This post comes
from reading Owen Barfield’s Saving the
Appearances for a monthly book club I organize in Pittsburgh called the
“Pittsburgh Inklings” (we meet at an awesome bar in Lawrenceville called The
Abbey; the main front section where we usually find seating easily is a lot of
dark, heavy wood, very English pub-ish). We did the book in two installments,
but there is way too much material to get into there in even two meetings.
There is so much cultural-historical-literary-philosophical-religious material intersecting
in the realms in which I have studied that you couldn’t fit it in even if
nobody else talked, and then the point of a book club is that other people do
talk, and have interesting and deep observations from their reading of the book
from their own perspective and experiences. So, I thought this would be a good
place to put up the things I saw from my background in studying Hebrew Bible,
background behind some of what he specifically talks about from the Old
Testament and intersections with other areas that aren’t so on the surface is
his work.
These come primarily from the
second half of the book, which he begins on the very solid footing, from a
Christian perspective, of a chapter devoted to the Greco-Roman world and a next
chapter on Judaism. At some point, Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger / Pope Benedict
the XVI, in response to a great deal of blowback against the Greco-Roman
tradition of philosophy (e.g., when Heidegger said “only a god can save us
now,” what he meant was getting back past the pre-Socratics like Parmenides,
back to the primal experience that gave rise to beliefs in gods), said that you
simply can’t jettison the Greco-Roman world and have any accurate idea of
Christian thinking, because that world and Judaism are the parents whose
interaction at a particular point in history gave birth to Christian thought
(well, of course, as a Christian, I believe there is a third element that is
bigger than the other two combined, the whole that is more than the sum of its
parts because it comes from a world above those parts, the Incarnation of the
second person of the Blessed Trinity in the hypostatic union, God truly
“dwelling among us” . . . but as far as human-thinking elements that carry
genetic characteristics, these are the parents). So that is important to
realize: that he begins this second half with two pillar chapters and that this
is a very sound exposition plan from the Christian perspective.
Don’t Look Back
I just couldn’t
resist using the Lot’s wife thing. Barfield has a really interesting line at
the end of the chapter on Greco-Roman, on p. 106, that the evolution of the
history of consciousness he seeks to establish is “possible only within the
limits of Pythagorus and Moses.” This means not back to the eastern aspect of
Plato or back to the ancient Near Eastern cultures back behind Israel . . . our
story we seek begins with those two. This reminds me a little of a rabbinic
discussion about Gen 1:1.
The rabbis are a prime example of
not thinking in the Western modern scientific mode: they definitely don’t ask
the same kinds of questions. They ask
questions like, given the acrostic principle that the first line/verse should
start with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and then continue from there
(second line/verse begins with the second letter, and so on), why does the
first word of the Torah begin with the second letter of the alphabet? “In the
beginning” is the translation of the Hebrew word bərəshith, which begins with the second
letter in the Hebrew alphabet, bêt.
One rabbi answers that, because the Torah is still a text and is not the Holy
One, Blessed Be He, himself, only a gift from him, it must show that nature by
beginning with the second rather than first letter. Another rabbi gives another
explanation (for Judaism, it is not any one voice or specific answer that is
authoritative, but the conversation itself . . . and this answer resonates
particularly with Barfield’s “not back behind Pythagorus or Moses” thing,
especially the “not back behind” part). This rabbis says that it is because of
the shape of the letter bêt, which looks like this:
ב
Hebrew reads from
left to right, and so this letter being first means it is at the right end and
the forward flow of the text is going left across the line from there. This
rabbi calls attention to the fact that the letter’s physical shape is open only
to the front (left); if we start in the middle space of that letter, we cam go
only forward (left), and this is how the movement goes. It cannot, he says, go
upward or downward or backward, for it is bounded solidly on those three sides. And
he applies this to interpretation . . . particularly the backward part. We do
not ask what was before the “beginning” of Gen 1:1. If the authors could be
brought to grasp what is meant by the question of Creatio ex Nihilo versus the Greek philosophical idea of eternal
prime matter, they would side with the former, but they don’t have that
category or that question (the idea of “nothing” in that sense wasn’t around
yet; think of those signs with “Jesus” in the negative space: until somebody
shows you, you try all these ideas to make some sense of the positive space,
but once somebody shows you, it makes so much sense you can’t see the positive
spaces in the way you did when you were trying to construct sense of the
positive space; it’s hard to think “maybe that positive space is a 1 with a
tail?” because all you now see easily is the space between the J and the E),
and it really doesn’t seem to hinder the finding of meaning in the text for the
rabbis. “Formless and void” means chaotic and “create” (Hebrew bara) means to instill order (in our way
of explaining: giving positive being by giving knowability through giving an
order that human reason can read). But as far as what is back behind that, whether
the Greek philosophical “nothing” (“things that are not” as conceived by the
Greek Elean school of philosophy in the 5th century BCE) or Greek
eternal matter (which Aristotle held to), if the Holy One, Blessed Be He,
wanted us to know that, he would have told us, and since he hasn’t, we move
forward with trying to participate with ongoing creation by participating in
bringing the order of the Torah to the chaos of the nations.
