wien.
Equally unthinkable from a Regietheater wunderkind is the unabashed enthusiasm of Broadway director O’Brien for the composer’s intentions. “The author and composer are my household gods,” says O’Brien, whose comic ensemble work in Il Trittico was infused with energy so taut as to make breathing difficult. “I don’t think that my opinion is more important than theirs; I don’t want to take my Magic Marker and scrawl over their works. Puccini’s knowledge, control, and insight into dramatic literature is staggering; there’s not a bar of music that is not dramatizable if you are sensitive to what the composer is asking you to do. I am never interested in a ‘point of view,’ only in making love to these pieces.”
Peter Gelb could do worse than make these sentiments a litmus test for every director he brings into the house: Can the prospect unashamedly use the words “beauty” and “love” to describe music? It is a positive sign that Bart Sher is one of Gelb’s additions to the Met’s directing roster (O’Brien, also new to the house this year, was hired by Volpe).
Gelb has said that the Met has become “artistically somewhat isolated from the rest of the world” and reliant on “somewhat conservative patterns of thinking,” and he has pledged to keep it “more broadly connected to contemporary society” through “exciting theatrical visions.” One hopes that he is speaking as the master promoter that he is, creating a sense of newness to attract new audiences—and not in anticipation of a move toward the less conservative “patterns of thinking” and “theatrical visions” prevalent in Europe.
Still, a dedicated opera fan can be forgiven for being a little worried about what exactly Gelb means, since Regietheater is nipping everywhere at the Met’s heels. Joseph Volpe says that as general manager, he constantly had to fend off demands for more “progressive” productions. “I was always criticized for not bringing in Peter Sellars,” he says, “but I was brought up with Zeffirelli and other great directors, for whom the intentions of the composer were of the utmost importance.” Sellars is in fact closing in, having turned Mozart’s Zaïde into a pretentious critique of sweatshops for Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival last year, and having staged his video extravaganza, The Tristan Project, in Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall this year. And with Mortier bringing his relentless updating agenda to the New York City Opera in 2009, Gelb will face the most glamorous exponent of Regietheater right next door.
Ideally, Gelb will choose a strategy of product differentiation, branding the Met as the place where you can still see opera as its composers intended it. But if the press falls for Mortier—and some of New York’s critics already disparage any production that they find too traditional—Gelb may face pressure to go Euro.
If Gelb’s offerings to date exemplify his ideal of cutting-edge theatrics, the house will be well served. Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly was a lacquered blaze of jewel-colored light; its stylized, Asian-influenced use of puppetry and props was beautiful and consistent with Puccini’s vision. Bart Sher’s Barber of Seville was even more reassuring. Despite Gelb’s efforts to package the production as a startling new twist on the story, primarily through an alleged emphasis on Figaro’s virility, neither that aspect of Figaro’s character nor the production itself represented a break from valid performance traditions. Sher simply directed an elegant, fast-paced Barber that pulsed with Rossini’s comic genius (despite two lapses from good taste: the gratuitous lesbian lovemaking in Figaro’s mobile barbershop and a wholly unmotivated visual pun on the name of a rock band that concluded the first act). The final production with a Gelb-chosen director this season—Richard Strauss’s Die Ägyptische Helena, mounted by David Fielding—took the greatest liberties with the setting, but Fielding’s storybook, surrealistic design matched the weirdly magical Hofmannsthal libretto without interpolating any self-indulgent political gloss.
The future, however, is more clouded, since some of Gelb’s hires for upcoming seasons have revisionist productions on their resumés. Luc Bondy, engaged for The Tales of Hoffmann in 2009, staged a bloody Idomeneo at La Scala this year that simply shaved off Mozart’s score when it conflicted with Bondy’s dark rewriting of the story; his Don Giovanni at the Vienna State Opera in 1990 was a bizarre farrago of historical and futuristic settings and costumes. Patrice Chéreau, scheduled to mount Janáček’s From the House of the Dead at the Met in 2009, directed a Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1976 that became a landmark in Regietheater—and led to the formation of the Wagner Protection Society, so scandalized were patrons by Chéreau’s injection of anticapitalist, environmental politics into the story. His Janáček, however, reportedly avoids heavy revisionism. Matthew Bourne will be staging Carmen at the Met; he has already shown a predilection for homoerotic themes in that opera, as well as in two ballet productions, The Nutcracker and an all-male Swan Lake. Richard Jones is one of Britain’s bad boys of opera—but since his Hansel and Gretel at the Met next year is part of Gelb’s new holiday family programming, he will probably tone down his usual intrusions.
Having done transgressive work in the past need not disqualify directors from working at the Met, as long as Gelb makes clear at the outset that he is not interested in their opinions on contemporary class or sexual relations. Directors should be able to work with that stipulation. When Giancarlo del Monaco, who set Verdi’s Old Testament story Nabucco in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for a German production, arrived at the Met in the early 1990s, he said: “I have a Eurotrash face for Europe and a classy face for the Americans.”
Gelb has made one unequivocal aesthetic stumble, however. In a bid to link the Met with the trendy downtown art scene, he commissioned an opera-inspired work from Richard Prince, among other art frauds, to display in a small new “art gallery” in the Met’s lobby. Prince’s contribution, “Madame Butterfly Is a Lesbian,” is a wall-size array of hundreds of cheap wallet-size porn shots of naked women engaged in lesbian sex. Scrawled over the photos is Prince’s idea of clever commentary: “I went to the opera. It was Madame Butterfly. I fell asleep. When I woke up the music was by Klaus Nomi and Cio-Cio-San had turned into a lesbian and refused to commit suicide. It was a German ending.” Apparently, neither Gelb nor anyone else in the Met’s press or fund-raising office was willing to say that such a work was inappropriate for a family institution seeking to spread the culture of opera, much less that it stank as art. Met patrons had better hope that the Prince display is just an aberration, of no deep meaning for the future.
The Met’s board and audience may restrain any inclination that Gelb might have to dabble in Regietheater, but the final check should be Gelb’s sense of the Met’s history. Generations of hard work and artistic passion have gone into the house’s current level of professional excellence. Gelb has sound business reasons for trumpeting a new beginning and an infusion of cutting-edge theatrical values. But it is important to remember how extraordinary the current state of the institution is. Though a certain type of opera lover perpetually mourns a lost golden age, arguably the golden age is now.
Gelb will earn a place in opera history if he maintains the Met’s artistic character while continuing the inspired promotional blitz that he has already begun. Nothing he touches in the area of marketing escapes a massive infusion of glamour; the brochure for the 2007–08 season is as luxurious as a Bergdorf Goodman Christmas catalog. “He’s a genius at selling,” says Herman Krawitz, who ran the Met’s complex backstage operations for years. “Gelb was a better press agent at age 18,” when he worked as an usher at the Met, “than anyone there.” His ideas for expanding the venues for opera—into movie theaters, schools, public spaces—are groundbreaking. “When he broadcast Madam Butterfly in Times Square, people here were amazed at the concept of this,” says Vienna-based critic Larry Lash. Gelb’s efforts are having a spillover effect: not only are other houses imitating his ideas—the Vienna State Opera will beam every performance into the plaza outside its house next season—but interest in local opera companies is rising in cities whose movie theaters have shown the Met’s productions.
As its season wound down this year, the Met had sold out every remaining seat—this, without having made a single step in the direction of trendy transgressive productions. Contrary to the usual hand-wringing about an aging audience, young and middle-aged adults already appear to make up a surprisingly high percentage of patrons. They are coming to see not a twisted rewriting of the great works, but the thing itself, drawn to what opera promises: sublime musical beauty and human drama. For all the deservedly hyped new productions this year, the greatest experience to be had at the Met came in a production of Verdi’s Don Carlo first mounted in 1979. German bass René Pape turned the extraordinary opening scenes of Act 4, in which the authoritarian King Philip II of Spain confronts first his own emotional isolation and then the ruthless Grand Inquisitor, into an unbearable portrait of anguish. There were no cutting-edge theatrical techniques in those two scenes, just singing and acting that left one’s hair standing on end and one’s head pulsing with Verdi’s obsessive contrapuntal harmonies and dark grinding dissonances.
By all means, Gelb should commission as many new productions as his budget will allow, and then sell the pants off them, with all the creativity that he has already demonstrated. And certainly contemporary political commentary has a place at the Met—so long as it is integral to a new work, rather than strapped like a suicide bomb onto the back of an old one. But Gelb should remember that he is the guardian of a tradition that generations have built. That tradition approaches the magnificent works of the past with love and humility, recognizing our debt to them. The Met will remain a vital New York and world institution for another century if it allows those works to speak for themselves.

2007-10-31T16:51:00.001-06:00

'With the Old Breed'

2007-10-31T16:49:00.000-06:00

I just completed reading the personal memoir of E. B. Sledge "With the Old Breed" published originally in 1981. Sledge, a native of Mobile, Alabama, served in the Marine Corps during WWII, primarily in the Pacific theatre. His experiences both leading up to battle (boot camp) and in the battles themselves are presented in a style that is lapidary and poetic. The memoir reads like a Hemingway novel both in its journalistic tone and the profoundly human insight if provides. The fact that he survived these two campaigns (Okinawa and Peleliu) is miracle enough, but the resulting narrative from someone trained in the sciences (zoologist) only confirms the uniqueness of Sledge's contribution. The descriptions of battle and death are sickening at times and evoke a 'why would anyone do this' reaction in any rational reader. However, woven throughout the narrative Sledge provides, is the reminder of the often tragic necessity of killing and dying in order to protect the freedom and liberty we otherwise risk losing. This is no 'gung ho' memoir. There is an almost reluctant inevitability in the tone of the narrative. Sledge seems to know that sometimes the unthinkable is not only thinkable but necessary. I give this memoir **** (Highest Rating). Go to the link below to purchase:

http://www.amazon.com/Old-Breed-At-Peleliu-Okinawa/dp/0891419195/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2333309-8190458?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194129831&sr=8-1

Favorite Links

2007-10-31T12:32:00.000-06:00

SteynOnline
http://www.steynonline.com/index.php?option=com_frontpage&Itemid=1
City Journal
http://www.city-journal.org/
Victor Davis Hanson
http://www.victorhanson.com/
First Things
http://www.firstthings.com/
New English Review
http://www.newenglishreview.org/
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
http://ayaanhirsiali.web-log.nl/ayaanhirsiali/english/index.html
Gates of Vienna
http://gatesofvienna.blogspot.com/
Front Page
http://frontpagemagazine.com/
Dhimmi Watch
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/
Arts and Letters Daily
http://www.aldaily.com/
Michael Yon
http://michaelyon-online.com/
Victor Hanson Works and Days
http://pajamasmedia.com/xpress/victordavishanson/
Books and Culture
http://www.christianitytoday.com/books
Union Evangelical Church Mexico City, Mexico
http://ebiz.netopia.com/unionchurch/door1/?sel=TRUE

Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Dennett . . . What's Up? Is there anything new 'under the sun'?

2007-10-30T11:24:00.000-06:00

This past weekend I watched (on CSPAN) a debate between Dinesh D'Souza and Christopher Hitchens at King's College in New York on the topic: 'Religion is bad for Us' Yes or No? Hitchen's new book 'God is Not Great' has elevated Hitchen's part in the new wave of 'Anti-Religion' books on the shelves. Theodore Dalyrmple offers an insightful series of observations on the upsurge in 'anti-theist' books. What is the cash value of these 'new' books? Is there anything 'new' in these works? Read Dalyrmple's essay and enjoy the critical mind at work.

What the New Atheists Don’t See
To regret religion is to regret Western civilization.
Theodore Dalrymple
Autumn 2007
City Journal

The British parliament’s first avowedly atheist member, Charles Bradlaugh, would stride into public meetings in the 1880s, take out his pocket watch, and challenge God to strike him dead in 60 seconds. God bided his time, but got Bradlaugh in the end. A slightly later atheist, Bertrand Russell, was once asked what he would do if it proved that he was mistaken and if he met his maker in the hereafter. He would demand to know, Russell replied with all the high-pitched fervor of his pedantry, why God had not made the evidence of his existence plainer and more irrefutable. And Jean-Paul Sartre came up with a memorable line: “God doesn’t exist—the bastard!”
Sartre’s wonderful outburst of disappointed rage suggests that it is not as easy as one might suppose to rid oneself of the notion of God. (Perhaps this is the time to declare that I am not myself a believer.) At the very least, Sartre’s line implies that God’s existence would solve some kind of problem—actually, a profound one: the transcendent purpose of human existence. Few of us, especially as we grow older, are entirely comfortable with the idea that life is full of sound and fury but signi-fies nothing. However much philosophers tell us that it is illogical to fear death, and that at worst it is only the process of dying that we should fear, people still fear death as much as ever. In like fashion, however many times philosophers say that it is up to us ourselves, and to no one else, to find the meaning of life, we continue to long for a transcendent purpose immanent in existence itself, independent of our own wills. To tell us that we should not feel this longing is a bit like telling someone in the first flush of love that the object of his affections is not worthy of them. The heart hath its reasons that reason knows not of.
Of course, men—that is to say, some men—have denied this truth ever since the Enlightenment, and have sought to find a way of life based entirely on reason. Far as I am from decrying reason, the attempt leads at best to Gradgrind and at worst to Stalin. Reason can never be the absolute dictator of man’s mental or moral economy.
The search for the pure guiding light of reason, uncontaminated by human passion or metaphysical principles that go beyond all possible evidence, continues, however; and recently, an epidemic rash of books has declared success, at least if success consists of having slain the inveterate enemy of reason, namely religion. The philosophers Daniel Dennett, A. C. Grayling, Michel Onfray, and Sam Harris, biologist Richard Dawkins, and journalist and critic Christopher Hitchens have all written books roundly condemning religion and its works. Evidently, there is a tide in the affairs, if not of men, at least of authors.
The curious thing about these books is that the authors often appear to think that they are saying something new and brave. They imagine themselves to be like the intrepid explorer Sir Richard Burton, who in 1853 disguised himself as a Muslim merchant, went to Mecca, and then wrote a book about his unprecedented feat. The public appears to agree, for the neo-atheist books have sold by the hundred thousand. Yet with the possible exception of Dennett’s, they advance no argument that I, the village atheist, could not have made by the age of 14 (Saint Anselm’s ontological argument for God’s existence gave me the greatest difficulty, but I had taken Hume to heart on the weakness of the argument from design).
I first doubted God’s existence at about the age of nine. It was at the school assembly that I lost my faith. We had been given to understand that if we opened our eyes during prayers God would depart the assembly hall. I wanted to test this hypothesis. Surely, if I opened my eyes suddenly, I would glimpse the fleeing God? What I saw instead, it turned out, was the headmaster, Mr. Clinton, intoning the prayer with one eye closed and the other open, with which he beadily surveyed the children below for transgressions. I quickly concluded that Mr. Clinton did not believe what he said about the need to keep our eyes shut. And if he did not believe that, why should I believe in his God? In such illogical leaps do our beliefs often originate, to be disciplined later in life (if we receive enough education) by elaborate rationalization.
Dennett’s Breaking the Spell is the least bad-tempered of the new atheist books, but it is deeply condescending to all religious people. Dennett argues that religion is explicable in evolutionary terms—for example, by our inborn human propensity, at one time valuable for our survival on the African savannahs, to attribute animate agency to threatening events.
For Dennett, to prove the biological origin of belief in God is to show its irrationality, to break its spell. But of course it is a necessary part of the argument that all possible human beliefs, including belief in evolution, must be explicable in precisely the same way; or else why single out religion for this treatment? Either we test ideas according to arguments in their favor, independent of their origins, thus making the argument from evolution irrelevant, or all possible beliefs come under the same suspicion of being only evolutionary adaptations—and thus biologically contingent rather than true or false. We find ourselves facing a version of the paradox of the Cretan liar: all beliefs, including this one, are the products of evolution, and all beliefs that are products of evolution cannot be known to be true.
One striking aspect of Dennett’s book is his failure to avoid the language of purpose, intention, and ontological moral evaluation, despite his fierce opposition to teleological views of existence: the coyote’s “methods of locomotion have been ruthlessly optimized for efficiency.” Or: “The stinginess of Nature can be seen everywhere we look.” Or again: “This is a good example of Mother Nature’s stinginess in the final accounting combined with absurd profligacy in the methods.” I could go on, but I hope the point is clear. (And Dennett is not alone in this difficulty: Michel Onfray’s Atheist Manifesto, so rich in errors and inexactitudes that it would take a book as long as his to correct them, says on its second page that religion prevents mankind from facing up to “reality in all its naked cruelty.” But how can reality have any moral quality without having an immanent or transcendent purpose?)
No doubt Dennett would reply that he is writing in metaphors for the layman and that he could translate all his statements into a language without either moral evaluation or purpose included in it. Perhaps he would argue that his language is evidence that the spell still has a hold over even him, the breaker of the spell for the rest of humanity. But I am not sure that this response would be psychologically accurate. I think Dennett’s use of the language of evaluation and purpose is evidence of a deep-seated metaphysical belief (however caused) that Providence exists in the universe, a belief that few people, confronted by the mystery of beauty and of existence itself, escape entirely. At any rate, it ill behooves Dennett to condescend to those poor primitives who still have a religious or providential view of the world: a view that, at base, is no more refutable than Dennett’s metaphysical faith in evolution.
Dennett is not the only new atheist to employ religious language. In The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes with approval a new set of Ten Commandments for atheists, which he obtained from an atheist website, without considering odd the idea that atheists require commandments at all, let alone precisely ten of them; nor does their metaphysical status seem to worry him. The last of the atheist’s Ten Commandments ends with the following: “Question everything.” Everything? Including the need to question everything, and so on ad infinitum?
Not to belabor the point, but if I questioned whether George Washington died in 1799, I could spend a lifetime trying to prove it and find myself still, at the end of my efforts, having to make a leap, or perhaps several leaps, of faith in order to believe the rather banal fact that I had set out to prove. Metaphysics is like nature: though you throw it out with a pitchfork, yet it always returns. What is confounded here is surely the abstract right to question everything with the actual exercise of that right on all possible occasions. Anyone who did exercise his right on all possible occasions would wind up a short-lived fool.
This sloppiness and lack of intellectual scruple, with the assumption of certainty where there is none, combined with adolescent shrillness and intolerance, reach an apogee in Sam Harris’s book The End of Faith. It is not easy to do justice to the book’s nastiness; it makes Dawkins’s claim that religious education constitutes child abuse look sane and moderate.
Harris tells us, for example, that “we must find our way to a time when faith, without evidence, disgraces anyone who would claim it. Given the present state of the world, there appears to be no other future worth wanting.” I am glad that I am old enough that I shall not see the future of reason as laid down by Harris; but I am puzzled by the status of the compulsion in the first sentence that I have quoted. Is Harris writing of a historical inevitability? Of a categorical imperative? Or is he merely making a legislative proposal? This is who-will-rid-me-of-this-troublesome-priest language, ambiguous no doubt, but not open to a generous interpretation.
It becomes even more sinister when considered in conjunction with the following sentences, quite possibly the most disgraceful that I have read in a book by a man posing as a rationalist: “The link between belief and behavior raises the stakes considerably. Some propositions are so dangerous that it may be ethical to kill people for believing them. This may seem an extraordinary claim, but it merely enunciates an ordinary fact about the world in which we live.”
Let us leave aside the metaphysical problems that these three sentences raise. For Harris, the most important question about genocide would seem to be: “Who is genociding whom?” To adapt Dostoyevsky slightly, starting from universal reason, I arrive at universal madness.
Lying not far beneath the surface of all the neo-atheist books is the kind of historiography that many of us adopted in our hormone-disturbed adolescence, furious at the discovery that our parents sometimes told lies and violated their own precepts and rules. It can be summed up in Christopher Hitchens’s drumbeat in God Is Not Great: “Religion spoils everything.”
What? The Saint Matthew Passion? The Cathedral of Chartres? The emblematic religious person in these books seems to be a Glasgow Airport bomber—a type unrepresentative of Muslims, let alone communicants of the poor old Church of England. It is surely not news, except to someone so ignorant that he probably wouldn’t be interested in these books in the first place, that religious conflict has often been murderous and that religious people have committed hideous atrocities. But so have secularists and atheists, and though they have had less time to prove their mettle in this area, they have proved it amply. If religious belief is not synonymous with good behavior, neither is absence of belief, to put it mildly.
In fact, one can write the history of anything as a chronicle of crime and folly. Science and technology spoil everything: without trains and IG Farben, no Auschwitz; without transistor radios and mass-produced machetes, no Rwandan genocide. First you decide what you hate, and then you gather evidence for its hatefulness. Since man is a fallen creature (I use the term metaphorically rather than in its religious sense), there is always much to find.
The thinness of the new atheism is evident in its approach to our civilization, which until recently was religious to its core. To regret religion is, in fact, to regret our civilization and its monuments, its achievements, and its legacy. And in my own view, the absence of religious faith, provided that such faith is not murderously intolerant, can have a deleterious effect upon human character and personality. If you empty the world of purpose, make it one of brute fact alone, you empty it (for many people, at any rate) of reasons for gratitude, and a sense of gratitude is necessary for both happiness and decency. For what can soon, and all too easily, replace gratitude is a sense of entitlement. Without gratitude, it is hard to appreciate, or be satisfied with, what you have: and life will become an existential shopping spree that no product satisfies.
A few years back, the National Gallery held an exhibition of Spanish still-life paintings. One of these paintings had a physical effect on the people who sauntered in, stopping them in their tracks; some even gasped. I have never seen an image have such an impact on people. The painting, by Juan Sánchez Cotán, now hangs in the San Diego Museum of Art. It showed four fruits and vegetables, two suspended by string, forming a parabola in a gray stone window.
Even if you did not know that Sánchez Cotán was a seventeenth-century Spanish priest, you could know that the painter was religious: for this picture is a visual testimony of gratitude for the beauty of those things that sustain us. Once you have seen it, and concentrated your attention on it, you will never take the existence of the humble cabbage—or of anything else—quite so much for granted, but will see its beauty and be thankful for it. The painting is a permanent call to contemplation of the meaning of human life, and as such it arrested people who ordinarily were not, I suspect, much given to quiet contemplation.
The same holds true with the work of the great Dutch still-life painters. On the neo-atheist view, the religious connection between Catholic Spain and Protestant Holland is one of conflict, war, and massacre only: and certainly one cannot deny this history. And yet something more exists. As with Sánchez Cotán, only a deep reverence, an ability not to take existence for granted, could turn a representation of a herring on a pewter plate into an object of transcendent beauty, worthy of serious reflection.
I recently had occasion to compare the writings of the neo-atheists with those of Anglican divines of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I was visiting some friends at their country house in England, which had a library of old volumes; since the family of the previous owners had a churchman in every generation, many of the books were religious. In my own neo-atheist days, I would have scorned these works as pertaining to a nonexistent entity and containing nothing of value. I would have considered the authors deluded men, who probably sought to delude others for reasons that Marx might have enumerated.
But looking, say, into the works of Joseph Hall, D.D., I found myself moved: much more moved, it goes without saying, than by any of the books of the new atheists. Hall was bishop of Exeter and then of Norwich; though a moderate Puritan, he took the Royalist side in the English civil war and lost his see, dying in 1656 while Cromwell was still Lord Protector.
Except by specialists, Hall remains almost entirely forgotten today. I opened one of the volumes at random, his Contemplations Upon the Principal Passages of the Holy Story. Here was the contemplation on the sickness of Hezekiah:
Hezekiah was freed from the siege of the Assyrians, but he is surprised with a disease. He, that delivered him from the hand of his enemies, smites him with sickness. God doth not let us loose from all afflictions, when he redeems us from one.
To think that Hezekiah was either not thankful enough for his deliverance, or too much lifted up with the glory of so miraculous a favour, were an injurious misconstruction of the hand of God, and an uncharitable censure of a holy prince; for, though no flesh and blood can avoid the just desert of bodily punishment, yet God doth not always strike with an intuition of sin: sometimes he regards the benefit of our trial; sometimes, the glory of his mercy in our cure.
Hall surely means us to infer that whatever happens to us, however unpleasant, has a meaning and purpose; and this enables us to bear our sorrows with greater dignity and less suffering. And it is part of the existential reality of human life that we shall always need consolation, no matter what progress we make. Hall continues:
When, as yet, he had not so much as the comfort of a child to succeed him, thy prophet is sent to him, with the heavy message of his death: “Set thine house in order; for thou shalt die, and not live.” It is no small mercy of God, that he gives us warning of our end. . . . No soul can want important affairs, to be ordered for a final dissolution.
This is the language not of rights and entitlements, but of something much deeper—a universal respect for the condition of being human.
For Hall, life is instinct with meaning: a meaning capable of controlling man’s pride at his good fortune and consoling him for his ill fortune. Here is an extract from Hall’s Characters of Virtues and Vices:
He is an happy man, that hath learned to read himself, more than all books; and hath so taken out this lesson, that he can never forget it: that knows the world, and cares not for it; that, after many traverses of thoughts, is grown to know what he may trust to; and stands now equally armed for all events: that hath got the mastery at home; so as he can cross his will without a mutiny, and so please it that he makes it not a wanton: that, in earthly things, wishes no more than nature; in spiritual, is ever graciously ambitious: that, for his condition, stands on his own feet, not needing to lean upon the great; and can so frame his thoughts to his estate, that when he hath least, he cannot want, because he is as free from desire, as superfluity: that hath seasonably broken the headstrong restiness of prosperity; and can now manage it, at pleasure: upon whom, all smaller crosses light as hailstones upon a roof; and, for the greater calamities, he can take them as tributes of life and tokens of love; and, if his ship be tossed, yet he is sure his anchor is fast. If all the world were his, he could be no other than he is; no whit gladder of himself, no whit higher in his carriage; because he knows, that contentment lies not in the things he hath, but in the mind that values them.
Though eloquent, this appeal to moderation as the key to happiness is not original; but such moderation comes more naturally to the man who believes in something not merely higher than himself, but higher than mankind. After all, the greatest enjoyment of the usages of this world, even to excess, might seem rational when the usages of this world are all that there is.
In his Occasional Meditations, Hall takes perfectly ordinary scenes—ordinary, of course, for his times—and derives meaning from them. Here is his meditation “Upon the Flies Gathering to a Galled Horse”:
How these flies swarm to the galled part of this poor beast; and there sit, feeding upon that worst piece of his flesh, not meddling with the other sound parts of his skin! Even thus do malicious tongues of detractors: if a man have any infirmity in his person or actions, that they will be sure to gather unto, and dwell upon; whereas, his commendable parts and well-deservings are passed by, without mention, without regard. It is an envious self-love and base cruelty, that causeth this ill disposition in men: in the mean time, this only they have gained; it must needs be a filthy creature, that feeds upon nothing but corruption.
Surely Hall is not suggesting (unlike Dennett in his unguarded moments) that the biological purpose of flies is to feed off injured horses, but rather that a sight in nature can be the occasion for us to reflect imaginatively on our morality. He is not raising a biological theory about flies, in contradistinction to the theory of evolution, but thinking morally about human existence. It is true that he would say that everything is part of God’s providence, but, again, this is no more (and no less) a metaphysical belief than the belief in natural selection as an all-explanatory principle.
Let us compare Hall’s meditation “Upon the Sight of a Harlot Carted” with Harris’s statement that some people ought perhaps to be killed for their beliefs:
With what noise, and tumult, and zeal of solemn justice, is this sin punished! The streets are not more full of beholders, than clamours. Every one strives to express his detestation of the fact, by some token of revenge: one casts mire, another water, another rotten eggs, upon the miserable offender. Neither, indeed, is she worthy of less: but, in the mean time, no man looks home to himself. It is no uncharity to say, that too many insult in this just punishment, who have deserved more. . . . Public sins have more shame; private may have more guilt. If the world cannot charge me of those, it is enough, that I can charge my soul of worse. Let others rejoice, in these public executions: let me pity the sins of others, and be humbled under the sense of my own.
Who sounds more charitable, more generous, more just, more profound, more honest, more humane: Sam Harris or Joseph Hall, D.D., late lord bishop of Exeter and of Norwich?
No doubt it helps that Hall lived at a time of sonorous prose, prose that merely because of its sonority resonates in our souls; prose of the kind that none of us, because of the time in which we live, could ever equal. But the style applies to the thought as well as the prose; and I prefer Hall’s charity to Harris’s intolerance.
Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

The Cosmopolitan Illusion?

2007-10-29T12:16:00.000-06:00

The essay by Lee Harris on Cosmopolitanism offers an insightful analysis of the growing trend in 'thoughtful' political theory regarding the role of the nation-state and its imminent downfall. Harris suggests otherwise and offers an intriguing look at what is at stake in the trend toward cosmopolitanism which is embedded deeply in the politically trendy notion referred to as 'mulitculturalism'. Enjoy!

http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/3449511.html

Violence: Islam and Christianity

2007-10-29T11:48:00.000-06:00

April 6, 2007
Fighting Faith
Is Judeo-Christian violence the same thing as Islamic violence?
by Raymond Ibrahim
Private Papers

Since the terrorist strikes of 9/11, Islam has often been accused of being intrinsically violent. In response, a number of apologetics have been offered in defense of the religion. The fundamental premise of almost all of these is that Islam’s purported violence — as found in Islamic scriptures and history — is no different than the violence committed by other religious groups throughout history and as recorded in their scriptures, especially Jews and Christians. The argument, in short, is that it is not Islam per se but rather human nature that is prone to violence.
So whenever the argument is made that the Koran as well as the historical words and deeds of Islam’s prophet Muhammad and his companions evince violence and intolerance, the counter-argument is immediately made: What about the historical atrocities committed by the Hebrews in years gone by and as recorded in their scriptures (i.e. the Old Testament)? What about the brutal cycle of violence Christians have committed in the name of their faith against both fellow Christians and non-Christians?
Thereafter two examples — one biblical, the other historic — are often cited as paradigmatic of the religious violence inherent to both Judaism and Christianity.
The first is the genocide-like conquest of the land of Canaan by the Hebrews (c. 1200 BC).Yahweh told Moses:
But of the cities of these peoples which Yahweh your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall let nothing that breathes remain alive, but you shall utterly destroy them — the Hittite, Amorite, Canaanite, Perizzite, Hivite, and Jebusite — just as Yahweh your God has commanded you, lest they teach you to do according to all their abominations which they have done for their gods, and you sin against Yahweh your God (Deuteronomy 20: 16-18).
So Joshua [Moses’ successor] conquered all the land: the mountain country and the South and the lowland and the wilderness slopes, and all their kings; he left none remaining, but utterly destroyed all that breathed, as Yahweh God of Israel had commanded (Joshua 10:40).
The second example revolves around the Crusader wars waged by European Christians between the 11th-13th centuries. To be sure, the Crusades were a “counter-attack” on Islam — not an unprovoked assault as is often depicted by revisionist history. A united Christendom sought to annex the Holy Land of Jerusalem, which, prior to its conquest by Islam in the 7th century, was an integral part of Christendom for some 400 years.
Nonetheless, these Crusades were violent and bloody and countless atrocities were committed — all in the name of Christianity and under the banner of the cross. Perhaps the most infamous act of villainy perpetrated by these “fighters-for-Christ” is the 1204 sack of Constantinople, wherein Christian slew Christian in a violent bloodbath.
Old Testament Violence
In light of the above — one a prime example of violence from the Bible, the other from Christian history — why should Islam be the one religion always characterized as intrinsically violent, simply because its holy book and its history also contain violence? Why should non-Muslims always point to the Koran and ancient history as evidence of Islam’s violence while never looking to their own scriptures and history?
While such questions are popular, they reveal a great deal of confusion between history and theology, between the temporal actions of men and the immutable words of God. The fundamental error being that Judeo-Christian history — which is violent — is being conflated with Islamic theology — which commands violence. Of course all religions have had their fair share of violence and intolerance towards the “other.” Whether this violence is ordained by God or whether warlike man merely wished it thus is the all-important question.
Old Testament violence is an interesting case in point. Yahweh clearly ordered the Hebrews to annihilate the Canaanites and surrounding peoples. Such violence is therefore an expression of God’s will, for good or ill. Regardless, all the historic violence committed by the Hebrews and recorded in the Old Testament is just that — history. It happened; God commanded it. But it revolved around a specific time and place and was directed against a specific people. At no time did such violence go on to become standardized or codified into Jewish law (i.e. the Halakha).
This is where Islamic violence is unique. Though similar to the violence of the Old Testament — commanded by God and manifested in history — certain aspects of Islamic violence have become standardized in Islamic law (i.e. the Sharia) and apply at all times. Thus while the violence found in the Koran is in fact historical, its ultimate significance is theological. Consider the following Koranic verses:
Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the pagans wherever you find them — take them [captive], besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due [i.e. submit to Islam], then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful (9:5).
Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger [i.e. Islamic law], nor acknowledge the religion of Truth [i.e. Islam], from the people of the book [i.e. Jews and Christians], until they pay tribute with willing submission, and feel themselves utterly subdued (9:29).
Sword-Verses
As with Old Testament verses where Yahweh commanded the Hebrews to attack and slay their neighbors, these Koranic verses also have a historical context. Allah (through Muhammad) first issued these commandments after the Arab tribes had finally unified under the banner of Islam and were preparing to invade their Christian and pagan neighbors. But unlike the bellicose verses and anecdotes of the Old Testament, these so-called “sword-verses” subsequently became fundamental to Islam’s relationship to both the “people of the book” (i.e. Christians and Jews) and the “pagans” (i.e. Hindus, Buddhists, animists, etc).
In fact, based on the sword-verses (as well as countless other Koranic verses and oral traditions attributed to Muhammad), Islam’s scholars, sheikhs, muftis, imams, and qadis throughout the ages have all reached the consensus — binding on the entire Muslim community — that Islam is to be at perpetual war with the non-Muslim world, until the former subsumes the latter. (It is widely held that the sword-verses alone have abrogated some 200 of the Koran’s more tolerant verses.) Famous Muslim scholar and “father of modern history” Ibn Khaldun articulates the dichotomy between jihad and defensive warfare thus:
In the Muslim community, the holy war [i.e. jihad] is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and the obligation to convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force... The other religious groups did not have a universal mission, and the holy war was not a religious duty for them, save only for purposes of defense... They are merely required to establish their religion among their own people. That is why the Israeilites after Moses and Joshua remained unconcerned with royal authority [e.g. a “caliphate”]. Their only concern was to establish their religion [not to spread it to the nations]… But Islam is under obligation to gain power over other nations (The Muqudimmah, vol. 1 pg. 473, emphasis added).
Even when juxtaposed to their Old Testament counterparts, the sword-verses are distinctive for using language that transcends time and space, inciting believers to attack and slay non-believers today no less than yesterday. Yahweh commanded the Hebrews to kill Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites — all specific peoples rooted to a specific time and place. At no time did Yahweh give an open-ended command for the Hebrews, and by extension their descendants the Jews, to fight and kill gentiles.
On the other hand, though Islam’s original enemies were, like Judaism’s, historical (e.g. Christian Byzantines and pagan Persians), the Koran rarely singles them out by their proper names. Instead, Muslims were (and are) commanded to fight the people of the book — “until they pay tribute with willing submission and feel themselves utterly subdued” (9:29) and to “slay the pagans wherever you find them” (9:5). The two conjunctions “until” and “wherever” demonstrate the perpetual nature of these commandments: there are still “people of the book” who have yet to be “utterly subdued” (especially in the Americas, Europe, and Israel) and “pagans” to be slain “wherever” one looks (especially Asia and sub-Saharan Africa).
The Prophet's Life as Model
Aside from the divine words of the Koran, Muhammad’s pattern of behavior — his “Sunna” or “example” — is an extremely important source of legislation in Islam. Muslims are exhorted to emulate Muhammad in all walks of life: “You have indeed in the Messenger of Allah a beautiful pattern [of conduct]” (33:21). And Muhammad’s pattern of conduct vis-à-vis non-Muslims is quite explicit. Sarcastically arguing against the concept of “moderate” Islam, terrorist Osama bin Laden, who enjoys half the Arab-Islamic world’s support per a recent al-Jazeera poll, portrays the prophet’s Sunna thus:
“Moderation” is demonstrated by our prophet who did not remain more than three months in Medina without raiding or sending a raiding party into the lands of the infidels to beat down their strongholds and seize their possessions, their lives, and their women” (from The Al-Qaeda Reader).
In fact, based on both the Koran and Muhammad’s Sunna, pillaging and plundering infidels, enslaving their children, and placing their women in concubinage is well founded (e.g. 4:24, 4:92, 8:69, 24:33, 33:50, etc.).
While law-centric and legalistic, Judaism has no such equivalent to the Sunna; the words and deeds of the patriarchs, though recorded in the Old Testament, never went on to be part of Jewish law. Neither Abraham’s “white-lies,” nor Jacob’s perfidy, nor Moses’ short-fuse, nor David’s adultery, nor Solomon’s philandering ever went on to instruct Jews or Christians. They were merely understood to be historical actions perpetrated by fallible men who were often punished by God for their less than ideal behavior.
As for Christianity, much of the Old Testament law was abrogated by Jesus. “Eye for an eye” gave way to “turn the other cheek.” Totally loving God and one’s neighbor became supreme law (Matt 22:38-40). Furthermore, Jesus’ “Sunna” — as in “What would Jesus do?” — is characterized by passivity and altruism.
And it is from here that one can best appreciate the Crusades. However one interprets these wars — as offensive or defensive, just or unjust — it is plainly evident that they were not based on the teachings of the New Testament or the example of Jesus who exhorted his followers to “love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you” (Matt 5:44). It would seem that if anyone, it is the Crusaders — not the jihadists — who have contradicted their religion.
In fact, far from suggesting anything intrinsic to Christianity, the Crusades ironically help better explain Islam. For what the Crusades demonstrated once and for all is that irrespective of religious teachings — indeed, in the case of these so-called “Christian” Crusades, despite them — man is in fact predisposed to violence and intolerance. But this begs the question: If this is how Christians behaved — who are commanded to love, bless, and do good to their enemies who hate, curse, and persecute them — how much more can be expected of Muslims who, while sharing the same violent tendencies, are further commanded by the Deity to attack, kill, and plunder non-believers?
Raymond Ibrahim is a research librarian at the Library of Congress. His new book, The Al Qaeda Reader, which translates Osama bin Laden's communiqués, will be available in April 2007.

Jesus and Mohammad: The PC Virus and Academia

2007-10-29T11:41:00.000-06:00

September 13, 2007Jesus and Mohammad, Version 2.0
In academic revision, Christ is confused, the Prophet humanitarian.
by Raymond Ibrahim
National Review Online

Few things are more demonstrative of the sad state of affairs of modern academia than the increasingly fictionalized portrayals of the founders of the two largest religions in the world: Jesus and Mohammad. Though the same dubious methods are used for both — ignore the most historically valid texts and documents, build ponderous theories atop evidence of the most tenuous kind — the goals are markedly different. In academia today, we find Jesus, far from the Son of God, portrayed at once as a wandering “magician” and a hippie-like philanderer inclined to homosexuality. Mohammad, whom the most authentic Muslim sources portray as, among other things, a warlord who had entire tribes executed and plundered, their women herded into harems, their children sold into slavery, appears as a peaceful and altruistic ruler whose governance ushered in, among other improvements, a sort of seventh-century “feminism.”Considering that the early writers who composed the original texts and scriptures of Christianity and Islam were separated by only a few generations from the historic Jesus and Mohammad, as opposed to modern academics who are separated by 20 and 14 centuries, respectively, one would think that the former group would have been in a better position of authority to tell the narrative of Jesus and Mohammad. Yet nowhere is the arrogance of modernity better manifested than in the universities, where the straightforward words of history’s primary sources are increasingly brushed aside. The implicit understanding is that the writers of the New Testament and Islam’s vast compendium of scriptures were naïve and superstitious simpletons who — unlike their more “objective” modern day counterparts — simply could not critically engage their subjects.
Whenever the primary sources make mention of anything that might annoy or offend modern sensibilities — from Jesus’ celibacy to Mohammad’s militant jihads — “progressive” academics tend to simply dismiss it out of hand, preferring to rely on their own thoughts on the matter.
When it comes to “reconstructing” Jesus, academics invariably make two assumptions: The Gospels are not inspired, and the historical events recorded therein are also untrustworthy. In other words, not only do they reject the miraculous, they suspect the entire narrative, which has long been the primary source for understanding the nature of Jesus, even in a secular sense. Irrespective of what Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John record Jesus saying or doing; irrespective of the antiquity and authority of the Gospels, written just decades after the events they describe; irrespective of the fact that much of the historical events described in the Gospels accord with first-century Roman history; irrespective of all this, several Jesus “reconstructionalists” have decided that the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament simply will not do for historical accuracy.Instead, they rely on two dubious authorities: any scraps of other religious writings and their own conjectures. Obscure Gnostic documents, which were refuted, discredited, and abandoned nearly 2000 years ago, or were of such little importance that the early church was not even aware of their existence, become foundational. Through these fragmented parchments, academics can read into Jesus whatever they desire. Pope Benedict XVI alludes to this in his book Jesus of Nazareth:
At the same time, though, the reconstructions of this [modern-day] Jesus (who could only be discovered by going behind the traditions and sources used by the Evangelists) became more and more incompatible with one another: at one end of the spectrum, Jesus was the anti-Roman revolutionary working — though finally failing — to overthrow the ruling powers; at the other end, he was the meek moral teacher who approves everything and unaccountably comes to grief. If you read a number of these reconstructions one after another, you see at once that far from uncovering an icon that has become obscured over time, they are much more like photographs of their authors and the ideals they hold.
Consider, for instance, the standards of the “Jesus Seminar,” a project of the Westar Institute. They have made it a first premise to grant equal or more weight to an arcane document that we know next to nothing about (the fourth-century Coptic “gospel of Thomas”) vis-à-vis the canonical Gospels. The title of the Seminar’s book, The Five Gospels, assumes that the “gospel of Thomas,” which was written nearly 300 years after the original Gospels, is enough to demonstrate the utter subjectivity of their supposedly rigorous methodology. Through a capricious “voting” system, the Jesus Seminar takes it upon itself to decide what Jesus “really” said and did. According to the seminar, Jesus apparently spoke no more than 20 percent of the statements ascribed to him, nor did he make mention of “the kingdom of heaven,” “the son of man/God,” or anything else that would have led to his execution.Following the loose standards set by the seminar, and based on another fragmented text known as “Philip’s gospel,” dating from the third century, books and movies that try to pass themselves off as quasi-documentary (Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code) try to make a case that Jesus was married with children. Then there was the late professor Morton Smith’s “find” — a parchment supposedly written by Church father Clement that purportedly contained “missing” fragments from the Gospel of Mark that portray Jesus spending the night with a “lightly-clad” youth, teaching him the mystery of the kingdom of heaven. Based on this, Smith and other “critical” scholars have either suggested or concluded that Jesus was gay. (Rather tellingly, when Smith was challenged to produce the original document, he could not oblige, and it is currently said to be “lost.”)Even if the aforementioned texts were authentic, they still do not at all support most of the academics’ sweeping conclusions. For instance, no matter how one manipulates the fragmented text of Philip’s gospel concerning Jesus and Mary Magdalene, the best that can be pieced together is that Jesus kissed her — we don’t know where, head, cheeks, lips — and that he “loved her,” a far cry from saying that they were married and had offspring.All this simply supports the pope’s notion that supposedly objective scholars are reading in whatever they want about Jesus. Nor do any of these academics note the fact that the Gnostic texts often directly contradict one another (unlike the Gospels, which enjoy a high degree of congruence). Where the gospel of Philip portrays Jesus as loving and kissing Mary, the gospel of Thomas has an extremely misogynistic quote to the effect that women are unworthy of heaven directed at none other than Mary herself. Is it any wonder that the early church deemed the Gnostic texts spurious and heretical?In the end, the so-called “historical” Jesus that sticks in people’s minds based on these academic distortions is little more than a liberal-minded, sexually ambiguous wandering sage, stripped, ironically, of all historical context. But as theologian John Meier points out:
A tweedy poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans…or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at lilies in the fields — such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him [the Jesus Seminar and their ilk] threaten no one.
While that is true, the pseudo-scholarship hashed out by universities’ religion departments has, in fact, permeated the non-academic world and influenced the popular imagination, where it is often taken as “fact.” One can easily dismiss as risqué fiction movies like the Da Vinci Code, or its predecessor the Last Temptation, or the distasteful and amateurish James Cameron “discovery” of the tomb of Christ. But the fact remains that these are often based on pseudo-scholarship that the unsuspecting public assumes must be plausible — for instance, the DaVinci Code quotes from Gnostic texts, including Philip’s.A left-wing academic attempt to discredit Christian faith is not all too surprising given the personal persuasions of modern scholars. But the academic treatment of Islam’s founder, Mohammad, exposes a double standard. The same class of academics uses the same uncritical methods — but for radically different purposes: to whitewash and romanticize.It has been remarked, and for good reason, that there is probably no one person of late antiquity who is better documented than Mohammad. Literally thousands of pages exist consisting of what Muslims believe to be verbatim statements and deeds attributed to their prophet. These are the “hadiths” that, after the Koran, are the second most important source for Islamic jurisprudence. There are also historical works such as Ibn Ishaq’s eighth-century Life of Mohammad, the earliest extensive biography of Islam’s prophet, as well as the voluminous histories of al Tabari, al Baladhuri, and al Waki that recount the life and especially military exploits of Mohammad.Indeed, there is much more “primary” source material on Mohammad than on Jesus. And this is to be expected, since the question of “what would Mohammad do?” in any given circumstance is of the utmost importance for Sunni Muslims — the word “Sunni” denotes the need to emulate Mohammad in every possible way. It comes as no surprise, then, that the portrait of Islam’s founder — his life, deeds, words, character, likes, dislikes — is very clear; only very few aspects, if any, of Mohammad’s life are open to conjecture.Based solely on these sources, which, it bears repeating, Muslims themselves consider to be of great authority, one can spend pages enumerating less-than-impressive deeds attributed to Mohammad: aggressive and unprovoked warfare, mass executions, assassinations, lies, thefts, the enslavement of women and children, and marriage to a nine-year old. These are the sort of calumnies that, if there was just one scrap of parchment hinting that Jesus may have engaged in, the same aforementioned “Jesus scholars” would undoubtedly have a field day popularizing and emphasizing. But when it comes to writing about Mohammad, few are the scholars who will even allude to these authoritative sources; they often go to great lengths to cover them up or at least minimize their authority.Consider, for instance, the issue of “jihad.” Islam’s earliest theologians unanimously agreed that jihad was simply offensive warfare with the express purpose of spreading Islamic rule — a path shown by Mohammad himself, and then by his companions, the “rightly-guided” caliphs, who conquered much of the Old World in the name of Islam. There is a good reason why all early works of English-language scholarship have always translated “jihad” as “holy war.”Yet the academic dissembling is well underway. Around the same time scholars of Christianity began perverting the image of Jesus, the professors of Islam began telling us that Mohammad’s concept of “jihad” had nothing at all to do with “holy war” (which, so the line of reasoning went, is instead a Christian creation of the Crusades), but that it simply means “to strive” — as in to strive to be “a better student, a better colleague, a better business partner” per one professor, Bruce Lawrence. This widely held view is based primarily on the oft-quoted hadith where, upon returning from battle, a group of Muslim warriors went to see Mohammad, and he said to them, “You have returned from the lesser jihad [warfare to spread Islam] to the greater jihad [warfare against one’s own vices].” This one hadith has all but come to define jihad for the academic community.Placing so much emphasis on this one hadith, however, is extremely problematic. For starters, not all hadiths are equal. Though there are thousands of hadiths, there are only six canonical collections that Sunnis consider trustworthy. This hadith does not occur in any of those six. On the other hand, the most authentic of the six hadith collections, the ninth-century Sahih Bukari mentions jihad 199 times, all in the context of warfare against non-Muslims in an effort to spread Islam. Further illustrative is the fact that the individual hadiths listed under the “jihad” heading of Sahih Bukhari often do not contain the word jihad at all; the words that predominate are “fighting,” “killing,” “warring,” and, the grand end of all three, “martyrdom.” A typical Sahih Bukhari hadith regarding jihad goes something like this:
The Prophet said: “He who wages jihad in the path of Allah — and Allah knows who it is who wages jihad in his path — is as commendable as one who continuously fasts and prays. Allah guarantees if he who fights for his cause dies, he [Allah] will usher him into paradise; otherwise, he will return him to his home safely, with rewards or war booty.”
Just as academics have downplayed the authority of the New Testament and ascribed much importance to the unauthenticated and dubious Gnostic parchments in their efforts to reconstruct Jesus, so too have they downplayed the authority of Islam’s most authoritative texts in favor of aberrant and unsubstantiated hadiths when reconstructing Mohammad.The next strategy consists of playing semantic games. Scholars of Arabic insist that the word “jihad” literally means “to struggle” and thus clearly has nothing to do with “holy war.” This line of reasoning totally ignores the historical and textual contexts in which the word jihad predominantly appears — all which revolve around “holy war” — and is nothing short of disingenuous. As Daniel Pipes put it:
It is an intellectual scandal that, since September 11, 2001, scholars at American universities have repeatedly and all but unanimously issued public statements that avoid or whitewash the primary meaning of jihad in Islamic law and Muslim history. It is quite as if historians of medieval Europe were to deny that the word "crusade" ever had martial overtones, instead pointing to such terms as "crusade on hunger" or "crusade against drugs" to demonstrate that the term signifies an effort to improve society.
Indeed, many are the words that, while denoting one thing, are only understood connotatively. Imagine going to Arabic speakers and adamantly explaining to them that the English words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” mean nothing more than what they denote: a boy or girl who is simply a “friend.” Considering that the vast majority of English speakers understand by those two terms something quite more than a friend, would that not be a dishonest explanation to the non-English-speaking Arab? Americans who don’t speak Arabic are being duped in the same way. Just as a “boy/girl friend” is a very specific type of friend, so too is jihad a very specific type of struggle — a lasting war in order to establish Islam supreme, “until all chaos ceases and all religion belongs to Allah alone,” in the words of the Koran.Even in encyclopedias — traditionally the most unequivocal source of scholarly information — the postmodern West’s academic disregard for objectivity can be discerned. Compiled some 80 years ago, the voluminous Encyclopedia of Islam has long been recognized as the most authoritative English-language compendium on Islam. Its entry on jihad is honest and to the point, as demonstrated by its opening sentence: “The spread of Islam by arms is a religious duty upon Muslims in general.” There is little talk of the “greater/lesser jihad” dichotomy or any other euphemisms, only facts: “[Jihad] must continue to be done until the whole world is under the rule of Islam.” Its closing sentence flatly states, “Islam must completely be made over before the doctrine of jihad [warfare to spread Islam] can be eliminated.”Contrast this brusque, but refreshingly honest, definition with the entry for jihad found in the 1995 Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World. Although eventually addressing the true aspects of jihad, the all-important opening sentences would lead the reader to think that jihad as warfare on behalf of Islam is all but nonexistent:
Carrying the basic connotation of an endeavor toward a praiseworthy aim, the word jihad bears many shades of meaning in the Islamic context. It may express a struggle against one’s evil inclinations or an exertion for the sake of Islam and the ummah, for example, trying to convert unbelievers [how, warfare?] or working for the moral betterment of Islamic society (“jihad of the tongue” and “jihad of the pen”).
At one point, jihad is even portrayed as a possible byproduct of Christianity in this same Oxford Encyclopedia entry — despite the fact that the founder of jihad, Mohammad, had absolutely no contact with Byzantium, aside from issuing an ultimatum to the Christian emperor Heraclius in 630 AD to the effect that if the latter did not embrace Islam, he would have only war (which proved only too true). Says the encyclopedia: “The doctrine of jihad may have been influenced somewhat by the culture of the Byzantine Empire, where the idea of religious war and related notions were very much alive. It is, however, very difficult to identify these sources.” If identifying these sources is “very difficult” — read “impossible” — why make the bold assertion? Simply because the encyclopedia, being a product of an academic age that tries to lay the blame on Christianity and the Church, cannot resist the temptation of portraying even jihad, that unique hallmark of Islam, as also being something of a Christian byproduct.One can go on and on about the aggressive white-washing campaign underway on behalf of Mohammad and certain doctrinal aspects of the faith he promulgated. Harsh measures and misogynistic statements permeate Islamic scriptures: Men may take four wives and can have sex with their female slaves captured during jihad; a woman’s witness in court is half that of a man; females inherit half of the male’s inheritance; men have “authority” over women and can beat them whenever they misbehave. All of these can be found in the Koran, which Muslims take as a doctrine of faith to be immutable and just as applicable today as in the seventh century. But academics stress only that Mohammad liberated women, who apparently suffered even worse injustices in the pre-Islamic period. (Mohammad banned the regular pre-Islamic Arab practice of burying unwanted female babies alive). The entry on women and Islam in the Oxford Encyclopedia, characterized by a markedly feminist tone, assures us that “Although certain social and economic regulations in the scripture seemingly favor men, the conditions prevailing at the time of the revelation, which seem to justify such inequality, have lapsed.” Such an opinionated statement totally contradicts the traditional belief of Muslims that the sharia is immutable. In the same vein, Leila Ahmad, author of Women and Gender in Islam, argues that the oppressive practices inflicted upon women living in Islamic lands are due to the prevalence of “patriarchal interpretations” of Islam rather than Islam itself.What’s most troubling about all the above is not that some writers make such dubious claims and arguments, but that supposedly authoritative and well-recognized professors – the “experts” of the field — are the ones pioneering this sort of academic chicanery. It is both alarming and revealing that the professors not only utilize unsound methodologies, but are not even consistent in doing so. By constantly trying to make Jesus appear all too human, and Mohammad (who was extremely human) appear as “a prophet for our time,” per one Karen Armstrong, secular academics will never refer to Jesus as the “Christ.” What the West used to construe as the Son of God and a moral leader is today just some liberal happy-go-lucky sage preaching love and passivity. And Mohammad has, in these circles, taken on the loving reputation of Christ. And herein lies academia’s ultimate aspiration: everything is relative, even the divine.
Raymond Ibrahim is the editor of the Al-Qaeda Reader, translations of religious texts and propaganda.

Scott LaFaro: Beacon for Jazz Bassists -- Home Page

2007-10-27T13:36:00.000-05:00

Scott LaFaro was one of the finest jazz bassist to ever grace the music scene. His short career, cut short by a tragic accident, is preserved on CD in such memorial perforances as 'Waltz for Debby' 'Sunday at the Village', etc., all in the company of Bill Evans and Paul Motian (drummer). His skill not only displayed in his playing but in his energy and creativity and his ability to integrate and at times lead the direction of the music was quite extraordinary, especially given the creative energy of Bill Evans on piano. Check out the website.

Scott LaFaro: Beacon for Jazz Bassists -- Home Page

Called to 'Teach'(?)!!

2007-10-27T12:09:00.000-05:00

The following brief apology for teaching was written upon the request of the Dean of Reformed Theological Seminary (at the time Allen Curry) and was part of a general request made to all the current faculty of RTS in Jackson, Mississippi in March of 2001. It reflects both my deepest understandings of what a theological educator is supposed to not only do but to 'be' as well as expressing some of my eccentric thoughts which at the time made perfect sense to me. It was unquestionably the first time the word 'f- - -t' had been used in a faculty meeting at Reformed Seminary in Jackson . . . I checked the archives to confirm this. Many of the names referred to in the footnotes are faculty, some of whom no longer serve on the faculty of RTS. Their identity is not important to the overall argument of the essay. Enjoy.

‘Called to Teach’: Theological Education

Aleatoric thoughts on Teaching in a Seminary[1] (Not just any seminary—RTS!)

By

Michael Payne

1. I am Reformed[2]
2. I am a 6 Point Calvinist (#6 covers any cracks some nosy Arminian thinks he has found in the first 5!)

3. From my earliest youth, I’ve always delighted in telling others what to do! The
failure to take any delight in being ‘told what to do’ has always been one of my most
charming shortcomings . . . and a cause of supreme sadness for my parents and Allen
Curry. [3]

Talking Points:

Speaking and Listening/ Commanding and Obeying-Answering/ Teaching and Being Taught/ Reading and Being-Read[4]

One must be able to speak to be able to listen (no private languages! Thank you Wittgenstein! Most importantly, thank you Gen. 1)
One must be in the habit of obeying to understand commands (meaning is application—however paradoxical that may sound! Thank you Jesus! The Gospel of John! Eph. 5:8-10; Phil 1:9-10)
One must be teachable to understand what teaching in fact is (thank you Paul! 2 Tim 2:2)
Being-Read is a sine qua non of being good readers

Two fundamental premises are buried in the above: robust living and vigorous listening
No good teacher can avoid either and in fact be a good teacher.
Living is more than occupying space and consuming/discharging energy.[5]
Listening is more than waiting for the cue dangling in the question/comment from the student allowing one to discharge more energy in the form of a pre-packaged answer to a question no one is really asking.[6]

None of us is invented from wholecloth, nor do we invent from wholecloth. Teachers are embroidered and dedicated to lives of embroidery. Our commitment to truth holds us painfully and uncompromisingly close to the actual/real, not the fanciful.