I will say, however that, while
those texts of Gen 1 were formed before the Greek philosophical language
developed of distinguishing between “things that are” and “things that are
not,” our belief in divine authorship means that we have to conceive of things
such that that creation ex nihilo is
a valid
interpretation of what is there in the original Hebrew sense into the
new language of ontology. We need that even just for consistency in the canon,
because we do get creation ex nihilo in the later strata, especially in the
Writings (the Ketuvim, third section after the Law/Torah and Prophets/Neviim),
in the book of 2 Maccabees, which was originally composed in Greek. The mother
tells her seventh of seven sons whose older brothers have all been publicly
murdered for not eating pork (for not syncretizing by forsaking their
distinctive, identifying practices) that he should go to his brave death not
worrying, because if God can create the world (“things that are”) from nothing
(“things that are not”), then he can raise them from the dead in bodies
restored from the mutilation.
And a certain thing I like in
this is also a quality of givenness that Tolkien seems to have been going for
to according to some of his letters. He wanted that ground to feel like it had
mysteries in it with unknown histories but a texture of the real that indicates
they must have been very real histories, just simply unknown, like those ruins
Merry finds in Dunharrow that obviously has some kind of significance and
function, but Tolkien says nobody now remembers (not just Merry or others here,
but he specifically says nobody: “Such was the dark of Dunharrow, the work of
long-forgotten men. Their name was lost and no song or legend remembered it.
For what purpose they had made this place, as a town or a secret temple or a
tomb of kings, none in Rohan could say” [Return
of the King, 777–78]) . . . and Tolkien knew every possible thing about the
world he created, with all it’s cracks and crevices, myriads and myriads more
than have any other authors about the worlds they have created (even my beloved
Terry Pratchett). His characters always start where they are and go forward. But
they are also always aware that there were things that came before in the lands
through which they travel, things that may not be remembered in the songs but of
which you can still see traces. The world appears as it is “given” to them, not
with the Greek propensity to give the whole back-story to everything (for more
on that in Greek vs. Hebrew literature, see Eric Aurbach’s “Odysseus’s Scar” .
. . the Greeks even had a grammatical convention that functioned something like
HTML tags for doing back-story digressions).
Translations and Souls
The first of the
of these elements is the issue of a difference in what is meant by words then
and now, differences so deep that they are significant contours of concepts and
not themselves concepts that you can isolate and lay out nicely on a table to
examine. As an example of what I am talking about, I’ll start with one he
doesn’t use, which is the word “body.” To us, that is defined as physical
material extended in three dimensions, having a certain density etc. (with the
most significant in that line being the three dimensions, under the influence
of Descartes’ definition of body as res
extensa, extended reality, defined by extension in three dimensions), but
for the Greeks and the Jews, it was defined as a mode of relation (they
wouldn’t have said it those kinds of words, but it’s the accurate translation
in our own intellectual jargon now for what they would men): We relate to other
human beings through the body (a consoling pat on the shoulder, hugging your
kid, spouses relating in physical intimacy); We relate to God through cultic
acts done with the body; we relate to the earth by sowing and tilling etc. It’s
not that they didn’t know about three dimensions; they did (height, breadth,
and width), but that wasn’t the core defining character of things in the
material world, of “bodies” (soma in
Greek . . . which was a more holistic concept, whereas sarx for “flesh” was more of what I would call the “squishiness” of
human experience living in the body . . . and I have always thought it very
import that it says that the Word became flesh).
Barfield had hinted at this issue
in the first half of the book, on p. 45, when he mentioned the difficulty of
translating between participation-era meanings and our-era meanings of the same
words, and on p. 100, in the chapter directly on Greco-Roman thought, he gives
us a specific example of a pair of terms he says it is better not to even try
to translate into our language because of the myriad associations in our
thinking for any candidate for translational equivalence, associations rather
misleading for accurate discussion of a participation-suffused thought world
like Greek philosophy. Those two terms are poiein
and paschein, and he even speaks of a
difference between Aristotle’s use of those Greek terms and Aquinas’s
rough-equivalence-translation Latin terms for them.