This is what Alisdair MacIntyre means by saying that we are inherently traditioned people. As teachers we embody what came before and extend into the future the renewing force of the message we bear.

This is why Our personal narratives are important to the fulfilling of our calling: it matters ‘who’ we are (the indicative) and not just ‘what we say’ (the assertorical).

Living: too many seminary professors hold their life in like a bakebean fart at a Baptist cookout and only let it slip out sideways a little at a time when they think there’s nobody noticing. (Thank you Frederich Buechner)[7]

Teaching in a theological setting is acutely ‘practical’ which presupposes the existence of evidence of practicality, or ‘usefulness’ or ‘transformational power’ and not simply rhetorical persuasiveness! There is an ‘imperatival’ quality to teaching in a seminary—much like the call to preach. Unless I the teacher convey this ‘oughtness’, a ‘nothing else will do’ quality in my teaching, I fail to inspire and to motivate true obedience. In this way, teaching is subversive in the most prophetic sense of the word: whatever hinders repentance must be deligitimized (overthrown) in/with/by my teaching. This is the force of Luke 11:34 / / keeping our eyes single / self-deception is always a problem/ as Luke describes it “see to it that the light within you is not darkness” (v35a)/

Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German lyric poet once wrote to an aspiring young poet: [Here I substitute ‘teach’ for ‘write’]: “Go into yourself. Search for the reason that bids you to teach; find out whether it is spreading out its roots in the deepest places of your heart, acknowledge to yourself whether you would have to die if it were denied you to teach. This above all—ask yourself in the stillest hour of your night: must I teach? Delve into yourself for a deep answer. And if this should be affirmative, if you may meet this earnest question with a strong and simple ‘I must’, then build your life according to this necessity; your life even into its most indifferent and slightest hour must be a sign of this urge and a testimony to it.” (Romans 1:14-15)

In the end, my ‘calling’ is implicity/ by definition (?) a grounding in Another and not ‘self-groundedness’! This is because ‘calling’ is profoundly covenantal. It is after all the Covenanting God who calls us into covenant (Lev. 26:12) . . . this serves as the basis/ground of all knowledge and expression (in other words, all of life is missional and hence a spectacle to the whole universe 1 Cor. 4:9; 2 Cor. 4:11). Calvin’s words are covenantal and hence penetrating: “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consist of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves. But, while joined by many bonds, which one precedes and brings forth the other is not easy to discern. In the first place, no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he ‘lives and moves’ (Acts 17:28). . . . Yet, however the knowledge of God and of ourselves may be mutually connected, the order of right teaching requires that we discuss the former first, then proceed afterward to treat the latter.” (Institutes Bk.I, 1,1,3)

Covenant is a gift of God which makes ‘gift giving’ possible (Eph. 2:8, Jas 1:17)
Teaching is profoundly a ‘gift-giving’ exercise for those called to teach.
The Covenant God is a speaking God, thus, listening (yielding) is required (Dt. 6:4ff) Refusal to listen is breaking the covenant (Jer 5:21, 7:13, 11:10)

Teaching is thus a call to ‘listen’, a call to ‘answer’, a call to ‘obedience’. It is a call addressed to the teacher, and through him/her to fellow travelers/pilgrims. The call to teach is a Covenant call from the Covenanting God.
[1] For background on the eccentric punctuation employed in the following, see Saul Bellow’s Mr. Sammler’s Planet and Humboldt’s Gift.
[2] Unlike Bill Clinton, my word is my bond.
[3] Ralph Davis has confirmed privately that he shares my distaste for taking orders!
[4] No, I’m not going to comment on all of these binary relations . . . these are aleatoric thoughts, remember!
[5] David Jussely, along with William Faulkner, agrees with me on this.
[6] For an illustration of such stultifying teaching see Ben Stein’s character in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
[7] This is a direct quote from Buechner’s Treasure Hunt (one fine novel if I must say so myself). I am working with Andy Hoffecker and Sam Larsen on this.

Deconstructing Defeater Beliefs: Leading the Secular to Christ by Tim Keller

2007-10-25T19:48:00.000-05:00

DECONSTRUCTING DEFEATER BELIEFS: Leading the Secular to Christ By Tim Keller, Senior Pastor, Redeemer Presbyterian Church

A. THE IMPLAUSIBILITY STRUCTURE OF A CULTURE
1. Defeater beliefsEvery culture hostile to Christianity holds to a set of 'common-sense' consensus beliefs that automatically make Christianity seem implausible to people. These are what philosophers call "defeater beliefs". A defeater belief is Belief-A that, if true, means Belief-B can't be true.
Christianity is disbelieved in one culture for totally opposite reasons it is disbelieved in another. So for example, in the West (as we will explore below) it is widely assumed that Christianity can't be true because of the cultural belief there can't be just one "true" religion. But in the Middle East, people have absolutely no problem with the idea that there is just one true religion. That doesn't seem implausible at all. Rather there it is widely assumed that Christianity can't be true because of the cultural belief that American culture, based on Christianity, is unjust and corrupt. (Skeptics ought to realize, then, that the objections they have to the Christian faith are culturally relative!) So each culture has its own set of culturally-based doubt-generators which people call 'objections' or 'problems' with Christianity.
When a culture develops a combination of many, widely held defeater beliefs it becomes a cultural 'implausibility-structure.' In these societies, most people don't feel they have to give Christianity a good hearing – they don't feel that kind of energy is warranted. They know it just can't be true. That is what makes evangelism in hostile cultures so much more difficult and complex than it was under 'Christendom.' In our Western culture (and in places like Japan, India, and Muslim countries) the reigning implausibility-structure against Christianity is very strong. Christianity simply looks ludicrous. In places like Africa, Latin America, and China, however, the implausibility structures are eroding fast. The widely held assumptions in the culture make Christianity look credible there.
2. Dealing with the implausibility structure todayMany books on reaching post-moderns today give the impression that people now need virtually no arguments at all. The 'apologetic' is a loving community, or the embodiment of social concern. I couldn't agree more that post-modern people come to Christ through process, through relationships, though mini-decisions, through 'trying Christianity on'. They are pragmatic rather than abstract in their reasoning, etc. But the books that are against any arguments at all seem to miss the fact that the extreme pragmatism of non-Christians today is part of a non-Christian world-view. Our post-enlightenment culture believes what has been called expressive individualism. That is – 'it is true if it works for me.' This obviously is based on the view that truth and right-or-wrong is something I discover within my own self and consciousness.
What then of the claim that "post-modern people don't want arguments – they just want to see if it works for them"? All right – as with any form of contextualization, let us as evangelists enter – adapt partially – to the culture of expressive individualism. Let us show them the reality of changed lives. Let us use narratives rather than long strings of logic. But at some point you must also challenge the sovereignty of individual consciousness. Jesus is Lord, not my personal consciousness. At some point, the idea that "it is true if and only if it works for me" must be challenged. We have to say: "Ultimately that is correct – in the very, very long run, obeying the truth will 'work' and bring you to glory and disobeying the truth will 'not work' and bring you to ruin. But in the short run (like – even throughout all the rest of your life!) obeying the truth might lead to ostracism, persecution, or other suffering.
There have been many times in New York City that I have seen people make professions of faith that seemed quite heart-felt, but when faced with serious consequences if they maintained their identification with Christ (e.g. missing the opportunity for a new sexual partner or some major professional setback) they bailed on their Christian commitment. The probable reason was that they had not undergone deeper 'world-view change'. They had fitted Christ to their individualistic world-view rather than fitting their world-view to Christ. They professed faith simply because Christianity worked for them, and not because they grasped it as true whether it is 'working' for them this year or not! They had not experienced a 'power-encounter' between the gospel and their individualistic world-view. I think apologetics does need to be 'post-modern.' It does need to adapt to post-modern sensibilities. But it must challenge those sensibilities too. There do need to be 'arguments.' Christianity must be perceived to be true, even though less rationalistic cultures will not demand watertight proofs like the older high-modern western society did.

B. A 'SANDWICH' APPROACH TO SHARING THE GOSPEL 1. Two parts to sharing the gospelWhat this means now is that there are two parts to sharing the gospel in a particular culture – a more 'negative' and a more positive aspect.
a) The more negative aspect has to do with 'apologetics' – it consists in deconstructing the culture's implausibility structure. In short, this means you have to show on the culture's own terms (that is, by its own definitions of justice, rationality, meaning) that its objections to Christianity don't hold up.
b) The more positive aspect of sharing the gospel is to connect the story of Jesus to the base-line cultural narratives. In short, you have to show in line with the culture's own (best) aspirations, hopes, and convictions that its own cultural story won't be resolved or have 'a happy ending' outside of Christ.
2. A sandwich of three layersBut I think the overall best way to 'present the gospel' is a kind of 'sandwich' approach to these two parts. The following assumes there is a process and a series of conversations between you and the person who doesn't believe.
a) Brief gospel summary. First, the gospel must be presented briefly but so vividly and attractively (and so hooked into the culture's base-line cultural narratives) that the listener is virtually compelled to say "It would be wonderful if that were true, but it can't be!" Until he or she comes to that position, you can't work on the implausibility structure! The listener must have motivation to hear you out. That is what defeaters do – they make people super-impatient with any case for Christianity. Unless they find a presentation of Christ surprisingly attractive and compelling (and stereo-type breaking) their eyes will simply glaze over when you try to talk to them.
b) Dismantle plausibility structure. Alvin Plantinga wisely asserts that people avoid Christianity not because they have really examined its teachings and found them wanting, but because their culture gives huge plausibility (by the media, through art, through the expertise and impressive credentials of its spokespersons) to believe a series of defeater beliefs that they know are true, and since they are true, Christianity can't be. The leading defeaters must be dealt with clearly and quickly but convincingly. Defeaters are dealt with when the person feels you have presented the objection to Christianity in a clearer and stronger way than they could have done it.
c) Longer explanation of the person and work of Christ. Now, if people find you have at least undermined the defeaters in a listener's mind, you can now return to talking at greater length about creation, fall, redemption, and restoration. If you try to do apologetics before you pull off a quick, attractive presentation of Christ, people's eyes will glaze over and they will become bored. But if you try to do a very lengthy explanation of the meaning of Christ's cross and resurrection before you convincingly deal with the defeaters, they won't listen to you either.
Summary of the approach:1. The attractive gospel – Brief gospel connected to baseline narratives2. Why Christianity can be true- Dismantling doubts and defeaters3. The Biblical story of the gospel – A more thorough telling
C. THE PROCESS1. The gospel connected to baseline cultural narrativesThe doctrines of creation, sin, grace, and faith must be presented in connection with 'baseline cultural narratives' – Jesus must be the answer to the questions the culture is asking. Don't forget – every gospel presentation presents Jesus as the answer to some set of human-cultural questions, like 'how can I be forgiven?' (Western moral individualism) or 'how can I be free?' (post-modern expressive individualism) or 'how can we over come evil forces in the world?' (contemporary Africans) etc. Every gospel presentation has to be culturally incarnated, it must assume some over-riding cultural concern, so we may as well be engaged with the ones that we face! Christianity must be presented as answers to the main questions and aspirations of our culture. Two of the over-riding concerns are:
a) Cultural concerns. First a concern for personal freedom and identity. Contemporary people ask: Who am I? I'm not completely sure – but I do know I have to be free to create my own identity and sense of self. Whatever spirituality I have, it must leave me free to experiment and seek and not be a 'one size fits all.'
Second, a concern for unity in diversity. Contemporary people ask: How can we get past exclusion and exclusivism? How can we live at peace in a pluralistic world? How can we share power rather than using power to dominate one another? How can we embrace the 'Other' – the person of a sharply different viewpoint and culture?
b) Gospel resources. Gospel resources for personal freedom. Kierkegaard's depicts sin in The Sickness unto Death – as 'building your identity on anything but God' which leads to internal slavery and narrowness of spirit. This is a gospel presentation that connects well today. (Kierkegaard, like Nietzsche and other great thinkers, was a good century 'ahead of his time.') Kierkegaard also deconstructed mere religion and moralism and contrasted them with the gospel. (See his Three ways of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the spiritual.) Building your identity on any finite created thing besides God leads to the idolization of that factor and the demonization of anyone who lacks it.
Gospel resources for living at peace. If you build your identity mainly on your class, or race, or culture, or performance you will necessarily vilify and disdain anyone who lacks what you consider the cornerstone of your own significance. Therefore, building your identity on God leads to hatred of the other, to social conflict and oppression. Jonathan Edwards (again, a man ahead of his time) recognized that if your highest love and greatest is your nation, your family, your career, even your religious performance, then you will disdain other nations, families, classes of people, and other religions. If anything but God is our "highest good" (i.e. if we make anything an idol) then we have to demonize or at least exclude some part of creation. But if God is our ultimate good, then we are free to develop deep love for (what Edwards calls) "Being in general." If we truly made the Lord our ultimate beauty and Savior and good – we would have an equal love and joy equally in all creation, all individuals, all people groups, even in all nature and created things.
In any case, there is no religion with a more powerful ground-motif for accepting enemies and the 'Other' than Christianity. We are the only faith that has at its heart a man dying for his enemies, forgiving them rather than destroying them. This must be presented to our culture as an unparalleled resource for living in peace in a pluralistic society.
Summary As we said above, people's eyes will 'glaze over' if you start your presentation with 'reasons Christianity is true'. Christianity must be attractive to people before they will sit still for a presentation of intellectual credibility. A person must come to the point where he or she says, "that would be great if it were true – but is it?" Then and only then will they sit still for a discussion on why Christianity is true. So Christianity has to first be presented attractively and compellingly. We must show post-modern western culture – with its aspirations for personal freedom and unity in diversity – that its 'Story' can only have a 'happy ending' in Jesus Christ. Then we can deal with the main objections (the 'defeaters') in our culture that make it hard to believe that Christianity is true.
Here is an example of a brief gospel presentation:

Why we are here. The one God is a community – a Trinity of three persons who each perfectly know and defer to one another and love one another and therefore have infinite joy and glory and peace. God made a good, beautiful world filled with beings who share in this life of joy and peace by knowing, serving, and loving God and one another.
What went wrong. Instead, we chose to center our lives on ourselves and on the pursuit of things rather than on God and others. This has led to the disintegration of creation and the loss of peace – within ourselves, between ourselves, and in nature itself. War, hunger, poverty, injustice, racism, bitterness, meaninglessness, despair, sickness, and death all are symptoms.
What puts the world right. But though God lost us he determined to win us back. He entered history in the person of Jesus in order to deal with all the causes and results of our broken relationship with him. By his sacrificial life and death he both exemplifies the life we must live and rescues us from the life we have lived. By his resurrection he proved who he was and showed us the future — new bodies and a completely renewed and restored new heavens and new earth in which the world is restored to full joy, justice, peace, and glory.
How we can be part of putting the world right. Between his first coming to win us and his last coming to restore us we live by faith in him. When we believe and rely on Jesus' work and record (rather than ours) for our relationship to God, his healing kingdom power comes upon us and begins to work through us. Christ gives us a radically new identity, freeing us from both self-righteousness and self-condemnation. This liberates us to accept people we once excluded, and to break the bondage of things (even good things) that once drove us. He puts us into a new community of people which gives a partial, but real, foretaste of the healing of the world that God will accomplish when Jesus returns

2. Deconstructing the implausibility structureWhat are the dominant defeaters in contemporary Western civilization? These are the dominant defeaters discovered in a recent survey I did of young under 25 year olds in NYC who are not Christian. Below six 'defeaters' are stated and answered in a nutshell. Why Christianity can't be true – because of:
a) The other religions. Christians seem to greatly over-play the differences between their faith and all the other ones. Though millions of people in other religions say they have encountered God, have built marvelous civilizations and cultures, and have had their lives and characters changed by their experience of faith, Christians insist that only they go to heaven — that their religion is the only one that is 'right' and true. The exclusivity of this is breath taking. It also appears to many to be a threat to international peace.
Brief response: Inclusivism is really covert exclusivism. It is common to hear people say: "No one should insist their view of God better than all the rest. Every religion is equally valid." But what you just said could only be true if: First, there is no God at all, or second, God is an impersonal force that doesn't care what your doctrinal beliefs about him are. So as you speak you are assuming (by faith!) a very particular view of God and you are pushing it as better than the rest! That is at best inconsistent and at worst hypocritical, since you are doing the very thing you are forbidding. To say "all religions are equally valid" is itself a very white, Western view based in the European enlightenment's idea of knowledge and values. Why should that view be privileged over anyone else's?
b) Evil and suffering. Christianity teaches the existence of an all-powerful, all-good and loving God. But how can that belief be reconciled with the horrors that occur daily? If there is a God, he must be either all-powerful but not good enough to want an end to evil and suffering, or he's all-good but not powerful enough to bring an end to evil and suffering. Either way the God of the Bible couldn't exist. For many people, this is not only an intellectual conundrum but also an intensely personal problem. Their own personal lives are marred by tragedy, abuse, and injustice.
Brief response: If God himself has suffered our suffering isn't senseless. First, if you have a God great and transcendent enough to be mad at because he hasn't stopped evil and suffering in the world, then you have to (at the same moment) have a God great and transcendent enough to have good reasons for allowing it to continue that you can't know. (You can't have it both ways.) Second, though we don't know the reasons why he allows it to continue, he can't be indifferent or un-caring, because the Christian God (unlike the gods of all the other religions) takes our misery and suffering so seriously that he is willing to get involved with it himself. On the cross, Jesus suffered with us.
c) The ethical straitjacket. In Christianity the Bible and the church dictate everything that a Christian must believe, feel, and do. Christians are not encouraged to make their own moral decisions, or to think out their beliefs or patterns of life for themselves. In a fiercely pluralistic society there are too many options, too many cultures, too many personality differences for this approach. We must be free to choose for ourselves how to live — this is the only truly authentic life. We should only feel guilty if we are not being true to ourselves — to our own chosen beliefs and practices and values and vision for life.
Brief response: Individual creation of truth removes the right to moral outrage. 1) Aren't there any people in the world who are doing things you believe are wrong that they should stop doing no matter what they believe inside about right and wrong? Then you do believe that there is some kind of moral obligation that people should abide by and which stands in judgment over their internal choices and convictions. So what is wrong with Christians doing that? 2) No one is really free anyway. We all have to live for something, and whatever our ultimate meaning in life is (whether approval, achievement, a love relationship, our work) it is basically our 'lord' and master. Everyone is ultimately in a spiritual straitjacket. Even the most independent people are dependent on their independence and so can't commit. Christianity gives you a lord and master who forgives and dies for you.
d) The record of Christians. Every religion will have its hypocrites of course. But it seems that the most fervent Christians are the most condemning, exclusive, and intolerant. The church has a history of supporting injustices, of destroying culture, of oppression. And there are so many people who are not Christian (or not religious at all) who appear to be much more kind, caring, and indeed moral than so many Christians. If Christianity is the true religion — then why can this be? Why would so much oppression have been carried out over the centuries in the name of Christ and with the support of the church?
Brief response: The solution to injustices is not less but deeper Christianity. 1) There have been terrible abuses. 2) But in the prophets and the gospels we are given tools for a devastating critique of moralistic religion. Scholars have shown that Marx and Nietzsche's critique of religion relied on the ideas of the prophets. So despite its abuses, Christianity provides perhaps greater tools than the other religions do for its own critique. 3) When Martin Luther King, Jr. confronted terrible abuses by the white church he did not call them to loosen their Christian commitments. He used the Bible's provision for church self-critique and called them to truer, firmer, deeper Christianity.
e) The angry God. Christianity seems to be built around the concept of a condemning, judgmental deity. For example, there's the cross — the teaching that the murder of one man (Jesus) leads to the forgiveness of others. But why can't God just forgive us? The God of Christianity seems a left-over from primitive religions where peevish gods demanded blood in order to assuage their wrath.
Brief response: On the cross God does not demand our blood but offers his own. 1) All forgiveness of any deep wrong and injustice entails suffering on the forgiver's part. If someone truly wrongs you, because of our deep sense of justice, we can't just shrug it off. We sense there's a 'debt.' We can then either a) make the perpetrator pay down the debt you feel (as you take it out of his hide in vengeance!) in which case evil spreads into us and hardens us b) or you can forgive – but that is enormously difficult. But that is the only way to stop the evil from hardening us as well. 2) If we can't forgive without suffering (because of our sense of justice) its not surprising to learn that God couldn't forgive us without suffering — coming in the person of Christ and dying on the cross.
f) The unreliable Bible. It seems impossible any longer to take the Bible as completely authoritative in the light of modern science, history, and culture. Also we can't be sure what in the Bible's accounts of events is legendary and what really happened. Finally, much of the Bible's social teaching (for example, about women) is socially regressive. So how can we trust it scientifically, historically, and socially?
Brief response: The gospels' form precludes their being legends. The Biblical gospels are not legends but historically reliable accounts about Jesus' life. Why? 1) Their timing is far too early for them to be legends. The gospels, however, were written 30-60 years after Jesus' death – and Paul's letters, which support all the accounts, came just 20 years after the events. 2) Their content is far too counter-productive to be legends. The accounts of Jesus crying out that God had abandoned him, or the resurrection where all the witnesses were women — did not help Christianity in the eyes of first century readers. The only historically plausible reason that these incidents are recorded is that they happened. The 'offensiveness' of the Bible is culturally relative. Texts you find difficult and offensive are 'common sense' to people in other cultures. And many of the things you find offensive because of your beliefs and convictions, many will seem silly to your grandchildren just as many of your grandparents' beliefs offend you. Therefore, to simply reject any Scripture is to assume your culture (and worse yet, your time in history) is superior to all others. It is narrow-minded in the extreme.
Two final notes on dealing with 'doubts' and 'defeaters.'

It is critical to state these defeaters in the strongest possible way. If a non-Christian hears you express them and says, "that's better than I could have put it" then they will feel that they are being respected and will take your answer more seriously. You will need to have good answers to these defeaters woven in redundantly to everything you say and teach in the church.
Our purpose with these defeaters or doubts is not to 'answer' them or 'refute' them but to deconstruct them. That is, to "show that they are not as solid or as natural as they first appear" (Kevin Vanhoozer). It is important to show that all doubts and objections to Christianity are really alternate beliefs and faith-acts about the world. (If you say, "I just can't believe that there is only one true religion" — that is a faith-act. You can't prove that.) And when you see your doubts are really beliefs, and when you require the same amount of evidence for them that you are asking of Christian beliefs, then it becomes evident many of them are very weak and largely adopted because of cultural pressure.

3. Steps into faithWhat about the positive? If you are ready to move toward the exploration of faith in Christianity, you must be –
a) Deconstructing doubt. Your doubts are really beliefs, and you can't avoid betting your life and destiny on some kind of belief in God and the universe. Non-commitment is impossible. Faith-acts are inevitable.
b) Knowing there's God. You actually already believe in God at the deep level, whatever you tell yourself intellectually. Our outrage against injustice despite how natural it is (in a world based on natural selection) shows that we already do believe in God at the most basic level, but are suppressing that knowledge for our convenience. The Christian view of God means world is not the product of violence or random disorder (as in both the ancient and modern accounts of creation) but was created by a Triune God to be a place of peace and community. So at the root of all reality is not power and individual self-assertion (as in the pagan and post-modern view of things) but love and sacrificial service for the common good.
c) Recognizing your biggest problem. You aren't spiritually free. No one is. Everyone is spiritually enthralled to something. 'Sin' is not simply breaking rules but is building your identity on things other than God, which leads internally to emptiness, craving, and spiritual slavery and externally to exclusion, conflict, and social injustice.
d) Discerning the difference between religion and the gospel. There is a radical difference between religion — in which we believe our morality secures for us a place of favor in God and in the world — and gospel Christianity — in which our standing with God is strictly a gift of grace. These two different core understandings produce very different communities and character. The former produces both superiority and inferiority complexes, self-righteousness, religiously warranted strife, wars, and violence. The latter creates a mixture of both humility and enormous inner confidence, a respect for 'the Other', and a new freedom to defer our needs for the common good.
e) Understanding the Cross. All forgiveness entails suffering and that the only way for God to forgive us and restore justice in the world without destroying us was to come into history and give himself and suffer and die on the Cross in the person of Jesus Christ. Both the results of the Cross (freedom from shame and guilt; awareness of our significance and value) and the pattern of the Cross (power through service, wealth through giving, joy through suffering) radically changes the way we relate to God, ourselves, and the world.
f) Embracing the resurrection. Because there is no historically possible alternative explanation of the rise of the Christian church than the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ. And if Jesus was raised from the dead as a forerunner of the renewal of all the material and physical world, then this gives Christians both incentive to work to restore creation (fighting poverty, hunger, and injustice) as well as infinite hope that our labors will not be in vain. And finally, it eliminates the fear of death.

Frame-Poythress Website

2007-10-25T19:20:00.001-05:00

Two of the most influential thinkers (both my former seminary professors) in my theological development are John Frame and Vern Poythress. I highly recommend the following website as a way of keeping up with their work as well as discovering first hand what they are up to in their respective fields of expertise (John Frame in Theology and Vern Poythress in New Testament Interpretation). In coming weeks and months I will highlight some of their works in an attempt to bring a wider audience to their ideas.

http://www.frame-poythress.org/blog/blog.html

The 'Worship Wars'

2007-10-25T19:13:00.000-05:00

The following essay by Tim Keller provides an excellent overview and analysis of the so-called 'Worship Wars' and attempts to offer a solution to what appears to be an otherwise impossible polarization of views. This is an excellent initiation into the discussion and a wise proposal for future directions.

http://download.redeemer.com/pdf/learn/resources/Evangelistic_Worship-Keller.pdf

Beneath the Underdog

2007-10-24T19:46:00.000-05:00

Haiku and Jazz Piano Improvisation

2007-10-24T19:12:00.000-05:00

I am a former jazz musician as well as being a theologian and pastor. My instrument was the string bass. I worked for a number of years as a jazz musician before pursuing theological education and a call to ministry. In coming installments I will reflect on jazz and on the special place it has had in my life. The single most influential recording in my personal musical history is 'Waltz for Debby' by the Bill Evans Trio. There have been others of course, 'A Love Supreme' by John Coltrane, for example. The following link is to the Bill Evans webpage and has some wonderful video samples of Bill's music and illustrates the hypnotic effect his playing has on any serious listener. One of my favorite recordings is the episode on 'Piano Jazz' where Marian McPhartland interviews Bill and brings out some quite wonderful insights from Bill on his playing and his philosophy. I highly recommend this recording and it is available for download at ITunes. Evans once wrote that jazz improvisation is like 'haiku' poetry . . . he's correct. Enoy the music:

http://www.billevanswebpages.com/

Violence and Ethnicity

2007-10-23T17:40:00.000-05:00

The Following Essay explores the issue of violence and ethnicity and the missiological implications of a renewed understanding of the Cross of Christ and the Body of Christ--The Church-- on seeking to ameliorate the causes of violence.

http://www.ocms.ac.uk/transformation/results_authors.php?mm_aut=515&Submit=Search

Living Between the Lines: Part Two

2007-10-23T17:20:00.000-05:00

The following is Part Two of a Two Part Essay Published by Westminster Theological Journal in 2006.

Re-Thinking the Ethics of Parsimony
Part Two: ‘Cultivated Deviance’ or (Not Cheating Contingency)

By

Michael W. Payne

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”
. . . Archilocus

You may know a truth, but if it’s at all complicated you have to be an artist not to utter it as a lie.
Iris Murdoch, An Accidental Man

Introduction
In Part One of this Two Part essay, we provided an overview of the increasing interest on the part of philosophers in reconstructing the moral-ethical landscape particularly as it relates to the role literature and the imagination might play in the work of ethics. In Part Two I will (1) argue that as Christian ethicists we should take a more hopeful (although not un-critical!) view toward the discoveries represented by both Nussbaum and Rorty. The insights both authors reflect lead us to re-assess the role of rules and particularly the impact “rule-based” or “act-based” ethical approaches have had in obscuring the dramatic quality of moral experience as suggested by Scripture itself. The attractiveness of rules and “act-based” ethics is inherently misguided. We will discover that its appeal is based, among other things, on an impoverished understanding of moral reasoning that is predicated on a fallacious view of moral concepts and terms as univocal and literal. I will argue secondly (2) that this misunderstanding leads inevitably to an oversimplification of moral living, one that fails to encompass the full range of interconnected faculties that constitute the believer as a moral agent construed in a way most consistent with scripture. Pursuant to this end, I will examine the suggestive use made by the apostle Paul of the cluster of terms: dokimazo, aesthesis and aestheteria as they illustrate the complex nature of moral judgment and the role of imaginative discernment in Christian living. It is again hoped that this discussion will provide a preliminary attempt to re-think ethics from a more robustly Christian and theological perspective.
I. Contra ‘Thin’
Why are we so attracted to “rules” and “act-based” versions of ethics and morality? If we employ the oppositional terms: thick/thin, unstable/stable and imagination/reason we can perhaps see more easily what the perceived advantages are for rules and acts as sound bases for construing ethics and the moral life.
For one thing, act-based ethics, which are largely “rule-governed” or criteria-driven ethical theories, are appealingly simple (or are at least imagined to be simple). This is reflected in the tendency to employ what Bernard Williams identifies (borrowing from Clifford Geertz) as thin as opposed to thick moral concepts.[1]
The term thin is meant to portray the “obviousness” of the moral rules or concepts, their “literal” and “univocal” qualities, which makes them more likely to qualify as objectively perceived facts (open to any observer—regardless of context), in other words, just what we need to guide actions unequivocally—to provide the “ought” basis for establishing obligations universally. As Mark Johnson describes this tendency, “they must have a single definite meaning, so that their application to concrete situations is simply a matter of determining whether the necessary and sufficient conditions defining the concept actually obtain in experience (i.e., actually apply to the concrete situation).”[2] They are thin because putatively they are unfettered by context, social and historical contingency (stable) and last but not least, ascertainable by reason—something universally shared by all men (thus overcoming the charge of relativism). Thin concepts/terms are, for example, those such as right, wrong, lie or don’t lie, kill or don’t kill, do not steal, duty, obligation, etc. These terms or concepts require little or no imaginative reasoning since they are understood to be literal and univocal.
However, there are dangers in so construing such terms/concepts as univocal and somehow literal in meaning. For one thing, to do so presupposes a referential (representational) theory of language, which as we saw earlier with Wittgenstein, simply isn’t workable with natural human languages. After all, what of those forms of expression which are not reducible to such "word-object” delimitations, e.g., poetic language, etc. Such reductive theories of word meaning minimize a language’s (expressions) richness (their application potential, or surplus of significance). Recall our earlier observations on Wittgenstein and the way he observed language works in the real world. Here we can draw our focus more specifically on the question of “meaning” as follows—Wittgenstein writes:
But if we had to name anything which is the life of the sign, we should have to say it was its use.[3]
The sign (the sentence) gets its significance from the system of signs, from the language to which it belongs. Roughly: understanding a sentence means understanding a language.[4]
For a large class of cases—though not for all—in which we employ the word ‘meaning,’ it can be explained thus: the meaning of a word is its use in the language.[5]
Wittgenstein’s point here is that the use of an expression is the key to its meaning, i.e., the particular or distinctive role it plays in the various activities where it is actually employed by speakers (communicators). What is it then that speakers do when they employ specific terms or expressions? This, according to Wittgensetin, is the key to determining the “meaning” of any word or series of words. The life of an expression (Wittgenstein’s understanding of “meaning”) is its being a part of a language and so to understand the word or expression (sentence) is to understand a language.
John Frame employs a similar line of argument in his discussion of the role of application in determining meaning, with particular reference to the relationship between our knowledge of the world and our knowledge of the Scripture as law. Frame writes, “that no matter how elaborate a linguistic explanation is, it is always the responsibility of the hearer to relate the explanation to the situation in which he is living and thus to understand the language.”[6] This is something that must be done by the individual, not vicariously by someone for someone else (no ventriloquism allowed!). Frame goes on to note, “ therefore any law will require knowledge of the world if it is to be properly applied.”[7] Thus, meaning is application, entailing one’s ability to use the language/expression/sentence/word, in ways which include answering basic questions about its context, possible translations, possible implications, etc. Thus, “when one lacks knowledge of how to ‘apply’ a text, his claim to know the ‘meaning’ becomes an empty—meaningless—claim.”[8] Frame draws the implication even further by noting that there is an interrelatedness between language (scripture/law) and the facts of history (use/grammar/culture etc.) which makes the relationship one of mutuality not of hierarchy. He writes,
And now I can make an even more surprising statement: just as the law is a fact, so the facts are laws in a sense; they have normative force. Why? Because as we have seen, the facts determine the meaning of the laws. To discover the meanings of the facts is at the same time to discover the specific applications of the laws—applications that are as binding as the laws themselves. . . . the law itself commands us to live wisely—to live according to an understanding of reality. It commands us to be governed by the facts, to take account of what is. Thus the law gives to the facts a normative status.[9]
I would argue that it was a recognition of this very way in which language functions as a polysemous and polyvocal system which enlivened the exegetical insights of a Calvin or a Luther.[10] Take for example Paul’s admonition in Ephesians 4:28: “Those who steal must stop stealing.”[11] In Calvin’s 31st Sermon on Ephesians which he preached between 1558 and 1559, Calvin says,
Now when St. Paul speaks here of thefts, he does not refer to such thieves as men punish with whipping or with hanging, but to all kinds of sly and crafty dealing that are used to get other men’s goods by evil practices such as extortion, deeds of violence and all other similar things. . . . Although a merchant may be accounted a man of good skill, yet he will still have a store of tricks and wiles, and they will be like nets laid for the simple and such as are without experience, who do not perceive them. The case is the same with those who follow the mechanical arts, for they have the skill to counterfeit their works in such a way that men shall be deceived by them. Again, with regard to prices, there is no trusting the sellers. . . . In short, there is no class of men in which there are not infinite faults and extortions to be seen for every man wishes to get the upper hand and make himself stronger than the rest.[12]
In commenting on the eight-commandment (Exodus 20:15): “Thou shalt not steal,” Martin Luther in his Treatise on Good Works (1520) takes the command to extend far beyond the obvious, i.e., theft. According to Luther, it covers “every kind of sharp practice which men perpetrate against each other in matters of worldly goods. For instance, greed, usury, overcharging, counterfeit goods, short measure, short weight and who could give an account of all the smart, novel and sharp-witted tricks which daily increase in every trade.”[13]
Even if one were to grant that a large number of moral/ethical experiences are governable by these thin moral terms/concepts, the simple fact is that much (perhaps most!) of our moral experience is not. The error, in part at least, arises in generalizing from these more or less obvious moral cases to the less obvious ones as if the same kind of reasoning is operating in both.
Building on a thin construal of ethics, Alan Donagan has proposed a possible schematic form for determining what is and what is not appropriate for the moral person to do in any given situation. He argues that specific precepts will usually if not always fit one of the following three options:
1. It is always permissible to do an action of the kind K (permissions).
2. It is never permissible to do an action of the kind K (prohibitions).
3. It is never morally permissible not to do an action of the kind K, if an occasion occurs on which one can be done (strict obligations).[14]
Thus, any possible act is one that the agent may do, may not do (under any circumstances) and or must always do if possible. Any system of morality would then be charged with providing a series of precepts compatible with the schema above that would cover the kinds of acts performed or considered in ordinary experience. However, the difficulty lies in determining which kinds of actions fit which of the three possible schemas. Additional premises are needed which might inform moral agents in any possible moral setting, whether one or another possible act does or does not conform with the precept under consideration. Herein lies the problem . . . “the system is not axiomatic, but rather involves the bringing of various kinds of actions under the one central concept.”[15] But how do we judge which do and which do not fall under this one central concept? These judgements are not directed by “rules,” unless one is prepared to follow an infinite regress of rules upon rules, ad infiinitum. Judgement of this sort is not reducible to the kind of formalized reasoning active at the “rule” level of moral understanding.[16] Are we then to appeal to an intuitive awareness of what does and what does not fit under the specified rule? And is this a collective intuition made and sustained by a community?
The appeal of “rule-based” ethics and morality is largely centered around the stable core of most of our rules which seem to present little or no difficulty in applying. The difficulty arises in new and “fuzzy” applications. These new applications often cause us to reconsider the precise nature of the previously undisputed normative rule, thus throwing us into confusion as to its previously established role as absolute moral norm.[17] H. L. A. Hart offers an enlightening illustration of this problem in his study of a statute that prohibited the use of wheeled vehicles in a park. Hart writes,
A legal rule forbids you to take a vehicle into the public park. Plainly this forbids an automobile, but what about bicycles, roller skates, toy automobiles? What about airplanes? Are these, as we say, to be called ‘vehicles’ for the purpose of the rule or not? If we are to communicate with each other at all, . . .then the general words we use . . . must have some standard instance in which no doubts are felt about its application. There must be a core of settled meaning, but there will be as well, a penumbra of debated cases in which words are neither obviously applicable nor obviously ruled out. These cases will each have some features in common with the standard case; they will lack others or be accompanied by features not present in the standard cases. . . . If a penumbra of uncertainty must surround all legal rules, then their application to specific cases in the penumbral area cannot be a matter of logical deduction, and so deductive reasoning, which for generations has been cherished as the very perfection of human reasoning, cannot serve as a model for what judges, or inideed anyone, should do.[18]
What the penumbral cases incite in us is the awareness that there is an inextricable and productive relationship between the rule (norm) and application made by the moral agent in any given context. This relationship is not reducible to deductive reasoning (connecting dots) but something far more complex. This complexity is reflected in the use of thick moral concepts.
Thick concepts are not minimalistic but robust and encompass more than simply externalized states of affairs produced by certain acts, whether moral or otherwise. Rather, they convey both normative and descriptive content, content that exceeds our ability to provide an exhaustive set of necessary and sufficient conditions to qualify. These would include moral concepts such as wisdom, insight, trustworthiness, understanding, treacherous, courageous, etc. These concepts “are not only normative terms, conveying a [positive as well as] negative evaluation, but indicate the way in which the believer acted improperly [or properly].”[19] How, for example, is insight reducible to a state of being “rule-governed?” What of wisdom or understanding? Is there an algorithm or procedure for determining these even in principle?[20] These concepts are all deeply connected to the penumbral areas, where grasping the contours of the situation and making application, all contribute to our overall understanding of what the norm(s) in fact are.
This of course raises the thorny issue of exactly how “normative” or “absolute” the rules, commands, etc., really are if in fact they seem to enlarge themselves, i.e., encompass more disparate areas of experience, which increasingly blurs the previously imagined sharp boundaries of meaning. This is directly related to what was alluded to earlier in this essay regarding the “determined” and “under-determined” nature of rules, commands, principles, etc. However, this is only a problem if we are operating with an impoverished understanding of word/sentence meaning (e.g., the early Wittgenstein). Vern Poythress has noted that this is reflected in many Christian readings (treatments) of the Bible itself and has led to inumerable fallacies/mistakes in interpretaion-application. Poythress writes,
A key area in our exegesis and our understanding of the Bible is the area of word meanings and the use of words in the Bible. It is also an area in which we can easily make mistakes. Some people have imagined that words in the Bible all have a special technical precision and give us automatically fixed, rigid categories. These fixed categories are then thought to exclude any kind of flexibility in the use of perspectives. I believe the opposite is the case.[21]
As Poythress goes on to note, natural languages are not capable of the kind of precision implicit in univocalist theories of language and meaning. The very terms/words employed in any natural language are those currently available—the so-called vocabulary stock. This stock is finite, whereas “the speakers of the language are capable of saying an indefinite number of things about an indefinite number of subjects using these words.”[22] This is possible due to the fact that “the words themselves, as members of the lexical system, can be applied to a range of cases.”[23] This constitutes the variation and distribution of terms based on purpose. Likewise, the very boundaries of the meanings of terms are what Poythress refers to as “fuzzy.” For example, the very act of distinguishing between one term and another as a means of classification leads inexorably to the creation of “intermediate cases.” Poythress notes,
Sometimes we will be unable to say easily which category the case belongs to. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? In such cases, we must beware of an inappropriate appeal to the law of excluded middle. The law of excluded middle says that, for any proposition A, either A is true or not-A is true. This law, however, may not help solve complex mixed cases. ‘Either it is raining or it is not raining,’ someone says. But it may be misting, something between an ordinary rain and no water at all.[24]
The only way to eliminate this aporia is to invent terms with the kind of precision we desire to eliminate this ambiguity. In doing so, however, we are no longer dealing with a natural language, but an invented, technical language. Embellishing this point, George Steiner has noted,
But the cardinal issue is this: the ‘messiness’ of language, its fundamental difference from the ordered, closed systematization of mathematics or formal logic, the polysemy of individual words, are neither a defect nor a surface feature which can be cleared up by the analysis of deep structures. The fundamental ‘looseness’ of natural language is crucial to the creative functions of internalized and outward speech. A ‘closed’ syntax, a formally exhaustible semantics, would be a closed world. . . . New worlds are born between the lines [emphasis mine].[25]