But I want to apply that
leave-untranslated principle to another Greek term he mentions here and, in
spite of his not bringing it in and in light of myself having received the same
protocol in doctoral studies, the Hebrew version and it’s even greater variance
from our present usage of the what is taken to be the usual English
equivalence. Here on p. 100, he presents the Greek word psyche (in Greek script, ψυχή), which we usually take to be translated by
the English word “soul.” But he here lists “life” as another possible meaning
or idea that could be a translation. To one who has studied the ancient Near
Eastern lit and the Greco-Roman and the medieval, this doesn’t look like much of
a difference, because we know that they mean “life” in the sense an animating
life force of a body, and that the reason that Barfield might present these as
different is that, in Christianity in our present world, “soul” has become
interchangeable with “spirit” and is used almost always in a sense of an
immortal soul that can go to heaven or hell after the death of the body. But in
the ancient world, you really couldn’t have a soul without a body because
animating a body is what a soul does by definition. This is
roughly true for both the Greek psyche
and the Latin anima that is used to
translate psyche in medieval theology
and philosophy (specialists in this field surely take exception to that
statement and list differences, as Barfield himself alludes to in saying that
those other words in Greek do not have exactly the same flavor as the words
Aquinas uses to translate them . . . but it’s an alright starting place into
the issue).
For Aristotle, and then for
Aquinas in an even more intricately detailed system, the soul is the “form” of
the body. This means not only that it gives it its three-dimensional shape that
can be encountered (and probably most easily observed) in stasis, but also (as
best as I am able to understand it and then express it) that it gives the form
of its change through motion (for Aristotle and Aquinas, being is all
about change from being in potential to being in act, and that happens through
motion, the study of which is physics, as the Physics is one of Aristotle’s most fundamental works, in part
because it is the necessary base from which to move on to his work the Metaphysics, and Aquinas’s commentaries
on these two works are two of his own works to which scholars constantly appeal
to expound his thought [and I have read both commentaries in full in English
when doing copy-editing for English translations being made available online by
an institute publishing a lot with the press for whom I do a fair bit of work in that field]). Think of it
in this way: the form of the cheetah is its potential to run fast (scholars
working on it in English usually say, “potency”)—all the rippled leg and torso
muscles and the clawed feet that can grip so strongly that you can see while it
is still really reach their true form only in the act of running (“being”
is always “potency” and “act”), in its motion from the potential to run to the
actuality of running, and it is the soul that does this movement.
In fact, the “soul” in these
pre-modern systems of thought is so far from our idea of a “soul” by definition
being a spirit that can have an eternal destiny and exist apart from the body
between death and the final resurrection that the medievals talk about three
levels or kinds of soul: the vegetative soul, the sensate soul, and the
rational soul (this is what I meant above about Aquinas having a more
explicitly intricate system). A tree has a soul, and the principle activity or
movement of the vegetative soul is growth, including the processing of things
like minerals and water through the help of light and oxygen into more of the
plant: growth. The tree is alive while that soul runs the growth, and dead when
it does not. Anything with a soul can die, and the definition of that death is
the de-animating of the body, the de-souling (I have a personal theory that
this is why fire has such a grip on human imagination, because it is the
closest in our world of visibility to what a soul does: you don’t supply the
power like the electricity you supply to a machine that can be turned off but
than back on with exactly the same life; fire you just provide fuel and it does
the movement of change to that on its own, and a fire can be sort of killed: If
we put out a fire and then start another, we tend to talk of them as different
fires, unlike how we talk about the machine being the same machine no matter
how many times we turn it off and back on again).
The other two forms of souls in
the Greco-Roman and medieval worlds (don’t worry, I’m getting back to that
more-mysterious world of the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible shortly)
are, as I said, the sensate and the rational. Non-human animals have a sensate
soul, a soul that can process sense perception, experience pain and pleasure, form
memories, and have a psychology of basic emotions. Only the human has the rational soul that can
be reflexive, aware of itself, able to say the word “I” (and I think these are
somehow the basis for other things that seem to be unique to humans, like
actual language, and religious conceptualization, and humor, and rational
thought). There were even debates among the medievals over whether the human
being, in progressing to the irrational soul, leaves behind the vegetative when
achieving the sensate and then leaves the sensate when achieving the rational, over
whether the same soul changes completely between the three stages or grows in
the manner of keeping the vegetative and simply adding the sensate status, and
then the rational.
Now we get back to my neck of the
woods, the Hebrew Bible and the language it borrowed from surrounding ancient
Near Eastern (ANE) cultures and languages like Ugaritic and Akkadian. The
Hebrew word nephesh is the “equivalent”
of the Greek psyche and the Latin anima, but the quote marks are even more
needed here. In fact, I have been in seminar classes reading through texts in
Hebrew in which one of the professor’s rules was not to translate nephesh, simply say the Hebrew word
because anything we could use to translate has myriad background
conceptualizations and interpretations that may be completely alien to the
Hebraic mindset of the text. To be sure, nephesh
can mean something like a life force, and even one more able to be physically
pinpointed than the Greek psyche and
the Latin anima: Leviticus 17
dictates that you not eat the flesh of animals that still has blood in it, for
the dam (blood) contains the nephesh. But, when one swears by the
life of the king, say, it is not that “life force” that is meant, but rather
the meaning of the king’s whole life: his valiant deeds in war, his wise
decisions in judging, etc. It’s a much broader concept with more nuance to hold
(to get into Barfield on such things, read Poetic
Dictation, which focuses on original unities of different senses of the
same words we now think to be completely disconnected from each other).