In addition, as Poythress goes on to show, we cannot control how readers/interpreters will in fact draw the boundaries themselves. With natural languages, there is a range of variation and potential meaning that constitutes what Wittgenstein referred to as “family resemblances.”[26] Poythress observes that whatever resemblances there may be within this particular “family” of terms, it is always a matter of degree. How closely must the term reflect commonalities of the core for it to be granted admission (family status) into the circle? People making this decision may disagree on what the necessary and sufficient conditions are and when they have been met. Acknowledging this doesn’t, however, lead to skepticism concerning the validity of our interpretation, but rather to a greater appreciation of just how connected the scriptures are to human experience in the world. Poythress writes,
We ought to recognize, then, the fluid character of meaning boundaries and the complex character of resemblances in dealing with language use both outside and inside of the Bible. Such recognition can only be for the good, since it gives us more accurate insight into what the Bible says and how much language tells us about the world.[27]
In some ways the issues again boil down to questions of “unity” and “diversity,” or that twentieth-century cause celebre known as “pluralism.” Once we talk about “family resemblances,” “intermediate cases,” and gradations of meaning, aren’t we left with no real “meaning” in the end?[28] If there is no univocal/literal “core” to our understanding of “ethical” (e.g., the Ten Commandments), why bother talking about being ethical at all? Doesn’t it end up meaning whatever we want it to mean?
The answer is a resounding ‘No’! The problem lies buried in the very conception of “unity” we are searching for. Is this concept derived from our reading of Scripture or is it one we have imported into our thinking from somewhere else?[29] Poythress has observed that among the reasons for our faulty conceptualizations of precision as it relates to both language and moral concepts is our disposition to believe that “theological knowledge should resemble the certainty and rigor of Euclid’s system.”[30] In addition there are those influences which “derive from suppositions about God’s knowledge.” Here is perhaps an even greater misconception which needs correction. Poythress writes,
We know that human thinking and human knowledge are often partial and flawed. But since God knows all things exhaustively, he is able to isolate each bit of truth and know it precisely. Christians sometimes assume, therefore, that this kind of knowledge is our ideal and that, when God speaks to us, his message will approximate this ideal.[31]
What we discover when reading the Bible is, however, just the opposite. Poythress notes that we often fall prey to such a reductionist reading of the Bible in our attempt to suppress the very “diversity” we find expressed in the Bible—the very Bible confessional believers proclaim to be the fruit of verbal and plenary inspiration. The Gospels illustrate Poythress’ point. Given the “diversity” of these accounts, how do we lay claim to some immune “core” or univocal meaning? Poythress argues that the only reason we would strive for such a univocal meaning would be the implicit assumption that such a meaning is the only way to secure “meaning.” Poythress states,
As one who believes in plenary, verbal inspiration of the canonical books of the Bible, I find such a view incorrect. The full text of each Gospel is what God says as well as what the Evangelist says. There is no tension here between divine speaking and human speaking, any more than there is a tension between the fact that Christ’s speeches are God speaking and a human being speaking. . . . It follows, then, that the very diversity of the Gospels is a divine diversity. . . . And so we are driven back to ask what God’s view is of the historical events recorded in the Gospels. The surprising answer is simply that God’s view is the Gospels themselves, in their unity and diversity.[32]
Applied to ethics, we can argue that the stability (unity) of the moral concept/rule, and its surplus of significance/application (the use to which it is put), is itself related to the source of the moral concept, namely, God Himself. Yet, it is the triune God’s very inexhaustibility and the very nature of special revelation contained in scripture (e.g., through the deployment of what we refer to as human language—which is dilemma prone[33]) that is at the root of the often troubling relatedness of the agent’s role in determining the meaning of any moral term/concept at any given point in time. In other words, paralleling the “fuzziness” inherent in language qua language, there is both a “determined” (meaning) and an “under-determined” (application/significance) quality resident in all moral rules and concepts as well. The “unity” of Christian truth is grounded in the unity of the Godhead. As Rowan Williams aptly puts the matter, “If there is one God, the acts of that God should, prima facie, be consistent; the community established by the divine action should have some unifying points of reference; and reflective speech of that community should in some way articulate the divine consistencey, or, at the very least, be able to deal with and contain what seems to make for fragmentation.”[34] Where do we look for the pattern in determining the unifying speech of the believer? Williams suggests that “our own consideraion of how we should speak of the unity of doctrinal [moral?] language must be shaped by the methods displayed in these writings [scripture].”[35] The Bible is our canon, and it establishes itself as our point of reference. As a book of discord and polyphony displayed diachronically and meant to be read diachronically, the Bible “is the canonical text of a community in which there are limits to pluralism.”[36] What does it mean, however, to read the scripture (law/rules/commands) `diachronically? What does it mean to in fact live diachronically? This is the key to understanding a thick conception of Christian living.
II. ‘Toward a Thick version of Christian Living’ : The Storied Imagination
An ethics of parsimony is in many ways generated and sustained by what Wittgenstein referred to as “our craving for generality.”[37] Such “cravings” are often based on what we have discovered are misguided beliefs in the “literal” and “univocal” meaning of rules/commands (which provides their imagined stability). We have seen how such assumptions are in fact problematic to a valid reading of rules and more specifically, the texts themselves (which is where these rules are embedded)—which begs the question of what “rules” are as language forms. The answer to this question determines what in fact an appropriate reading of rules/texts would then look like?[38]
A corrective is thus needed if we are to answer to the full complexity of the moral experience, an experience that includes factors ignored for the most part by an ethics of parsimony. What is arguably gained by its purported universality, vis a vis, its objectivity (detached, ahistorical quality), its universally obligatory character (transcultural quality), and its universally accessible qualities (reason-based), is offset by what is in fact lost, namely, a serious recognition of the complexity of moral/ethical living—which is reflected in the personal, existential and social-historical aspects of our moral experience and knowledge. Employing a spatial metaphor, Charles Taylor has noted, “I can be ignorant of the lie of the land around me—not know the important locations which make it up or how they relate to each other. This ignorance can be cured by a good map. But then I can be lost in another way if I don’t know how to place myself on this map.”[39] How do I “place myself on the map,” i.e., make moral sense of my life and my choices, if I continue to disregard or at best relegate to a lower order, these other factors which constitute me as a moral being?
A more fruitful response to this aporia lies in the reconfiguring of moral experience in light of what I will call, following the lead of Rowan Williams, a dramatic reading of scripture (and by extension—the self-world relation itself!).[40] This reading is made up of two moments that converge simultaneously, to produce the kind of moral vision needed for a more robust picture of Christian moral experience. These two moments are the visional (what Williams refers to as diachronic) and the aesthetic (the aesthesis referred to, for example, by Paul in Philippians 1:9). I will limit somewhat my remarks regarding the visional and concentrate more fully on the aesthetic moment.
A visional reading of life (and texts) is one that attempts to see life as more than a mere succession of events or occurrences (whether found in life or in scripture), and in doing so attempts to establish a more synoptic or “narrative” viewpoint.[41] Whereas the ethics of parsimony (employing the model we began with) focuses almost exclusively on the arguably simplest form of objectivity, e.g., rules, commands, etc. (and their application to specific situations of crisis)[42], the visional recognizes that the part is known only in relation to the whole. In Williams’ words, the ethics of parsimony is modeled along the lines of the “synchronic” rather than the “diachronic.” The “synchronic” which suggests attention to the literalness of the rule or command (or text) in fact diminishes the true literalness of the text.[43] This is achieved by furthering an abstraction, namely, the ahistorical “present” tense of interpretation and understanding. Williams writes,
To attend to a ‘literal’ sense . . . is to insist upon there being some controlling force in the fact that meaning comes to light in a process of learning to perceive; it is to challenge the idea that there could be an adequate reading of the text which ignored the time of the text itself, its own movement, with the time of the writer and the writer’s world opened up to us through the movement of the text. It is to protect against any reading which elided or softened or simply ignored the tensions realized and worked through in th time of the text . . . concern with the literal, the diachronic, is a way of resisting the premature unities and harmonies of a non-literal reading . . . in which the time that matters is only the present of the reader faced with the ‘spatial’ expanse of a text cut off from its own inner processes and the history of its production.[44]
What appears as guardian of the “literal” becomes a haven of timelessness. The attraction to the “synchronic” is in fact more about the reader’s aversion to risk and the provisionality of meaning, and less about getting at the truth of things. The “dilemma proneness” of language is tentatively obviated by our addiction to pseudo-literalness (i.e., parsimonious readings of rules and commands) and the implicitly diremptive strategy of misconstruing the nature of literalness itself. The Christian reader who should know better than to harbor erroneous “fact-value” distinctions, in point of fact, is the one who propagates such notions in his very reading of texts and rules. In a dramatic reading, as Williams describes it, we see “fact” and “value” merge in the narrative field of human existence. Recognizing this reality enables the individual (reader) to develop what Paul Ricoeur refers to as “narrative intelligence.”[45]
Ricoeur has noted that there is a deeply profound relationship between story (narrative) and human life. Drawing on Aristotle’s definition of mythos as “plot,” he develops a dynamic conception of the relation between subject (individual) and history (time). Narration (storytelling) involves the bringing together (unifying) of what would otherwise be seen as discontinuous (discordant) actors, events, etc., into an intelligible form (whole). In doing this narrative displays time in both its qualities as “open” and “closed.” Ricoeur writes,
One can say that two kinds of time are found in every story told: on the one hand, a discrete, open, and theoretically undefined succession of incidents; . . . on the other hand, the story told presents another temporal aspect characterized by the integration, the culmination, and the ending in virute of which a story gains an outline. In this sense I would say: to compose a story is, from the temporal point of view, to derive a configuration from a succession.[46]
Thus, following Ricoeur’s suggestion, the parameters are established for interpreting human experience from a perspective that embraces the totality of possible moments of existence, without making each individuated moment insignificant or meaningless. Through what I am calling a dramatic reading, this can be achieved without the sundering of either the need for boundaries (the ‘determined’) or the capacity for extension (the ‘under-determined’). What do I mean?
Ricoeur uses the dialectical partnering of ‘sedimentation’ and ‘innovation’ to explicate this relationship. By this he makes reference to the living quality of the historically mediated narrative (text/tradition) that continues to be “innovative,” i.e., producing new applications and understandings. There is a fixed quality to the tradition or text (narrative in this instance), but the text that is interpreted (engaged) requires imaginative re-figuring if it is to enter the contemporary situation in which the reader now engages. The innovation is rule-governed, i.e., not helter skelter, but also not encased in a kind of “servile repetition.” Rather, there is what Ricoeur refers to as a “calculated deviance,” a kind of “regulated deformation.” All of this is meant to produce a transfigured reader. In the end, the goal for Ricoeur (and for us) is the development of what he calls “phronetic intelligence,” or what scripture refers to as “wisdom” and “insight.”[47] Hans Frei describes how the process is one whereby the biblical texts themselves ‘seek to overcome our reality’:
We are to fit our own life into its world, feel ourselves to be elements in its structure of universal history . . . Everything else that happens in the world can only be conceived as an element in this sequence; into it everything that is known about the world . . . must be fitted as an ingredient of the divine plan.[48]
The Problem of Contingency Once More: Syncrhonicity [Plato] vs. Dichronicity [Aristotle]
Referring back to our earlier discussion of the difference between Plato and Aristotle we can perhaps see what is involved in this idea of “calculated deviance” as described by Ricoeur. The issue in a sense is one of “normativity.”[49] In a now classic essay on the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy,[50] the philosopher Isaiah Berlin made use of the “hedgehog” and the “fox” distinction to distinguish between two kinds of thinkers. Taking a line from the Greek poet Archilocus—“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”—Berlin classified the hedgehog as one “who relates everything to a single coherent vision,” while the fox is “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels, seizing upon the essence of a vast variety of experiences and objects for what they are in themselves.”[51] The hedgehog is drawn to the “universal” or general where the fox is focused upon the “particular” or the individual event or experience. The former downplays differences and minimizes distinctions seeking unity or harmony, whereas the latter gives equal weight to each particular thing, detail or nuance and leaves the table a mess from the hedgehog’s perspective.
These respective tendencies have a rich heritage that goes back several millennia in the history of philosophy, starting arguably with Heraclitus and Parmenides and eventually in the contrasting approaches of Plato and Aristotle.[52] Heraclitus’ emphasis (the fox?) on movement, change and empiricism is countered by Parmenides’ focus upon unity and oneness. The former is perceived to lead to irrationalism and skepticism (after all, if everything is constantly changing and we are bombarded by new bits of experience on a minute by minute basis), whereas the latter is a prototype of rationalism, imposing unity and coherence where none seems to exist. Perhaps no one in the history of ideas better illustrates the “hedgehog” of Archilocus’s poem than Plato,[53] who pictured human life as a movement (pilgrimage?) from “appearance” to “reality,” namely, a move away from the world of sense experience (where desire rules and distorts ) as a source of knowledge, which in the end could only give one “opinion,” to an apprehension of the Forms, through what Plato refers to as anamnesis or “recollection,” and the exercise of “reason,” which could and did offer “certainty.” Plato thus sets up a tension between “lived experience” and “thought” which parallels his division of man’s essential constitution as being made up of “higher” and “lower” elements. Life is largely about gaining control, or mastery over one’s lower parts, thus the “good man” is the master of himself.[54] Success in this process means the rule of the “higher” over the “lower,” or in Plato’s thought—reason over the desires or appetites. As a result, order is achieved where otherwise chaos or anarchy would rule. Rather than the insatiable appetite of desire ruling man’s life, a kind of centering or self-collectedness attains hegemony. To be rational is to be calm, collected and cool . . . not given to extremes of any kind. The former is a condition Plato describes as “healthy” whereas the latter one of disease or disfigurement.[55]
“Order” is an important concept for Plato and the role of well-functioning reason is to see or to “perceive” that order. Let me explain what I mean. For Plato, reason is the ability to understand and to “see.” It is “visional” by nature. It is also the ability to give a reasoned explanation of that order, i.e., to be governed by reason is to be governed by a true vision of things, to have the right understanding of things. It is to grasp the natural order as it really and truly is. This order gives us the proper balance between the various priorities we are meant to have in our living and loving. The goal is then to see correctly and to be governed by that vision (reason). The true vision functions then as the standard or measuring line for our activities. The part finds its true meaning only in relation to the whole of things.
The whole of things is summed up for Plato in the Idea of the Good, that which sums up, encompasses, all the bits and pieces of Good we encounter only in partial form through experience. Plato describes it thusly:
For surely, Adeimantus, the man whose mind is truly fixed on eternal realities has no leisure to turn his eyes downward upon the petty affairs of men, and so engaging in strife with them to be filled with envy and hate, but fixes his gaze upon the things of the eternal and unchanging order, and seeing that they neither wrong nor are wronged by one another, but all abide in harmony as reason bids, he will endeavor to imitate them and, as far as may be, to fashion himself in their likeness and assimilate himself to them. Or do you think it possible not to imitate the things to which anyone attaches himself with admiration [56]
Plato believed that a vision directed toward the world of experience that is ruled by contingency and shadows, is to be trapped in the world of illusion. These are what Plato refers to as lovers of sight, sound and the spectacle. His now famous parable of the cave dwellers[57] illustrates the point. Some degree of awareness is possible before escape from the Cave, but it is largely only an illusory, defective kind of awareness.[58] What is needed is a vision of the Form of Good . . . the very Form itself. The Forms in Plato’s philosophy come to be understood as “changeless” and “eternal” objects of a kind of spiritual vision (not ordinary knowledge). They are known by “direct experience,” unmediated by ordinary language or other media. They are “unitary” and “simple” and not fully expressed in the sensible world at all. Everything in the physical and spatial world is at best a “copy” and two or three removes from the original.[59]Most importantly, for Plato, the Good is “person-neutral.”
Since what Plato regards as the “lower parts of the soul” can only draw the individual to the shadowy and partial in experience, the result will always be to lead us to a “veil of ignorance.” Art, part of the ordinary world of perceptible things, is hence only illusion, a shadow. The artist is thus engaged in a form of “deceptive practice.” Remember, the goal is to remember (“recollect” as Plato described it) the Form(s), and art or anything aesthetic, and “person-specific” or “person-directed” can only provide a caricature of the truth. In addition, by appealing to the desires it promotes a kind of collusion between the senses and desires. For Plato, the highest pleasures can only be found in contemplating the eternal, changeless and unitary Good. Art, that is by definition open to interpretation, leads only to folly. We are to seek the “pattern” of things, the fixed and certain, not the fluid and alterable aspects of things. The work of the artist then deceives us into believing we have gained access to the true nature of things when in reality we are still in the cave. Better to be the “craftsman” where measuring and counting (mathematics) are the most useful aids, appealing as they do to those parts of the soul that are most reliable, i.e., calculating and measuring (Republic 602C,603A). The artist celebrates the deception and enslaves us to the “mean petty slavery of the particular” (Symposium 210D).
So much for the unitary [synchronic] vision of the hedgehog; what of the fox? The “fox” of course is Aristotle. We won’t revisit our earlier remarks concerning Aristotle’s advance over Plato except to note that whereas Aristotle agrees that all actions aim at some good, the task of ethics is primarily to discover the chief or most final good.[60] In other words, the good Aristotle has in mind is not some Platonic Form but somehow the good for a specific man or for the individual himself.[61] Practical normativity is thus best (perhaps only) understood through relation to the agent’s specific good and that given as “end” (telos). Not a generic end, but a specific “end” for the individual under discussion. There is a resulting vertigo from this conceptualization. Aristotle moves away from the grasping a the Form (Good), which for Plato is more or less unrealizable anyway, to the securing of the particular good for the particular individual. The “good” is not codifiable (reducible to generalizable rules), but is realized through experience itself [diachronic]. This is illustrated in Aristotle’s understanding of the Practical Syllogism. It is recalled that the syllogism is about deductive logic, or the movement from major premise (some universal knowledge, i.e., in this instance some moral precept let’s say), to minor premise, namely, the situation that confronts the agent, to conclusion, i.e., what is to be done as a deductive conclusion. The syllogism works only if the major premise is in fact codifiable, i.e., apt for serving as a major premise in a syllogism. However, we are confronted with the dubiousness of such an idea once we enter the real world of language and its irreducible qualities (recall Aristotle’s previous comments regarding the “Ultimate Particular”). Can any rule “capture” the mind of God in the sense that it is unequivocally and unambiguously articulated in the maxim (whatever maxim one chooses). Does the “real” ever in fact fully meet [exhaust] the “ideal?” If not, how do we proceed? The answer lies in recognizing that we have imposed a version of rationality that may in fact be erroneous. John McDowell writes,
A deep-rooted prejudice about rationality blocks ready acceptance of this. A moral outlook is a specific determination of one’s practical rationality: it shapes one’s view about what reasons one has for acting. Rationality requires consistency; a specific conception of rationality in a particular area imposes a specific form on the abstract requirement of consistency—a specific view of what counts . . . The prejudice is the idea that acting in the light of a specific conception of rationality must be explicable in terms of being guided by a formulable universal principle.[62]
It is precisely this prejudice that Aristotle’s formulation of the syllogism challenges. Why must there be a “formulable universal principle” suited to serve as the major premise of the syllogism? The answer is simple . . . it is a logical necessity, i.e., it is necessary only if one needs to proceed according to the canons of deductive logic! But no matter how tightly one construes the “universal principle,” the potential for dilemma still threatens. This is what constitutes “hard cases.” These are cases that resist any resolution by standard argument form. They usually resolve into comments like, “you are not looking correctly,” or “don’t you see?” Either one is simply not following the rules in terms of concept formation and application or one is delusional. The former is the frustration that arises when the seemingly obvious and compelling principle is somehow missed. But implicit in this conclusion is the reliance on a version of rationality that simply wouldn’t allow other factors to play a role in moral application. The problem is one of “detachment” or “disengagement” as the necessary precondition and criteria for deductive correctness. After all, it simply isn’t possible to arrive at clear and exact conclusions unless one is able to step outside human experience, language and culture to make the necessary decisions relative to deductive logic. Of course, we cannot step outside the “forms of life” or what Stanley Cavell refers to as “the whirl of organism.” Cavell writes concerning the complexity of both self-understanding and what we might call “other-understanding” as follows:
We learn and teach words in certain contexts, and then we are expected, and expect others, to be able to project them into further contexts. Nothing insures that this projection will take place (in particular, not the grasping of universals nor the grasping of books of rules), just as nothing insures that we will make, and understand, the same projections. That on the whole we do is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, senses of humor and of significance and of fulfillment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when a explanation—all the whirl of organism.[63]
Thus, Aristotle reformulates the syllogism in light of his refusal to posit a codifiable (universal) major premise or principle. Rather, the major premise is transformed into a legitimate subject of desire (orexis) that is then transferable into an action which comports with the desire. The minor premise is what must be changed or altered in order for the desire to be operationalized. For Aristotle this major premise is the individual’s conception of the kind of life worth leading, one that in the end is characterized as “blessed.” This overarching “end” is the measure against which one judges practically how this end or “good” is to be actualized in my own experience.[64] It appears that according to this model of the syllogism, one comes to know what he is to do, not by applying rules but by being a certain kind of person, i.e., the kind who sees situations in a certain and distinctive way.
To return to Ricoeur’s notion of “calculated devience” mentioned above, it now appears that there is good reason to allow for a range of under-determinedness in our understanding of rules or principles. The alternative is both the positing of an illusion with respect to what rules can do, what language can do, and what we can do. There is a certain vertigo that arises with recognition of this. However, the answer to this vertiginous experience is not a return to the rules, but something else.
A Dramatic Reading (Performance): Laying Hold of the Imagination
Recall our earlier connection between dramatic (ethical) living and “dramatic reading.” Gerard Loughlin writes concerning this notion,
A literal reading of the text is one that follows it to the letter; not in the sense of trying to discern the frailties of its historical reference; nor in seeking for the disclosure of the human condition within its interstices; but in the sense of making oneself over to its narrative in order to be made anew.[65]
In many ways, as Loughlin points out, this refers to our realizing or bringing to performance what the Scriptures portray, i.e., the identity they call us to emulate or embody. This calls for our “identifying ourselves in the story being contemplated . . . its movements, transactions, transformations . . . an active working through of the story’s movement in our own time.”[66] This is what Nicholas Lash refers to so poignantly in his article “Performing the Scriptures.”[67] Interpreting the Bible is, according to Lash, somewhat akin to interpreting a musical score or dramatic script.[68] To interpret a Beethoven score, it is not sufficient to simply “play the notes” correctly, or even to interpret the music consistently with its past performances (interpretations). These are certainly necessary, but what is needed is more that technical accuracy. A kind of creative fidelity is necessary, one that can only be achieved “through performance” and in the awareness that there is an audience of both listeners and critics. All three make the music happen. What is true of Beethoven and Shakespeare is fundamentally true of the Scriptures themselves. Lash states:
I want to suggest, first, that, although the texts of the New Testament may be read, and read with profit, by anyone interested in Western Culture and concerned for the human predicament, the fundamental form of the Christian interpretation of scripture is the life, activity and organization of the believing community. Secondly, that Christian practice, as interpretative action, consists in the performance of texts which are construed as ‘rendering’, bearing witness to, one whose words and deeds, discourse and suffering, ‘rendered’ the truth of God in human history. The performance of the New Testament enacts the conviction that these texts are most appropriately read as the story of Jesus, the story of everyone else, and the story of God.[69]
The point Lash seems to be asserting is one that directly corresponds to the paradigm being suggested here, namely, to avoid overly-simplistic assumptions about reading and about interpretation, the very issues that prompted our initial discussion of language and rules earlier. The only alternative to the kind of engagement we are describing above is one that succumbs to an aberrant Neo-Platonizing of language and interpretation, a perspective reflected in the early and middle dialogues of Plato himself, one that hopes of achieving a kind of God’s eye point of view on meaning—one that then makes the designative view of language dominant. No less a light that Augustine surrendered to such notions in his reflections on language and fallen-ness.[70] Once one accepts as an a priori truth that language is by definition “imperfect” since by definition it is made up of “symbols” that are inherently open to a variety of interpretations, one is forced to deny that language qua language existed before the Fall (since there was no imperfection before the Fall). Unless, that is, mental telepathy counts! And by extension, why would we need language after the consummation of history? Language is only valuable in media res. Language is in fact really only for “creaturely” communication, i.e., between creatures. Since there is always a gap between signa and res, there will always be distortion. Augustine comments:
Man as he labors on the earth, that is, as he has become dried up by his sins, has need of divine teaching from human words, like rain from the clouds. However, such knowledge will be destroyed. For while seeking our food, we see now in an enigma, as in a cloud, but then we will see face to face, when the whole face of our earth will be watered by the interior springs of water springing up.[71]
The argument being made in this essay is of course contrary to any suggestion that language’s qualities as multivalent and polysemic are inherently problematic when it comes to making sense of our lives in an ethical manner. Quite the contrary. There is something profoundly disclosive about the nature of the relationship being sustained by God with man through the mystery of language and understanding that demands our closest attention. The goal of understanding and obedience is not to identify or isolate “timeless” truths[72] and then simply connect the dots.[73] That would be more like wanting to have the candy without the wrapper. The goal is really about becoming more finely aware.[74]
Becoming ‘Finely Aware’ or ‘particularizing’ not ‘generalizing’
In her now classic work, The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch wrote, “I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.”[75] Consistent with our initial suspicion concerning the purported sufficiency of “action-based” or “belief-based” models of moral theorizing for understanding and construing ethical living, we need to complete our exploration with a brief analysis of exactly what is meant by the art of apprehension or attention with specific reference to the nature of what defines our existence as moral creatures (and specifically as believers).
The Intratextual Moment or ‘Insight’ and Moral Living in Philippians 1:9-11
And this is my prayer: that your love may abound more and more in knowledge and depth of insight, so that you may be able to discern what is best and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ, filled with the fruit of righteousness that comes through Jesus Christ—to the glory and praise of God (Philippians 1:9-11).[76]
The New Testament provides us with an important illustration of what I am referring to as a thick conception of moral living—in the writings of Paul, particularly in the use Paul makes of the term aisthesis (translated “insight”) in Philippians 1:9 as a practical extension of epignosis (“knowledge”).[77] Early in Paul’s thanksgiving to God for what has been produced in the lives of the Philippians (1:9-11), Paul specifies the kinds of things he is intent on praying for in his hopes for an enlargement of their experience as followers of Christ.
He begins by praying for an abundance of love (v.9) to be experienced and manifested both individually (existentially) and in the community (corporately). Secondly, he prays for an increase in “knowledge and depth of insight” (v.9). It is particularly the relationship between the former “love” and the latter (“insight”) that interests us here, because in an important sense, insight is only possible in relation to an ever-widening understanding of God and his character—namely, our love for God. Epignosis is, after all, designative of the kind of knowledge God is said to have of us (intimate), and as is elsewhere indicated, will characterize our knowledge of Him at the end of human history (1 Corinthians 13:12). This is a “full knowledge” which expresses a deep personal appropriation of God’s presence. It is not knowledge on a purely object level (intellectual) but a far more personal, intimate kind of knowledge. Giving sufficient attention to this feature should inhibit our tendency to limit the range of “important” ethical questions to issues of “doing” and “choosing.” Love surely has the added dimension of “having the power to move” us. It is of extraordinary moment in ethical reflection not simply what we are choosing to do, but “what we in fact are,” and this is directly correlative to “what (who) we love.” Our shyness concerning this is largely due to the inarticulacy associated with such a notion. It is not intellective and hence not easily described or measured. “Love” in this instance serves as a kind of “background” understanding that encapsulates the entirety of the moral experience of the believer. In includes acquired habits (practices) and paradigms for making sense of experience generally. Far from providing crystal clear decision-making procedures that are predicated on detachment and disengagement . . . the focus is on larger and often difficult to articulate goods bound up with our experience of love for God. So what is the insight that Paul then prays for?
Aisthesis (“insight”) is a hapax legomenon in the New Testament. Its meaning is, therefore, somewhat more obscure, echoing the interests expressed in the secular Greek expression indicating an understanding that flows out of experience. It is likewise employed in the LXX where of the twenty-seven occurrences; twenty-two are in the book of Proverbs.[78] Gordon Fee notes the parallel between the use of aisthesis and its near synonym sunesis in Colossians 1:9 (which is a kind of equivalent prayer of Paul’s) which reads:
That by means of all of the Spirit’s wisdom [sophia] and insight [sunesis] you might be filled with the knowledge [epignosis] of God’s will.[79]
The meaning of aisthesis is perhaps best conveyed in Ernst Kasemann’s reading: “the feeling for the actual situation at the time” which highlights what might be referred to as “phronetic intelligence.”[80] Epignosis conveys a broader scope (landscape) whereas aisthesis suggests the more specific, contextual application (portrait)—where attention to the details and nuances is most important.[81] The cognate form of aisthesis, namely, aistheteria appears in Hebrews 5:14 and is translated “senses” or more expansively, “moral faculties.” The passage reads:
But solid food is for the mature, who by constant use have trained themselves to distinguish good from evil (Hebrews 5:14).
The NIV doesn’t translate aistheteria, and translates pros diakrisin (“to discern”) by the English verb “distinguish.” Just as here in the book of Hebrews the intended result of such “training” or “exercise” is that the people might be able to “discern” the presumably finer nuances of good and evil, so in the epistle to the Philippians, Paul extends this intended result as follows in the following verse (10) only with a slightly different focus:
. . . so that you may be able to discern what is best (eis to dokimazein umas ta diapheronta) and may be pure and blameless until the day of Christ.
Here the term Paul employs is dokimazein (“discern” or “prove”)[82], within the assumed context where there might be more than one “good” thing to choose from (“what really matters”)—not to distinguish good from evil as in Hebrews 5:14.[83] As P. T. O’Brien writes,
This phrase can also be understood against the religious background of Judaism. The Jew was to choose what was essential on the basis of the law. Apparently for Paul’s opponents the norm for choosing what was excellent was found either in the attainable standards of the law, or in the behavior that does not rise above ‘earthly things’. But the Philippians who were in Christ were to make such choices of what was vital . . . on the basis of an ever increasing love—a love that penetrated more deeply into the knowledge of God and the treasures of Christ, and imparted to the Christian a keener and more delicate moral sense for specific situations.[84]
Paul seems to know something most of us don’t. Of course, this could be said of Jesus too![85] Charles Taylor has spoken suggestively of the fact that we are primarily “forest dwellers” who are most often intent (some might say “obsessed” with) on living either exclusively in pens, or at most in large and open fields.[86] Even if we cannot achieve our desired goal, we can pretend to.[87] He writes,
The forest is virtually untracked. Or, rather, there are old tracks; they appear on maps which have been handed down to us. But when you get in there, it is very hard to find them.[88]
Finding the tracks doesn’t require sharper and clearer concepts (principles), but rather a more attentive vision or perception. As Murdoch describes it, what we need is “a difference of Gestalt.”[89] Cora Diamond illustrates this with G.K. Chesterton’s choice of gestalt, namely, life as an adventure, the world as “a wild and startling place.” This picture of the world (the forest) “went with a great tenderness towards the world, a sense of modesty, and a willingness to submit to what might appear to be odd limitations.”[90] This conceptual attitude (Gestalt) provided by Chesterton doesn’t produce a criteria (set of rules for application) that then precedes the application of his Gestalt, but rather, the attitude is what provides the background or the “convictions that underlay any conscious understanding of the world.”[91] This is what provided him with a language, and images that then made his choices intelligible.
Paul provides us with numerous pictures of the world, the theatre where God both displays his character and his power but also his wonder and mystery.[92] The “new creation” is perhaps one of his most evocative images and the one with the most obvious power of ethical applicability.[93] Paul writes,
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation . . . (2 Corinthians 5:17).
It is no accident that Paul employs ktisis (“new creation”) in reference to the transformational effect of Christ’s reconciling work in, through and upon the world. Ktisis is used in Romans 8:18-25 to refer to the whole of the created order. A “new created order” has been brought into being by Christ’s reconciling work. This positions believers as “those upon whom the ends of the age” have met (1 Corinthians 10:11). The end of one time and the beginning of a new time stand as the junction point between two ages, the point where those today stand (1 Corinthians 7:31). We are not left to our own “wits” however, since we have been given the Holy Spirit (2 Corinthians 1:22; 5:5). The “already” and “not yet” perspective insures us that there is no crystalline pure logic that can be found or employed to elucidate the tracks through the forest of human experience, an experience that Paul elsewhere describes as one characterized by suffering and loss (2 Corinthians 4:7-9, 11). There is an unimpeachable ambiguity that endows human existence and human perception. Any attempt to transcend these limits (by whatever reductionistic methodology or strategy) is an act of idolatry.

Once we acknowledge the importance of perception as interpreted by Aristotle, the question as to the choice of ‘literary form’ must be answered. Why ‘fiction’? For many, the attitude toward fiction will be that reflected in the words of Descartes who wrote
“ . . . the delicacy of fiction enlivens the mind” but concluded that these are negligible merits since “fiction makes us imagine a number of events as possible which are really impossible.”[94] Nussbaum, Murdoch and Charles Taylor see things differently.
When we apply this to the question of what Taylor calls ‘strong evaluation’, i.e., questions of what kind of life is worth living, e.g., “what constitutes a meaningful or rich life as opposed to one that is empty or less than honorable,”[95] we see how literature can serve to enliven and to orient, to engage us in more than the mere analysis of ‘object relations’ and consider what confers intelligibility to our choices and our lives.[96] It was in this vein that Marcel Proust wrote,
In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.[97]

Such sentiments are echoed by David Parker who writes, “the ethical interest of imaginative literature is not then, as often implied, in ethical propositions that can be gleaned from it. It lies in the spirit, the ‘ethos’ or character of a literary work’s creative thinking, which involves both the sense of life that is expressed by the work as a whole and implicit in that, the practical discernment which mediates between and explores, the clashes of moral value it embodies." [98] Proust described the act of reading as similar to the activity of viewing a painting. De Botton writes, “whenever he [Proust] looked at paintings, Proust had a habit of trying to match the figures depicted on the canvases with people he knew from his own life.”[99] The ability to do this suggested for Proust a manageable number of human characters from which we could easily deduce common characteristics, thus enabling us to “have the pleasure of seeing people we know,” and “in places we might never have expected to do so.”[100] The novel is uniquely fitted to the ethical task since in it we do more than simply assess their (the character’s) ‘solutions’ to various moral dilemmas, but rather, “consider something more elusive which may be called their total vision of life, as shown in their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words, their assessment of others, their conception of their own lives, . . . in short the configurations of their thought which show continually in their reactions and conversations.”[101] This is what constitutes what we may call, “a man’s being or the nature of his personal vision.”[102] De Botton describes three benefits of such an approach to the novel: 1) To feel at home everywhere; 2) a cure for loneliness; and 3) the finger-placing ability. The novel gives us a sense of continuity through time with people of the past who feel much the same way we do, thus “expanding the range of places in which we feel at home.”[103] Likewise, through the experience of reading one discovers “a hugely expanded picture of human behavior, and thereby a confirmation of the essential normality of thoughts or feelings unmentioned in our immediate environment.”[104] We thus share in a collective experience and not just singularly, in isolation from others. Lastly, the novel allows us to perceive more accurately, “to put a finger on perceptions that we recognize as our own, but could not have formulated on our own.”[105] Thus the novel broadens our access to full range of reflections all of which are morally important in constituting a person’s complex attitudes and existence. These include, “a man’s meditation upon the conception of his own life, with its selective and dramatic emphases and implications of direction.”[106] In novels then, we encounter “a plurality of real persons more or less naturalistically presented in a large social scene, and representing mutually independent centers of significance which are those of real individuals.”[107]

[1] Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 128-130.
[2] Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination, 81.
[3] Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and the Brown Books, ed. Rush Rhees (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1958; 2nd ed, 1960), 4. Hereafter cited as BL/BRBK.
[4] Ibid., 5.
[5] Wittgenstein, PI, 43.
[6] John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Phillipsburg, N.J.: Presbyterian and Reformed Pub., 1987), 66.
[7] Ibid., 66.
[8] Ibid., 67.
[9] Ibid., 67-8.
[10] For an interesting appraisal of Medieval and Reformation interpretative strategies, see the essay by Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson, “The Significance of Precritical Exegesis: Retrospect and Prospect” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation, eds. Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co., 1996), 335-45.
[11] Those being referred to here are not those ‘who once stole’ but rather as indicated by the use of the present participle o kleptwn seems to refer to a recurring problem within the midst of the body of the church to whom Paul is writing.
[12] John Calvin, Sermons on Ephesians, revised version of the original translation from French by A. Golding (1577) (London: Banner of Truth, 1973), 451-52.
[13] From the translation of James Atkinson, vol. 44 of Luther Works (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1968), 107.
[14] Alan Donagan, The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 67-68.
[15] Johnson, Moral Imagination, 86.
[16] See Stephen Toulmin’s reflections on ‘field-independent’ and ‘field-dependent’ reasoning in The Uses of Argument (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 11-43.
[17] Wittgenstein argues repeatedly concerning the “preconceived idea of the crystalline purity” of logic as a mistake in understanding. On any level, Wittgenstein notes that such a picture of logic is “not a result of investigation: it was a requirement” (PI, 107). He notes, “But what becomes of logic now? Its rigour seems to be giving way here.—But in that case doesn’t logic altogether disappear?—For how can it lose its rigour? Of course not by our bargaining any of its rigour out of it.—The preconceived idea of crystalline purity can only be removed by turning our whole examination round” (PI, 107). In his Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, eds. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscome (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956; 2nd ed., 1967) hereafter cited as RFM, V-12, Wittgenstein writes: “Let us suppose that the Russellian contradiction had never been found. Now—is it quite clear that in that case we should have possessed a false idea of calculus? For aren’t there various possibilities here? And suppose the contradiction had been discovered but we were not excited about it, and had settled e.g., that no conclusions were to be drawn from it. (As no one does draw conclusions from the “Liar.”) Would this have been an obvious mistake? “But in that case it isn’t proper calculus! It loses all strictness!” Well, not all. And it is only lacking in full strictness, if one has a particular ideal of rigour, wants a particular style in mathematics.”
[18] H.L.A. Hart, “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals,” Harvard Law Review 71 (1958): 593.
[19] Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind, 20.
[20] What of ‘forbearance,’ and ‘kindness’ (1 Corinithians 13:4) which are aspects of love? How can “noble,” “pure,” ‘lovely,” and “admirable” (Philippians 4:8) be rule-governed?
[21] Vern S. Poythress, Symphonic Theology: The Validity of Multiple Perspectives in Theology (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Academie Books, 1987), 55.
[22] Ibid., 56-7.
[23] Ibid., 57.
[24] Ibid., 65.
[25] George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 228.
[26] Wittgenstein wrote, for example, “Would it be any wonder if the technique of calculating had a family of applications” (RFM, V-8D)? “Why should I not say that what we call mathematics is a family of activities with a family of purposes” (RFM, V-15C)? With reference to number, he wrote: “Why do we call something a ‘number’? Well, perhaps because it has a –direct-relationship with several things that have hitherto been called number; and this can be said to give it an indirect relationship to other things we call the same name. And we extend our concept of number as in spinning a thread we twist fibre on fibre” (PI, 67B). In the very next remark he writes, “For I can give the concept ‘number’ rigid limits in this way, that is, use the word ‘number’ for a rigidly limited concept, but I can also use it so that the extension of the concept is not closed by a frontier” (PI, 68).
[27] Poythress, Symphonic Theology, 66. Poythress develops these insights further with regard to interpretation theory in his God-Centered Biblical Interpretation (Phillipsburg, N.J.: P&R Publishing, 1999).
[28] I cannot pursue this question fully due to limitations of scope (and publication!), but an excellent place to begin is Kevin J. Vanhoozer, Is There a Meaning in this Text? (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing, 1998).
[29] See Wittgenstein’s earlier comments on the ‘crystalline purity of logic’. This is what Wilfrid Sellars referred to as the “Myth of the Given” in his “Empricism and the Philosophy o fMind,” Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 176.
[30] Poythress, Symphonic Theology, 47.
[31] Ibid., 48.
[32] Ibid., 48-9.
[33] I owe this observation and the productive use he makes of it, to Robert J. Fogelin’s excellent essay “Wittgenstein’s critique of philosophy” in The Cambridge Companion to Wittgenstein, eds. Has Sluga and David G. Stern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 54.
[34] Rowan Williams, “The Unity of Christian Truth,” in On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell Pub., 2000), 21.
[35] Ibid., 22.
[36] Rowan Williams, “The Discipline of Scripture,” in On Christian Theology, 56. In stressing the “unity’ that emerges from the narrative, Paul Ricoeur employs the contrastive pairing of “discordant concord” in his “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” in A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination ed. Mario J. Valdes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 426.
[37] Wittgenstein, BL/BRBK, 17. Paul Ricoeur discusses this problematic in terms of the polarization between idem identity and ipse identity. The former tending toward generalization and stability (sedimented) and the latter being more fluid and act-governed/articulated (innovative). For more on this see Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, translated by Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 117-123.
[38] In “The Discipline of Scripture” Rowan Williams observes how what we often call fundamentalism was a reaction against more sophisticated hermeneutical approaches that went overboard in the opposite direction. As a consequence, “literal” came to be identified “with ‘historical’, only “historical could now only be applied to a univocally descriptive and exact representation of particular sequences of ‘fact’” (48). For further reflection on these matters one should consult Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974).
[39] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 41.
[40] Rowan Williams, “The Discipline of Scripture,” 44-59. The following also shows strong reliance on Charles Wood, Vision and Discernment: An Orientation in Theological Study (Atlanta, Ga.: Scholars Press, 1985), esp. 57-78; as well as Paul Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of A Narrator,” 425-37.
[41] This is decidedly not a “view from nowhere” (e.g., Thomas Nagel) but a profoundly “intratextual” viewpoint. See Hans Frei, “The ‘Literal Reading’ of Biblical Narrative in the Christian Tradition: Does it Stretch or Will it Break?” in The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, ed. Frank McConnell (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 36-77.
[42] Edmund Pincoffs, “Quandary Ethics,” in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy eds. Stanley Hauerwas and A. MacIntyre (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983), 92-112.
[43] Such confusion arises by the failure to see the subtle yet important distinction between “letteralness” and “literalness.” For more on this see the insightful discussion by Gerard Loughlin, “Following to the Letter: The Literal Use of Scripture,” Literature and Theology, Vol. 9, No. 4 (December 1995), 370-82. For a more complete analysis by Loughlin, see his Telling God’s Story: Bible, Church and Narrative Theology (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
[44] Rowan Williams, “The Discipline of Scripture,” 47.
[45] Paul Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of A Narrator,” 428.
[46] Ibid., 427. For more on this theme in the writings of Paul Ricoeur, one should consult his Time and Narrative 3 vols. Translated by Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), esp. vol. 3.
[47] Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator,” 428-430.
[48] Hans Frei, The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), 3.
[49] This takes us back to the issues that drove the “internalism/externalism” debate that is perhaps best exemplified in the debates of the 17th and 18th centuries in Britain. On this see Stephen Darwall, The British Moralists and The Internal ‘Ought’: 1640-1740 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).
[50] Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (New York: New American Library, 1957).
[51] Ibid, 7-8.
[52] For more on this see Colin Gunton’s excellent work in The One, the Three and The Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[53] To generalize about Plato’s thought on any point is to tread on pretty thin ice. However, some generalizations can be made with due respect being given to the shifts and changes in his thought as reflected in the various dialogues written over an extended period of time. For example, Plato moves from a somewhat straightforward version of “realism” with respect to perception and the Forms, i.e., a kind of “imminent universal” idea, to a more “transcendent model” version of the Forms (cf., Theaetetus and Republic respectively). For more on this see G. M. A. Grube, Plato’s Thought (1935; repr. London, 1980); Richard Kraube, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Plato (Cambridge University Press, 1992).
[54] Republic, 430E.
[55] Republic, IV, 444D-E.
[56] Republic, IV, 500B-C.
[57] Plato’s Republic and Phaedo are the best places to begin in analyzing his theory of Forms and the illustration of the cave. For the best recent translation and analysis of the Republic, see Robin Waterfield’s translation of Plato’s Republic (Oxford: Clarendon Press,, 1993); for the Phaedo, see David Gallop’s translation of Phaedo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). For useful and accessible commentary on Phaedo, see David Bostock, Plato’s Phaedo (Oxford, 1986). For thorough and accessible analysis of Republic, see Julia Annas, Introduction to Plato’s Republic (Oxford, 1981).
[58] Plato refers to this as eikasia, a state of vague, image-ridden illusion.
[59] For example, the carpenter makes a table (a copy of the Form) which is then drawn by the artist (three removes from the original). He (the artist) does so from a singular and limited point of view! On the problem of mimesis in Plato and its extension in the history of western philosophy, see Willaim Schweiker, Mimetic Reflections: A Study in Hermeneutics, Theology and Ethics (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990), esp. 15-17.
[60] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, [hereafter cited as EN] I.1-2, trans. W.D. Ross (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). Also see Julia Annas, The Morality of Happiness (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 3-43.
[61] EN, I.4.
[62] John McDowell, “Virtue and Reason,” in Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 58.
[63] Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge University Press, 1994),52.
[64] Aristotle writes, “If, then, there is some end (telos) of the things we can do, an end which we wish for because of it itself, while we wish for the other things because of it; and if we do not choose everything because of something else . . . then it is clear that this would be the good, and the best [good]. So surely as far as our lives are concerned knowledge of this has great influence, and just like archers with a target we would be more like to achieve what we ought? (EN, 1094 a 18-24).
[65] Gerard Loughlin, “Following to the Letter,” 379.
[66] Rowan Williams, “The Discipline of Scripture,” 50.
[67] Nicholas Lash, “Performing the Scriptures,” in his collection titled: Theology on the Way to Emmaus (London: SCM, 1986), 37-46.
[68] Hans Urs von Balthasar explores similar themes, particularly the latter, i.e., “dramatic existence,” in his Theodramatik, vol. I, Prolegomena (Johannes Verlag: Einsiedein, 1973); also see ET: Theo-Drama: Theological Dramatic Theory, Volume 1, Prolegomena, trans. by Graham Harrison (San Francisco, Ca.: Ignatius Press, 1988).
[69] Nicholas Lash, “Performing the Scriptures,” 42.
[70] See the earlier discussion of language in Part One of this essay. In addition, see the fine work of James K.A. Smith, The Fall of Interpretation: Philosophical Foundations for a Creational Hermeneutic (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 133-148.
[71] Augustine, De Genesi contra Manichaeos libri 2.5.6.
[72] This idea corresponds to what Frei so convincingly argues against, namely, creating a false criteria whereby the text of Scripture is measured against false standard, e.g., whatever historical criticism deems the ‘sense’ of the historical.
[73] Dorothee Solle, Phantasie und Gehorsam: Uberlegungen zu einer kunftigen christlichen Ethik (Stuttgart: Kreuz Verlag, 1968). Solle argues for “answer” rather than “obedience” since the latter suggests an automaton-like response, i.e., without ‘thinking’—something she feels the German people have demonstrated an all-too common felicity for in their history. I think she might protest too much, but there is a subtlety to her argument that suggests that morality or ethics is more than automatic response, one reflected in the simplistic model of ethics being criticized in this essay. In many ways her concerns regarding “obedience” are rooted in the Kantian Achtung, which is a reversal of the subject’s encounter with the Sublime, i.e., contingency, that returns one to the actions of a rational “will” and to duty.
[74] Henry James, The Art of the Novel (New York: 1907), 149.
[75] Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (New York: Routledge & Kegan paul, 1970), 37.
[76] All English translations unless otherwise noted are from The New International Version.
[77] This is evidenced by the use of the single preposition that governs both nouns.
[78] See the comments of P. T. O’Brien, Philippians (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1991), 75-6.
[79] Gordon Fee, NICNT: Philippians (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1995), 100.
[80] See Paul Ricoeur’s comments on this idea in “Life: A Story in Search of A Narrator,” 428.
[81] The term discern or discernment is an apt translation of “insight” and this is further conveyed by the Latin “discernere,” meaning “to sift,” or “to distinghish.”
[82] Compare for example: Luke 12:56; 14:19; Hebrews 3:9; 1 John 4:1.For Paul’s use of dokimazein and other terms related to “discernment” see Gerard Therrien, Le discernement (Paris: J. Gabalda, 1973).
[83] The expression ta diapheronta is not referring to “things that differ” fundamentally, i.e., between “good” and “evil,” but between degrees of excellence. See the comments by P.T. O’Brien, Philippians, 77, esp. n.28.
[84] P.T. O’Brien, Philippians, 77-8.
[85] See Richard B. Hays’ exemplary exegetical insight into Jesus’ employment of what he refers to as a “hermeneutic of mercy” to insist on the need for “insight” in understanding the relationship between “rigor” and “mercy” in interpreting the law. This is elucidated most fully in his The Moral Vision of the New Testament (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996), 101-104.
[86] I owe this metaphor, i.e., “forest dwellers” to Charles Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy” in Iris Murdoch and The Search for Human Goodness ed. Maria Antonaccio and Willaim Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3-28. Further to the implications of the metaphor, see Jakob MelØe, “Some Remarks on Agent Perception” in Perspectives on Human Conduct, ed. Lars Hertzberg and Juhani Pietarinen (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988), 89-96.
[87] Jakob Meloe in “Some Remarks on Agent Perception” notes: There are two ways of not seeing what there is to see. One is where you locate the action to its proper activity space, but you are not experienced enough, or not (as yet) conceptually equipped, to catch its richness. You don’t see enough of it. The other, more dramatic, is where you allocate it to the wrong activity space. You are blind to it [emphasis mine],” 92.
[88] Charles Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” 18.
[89] Iris Murdoch, ‘Vision and Choice,” 40-41.
[90] Cora Diamond, “We are Perpetually Moralists,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness eds. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 93.
[91] Ibid., 94.
[92] The following closely reflects the argument developed more fully by Richard B. Hays in The Moral Vision of the New Testament, 19-27.
[93] See 2 Corinthians 5:14-18.
[94] René Descartes, Discourse on Method.
[95] Ibid., p.41.
[96] David Wiggins’ characterization of the reductionist model of practical reasoning (object relations) is enlightening. He writes, “There are theories of practical reason according to which the ordinary situation of an agent who deliberates resembles nothing so much as that of a snooker player who has to choose from a large number of possible shots that shot which rates highest when two products are added. The first product is the utility of the shot’s success multiplied by the probability ‘P’ of this players potting the ball. The second product is the utility (negative) of his failure multiplied by (1-P). . . . There is no problem about the end itself nor about the means, which is maximizing points.” “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” p. 232.
[97] Quoted by Alain de Botton, How Proust Can Change Your Life (New York: Random House, 1997), pp.24-25.
[98] Ethics, theory and the Novel, p. 38.
[99] How Proust Can Change Your Life, p. 20.
[100] Ibid., p. 22.
[101] “Vision and Choice in Morality,” p. 81.
[102] Ibid., p. 81.
[103] How Proust Can Change Your Life, p. 26-27.
[104] Ibid., p. 27.
[105] Ibid., p. 28.
[106] “Vision and Choice in Morality,” p. 85.
[107] Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 271.

Living Between the Lines : Part One

2007-10-23T17:15:00.000-05:00

The following essay is Part One of a Two Part Series Published in the Westminster Theological Journal in 2006.

Re-Thinking the Ethics of Parsimony:
Part One: On Not Cheating Contingency
By
Michael W. Payne

There is a growing interest in and reflection upon the relationship between epistemology and ethics in recent scholarship. In many ways, each discipline is wrestling with similar concerns—unfortunately, these concerns are largely centered upon “getting it right,” i.e., procedural questions which can insure correct belief in the former and correct acts in the latter. The question that begs to be answered is “are we even asking the correct questions”—whether they are epistemological or ethical?
Commenting on the apparent confusion of contemporary ethical reflection, Cora Diamond notes that “our habits of classification of ethical theories and modes of ethical thought . . .[often] impede our understanding and distort our perception.” According to Diamond, this is due to our “false and over-simple notions of the aim of ethics.”[1] The frequent abstraction of ethics into categories of “obligation” (deontology/Kantian formalism) or its opposing reduction to “ends-means” (teleology/utilitarianism) questions, flows from what Bernard Williams describes as the characteristically Western, post-Enlightenment tug-of-war between a broadening conceptualization of the “ethical” or a narrowing toward the “moral” (subject-centered).[2] Each trajectory generates its own picture and criteria of the ethical.[3]
Epistemologists likewise, have begun to wonder about their own discipline’s emphases and the tendency toward polarization reflected, for example, in the internalist/externalist debates.[4] Recently, Linda Zagzebski has focused on the relationship between our theories of ethics and corresponding epistemological methodologies. Zagzebski argues that most theories of knowledge (which are belief-based) are analogous to act-based moral theories rather than virtue-based theories.[5] Thus, according to Zagzebski, “it is no surprise that the type of moral theory from which these approaches borrow moral concepts is almost always an act-based theory, either deontological or consequentalist.”[6] Zagzebski notes, as a result, that epistemologists like ethicists tend to focus their questions in one of two areas: “(1) Does the belief violate any epistemic rules or any epistemic duties, i.e., is it epistemically permissible, within one’s epistemic rights? (2) Was the belief formed by a reliable process for obtaining the truth?”[7] All of this, according to Zagzebski, is to the disadvantage of epistemology which suffers in the end from a fixation upon rules (procedures) and individual beliefs and belief-states, to the neglect of the more complex way in which beliefs are formed and maintained—ways which she argues encompass both cognitive and noncognitive dimensions of knowing and doing.[8] After all, in the process of making such reductive moves, we have neglected any emphasis or reflection upon such categories as understanding and wisdom. Are these concepts not comportable with our epistemological theories? If they are not, have we perhaps developed an epistemology of parsimony?
Martha C. Nussbaum’s recent work on emotions and ethics further highlights the growing concern among some ethicists that there has perhaps been a devaluing of all ethical matters not easily qualified as discursive or reducible to syllogism.[9] Where Zagzebski asks concerning the absence of virtue, wisdom and understanding in epistemology; Nussbaum asks where is the appropriate emphasis upon imagination and emotion in ethics? Her work is a continuation in many respects of the seminal work of Iris Murdoch whose essay “Vision and Choice in Morality” was published in 1956.[10] In an attempt to offer an account of moral subjectivity, i.e., the legitimate but often overlooked dimension of the role of the subject in moral living, Murdoch sees the divide between ethical reasoning falling either on what she calls the Liberal (represented by Kant among others) or the Natural Law (Hegel) side. The former argue in terms of the self that constitutes its world through its acts and choices apart from any determination (influence) from an existing antecedent order of value. The latter who are the natural offspring of Hegel, believe that whatever aims or purposes an individual has are in fact constituted by its natural, social and historical existence in particular communities. What remains is the absence of any mediating position that would situate man (ethically speaking) in terms of a metaphysical framework.[11] Either position is unacceptable, according to Murdoch. On the one hand one has the self positing itself, i.e., the individual being the ultimate source of all value. The Natural Law view encapsulates the subject in an inescapable framework that in the end becomes more about the system and less about the agent himself. If our choices are only these two extremes it would again appear that we are left with only an ethics of parsimony.
Regardless of the genealogy one draws, whether the subject is epistemology or ethics, more and more recent scholarship is advancing the same conclusion . . . there is an impoverishment of moral reasoning and understanding. Both in its Kantian and Utilitarian forms, moral reasoning has been constructed in a one-dimensional way, leaving little or no room for the development of a more fully integrated view of ethics. This tendency to relegate one aspect of the moral experience to the role of the “outsider” is no better exemplified than by the non-existent or subordinate role given to the imagination, perception, passion, desire, emotion, etc. Consequently, conceptualizations of the moral life are narrower and narrower, becoming largely procedural or calculative in nature, and once the shape of practical reason is determined a priori to function this way, the range of issues relevant to moral living are by definition delimited. There is simply no room left for anything else to intrude.[12] Of course, neither of the previous ways of formulating the important issues (formalism or utilitarianism) is inherent in ethics qua ethics! Rather, according to Diamond, “we shape what the ethical discussion is in part by what we choose to bring together, by the patterns of resemblances and differences in ethical thought that we trace and display.”[13]
In this essay I will pursue the suggestive insights of Cora Diamond, Linda Zagzebski, Martha C. Nussbaum, Iris Murdoch and others regarding the insinuation of act-based moral theory as it obscures a more robust vision of Christian living (ethics)—producing what I am referring to as an ethics of parsimony.[14] In doing so, I will attempt to lay a foundation for the recovery of a dramatic understanding of the Christian life—what I will refer to as a thick version of Christian morality—which includes a “storied imagination” as central to the development of understanding and wisdom—two essential components of moral living.
To accomplish this I have divided the paper into two Parts: In Part One I will first provide a brief overview of the increasing interest[15] on the part of philosophers in reconstructing the moral-ethical landscape particularly as it relates to the role literature and the imagination might play in the work of ethics.[16] In Part Two I will first (1) argue that the attractiveness of rules and “act-based” ethics is inherently misguided. Its appeal is based, among other things, on an impoverished understanding of moral reasoning that is predicated on a fallacious view of moral concepts and terms as univocal and literal. I will argue secondly (2) that this misunderstanding leads inevitably to an oversimplification of moral living, one that fails to encompass the full range of interconnected faculties that constitute the believer as a moral agent construed in a way most consistent with scripture. Pursuant to this end, I will examine the suggestive use made by the apostle Paul of the cluster of terms: dokimazo, aesthesis and aestheteria as they illustrate the complex nature of moral judgment and the role of imaginative discernment in Christian living. It is hoped that this discussion will provide a preliminary attempt to re-think ethics from a more robustly Christian and theological perspective.
Introduction: Ethics and Literature: A new turn toward the “literary”
Martha Nussbaum notes that philosophy, and in particular ethics, has taken a new turn beyond the “linguistic” to the “literary”.[17] As David Parker describes it, “literature has become for ethics what mathematics is for physics, a sort of necessary handmaiden.”[18] Extending Coral Diamond’s earlier comments, we might say that this shift marks a renewed interest in and awareness of certain dimensions of ethical reflection and discourse that have been overlooked in our previous quest for “objectivity” and instrumental and procedural certainty.[19] There are at least two trajectories in this direction which we may chiefly classify as the pragmatic (ironist) line, e.g., Richard Rorty[20], and the Aristotelian (virtue theory) line, e.g., Martha C. Nussbaum. Both of these approaches have something to teach us concerning the role of the imagination in making moral judgments. The pragmatist (Wittgentsteinian) approach is especially helpful in coming to terms with the nature of language (particularly its underdetermined quality) and the function of rules. The Aristotelian approach draws us closer to the need for engaging with the particularity of human experience and the role of character in making sense out of the variety of choices the virtuous person faces in moral living. We begin with Wittgenstein and the Ironist line.
I. The Wittgensteinian Paradigm
A. The Designative (Representationalist) and the Expressive
For the purposes of brevity let us distinguish what have been referred to as “designative” and “expressive” views of language and meaning.[21] Utilizing the relationship between language and meaning we can then begin with a brief explanation of the nature of each of these approaches in terms of their appeal and their contours. Then we can proceed to view the historical development as one overtakes the other in importance, a shifting of tides relative to both epistemological as well as linguistic considerations. This is essential for properly understanding the work of Wittgenstein.
The Distinction Itself
Designative theories of language are those which begin with the correlations that exist between words, terms, expressions, etc., and things, objects or states of affairs in the world. Words then “designate” things, or objects in the world, and the meaning of sentences likewise is found in the correspondence they have to such states of affairs either obtaining or not obtaining in the world (e.g., the role of truth conditions). Such theories “make meaning something relatively unpuzzling, unmysterious.”[22] Designative theories are compatible with the very nature of modern scientific thought where there is the intention of avoiding “subjectivity” at all costs. Expressive theories, on the other hand, are inherently mysterious since according to such theories, there is no way to extract the subject (the part) from the expression (the whole). Taylor writes,
The meaning of an expression cannot be explained by its being related to something else, but only by another expression. Consequently, the method of isolating terms and tracing correlations cannot work for expressive meaning. Moreover, our paradigm-expressive objects function as wholes.[23]
Expressive accounts cannot and do not attempt to avoid the “subject-relatedness” of meaning, since expression is after all the very power of a subject. Expressions “manifest things, and hence refer us to subjects for whom these things can be manifest.”[24] Its meaning cannot be paraphrased or translated into some objective language, i.e., it simply cannot be explained in terms of something else.[25] Expressive accounts of language and meaning give no purchase to scientific theories of language or of the possibility of creating objective accounts of meaning. Designative theories on the other hand, which build on a more or less atomic notion of reality as constituted by “bits” of facts, etc., can produce or be identified objectively and thus can provide a model which fits with natural science. In the end, designative theories demythologize or demystify language and meaning, thus finding a home in what will be seen to be the positivist environment of both language and science in the early twentieth-century.
Historical Roots
What is needed, however, is a historical account of this development, a development which, as will be argued later, is based on an unnecessary dualism between designative and expressive, one which unfortunately drives the movement of philosophy and science as well as ethics on into the contemporary setting of the century we now find ourselves living. Where do we begin?
The Greeks are usually the starting point for all things philosophical, and there was some discussion of these matters by Plato in his Cratylus.[26] The Cratylus is concerned with the correctness of names (383a4-b2) and is particularly interested in considering whether their correctness is by nature or by convention. For Plato, there is, contrary to the Protagorean (coventionalist) view, something about external reality itself that makes it right to classify things in one way rather than another. Hence, taking ousia (being) as an illustration, to subscribe to the conventionalist perspective would make the ousia of things private to each person (385e5), thus denying stability to ousia. This simply won’t do. More importantly, the framing of the question regarding language and the Greeks (in particular Plato) is largely one which defers to their understanding of reality as a whole as the larger environment in which any discussion of language and meaning can be made intelligible. This is reflected in the use of logos itself . . . a word whose root meant “to say” (legein). There was an inextricable link in the Greek way of thinking between “saying, language and reason.”[27] Thought is thus characterized along the lines of discourse itself and expressed the same things as language generally does. Hence we note the duplicitous usage of logos by the Greeks for both reason and reasoned account. By extension, the Greeks viewed reality as a kind of discourse. Plato’s Ideas are what grounds the world of sensible things, and whatever we do (be it discourse/speak/describe, etc.), it should accord with the nature of reality. Hence the emphasis upon phusei (nature) as opposed to convention in Plato’s understanding of words and reality.[28]
Implicit in this theory is a view that finds greater articulation later, from the Neo-Platonists, the early Fathers, Augustine and beyond.[29] This view is one embedded in Plato’s understanding of the world of sensible things as a copy of an Ideal world, the world of Forms or Ideas. The world thus follows the pattern of logos and is the extensional expression of these Ideas. Plato has no doctrine of God as that to which the Christian tradition bears witness, that is, the triune, tri-personal, creator God. However, Plato is clearly echoing a familiar Biblical theme, vis a vis, the world as the “speech of God.” Thus for Augustine, the divine Verbum (Word/Logos) is expressed in the creation itself. Hence, everything is a sign (signifier) for something else, i.e., the thoughts of God Himself. Men likewise employ/utilize signs (words/language) as the clothing of our thoughts.
What emerges is a theory of language and meaning that is linked directly to ontology, to an understanding of the nature of reality itself. Since God is an “expressivist”, so to speak, our approach to language and meaning will follow an expressivist line. Our expectations that this will be the case are fulfilled in the Medieval and Renaissance periods of history, where “semiological ontologies” which pictured the world as inscribed by the creator with order (like a giant text!) prevail. This view of the world as a meaningful order designed in its various domains to reveal or embody the very thoughts of the Creator, will continue to hold sway until the seventeenth century (with precursors in late medieval nominalism) and the so-called scientific revolution.[30]
It was against such ontologizing (realism) that nominalism rebelled, a rebellion which promoted a designative view of language—one which elevated the importance of words and language to new heights. Nominalism (medieval) thoroughly rejected any notion of reality as predicated by the Platonists or the Augustinians (seen often erroneously as furthering a purely Neo-Platonist cause) where the thoughts of God (universals / essences) were embedded in the world of everyday language and practice (particulars). For Nominalism there are no universals or essences. Regardless of the fact that men tend to think in such categories, this is purely a matter of practice (efficiency) and habit. Universals are nothing more that linguistic habits, formed and sustained by practice. Generalities and universals are no longer constitutive of the real world, but rather find their home in our language. As a result, language has a purely designative sense. This is a conclusion that is predicated upon a rejection of the previous (expressivist) view of the world and the universe itself. Words simply name things, in the absence of which (things) there is simply no meaning. Gone is a vision of the world as a “meaningful order,” endowed with this order as the very speech of God.
A new picture of the world emerges which correlates with this view of language and meaning . . . a view of the world as “objective”, “machine-like.”[31] Medieval theologians like William of Occam and others who were inspired by their purported desire to protect God’s freedom (a freedom easily extended to man the creature as well), opted for what they believed was an anti-Aristotelian view of the world, i.e., non-teleological and non-realist. Although initially intended to “protect” God’s freedom (voluntarism), by positing His absolute license to act by fiat whenever and wherever He chose; such a world picture eventuated in a world which operated autonomously according to observable rules and processes independent of God’s power or presence.
This is reflected in Descartes and the revolution he inspired in epistemology, building unwittingly (?) on the Nominalist’s foundation. The activity of the thinking subject, not the connecting of the mind to the order present in the world, prevails in Descartes’ methodology. Framing representations of the world according to established canons of rational thought . . . thus, according the warrants for certainty in knowledge to the functioning of the mind itself, not to God! Here the development of the role of the mind as mirror, or its primarily representational function emerges to supremacy.[32] To understand the world, we must first disassemble the phenomena and reassemble them in our thought. As Thomas Hobbes would later put it in De Cive (11.14):
For everything is best understood by its constitutive causes. For as in a watch, or some such small engine, the matter, figure and motion of the wheels cannot be well known, except it be taken asunder and viewed in its parts; so as to make a more curious search into the rights of states and duties of subjects, it is necessary, I say, not to take them asunder, but yet that they be so considered as if they were dissolved.
How does this express itself in a theory of language? Words assist us in performing the tasks described above. To avoid falling prey to the duplicitous nature of words (its polysemic qualities), we must opt for transparent language and terms. The language must fit the subject and since the world is more and more conceived of as process and machine-like, our terms and language must follow suit. There can be no mystery in our language, since the very terms we employ must aid and abet our reflection of the true course and nature of the world we describe. Thus, a designative connection must follow. This is in fact what gives the word its meaning.
The rationalist slant of Descartes is paralleled by the empiricist orientation of Locke in the seventeenth century and Condillac in the eighteenth century. Locke’s notion of what constitutes understanding reveals precisely how language is to be understood.[33] In accord with Locke’s rejection of any notion of “innate ideas,” on the basis of redundancy, that is, why would God make us the way we are (creatures who through the use of our senses acquire our basic ideas) and then stock us with a set of innate ideas; we are left to gathering and collecting individual particulars of experience into coherent wholes (and creating a lexicon of meaningful terms in the process!). The unanswered question is “what is each sensation ‘about’?” That of course poses the fundamental dilemma of “reflection,” which will eventually supply Kant (1724-1804) with his critique of empiricism altogether.[34] After all, if each individual impression is taken as a piece of potential information, what is the background understanding that lies under all of our perceptual discriminations? The sensation has to be about something . . . what Kant will eventually call “intentionality.” The subject (knower) must be able to “place” the sensation (particular) somewhere, that is, give it a location in a world that is already familiar to the knower. Without this, Kant says, “it would be possible for appearances to crowd in upon the soul, and yet to be such as would never allow of experience.” One’s perceptions “would not then belong to any experience, consequently would be without an object, merely a blind play of representations, less even than a dream.”[35]
If the empiricists are correct, language would be the collection of otherwise independently introduced words, or “sounds” (atomism), without the necessary framework (the linguistic dimension itself) being elaborated. Such a designative view (representational) of language lays the groundwork for the later logical atomists and positivists who will initiate the linguistic turn in the twentieth century.
3. The Heyday of ‘Words’
We can fast forward to the twentieth century and begin to see where the turn toward language begins to emerge with greater force and implications. The connection between what has been described earlier, regarding the designative and expressive views of language, is now further elaborated by the development of logical atomism and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951). It is primarily the designative theory of language and meaning (or what will now be referred to as representationalist or depictive theories) that takes hold of the scientific mindset in the early part of the century with a vengeance. Although expressivism was rekindled by the work of Herder, Hamman and others in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the form of Romanticism, it was eclipsed by a resurgence of enlightenment scientism or what came to be known as positivism in the twentieth century.
What seems to drive the placing of increasing importance on language and in particular the continuation of a particular representational or depictive view of language, in the early twentieth century? The question is particularly perplexing when we consider the insights of Nietzsche (as well as the pragmatism of James and Dewey) in the nineteenth century, insights that militate against any repristination of representationalist views of knowledge and language. It is perhaps best to see the Positivist (early Wittgenstein) period as a parenthesis, bracketed by Nietzsche (1844-1900) on the one side, with the` “later” Wittgenstein on the other. It was Nietzsche who portended the collapse of the Kantian resolution to the Cartesian and Empiricist conundrum. Kant, you recall, wanted it both ways, a vigorous “ego-subject” which constitutes (by virtue of the structures and operations internal to the mind) human knowledge, and alongside this, an ineffable Ding-an-sich, the “thing-in-itself,” that is supposed to anchor our representations (a policing function). Nietzsche observed that however functionally important this Ding-an sich was for Kant, it was only a postulation, a wheel that when turned, turned nothing else because it wasn’t in actuality a part of the mechanism itself. It performs no “real” function thus it could be eliminated without effect. All we are left with is one representation after another which in effect destroys the very meaning of the term itself, for the metaphor of representation relies upon the possibility of there being something to represent. Wittgenstein describes this futile enterprise as comparable to buying several copies of the same newspaper to verify the accuracy of its front-page headline. Without the anchor, which was only a fabrication anyway, one needs a new metaphor. Nietzsche suggests that the metaphor for the new age is interpretation and man is the willful imposer of meaning. As Nietzsche put it, “’Interpretation,’ the introduction of meaning—not ‘explanation.’ . . . There are no facts, everything is in flux, incomprehensible, elusive; what is relatively most enduring is—our opinions.”[36] Nietzsche’s ideas would not carry the day however. His insights would be eclipsed by a renewed emphasis in philosophy and logic on empiricist methodologies and representationalism. Nietzsche’s criticisms of metaphysics did not apply to those known as the Vienna Circle—philosophers committed to satisfying an unquenchable thirst to “explain.” In the vacuum created by the anti-metaphysical bias of Nietzsche and his successors, arose the scientism of Logical Postivitism. What emerges is a kind of “joyous nihilistic positivism.” An attempt to secure finiteness, which is itself grounded in the awareness of the infinite . . . an awareness that must be reconfigured according to the joyful positivity which only an absolute historicism can provide. It is this move toward positivity that propels the linguistic turn. Under this regime, “Truth” becomes only a property of logical form and language where the emphasis upon formalization via mathematics can reproduce the mechanics of the world and the mind.[37]
Recall our earlier reflections on the emergent nominalism associated with the rise of representationalist (designative) theories of language and meaning. Among the motivations lying behind this nominalism (and there are many!), one was to find an adequate language of science. One of the primary concerns of Locke, for example, was to ground our picture of the world in the foundations provided by the so-called clear and unequivocal definitions of basic terms. How was one to do this? The goal was correct representations that would enable one to affirm a true knowledge of the object. A primary issue was epistemological, i.e., to sift out any contributions the knowing subject might make in the actual representation of things that the knowledge acquired was supposed to be about. This becomes the overriding concern in twentieth century inquiries regarding language, namely, how language can be a vehicle of knowledge as modern epistemology conceives it.
B. The Ideal Language Approach
As Richard Rorty describes the history, two approaches emerge in the early twentieth century to address the issue of language: The Ideal Language School and Ordinary Language Analysis.[38] The first, Ideal Language, is closest in form, structure and interest, to the early Wittgenstein.[39]
In his “Notes on Logic,” written in 1913, Wittgenstein states that “Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics: logic is its basis.”[40] In the Tractatus, he develops this idea, namely, that language is a mirror of reality, and that logic is the essence of language. For Wittgenstein, reality has the same form or structure as logic, i.e., it bears a logical form. He writes, “how can logic—all embracing logic, which mirrors the world—use such peculiar crotchets and contrivances? Only because they are all connected with one another in an infinitely fine network, the great mirror” (Tractatus, 5.511). This is in many ways a reflection of what is known as logical atomism, a view codified in Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. Logical Atomism is a theory according to which reality is ultimately composed of atomic facts, each distinct from any other. These atomic facts are essentially empirical data, and combined together they form molecular facts which are then “truth-functional.” By this is meant that these atomic facts are represented by atomic propositions, and the molecular facts by truth-functional compounds of atomic propositions. Philosophy is then set upon the task of ‘explanation’ and ‘clarification’ of these facts and their corresponding propositions. Thus genuine philosophical problems are really confusions that derive from a disjunction between the way we articulate (speak), what Rudolph Carnap referred to as the “grammatical syntax,” and the “logical syntax” that reflects the true nature of things.[41] It is this logical syntax which is at the heart of language as it is meant to be understood (at least in terms of its bearing any relation to truth or falsity).[42] As Wittgenstein describes the matter, the world is made up of simple objects (atoms) which are the basis of all analysis, and this is what prevents indeterminacy, i..e, the rule of absolute contingency, thus, without these objects (and the worldview implied in such a theory), “it would be impossible to frame any picture of the world (true or false)” (T 2.0212). This is what prevents an infinite regress in terms of propositional knowledge, otherwise there could be no definite meaning (T 3.23). Without ‘reference’ there is no ‘meaning. Why? Because there would only be convention, which is fundamentally arbitrary. The “simples” (i.e., simple objects) thus supply what Russell referred to as the “furniture of the world.”
Building from this point, Wittgenstein develops his tractarian views in the Tractatus. These “simple objects” create “states of affairs” (Sachverhalt), either “possible” or “actual”. As Wittgenstein describes it, “Each thing is, at it were, in a space of possible ‘states of affairs’” (T 2.013). The possibilities are fixed for each thing. This is the ‘form’ of the object. The Tractatus maintains that the world as a whole has a form, that is, a fixed number of possible states of affairs: “The existence and non-existence of sates of affairs is reality” (T 2.06). Thus, “the sum total of reality is the world” (T 2.063). Granting this “picture” of reality, philosophy can now give a complete analysis of the world in terms of propositions: “A proposition is a picture of reality” (T 4.01). A proposition has ‘sense’ if it pictures a possible state of affairs. Its truthfulness or falsity is determined by empirical verification. Thus, Wittgenstein’s views on the nature of language and the role of philosophy can be summarized as follows: (1) Ordinary language is inherently vague and ambiguous (T 4.014-015, 4.002); (2) Clarity and accuracy are appropriate to sentences which “picture” or “record” facts (or states of affairs)—this form is ‘logical’ and not grammatical—and, where there is a correspondence between the content of the sentence and that which it represents; (3) the role of philosophy is to remove misunderstandings which are the direct result of linguistic confusions.[43]
1. The ‘Heyday of Sentences’
In many ways, Wittgenstein’s later works on language philosophy reflect a shift that began at least as far back as Immanuel Kant and continued through the so-called Romantic period in philosophy (Herder, Hamann, etc.). The shift I am referring to is that which arose in reaction to the empiricist and rationalist philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in particular the ideas of Descartes, Hume and Locke.[44] Two primary features characterize modern rationalism as embodied in these philosophers: disengaged reason and proceduralism.[45] By disengaged reason, we mean a construal of the thinking subject as occupying a “proto-variant” of Thomas Nagel’s “view from nowhere.”[46] By being “from nowhere,” this subject occupies no known space, has no history, no culture, no “world” so to speak. This individual is really an information processing being, taking in bits of information and collating them is some fashion in order to then construct a manageable, usable, livable world in which to then live. What results—proceduralism—is an “atomism of input with a computational picture of mental function.” This picture is completed by distinction between ‘fact and value’ and its correlate of neutrality. However distinguishable the views of Descartes and Locke, vis a vis, their methods and strategies, “both views call for reflexive self-policing in the name of a canonical procedure.”[47] These views also redefined what post-Cartesian ‘science’ and ‘scientific thought’ consisted in, namely, it became all about the pursuit of objectivity. However, objectivity itself was redefined. “Objectivity” is achieved only as we eliminate any possible distortions and takes in the world as it “really” is. Thomas Nagel puts it aptly as follows:
The attempt is made to view the world not from a place within it, or from the vantage point of a special kind of life or awareness, but from nowhere in particular and no form of life in particular at all. The object is to discount for the features of our pre-reflective outlook that make things appear as they do, and thereby to reach an understanding of things as they really are.[48]
However advantageous the attempt to carefully scrutinize our observations and calculations in terms of possible distorting forces, etc., (a view which would not constitute very much controversy!)—this was not in fact what the modern rationalists are up to. The fatal error was in defining the mind qua mind as functioning as it was intended to function only in such a disengaged way, absent from any context or situation.[49] Whether in its more purely dualistic or positivistic (mechanistic) forms, thinking (knowledge), in order to provide useful results, must take place outside any form of engagement. Secondly, it must follow a trustworthy procedure (although there was no agreement on exactly what that procedure should be).
What is absent of course is any articulation of the essential role “background” plays in this entire enterprise. What must be the case for any one perception to be counted as a perception? As noted earlier, it was Kant’s transcendental deduction and in fact various other arguments found in the Critique of Pure Reason that constituted a turning point in this regard. Kant noted that there must be a conferring of intelligibility, and such a context conferring intelligibility is what makes any single perception intelligible. What Descartes and Hume along with Locke had done in their various attempts at describing the process, was to make invisible this very context of intelligibility. However, for something to be intelligible is for it to count as intelligible, and for it to count as intelligible, there are certain conditions that must be met.
In many ways, Wittgenstein builds on a similar notion in his later reflections on language.[50] We could say that the transition in Wittgenstein’s philosophy is one that moves from an emphasis upon lines of projection to one emphasizing methods of projection.[51] The earlier Wittgenstein was preoccupied with the implications of his own logical atomism and the ontology it seemed to imply, namely, either words could be shown to refer to substances that existed independently of language, or truth and falsity were mere constructions of an endlessly regressive process of signification. The former referential emphasis in the early Wittgenstein was predicated on what seemed the only alternative to absolute free play in terms of meaning. Once Wittgenstein succumbed to the ontology of atomism (logical simples), truth functions then depended on the demonstration of logical form operating pictorially as language mirrored states of affairs in the world of objects. Thus, logical form . . . captures lines of projection between propositions and the world they purport to represent. In the later Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein reflects upon his earlier direction as representing a gross misunderstanding of the way language actually works in the world. A desire for simples leads to a label view of language that assumes that the principal function of language is simply to correctly identify or name objects. We can refer to this phase as the “explanation fixation” in the early Wittgenstein. In the earlier Tractatus, there is an emphasis upon the need to have “determinate” sense, i.e., a fixed notion which comports with the simple “objective” view of reality it is premised upon. What Wittgenstein discovers in his later work is that “sense” is more ad hoc and derives not from correspondence with objects per se, but as constituted by a variety of language games. Thus meaning and sense are produced in and by practices and life-forms.
In other words, the former reductionistic approach based upon lines of projection between logical simples and states of affairs failed to appreciate the mediated character of naming and defining. Such naming itself presupposes any number of categories and procedures that make identification possible. As Wittgenstein put it, “Only someone who already knows how to do something with it can significantly ask a name.”[52] Wittgenstein discovered that basic facts cannot be discovered independently of methods of projection which guarantee their status as facts. Wittgenstein realized that there are many ways of dealing with the facts in the world, many ways for language to project a relationship to the world. Thus, what should concern the philosopher is not whether a statement ‘pictures’ the world, but rather the way utterances and descriptions fit in specific contexts or operations, and fit, as a matter of appropriateness to specific forms of acting on objects. Wittgenstein introduces language game to explain the relation of language to world. He writes, “I shall call the whole, consisting of language and the actions into which it is woven, the language game. . . . To imagine a language means to imagine a form of life.”[53] Gone now are any pristine notions of some pure idealized connection between mind and nature. Philosophical problems arise “when language goes on holiday” (PI 116), when there is a “false and idealized picture of the use of language” (PG 211).[54] Gone is the addiction to “explanation,” which is the attempt to speak from a position that resides outside language. Philosophy can only “describe” what is going on, or as Wittgenstein puts it: “philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it” (PI 124). What is possible (and needed) is “description.” Philosophical problems are really “direction problems,” i.e., not knowing our way about (PI 123). Description thus makes a way of escape from the philosophical problem by showing “the fly the way out of the fly-bottle” (PI 309). An emphasis upon “explanation” leads to a set of false problematics, the result of more or less ungrammatical applications of language that seeks resolution outside language itself. As Wittgenstein stated, “Our illness is to want to explain.”[55] Our “addiction to generality” is the result of our attempting to move beyond the particular toward the general—a characteristic of the explanatory approach. A kind of therapeutic description will help us overcome this addiction. Wittgenstein insists, “we may not advance any kind of theory. There must not be anything hypothetical in our considerations. We must do away with all explanation and description alone must take its place” (PI 109). “Description” is about what “is” and decries metaphysical justification as a “pre-linguistic” notion altogether. In its place is the far more complex game of life. Among the multiple games (contexts, grammars) we participate in, there are multiple methods of projection (lebensform) which affect every line of projection imaginable. As attractive as the world of the Tractatus may have once appeared, it was a world impossible to actually live in and communicate in. As Wittgenstein describes it, “We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction (the world of the Tractatus) and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground.”[56]
2. Nietzsche, Rorty, and Pragmatism
Paralleling the development of the ‘later’ Wittgenstein, philosophers of science began to recognize that it was simply impossible to disentangle fact from value as if to achieve some pristine or immaculate realm of fact. Values and facts were interconnected, interlaced, one with the other such that finding an ‘absolute’[57] or as Nagel refers to it, a “view from nowhere,”[58] became the never ending quest of but a few. With the later Wittgenstein and ordinary language analysis[59], the attention to genre and speech-act theory in Austin and Searle,[60] and the move from semiotics to semantics in Ricoeur,[61] to name only a few, language has been released from a kind of philosophical captivity which worked against the legitimacy of religious and ethical discourse as anything other than languages of projection. It was now acknowledged that all language, whether scientific or moral was value-laden.
All of this bodes well for the view that ethical language is cognitively meaningful, but there seems to be a downside as well. We seem to have entered a new paradigm where all language is seen in terms of pure immanence with a denial of any kind of ‘extra-linguistic’ reality toward which our language might be said to refer, resulting in what Kai Nielsen has termed a ‘Wittgensteinian fideism’.[62] The tribunal for determining what is ‘good’, ‘true’ or ‘meaningful’ is to be found entirely within communal or intersubjective experience with no additional court of appeal residing outside language which is after all,
according to this view, of purely human convention.[63] Since, according to this view, there is no ‘essential’ reality; there is only ‘contingent’ reality.[64] As such, there is only perspective, or ‘perspective seeing’ as Nietzsche described it in On the Genealogy of Morals, and to attempt to ignore this is to ‘castrate the intellect’.[65] Derrida picks up on this Nietzschean theme and describes the desire for ‘essence’ as a misguided metaphysical quest, one seeking a “centered structure” where whatever contingency or ‘play’ there is, “[it] is based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond play.”[66] Such quests for Derrida and other deconstructionists are illusory at best. In the end, Nietzsche’s ‘strong poet’ prevails over the scientist![67]
What is the result of this renewed attention to contingency? In the words of Hillary Putnam, “the greatest pretensions of philosophy have collapsed!”[68] A great ‘leveling’ has occurred. There is no privileged status to which philosophy can appeal in the adjudication of truth claims. ‘Truth’ or value is now nothing more than the function of sentences which of course are strung together by people, the very people who create language![69] Ethics like science is just one more area of discourse (language game) which deals with a different area of inquiry. Just as language is severed from any connection with external reality, so in other domains of inquiry we are freed from the impossible quest for foundations whether in ethics or science.[70]
Thus we can see how the shift toward the ethical and the shift toward the literary now converge in the pragmatist line. Ethics is no longer a second class discourse due to its subject matter but rather one of many discourses each equally relevant to their own semantic domains. The emphasis in ethics is upon description rather than prescription, since to be prescriptive is to assume a universality which is unjustifiable given the purely immanent character of all reflection and knowledge.[71] Thus, according to Richard Rorty--identifying pragmatism as the heir apparent to the now deceased representationalist paradigm--what we have before us is a major paradigm shift, a la Kuhn.[72] He writes:
Pragmatism, by contrast, does not erect Science as an idol to fill the place once held by God. It views science as one genre of literature—or, put the other way around, literature and the arts as inquiries, on the same footing as scientific inquiries. Thus it seems ethics as neither more ‘relative’ nor ‘subjective’ than scientific theory, nor as needing to be made ‘scientific’. Physics is a way of trying to cope with various bits of the universe; ethics is a matter of trying to cope with other bits. Mathematics helps physics do its job; literature and the arts help ethics do its.[73]
Gone, according to Rorty and the modern Pragmatists, is any quest for ‘objectivity’ and along with it any interest in epistemology or metaphysics. The old Platonic distinction between the realm of knowledge and opinion which led to the Positivist split between empirical and transcendental, a split that harbored ill-will toward the non-empirical, languished in the field of ‘correspondence’, a weedy bed that offers no rescue. Where the Positivist failed to extract herself from the dualisms of epistemology, the Kantian transcendentalist simply made the reverse error of hypostasizing Thought, and was left with only a quasi-Platonic worldview. Pragmatism, it is thought, frees us from both errors. Contrary to Positivism, the Pragmatist “drops the notion of truth as correspondence with reality altogether, and says that modern science does not enable us to cope because it corresponds, it just plain enables us to cope.”[74] We are left with our language and there simply is no way to assume some position from outside to judge or determine adequacy. As Rorty states, “it lets us see language not as a tertium quid between Subject and Object, nor as a medium in which we try to form pictures of reality, but as part of the behavior of human beings.”[75] Labels like ‘truth’ and ‘goodness’ are simply metaphysics, which only leads back to the Plato-Kant continuum—a continuum made vacuous by the critique of Nietzsche. Ironists (like Rorty) celebrate nominalism and historicism. The ironist searches for new vocabularies “not as a way of getting something distinct from his vocabulary right.” After all, “they don’t take the point of discursive thought to be knowing, in any sense that can be explicated by notions like ‘reality’, ‘real essence’, ‘objective point of view’, and ‘the correspondence of language and reality’.” For the ironist, the final vocabulary doesn’t settle things once and for all, as if there were some criteria of adequacy. “Criteria, on their view, are never more than the platitudes which contextually define the terms of a final vocabulary currently in use.”[76]
Literature for the ironist serves an entirely different purpose than it does for the person operating out of the common sense perspective. In the quest for a better final vocabulary, the ironist is not hoping to discover but create (make), the goal is “diversification and novelty rather than convergence to the antecedently present.” These vocabularies are “poetic achievements.” Orwell, Proust, D. H. Lawrence, along with others, are to be treated “not as anonymous channels for truth but as abbreviations for a certain kind of vocabulary and for the sorts of beliefs and desires typical of its users.” One must play with the images each of these authors creates. Words like should, ought, good and bad “name properties of sentences, or of actions and situations,”[77] they are not extra-mental realities to which our words or actions conform. In consistently Darwinian fashion, language and meaning are fundamentally adaptive strategies, so that “what is rational for us now to believe may not be true, [this] is simply to say that somebody may come up with a better idea. . . . a whole new vocabulary may come along”[78] and change things.
The Pragmatist emphasis upon the radical contingency of both self and community emphasizes or rather de-divinizes the world. As Rorty somewhat poetically puts the matter:
Once upon a time we felt a need to worship something which lay beyond the visible world. Beginning in the seventeenth century we tried to substitute a love of truth for a love of God, treating the world described by science as a quasi divinity. Beginning at the end of the eighteenth century we tried to substitute a love of ourselves for a love of scientific truth, a worship of our own deep spiritual or poetic nature, treated as one more quasi divinity.[79]
According to Rorty, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche and others have freed us from such delusions to the point “where we no longer worship anything, where we treat nothing as a quasi divinity, where we treat everything—our language, our conscience, our community—as a product of time and chance [emphasis in the original].”[80] Opposed to the possession of final vocabularies—the futility of such a project the history of philosophy serves to illustrate—Rorty and the Pragmatists are concerned with the development of new and ever-changing vocabularies. We are all about ‘self creation’ and coming to understanding this is what constitutes self-knowledge. “The process of coming to know oneself, confronting one’s contingency, . . . is identical with the process of inventing a new language—that is, of thinking up some new metaphors.”[81] We should not accept someone else’s description of ourselves (the prevailing language game) since that would be to discover oneself as only a ‘copy or replica’.[82]
3. Irony vs. Common Sense
According to Rorty, each of us embodies a final vocabulary, a stock of words “which we [they] employ to justify their actions, their beliefs and their lives.” These are the words one employs to tell “the story of their lives.” It is a ‘final’ vocabulary in the sense that “if doubt is cast on the worth of these words, their user has no noncircular argumentative recourse.” There is nowhere else to go, except perhaps to force. This vocabulary is made up of ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ terms, the former represented by words like ‘good’, ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, etc., whereas the latter consists of words such as ‘decency’, ‘cruelty’, ‘kindness’, etc.[83]
People fall into one of two classes with respect to this notion of final vocabulary: they are either ironists or they are committed to some form of common sense strategy. An ironist is one who accepts the contingency of her final vocabulary, one who has “radical and continuing doubts about the final vocabulary.” This is usually a result of ongoing encounters with other vocabularies either in actual persons or in books. She is also one who realizes that the mere appeal to her vocabulary will not settle the incommensurability present in the encounter with others. Lastly, the ironist is one who understands that her vocabulary is no closer to some objective reality than any others’. In other words, for her, there is no ‘metavocabulary’ to measure one proposal off against another.[84]
Common sense is the label Rorty attaches to those who “unselfconsciously describe everything important in terms of the final vocabulary to which they and those around them are habituated.” When challenged by alternative vocabularies, this person responds by appeals to criteria, to standards of evaluation, as if there is some permanent, essential, quality behind our evaluative terms. For the ironist, this is simply a return to hors presents, redescribing ourselves using their vocabularies in the hope that “by this continual redescription, [we might] make the best selves for ourselves that we can.” We are thus continually ‘revising’ ourselves and in the process “doubts about our own characters or our own culture can be resolved or assuaged only by enlarging our acquaintance. The easiest way to do that is to read books.[emphasis mine]”[85]
C. The Aristotelian Renaissance in Ethics--Virtue and Reading It would not be an exaggeration to say that apart from the modern pragmatist’s interest in literature and morality, the principal charge toward literature in ethics is being led by those working out of the Aristotelian tradition,[86] where ethics is not narrowly construed as the articulation and justification of rules and obligations, but rather, the pursuit of the question ‘how should one live?’.[87] Their shared interest in the literary, however, is where the unity ceases. Perhaps the best representative of marriage of literature and ethics from an Aristotelian perspective is that found in the work of Martha C. Nussbaum. In addition to her interest in the role of literature in explicating the moral experience, she has also taken pains to position herself from the position of Rorty and the so-called “ironists.” This is humorously illustrated in her citation from Plato’s Phaedrus:
We’ll let Teisias and Gorgias continue sleeping. For they noticed that plausible stories win more public honor than the truth. And so they make trivial things seem important and important things trivial through the power of their discourse, and they dress up new views in old language and old views in new language, and they have discovered how to speak about any subject both concisely and at interminable length.[88]
Nussbaum concludes her assessment of the contemporary discussion of moral and ethical thought (with Rorty and Stanley Fish in mind): “the sophists are among us once again.”[89] Unlike Rorty, she sees the discussion of ethics and morality requiring more seriousness and greater attention to such old-fashioned categories as ‘truth’ and ‘objectivity’. As Nussbaum notes:
For if we are talking about real things, it does matter, and matter deeply, whether we say this or that, since human life, much though we may regret the fact, is not simply a matter of free play and unconstrained making.[90]
Rorty and others with his pragmatic inclinations, have succumbed to the all to easy temptation to conclude that if ethics can’t be about representation (correspondence theories), it must be about subjectivity, namely, the will to power. Nussbaum will have nothing of that. For her the answer lies in reconsidering the approach suggested by Aristotle in answer to the problem of ethics and practical rationality.
In what does ‘moral judgment’ consist? The search for an answer to this question guides Nussbuam in her work on ethics. Her primary adversary in most of her writings on this subject is the position she feels is best illustrated by Plato’s conception of practical reasoning as ‘scientific’. According to Nussbaum, not only is practical reasoning not scientific, it cannot be made to be so without suffering irreparable damage. As she describes the situation,
Aristotle’s position is subtle and compelling. It seems to me to go further than any other account of practical rationality I know in capturing the sheer complexity and agonizing difficulty of choosing well.[91]
According to Nussbaum, the Aristotelian model provides this largely from its emphasis on ‘perception’ and ‘discernment’ in the moral life which sets him apart from the more Platonic emphasis upon ethics as a ‘scientific’ enterprise.[92] This is part of what Nussbaum sees as a three-fold emphasis in Aristotle, which was in antithesis to the prevailing opinion toward ethics in Greek philosophy in general and in Plato in particular.[93] The three are: (1) an attack on the claim that all valuable things are commensurable; (2) an argument for the priority of particular judgments to universals; and (3) a defense of the emotions and the imagination as essential to rational choice.[94]
Nussbaum characterizes the Platonic error as follows: According to Plato,[95] what is needed is a science of measurement, which will free the moral agent from what otherwise would be an impossible situation of diverse and often contradictory choices. Plato writes, “whereas the art of measurement would render the appearance ineffective: by making clear the truth, it would cause the soul to be at peace by abiding in the truth, and so save our life” (356e).[96] Plato delineated this ‘science’ in terms of four basic constituents: 1) metricity, 2) singleness, 3) consequentialism and 4) pleasure. According to the first, there is the recognition that there is only one homogenous ‘good’ or ‘value’ which differs from situation to situation only in amount or quantity. By using a single rule or measure, the agent applies the principle of metricity to the determination of quantity of value. The ‘singleness’ principle refers to the universality of the metric or measure, i.e.; it applies in every situation. Thirdly, whatever the choice in a given situation, the end is the same and this is after the all the goal—producing the consequence desired, namely, optimization of the ‘good’. The agent is therefore to act so as to maximize the quantity of good produced in any action. Lastly, the nature or content of the ‘good’ is ‘pleasure’ for Plato.
I want to focus my initial comments on the second and third advances made by Aristotle as a prelude to a more narrowly constructed analysis of the importance of literature for ethics[97]. I will return to the singleness and metricity questions under our discussion of ‘rules’ in the second part of this essay.
As Nussbaum sees it, (1) Aristotle gives priority to the particular over Plato’s ‘universal’, as well as (2) defending the role of the emotions and imagination in the ethical life. For Aristotle, “ . . . a young man can[not] have Prudence. The reason is that Prudence includes a knowledge of particular facts (ta kath’hekasta), and this is derived from experience, which a young man does not possess.”[98] Our concern at this juncture is not with the role rules play in Aristotelian ethics generally but with the priority he gives to the particular in the process of deliberation, as opposed to subsuming all ethical judgment under the more general or universal rule.[99] We shall let the following excerpts from EN suffice in illustrating Aristotle’s concern with ‘perception’.
Let this be agreed on from the start, that every statement concerning matters of practice ought to be said in outline and not with precision, as we said in the beginning that statements should be demanded in a way appropriate to the matter at hand. And matters of practice and questions of what is advantageous never stand fixed, any more than do matters of health. If the universal definition is like this, the definition concerning particulars is even more lacking in precision. For such cases do not fall under any science (techne) nor under any precept, but the agents themselves must in each case look to what suits the occasion, as is also the case in medicine and navigation (EN, 1103b34-1104a10).
Aristotle concludes from the above that for at least three reasons, ethics cannot be reduced to the level of science or technique. For one thing, rules only offer generalizations based on what has come before, and hence are limited by definition. Secondly, the very nature of the practical speaks to its indefiniteness and indeterminacy. Lastly, the ethical situation being often-times ‘ultimately particular’, i.e., non-repeatable, simply doesn’t fit under any pre-existing category or rule. As Nussbaum describes this, “this is in part a function of the complexity and variety already mentioned: the occurrence of properties that are, taken singly, repeatable in an endless variety of combinations makes the complex whole situation a non-repeatable particular.”[100] Aristotle comments further:
And it is clear that Prudence is not the same as Scientific Knowledge: for as has been said, it apprehends ultimate particular things, since the thing to be done is an ultimate particular thing (EN, 1142a23ff).
All these qualities . . . Considerateness, Understanding, Prudence and Intelligence. . . all these faculties deal with ultimate and particular things; . . . and a man has understanding and is considerate, or considerate of others when he is a good judge of the matters in regard to which Prudence is displayed . . . . All matters of conduct belong to the class of particular and ultimate things (EN, 1143a25ff).
Consequently the unproved assertions and opinions of experienced and elderly people, or of prudent men, are as much deserving of attention as those which they support by proof; for experience has given them an eye for things, so they see correctly (EN, 1143b6).
The person who diverges only slightly from the correct is not blameworthy, whether he errs in the direction of the more or the less; but the person who diverges more is blamed: for this is evident. But to say to what point and how much someone is blameworthy is not easy to determine by a principle. . . : nor in fact is this the case with any other perceptible item. For things of this sort are among the concrete particulars, and the discrimination lies in perception (EN, 1109b 18-23).
From all of this, Nussbaum concludes that “practical insight is like perceiving in the sense that it is noninferential, nondeductive; it is an ability to recognize the salient features of a complex situation.”[101] This particular advance in Aristotle is perhaps best captured in his notion of ‘practical judgment’ or phronesis. Again, contrary to Plato’s conceptualization, where contemplation of the right order of things, i.e., the cosmos, is linked inextricably to determining the right order of life (it is given priority in the Republic); Aristotle regards knowledge of the order of things as reflecting science and the scientific method. The cosmic order is eternal and unchanging in Plato. Judgement in the moral sense is a knowledge of the constantly changing, where particular circumstances and situations can never be known exhaustively. This explains Aristotle’s ‘rule of thumb’ understanding of the norms or rules for behavior illustrated by his emphasis on the Lesbian rule (EN 1137b-30-32). This helps us to understand why for Aristotle, “the practically wise man (phronimos) has a knowledge of how to behave in each particular circumstance which can never be equated with or reduced to a knowledge of general truths. Practical wisdom (phronesis) is a not fully artriculable sense rather than a kind of science.”[102]
Practical judgement for Aristotle is possible only for the virtuous man: “Virtue makes the prohairesis (choice) right. . . . Virtue makes the project right” (EN 1144a20; 7-8). Right judgment can only issue “from the deliberations of those whose formed caharacter is the result of the systematic disciplining and transformation of their initial desires.”[103]
According to Nussbaum, the last advance over Plato made by Aristotle regards the role he attached to the emotions and imagination in the ethical life, what Nussbaum refers to as “the non-intellectual components.”[104] Contrary to Plato’s more antagonistic stance toward the passions[105], where they are portrayed as “corrupting influences,” [106]Aristotle saw them as “closely linked with our ability to grasp particulars in all of their richness and concreteness.”[107] He develops this idea in concert with his discussion of ‘imagination’ (phantasia) and its role in voluntary movement, which Nussbaum describes as “that human . . . capability . . . of focusing on some concrete particular, either present or absent, in such a way as to see[108] (or otherwise perceive) it ‘as’ something, picking out its salient features, discerning its content.”[109] Along with the imagination, the emotions are viewed as “responsive and selective elements of the personality.”[110] This is reflected in two passages from the Nicomachean Ethics:
As then the object of choice is something within our power which after deliberation we desire, Choice will be a deliberate desire of things in our power; for we first deliberate, then select, and finally fix our desire according to the result of our deliberation (EN, 1113a10-12).
Hence Choice may be called either thought related to desire or desire related to thought; and man, as an originator of action, is a union of desire and intellect (EN, 1139b3-5).
Nussbaum notes that the emotions do not simply play a supplemental role as in offering aid, but rather in fact constitute appropriate response.[111] For example, according to Nussbaum, “to have a correct perception of the death of a loved one is not simply to take note of this fact with intellect or judgment. If someone noted the fact but was devoid of passional response, we would be inclined to say that he did not really see, take in, recognize, what had happened; that he did not acknowledge the situation for what it was [emphasis in the original].”[112]Here the whole personality sees the situation for what it really is. Thus, “the emotions are themselves modes of vision, or recognition,” apart from which one cannot be said to truly ‘recognize’ or even ‘know’.[113]
From all of this Nussbaum and others conclude that Aristotle provides a starting point that doesn’t preclude the inclusion of a variety of areas for consideration in ethical criticism. It makes “no a priori demarcation” between areas of relevance or irrelevance for morality. Unlike Kant or the utilitarians, who focus exclusively on questions of ‘duty’ and ‘utility’, a more inclusive approach represented by Aristotle addresses the moral life “as a continuous process which goes on before and after there is any question of conscious volition.”[114] This is reflected in the way I ‘attend’ to people and circumstances. Ethics then is not simply concerned with materials which identify “acts and choices, and choice-guiding words together with the arguments which display the descriptive meaning of these words,” but much, much more.[115] The question that emerges from these insights is obvious, what then can be said to engage and sharpen my attentive powers?
After surveying the development of ethics and literature from both the Pragmatist and Aristotelian streams, one thing that becomes obvious is the attention being paid by both to the deeply subjective component in all ethical experience. Rather than viewing ethical and moral experience in a mechanical or behavioristic fashion, both Rorty and Nussbaum think attention to the role of the agent or ‘self’ is of utmost importance. After all, as Charles Taylor has noted, having desires is not what demarcates man from the animals, but “what is distinctively human is the power to evaluate our desires, to regard some as desirable and others as undesirable.”[116] The ‘free play’ of Rorty’s ironist, rests in the radically contingent nature of that determination, as one act in a long series of acts which constitute self-creation. For Nussbaum, attention to the subject is not a radically contingent affair but one which is designed to approximate virtue after careful deliberation. For Rorty, there is no telos for man in his or her ethical/moral experience, whereas for Nussbaum there assuredly is one.
Both philosophers in one way or another recognize that “rationalism purchases a third-person standard for the good at the cost of first-person predicates that capture the stakes in being ethical at all.”[117] However, they reject the Enlightenment construal of ethical and moral life, but for very different reasons. In Part Two of this essay, we will explore the implications of both the “later” Wittgenstein and “virtue” ethics (Aristotle) for re-thinking the ethics of parsimony in an attempt to promote a more robust conceptualization of ethical living in light of the meaning given to such living by the Scriptures themselves.
[1] Cora Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts” Ethics vol. 98 (1988) no.2, p. 255.
[2] Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana Press, 1985), p. 6.
[3] An excellent place to begin is: Alasdair MacIntyre Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame: university of Notre Dame Press, 1990); Jeffrey Stout, Ethics After Babel: The Languages of Morals and Their Discontents (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988); William Schweiker, Power, Value and Conviction: Theological Ethics in the Postmodern Age (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 1998); J. B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
[4] In this regard see Hilary Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge University Press, 1981), 50-74; in addition one should consult John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 95-218; see also Bernard Williams, “Internal and External Reasons,” in Moral Luck (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
[5] Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind (Cambrige, Mass.: Cambridge University Press, 1996). She further distinguishes between what she refers to as “weak virtue” theory and “pure virtue” theory. Broadly speaking Zagzebski defines the mark of a “virtue theory” as “where the primary object of evaluation is persons or inner traits or persons rather than acts. To describe a good person is to describe that person’s virtues, and it is maintained that a virtue is reducible neither to the performance of acts independently identified as right nor to a disposition to perform such acts. There is both more and less to a moral virtue than a disposition to act in the right way. There is more because a virtue also includes being disposed to have characteristic emotions, desires, motives, and attitudes. There is less because a virtuous person does not invariably act in a way that can be fully captured by any set of independent normative criteria,” 16. A “weak virtue theory” is one which determines what is right based on “what a virtuous person would do . . . this is the best criterion for what is right,” 16. A “pure virtue theory” is one “that treats act evaluation as derivative from the character of an agent. Roughly, an act is right because it is what a virtuous person might do,” 16.
[6] Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind , 7-8.
[7] Ibid., 7-8.
[8] Ibid. 1-29.
[9] Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
[10] Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement 30 (1956): 32-58.
[11]A more complete and nuanced articulation of this can be found in Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Penguin Books, 1993).
[12] Mark I. Johnson, Moral Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
[13] Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” p. 255. In a similar vein, see the work of Mark Johnson, Moral Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Science for Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Specific application to medical ethics can be found in Anders Nordgren, “Ethics and Imagination: Implications of Cognitive Semantics for Medical Ethics” Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics 19 (1998): 117-141.
[14] In many ways, the essay by Kevin J. Vanhoozer “The Trials of Truth” in To Stake a Claim: Mission and the Western Crisis of Knowledge edited by J. Andrew Kirk and Kevin J. Vanhoozer (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), pp. 120-156 is a similar attempt to ‘re-think’ the apologetical in light of an expanded epistemology like that suggested by Zagzebski and others.
[15] The reader should notice that I did not say that this interest was new. At least since Socrates’ association of morality with ‘living’, i.e., ‘how should we live?’ as opposed to ‘what ought I to do?’; the role of ‘poetry’ or other imaginative literature has been in dispute as to its either positive or negative part in the matter.
[16] Clarence Walhout, “The End of Literature: Reflections on Literature and Ethics” Christianity and Literature, Vol. 47, no. 4, (Summer: 1998): 459-476. Also see: John Barton, “Reading for Life: The Use of the Bible in Ethics and the Work of Martha C. Nussbaum” JSOT Supplement Series No. 207, (1995): 66-76.
[17] Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 168-194; although one should note that the entire volume is evidence of this shift. Again, Nussbaum’s works attest to the not altogether ‘newness’ of this shift, especially when considered against the background of the place of Greek Tragedy in the development and work of moral reflection. Likewise, the reader should consult the following: Charles Altieri, Canons and Consequences: Reflections on the Ethical Force of Imaginative Ideals (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1990); Wayne C. Booth, The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Cora Diamond, “Losing Your Concepts,” Ethics, 98 (1988), pp. 255-277; Richard Eldridge, On Moral Personhood: Philosophy, Literature, Criticism and Self-Understanding (Chicago University Press, 1989); S. L. Goldberg, Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in literature (Cambridge University Press, 1993); Geoffrey Galt Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature and Ethics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); J. Hillis Miller, The Ethics of Reading: Kant, de Man, Eliot, Trollope, James and Benjamin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987); David Parker, Ethics, Theory and the Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994; Leona Toker (ed.) Commitment in Reflection: Essays in Literature and Moral Philosophy (New York: Garland, 1993); Brian Stock, “Ethical Values and the Literary Imagination in the Later Ancient World,” New Literary History, vol. 29, no. 1 (1998): 1-13; Wayne Booth, “The Ethics of Teaching Literature,” College English, Vol. 61, no. 1, (September, 1998): 41-55; Frank Palmer, Literature and Moral Understanding: A Philosophical Essay on Ethics, Aesthetics, Education and Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
[18] Ethics, theory and the novel, p. 34. For Martha Nussbaum the literary is elevated even higher—for her, literature is moral philosophy.[18]
[19] Here see the magisterial work of Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[20] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
[21] I am following closely the work of Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” in his Philosophical Papers Vol.I: Philosophy and Human Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), see also Taylor’s Philosophical Arguments (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), especially pages 61-99. Another singularly important work in this regard is George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). For further explorations in the matter see John Milbank, “The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn,” in The Word Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 84-122.
[22] Charles Taylor, “Language and Human Nature,” 220.
[23] Ibid., 221.
[24] Ibid.
[25] This is the later Wittgenstein’s cricitism of “philosophy” as the failed attempt to “explain” or service “explanations.” In the end, all philosophy can and is allowed to do is to offer “descriptions.”
[26] J. Burnet, ed. Platonis Opera, 5 Vols. (Oxford University Press). All citations are from this edition.
[27] Taylor refers to this as a “discourse-modelled notion of thought”—see “Language and Human Nature,” 222.
[28] John Milbank, “The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn,” 88.
[29] Here see especially the work of John Milbank, “The Linguistic Turn as a Theological Turn,” 84-122. The point that needs to be made is how one’s theory of God, the world and language are interrelated! For illustrations in Augustine on this subject see his On Christian Doctrine, 1.8, 1.2.2; 2.10.15; 3.59; 3.10.14.
[30] See here the work of Louis Dupre, Passage to Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993); also see the fascinating analysis provided by R. K. French and Andrew Cunningham, Before Science: The Invention of the Friars’ Natural Philosophy (London: Scolar Press, 1996).
[31] For a fuller explication of the implications and genesis of these ideas, see Francis Oakley, “Christian Theology and the Newtonian Science,” Church History 30 (1961), 433-457.
[32] Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979).
[33] John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Prometheus Books, 1994), 2.2.2.
[34] Immanuel Kant, Critique: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Prussian Academy ed., in Kant’s Werke, vol. 4 (Berlin, 1968), A104, 112.
[35] Ibid., A111, 112.
[36] F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. Walter Kaufmann, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), section 604.
[37] George Steiner, After Babel, 206.
[38] Richard Rorty, “Introduction,” The Linguistic Turn, 15-24.
[39] I am not interested in pursuing the issue(s) surrounding the notion of ‘development’ or ‘change’ relative to the ‘early and ‘later’ Wittgenstein. There is sufficient ‘continuity’ as well as ‘discontinuity’ to validate a variety of positions on the matter. For further considerations on the matter, one should consult J. Koethe, The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought; Norman Malcolm, ‘Nothing is Hidden’: Wittgenstein’s Criticism of His Early Work; J. Cook, Wittgenstein’s Metaphysics.
[40] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Notebooks, 1914-1916, eds. G.H. von Wright and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961; 2nd ed., 1979), 106.
[41] Rudolph Carnap, Logical Structure of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1928] 1967), 327-28. A brilliant (if misguided) analysis of similar considerations is to be found in Gilbert Ryle, “Systematically Misleading Expressions” reprinted in The Linguistic Turn, 85-100.
[42] Carnap develops what is referred to as a ‘semantic theory of truth’ which differentiates between those sentences capable of being ‘true’, e.g., ‘object sentences’ or ‘token sentences’, and those which are not, namely, ‘psuedo-sentences’. The latter would include ‘metaphysical’ utterances, e.g., religious, ethical, etc. Further to this see Rudolph Carnap, Introduction to Semantics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942), and Meaning and Necessity: A Study in Semantics and Modal Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1947).
[43] Dudley Shapere, “Philosophy and the Analysis of Language,” in The Linguistic Turn, 279-80.
[44] The reader should consult previous chapters in this book for greater elucidation of the contours of each of these philospher’s ideas and projects.
[45] Charles Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 61-78; see also Taylor’s Sources of the Self, 143-176.
[46] Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
[47] Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 64.
[48] Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1979] 1991), 208.
[49] Taylor, Philosophical Arguments, 66. Such an ‘ontologizing’ of reason and the rationalist methodology is canonized in the work of the Port Royal Logic in seventeenth-century France.
[50] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958). Hereafter cited as PI.
[51] Peter Winch, “Introduction: The Unity of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy,” in Winch, ed. Studies in the Philosophy of Wittgenstein (New York: Humanities Press, 1969): 1-19.
[52] PI, 31.
[53] Wittgenstein, PI, 7, 19.
[54] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Grammar, ed. R. Rhees, trans. A. J. P. Kenny (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974) hereafter cited as PG.
[55] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, eds. G.H. von Wright, R. Rhees, and G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956); 2nd ed., 1967; 3rd ed., 1978), 333.
[56] PI, 107.
[57] See Bernard Williams’ Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 132-155, for his distinction between ‘absoluteness’ and ‘truth’; a distinction which is meant to prise off a realm of ‘objective’ fact which is somehow non-perspectivally true, from that which is ‘true’ in the sense that it is ‘rightly assertable’ within a specific language-game.
[58] Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).
[59] Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations 3rd edition. Translated G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958).
[60] J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 2nd edition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975) and John Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969).
[61] Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth, Texas: Texas Christian University Press, 1976); also cf. Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action and Interpretation, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination. Ed. Mario J. Valdes, (New York and London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991).
[62] Kai Nielsen, “Wittgensteinian Fideism” Philosophy 62 (1967), pp. 191-193. This consequence is most profoundly reflected in the works of Richard Rorty, e.g., Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Not all agree with Nielsen’s analysis and his charge of fideism.
[63] Rorty refers to this ancient preoccupation with ‘truth’ and the ‘invisible’ as “the disposition to use the language of our ancestors, to worship the corpses of their metaphors,” Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. 21.
[64] The use of ‘essence’ is burdened with all kinds of metaphysical freight which ultimately blurs our ability to see language doing more than function self-referentially. This is developed more fully by Ricoeur in Interpretation Theory.
[65] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson (Cambridge University Press, 1994) p. 92.
[66] Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 279.
[67] More on this can be found in Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).
[68] Hillary Putnam, “Taking Rules Seriously—A Response to Martha Nussbaum,” in New Literary History, 15 (1983), p. 199.
[69] As Nietzsche poetically frames it in “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense,” in The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 46-47: “Truth is a mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthromorphisms—in short a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people.”
[70] This misguided quest produced the ‘Cartesian Anxiety’ as Richard Bernstein labels it in his Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis, (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).
[71] Arthur Allen Leff, “Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law,” Duke Law Journal, no. 6 (1979), 1233-34.
[72] Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edition, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); also cf. Mary Hesse, Revolutions and Reconstructions in the Philosophy of Science (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1980);
[73] Richard Rorty, Consequences of Pragmatism, (Hempel Hempstead: Harverster Wheatsheaf, 1991), xliii.
[74] Richard Rorty, “Pragmatism and Philosophy” in Consequences of Pragmatism, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982) as found in After Philosophy, eds. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996), 30-31.
[75] Ibid., 32.
[76] Ibid., 74-75.
[77] Ibid., 27.
[78] Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 23.
[79] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 22.
[80] Ibid., 22.
[81] Ibid., 27.
[82] Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973).
[83] Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, 73.
[84] Ibid., 73.
[85] Ibid., 79-80.
[86] For example, Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981).
[87] For a concise analysis of the variety of ways in which philosophy has both enabled and disabled ethical pursuits, see Bernard Williams’, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (London: Fontana, 1985).
[88] Plato, Phaedrus, 267a6.
[89] Martha Nussbaum, “Sophistry About Conventions,” in Love’s Knowledge, 220.
[90] Ibid., 220.
[91] Martha Nussbaum, LK, 55.
[92] Nussbaum discusses this in “The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of Private and Public Rationality” in Love’s Knowledge, pp. 54-105. This is a recurrent theme of her works beginning with The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and ethics in Greek tragedy and philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1986) and subsequent The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton University Press, 1994).
[93] Martha Nussbaum, “Consequences and Character in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” in Philosophy and Literature 1 (1976-7), pp. 25-53.
[94] Love’s Knowledge (hereafter cited as LK), p. 55.
[95] Nussbaum builds her characterization of Plato around her reading of Protagoras. All references cited here are from R. E. Allen’s translation and commentary, Ion, Hippias Minor, Laches, Protagoras Vol.3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), pp. 169-223.
[96] Protagoras, p. 217.
[97] The first two areas (singleness and metricity) are ultimately combined in the analysis of ‘particularity’ in Aristotle where homogeneity and heterogeneity form the background against which discussions of universal and general rules takes place, cf. LK, pp. 66ff.
[98] Nicomachean Ethics, 1142a. Hereafter cited as EN, quotations taken from Aristotle XIX :The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934).
[99] What follows is largely influenced by Nussbaum and the work of David Wiggins, particularly the latter’s “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley, Ca.: Univ. Of California Press, 1980), pp. 221-240.
[100] Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 304.
[101] LK, p. 74.
[102] Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self, 125.
[103] Alisdair MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 136. The quotation from Aristotle is suggestive of the relationship between aretaic theory and epistemic justification. This is pursued somewhat by James A. Montmarquet, Epistemic Virute and Doxastic Responsibility (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1993), p.99 where he writes: “A person S is justified in believing p insofar as S is epistemically virtuous in believing p.”
[104] Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 309.
[105] Iris Murdoch, “The Fire and The Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists,” originally published in 1976, reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics: Essays in Philosophy and Literature (London: Allen Lane, 1998), pp. 386-463; with application to Kant, see also by Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited” in Existentialists and Mystics, pp. 261-286.
[106] LK, p. 76.
[107] LK, p. 77.
[108] Nussbaum deviates from the standard translation of ‘phantasia’ as ‘imagination’ opting for ‘appear’. See her essay on De Motu cited below.
[109] LK, p. 77; cf. Martha C. Nussbaum, Aristotle’s De Motu Animalium (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1978) Essay 5. Nussbaum discusses these themes further in Fragility, pp. 277ff.
[110] Lk, p. 78.
[111] See the stimulating analysis by L. A. Kosman, “Being Properly Affected: Virtues and Feelings in Aristotle’s Ethics” in Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 103-116. Kosman comments regarding Aristotle’s idea of virtue that it is best seen as “a complex disposition in the sense that its actualization is complex, and specificially in that its actualization consists of a characteristic set of feelings and a correspondent characteristic set of actions.” (109)
[112] Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness, 309.
[113] LK, p. 79.
[114] David Parker, Ethics, theory and the Novel, p. 37; cf. Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), especially the chapter ‘The Idea of Perfection’, pp. 1-45.
[115] Iris Murdoch, “Vision and Choice in Morality,” in Existentialists and Mystics, p. 79.
[116] Charles Taylor, “What is Human Agency?” in Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1992), 15-16.
[117] Charles Altieri, “From Expressivist Aesthetics to Expressivist Ethics,” in Literature and the Question of Philosophy, ed. Anthony J. Cascardi (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 135.

The Whole is Greater than The Sum of Its Parts

2007-10-23T17:04:00.000-05:00

The attached essay explores the need for a narrative approach to self-understanding in light of the grand narrative of God revealed in the Scriptures.

http://www.rts.edu/quarterly/winter97/payne.html

The Unbearable Lightness of Being?

2007-10-20T22:06:00.000-05:00

ehttp://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/rat/2006/00000013/00000002/art00002

The following is an essay published by Dr. Michael Payne that explores the complexity of Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being as to its relevance to issues of time and morality.

Revelation and Reason

2007-10-20T18:50:00.000-05:00

New Title from P&R Publishing Co. Revelation and Reason with chapter contributed by Dr. Michael Payne.

To Purchase: http://www.amazon.com/Revelation-Reason-Essays-Reformed-Apologetics/dp/0875525962/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2333309-8190458?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194130720&sr=1-1

Worldview

2007-10-20T18:45:00.000-05:00

New Title from P&R Publishing Co. on Worldview with chapter contributed by Dr. Michael Payne released October October 2007. To Purchase:

http://www.amazon.com/Revolutions-Worldview-Understanding-Western-Thought/dp/0875525733/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2333309-8190458?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1194131076&sr=1-1

Apologetics

2007-10-20T17:18:00.000-05:00

http://www.wts.edu/publications/wtj/payne-spring-02.pdf

Events

2007-10-20T00:30:00.001-05:00

Events

Commentary

2007-10-20T00:28:00.000-05:00

This page will hold the Commentary of Michael Payne.

Acts Study - Week 5 – SHARING A TESTIMONY

2007-10-20T00:06:00.000-05:00

Week 5 Project – SHARING A TESTIMONY

Acts 3:1-26

I. The Story of your spiritual journey.

Have you experienced salvation? If so, you have a message. Read I Peter 3:15. Let’s consider what we need to know to be ready:

A. Write one word best describing your life during each of the three phases of your spiritual journey to knowing Christ. Then, share them, by category, without comment.

1) Before ____________________
2) How ____________________
3) After ____________________

B. Record 3 phrases or words that describe different attitudes, circumstances or actions you had before you came to know Christ, then share them.

1)
2)
3)

C. How would you summarize your differences and what you had in common?

II. The story of Jesus Christ’s spiritual journey. Read Romans 10:14-17.

A. How did you hear the gospel (who, where, when)? Consider finding a way this week to thank that person for influencing you to give your life to Christ. It might encourage them!

B. What did you understand about the claims of Jesus Christ? This is the part of your testimony that must be clear and about HIM, not you!

III. Proclaiming His praises!

Read Isaiah 52:7. “In biblical times, there was no CNN to take people into the battle zone via television. Instead, messengers ran from the war zones to inform anxious family members and friends of the outcome of the battles. In this passage, the message is one of victory, “Your God reigns!” (The Treasures of Encouragement , Sharon Betters)

A. Ps. 66:16 says, “Come and listen, all you who fear God; let me tell you what He has done for me.”

1. What is an area where you have seen change in your life because of Jesus? A true testimony relates to personal experience.
2. How has God comforted you though relational conflict, deep loss, illness, financial or job pressures? You have a message!

B. This is now we can preach without ‘preaching’! We can cultivate the habit of seeing ALL of life as an opportunity to express gratitude to God! No child of God is exempt from this type of ‘preaching’ ministry.

IV. Read Jer. 20:9.

Pray for our testimonies to burst forth from an inward fire! We ARE to preach the gospel, without ‘preaching’ and talk about Jesus! An energizing power is given by the Holy Spirit to cleansed, trusting hearts. So confess your sins for continual cleansing and consider this quote by Michael Green: “EVANGELISM IS OVERFLOW’!

Study of Acts - Week 3 – THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

2007-10-19T23:45:00.000-05:00

Week 3 Project – THE POWER OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Acts 2:5-39

Introduction: The Holy Spirit’s Coming

Before His death, Jesus told all those who were spiritually thirsty to come to Him and drink. He promised that rivers of living waters would flow out of them, speaking symbolically of the Holy Spirit who hadn’t been given, because Jesus had not yet been glorified (John 7:37-39). Jesus later said it was for our good that He was going away and He promised to send the Counselor, the Spirit of truth, to guide us into all truth and to tell us what is yet to come (John 16:7,13). Then, Christ’s last words before His ascension assured believers that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came, that would result in their being bold witnesses of His death and resurrection (Acts 1:8). Pentecost was fifty days after Christ was resurrected and just 10 days after His ascension. It is here, in Acts 2:1-36, that we see Jesus’ promises about the Holy Spirit fulfilled. On that day, all the Christians were filled with the Holy Spirit. Peter was empowered to explain what was happening. He describes David’s prediction of Christ’s resurrection and exaltation as fulfillment of prophecy and God’s foreordained plan. And he points to the gift of the Holy Spirit as proof of Christ’s Lordship.

Today we have the gospels, the book of Acts and the epistles to teach us about the Holy Spirit’s ministry in our lives and in the life of Christ’s church. We are inseparably linked to this Person as believers, yet many believers are confused about or ignorant of His ministry in our lives. Ask yourself – “Theoretically, if the Holy Spirit left my life today, would it make any difference in the way I respond to things?” (Leader: 10 min. #1; 10 min. #11A; 10 min. #11B; 15 min. for prayer.)

I. The Holy Spirit’s Ministry

A. The Holy Spirit came to convict the world of sin, righteousness and judgment, according to John 16:8-11. What has been the world’s response, from Old Testament times until now, according to Acts 7:51-53?

B. Assign these verses. Discuss how the Holy Spirit relates to all believers.

1. I Corin. 6:19, 20
2. Eph. 1:13
3. Rom. 8:11, 16 & 26
4. In I Corin. 12:7-13, we see that there is both diversity and unity in the body of Christ, for the common good. Everyone profits as the spiritual gifts are exercised that the Holy Spirit bestowed. He gives ‘severally, as He wills, we receive’.

C. Once we better understand the theology of God’s Spirit at work in the church and in us, what should be the implications in our walk with God and the life of the church?

II. How Christians relate to the Holy Spirit

A. What potential problems are exposed in the following verses?

1. Eph. 4:30 (What solutions are offered in v.31,32?)
2. I Thes. 5:19 (What solutions are offered in verses 20-24?)
3. Gal. 5:17 (What solutions are offered in verses 16, 18 & 25?)
4. I John 1:5-10 once again shows us problems, or hindrances, that can keep us from the Spirit’s fullness. How can these verses help us follow through on obeying the solutions offered in the verses above and what’s at stake if we don’t?

B. Eph. 5:18 is a command for believers to be filled with the Holy Spirit. It’s not an option, but He doesn’t tell us to do something beyond our grasp. Eph. 5:19-21 and Col. 3:15, 16 describe evidences of the Spirit’s fullness in our hearts and in the church. We speak to one another with songs, hymns, and spiritual songs, singing and making music in our hearts to the Lord, being thankful for everything and submitting ourselves one to another. Do you see the Spirit’s fullness being manifested in our church?

III. Pray together about:

A. Where you need deeper understanding, confessing obstacles to obedience in your walk and your desire to experience the Spirit’s work in yourself and in our church.

B. ALTAR Accountability. In the whole group, or in smaller groups of 2 or 3, share how you are doing in the 3-5 things that you resolved to do in order to ‘build an altar’ and have a life more useful to God.

Study on Acts - Week 2 - BUILDING A LIFE ALTAR

2007-10-19T23:27:00.000-05:00

Week 2 Project – BUILDING A LIFE ALTER

Acts 1:8 – 2:4 Read silently and mark “!” – for something that helped you
“?” – for something that raised a question

The Ascension and the Power of the Spirit

Jesus would not let the disciples leave Jerusalem to be his witnesses until they received “the gift”, the power of the Holy Spirit (1:4-8). What did they have to wait for? Why couldn’t the Spirit be given to them immediately? Because Jesus had to ascend to the right hand of the Father. It is from there, from the right hand of God, that Jesus pours out the Spirit. See Peter’s sermon in Acts 2:33. “Exalted to the right hand of God, he has received from the Father the promised Holy Spirit and has poured out what you now see and hear.” The Spirit was not given in this major way until Christ assumed his place as our Priest and King before the Father. John 16:7 – Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. Pentecost happens when Jesus goes to the right hand of the Father.

Therefore, Pentecost and the Ascension are the one time events. Yet, there is a repeatable aspect to them. There is still a connection between seeing the ascended Christ and experiencing the power of the Spirit. When Stephen was dragged before a human court, he was condemned unjustly and was about to be executed. But he was “filled with the Holy Spirit” (Acts 7:55). How so? We are told, “full of the Holy Spirit he looked up to heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look” he said, ‘I see heaven opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!’ At this they covered their ears, and yelling at the top of their voices, they all rushed at him . . . While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed . . . ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

What happened? The sight of Jesus at the right hand of God filled him with the Holy Spirit. Why? Jesus was “standing” at God’s right hand. This refers to his work as our Advocate (I John 2:1 – we have an advocate with the Father, one who speaks in our defense – Jesus Christ the Righteous One. He is the propitiation for our sins.) At that very moment that an earthly court was condemning him, he realized that the heavenly court was commending him. In other words, the “fullness” he experienced was an experience of the gospel. At that moment, he got an extremely vivid, powerful sight of what he already knew intellectually – that in Christ we are beautiful in God’s sight and free from condemnation (Col. 1:23). But the Spirit took that intellectual concept and electrified his entire soul and mind and heart and imagination with it. At that moment, the verdict there (at the throne of God) became so real and overwhelming to him that the verdict here (in the earthly kangaroo court) became inconsequential. He faced his accusers with not just boldness, but even with at calmness and joy, and forgiveness.

Now it cannot be coincidence that Pentecost is so connected to the Ascension. It means that to the degree that we have an awareness of Jesus as our advocate, as being our righteousness and holiness before the Father, to the degree that we understand our position in him before God, to that degree we will have courage, love and power. When we ask for the fullness of the Spirit, we do not just sit and wait for a zap. Rather, we go to the truth and pray it into our souls until the Spirit comes and sets it on fire. That tends to happen not just as the result of faithful “waiting on him” in prayer, but also when we attempt to share our faith with others. Then the Holy Spirit may to one degree or another, make the truth “catch on fire” in us, filling us with the same assurance he gave Jesus, that we are his beloved children (Luke 3:21-22).

To ask for the fullness of the Spirit for witness is to grasp and thrill under the gospel and all it teaches.

The Nature of Spiritual Experience

We see then that we cannot divorce Word from Spirit or pit them against each other. Spirit-filledness is for the purpose of speaking effectively. On the other hand, Spirit-filledness is actually “truth beginning to shine” in the soul. It arises from meditation and prayer and reflection over the truths of the Word.

In Ephesians 1:17, Paul prays for the Ephesians and asks that the Spirit of wisdom and revelation will enlighten the eyes of your heart in order that the Ephesians might know the hope to which he has called you, and the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints. Does he think the Ephesians don’t know that they have this hope and inheritance? No, of course they know it intellectually. But Paul here says that the fullness of the Spirit “enlightens the eyes of the heart” and shows us the “glory” and “riches” of it all. In Eph. 3:18ff. Paul shows the nature of spiritual experience again. He says that the Spirit’s job is to strengthen in the inner being so that we might receive power to grasp . . .how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” This is the fullness of the Spirit! It is to take truths that we know – like the love of Christ – and meditate on them, seeking the Spirit’s help, until we find ourselves with the “power to grasp” and we find the dimensions of his love simply overwhelm our mind and heart and fill us up.

This is Paul’s prayer for his people. This is what happened to Stephen. This is what happens at every place that “the fullness of the Spirit” is mentioned. The truth begins to shine out, we hear God saying, “you are my beloved”, and it revolutionizes us, making us effective as ambassadors of his kingdom.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Discuss those things in the reading that most helped you – things you marked with an ‘!’.

2. Discuss those things in the reading that raised questions – things you marked with an ‘?’

3. How could your group as a group “build and altar” along the lines of Acts 1 so as to be more useful to God?

4. What one or two practical things will you do in order to “build an altar” and seek the fullness of the Spirit?

Small Group Studies

2007-10-19T23:23:00.000-05:00

This page will contain study guides for small groups.

Sermons Page

2007-10-19T23:15:00.000-05:00

This page will contain all of the sermons at Union Evangelical Church, Mexico City, Mexico.