One last thing about the Hebrew nephesh: A number of times Barfield
designates the human as the one who “speaks through the throat,” but I can’t
find anywhere in the book where he expounds on that designation. But what is so
interesting about it in this context, even though he does not go into the
Hebrew term at all, just the Greek, is that the Hebrew word nephesh
originally means the throat. A number of Hebrew words for more abstract
concepts are taken from the name of body parts; another example is the word rechem originally meaning a woman’s womb
and then being adapted into the concept of “mercy.” I have always thought that
the reason nepesh as the word for
throat came to mean soul was a background in a physical practice: in a
sacrificial culture, you kill a lot of animals, and the quickest way to kill
the animal and get it ready is to cut its throat and hang it from it’s hind
legs so the blood (the dam containing
the nephesh) drains as quickly as
possible. But maybe there are other sources that have to do with speech
capacity and are behind Barfield’s characterizing humans as those who speak
through the throat.
A Big Opening Salvo
The instance with
which Barfield opens his chapter on Israel is beyond packed, at least
concerning the background of language from the Hebrew Bible. He quotes here
Psalm 104:2: “ Thou deckest thyself with light as it were with a garment; and
spreadest out the heavens like a curtain” (using that good old King James
version). I say this is a “big opening salvo” because there is simply so much
connection packed into the one verse.
First is sort of side one that
resonates with another book our club has done, which is The Man Who as Thursday by G. K. Chesterton. In light of the
creation narrative in Genesis, “the heavens” in the second half of the Psalms
verse is not simply a different way of saying the same thing as the light in
the first half of the verse just with a different term so it’s not
repetitive (which is something that does
often happens in the system of parallelism that is distinct to Hebrew poetry).
In creation, those “light” and the bodies in “the heavens” are created, respectively,
on day 1 (our Monday/Secretary in GKC’s Man
Who Was Thursday) and the day 4 (GKC’s Thursday himself, Syme).
(The are a whole lot of things
with this I am about to go into, but first I want to say that the book club had
an awesome discussion on something that I had never really noticed and two
other members picked up on, which is the lamp on the front of the car in the
night chase right before they find Monday is on their side: it shows just
enough light to keep from crashing, which is maybe sometimes as much as our
weary minds can handle, our “daily bread/light,” so to speak. And, of course,
being the English and text major, that pops out to me as being really
important, even though it might seem a small detail, because it happens at a
key shift in the narrative, from the leader being Thursday, the day of the
heavenly bodies, to the leader being Monday, the primordial light).
So, that shift from “light” to
“heavens” in Ps 104:2 , which Barfiled uses as his lead passage to his chapter
focusing on Judaism, hooks into something very deep in Judaism and Christianity
and the foundational narrative of the creation of the world. What interests me here is the heavenly bodies
in the second half of the verse as a “curtain.” Reading this immediately set me
investigating whether the Greek word kosmos
is used in the Septuagint translation (begun around 300 BCE under the
Hellenistic empire and culture . . . and indispensable for the study of both
the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, in fact by way of the Christian concept
of the Hebrew Bible as an Old Testament for the New, as the Septuagint has a
different canonical arrangement from the TaNaK Hebrew Bible and was taken by Christians in
particular as the authoritative canon of the OT—somehting like 90 percent [or
some very high percentage] of the times an NT author quotes the OT, the
vocabulary and constructions indicate they are directly quoting from the
Septuagint, rather than doing a new translation themselves from the Hebrew
original). What I found is that kosmos
is not
there, but the Hebrew does the work I was looking for anyway, but as I have
mentioned the Greek and it is a connected phenomenon (just not present in this
particular passage), and because it was my own entry into the concept, I will
go through that first.
There is a reason that the same
Greek term, kosmos, is the base for
both our English word “cosmos” for the whole world and our word “cosmetics” for
facial make-up or matters of surface presentation (a connection that looks a
bit likes Barfield’s own emphasis on the original unities of words applied to
his own title term here, “appearances”). Ancient temples, including the
Jerusalem Temple, would have some type of surface (something cosmetic) around
the upper parts of inner areas depicting the heavenly bodies (the cosmos). As I
say, the Jerusalem Temple would have had this too, but it likely would have
differed as much from those in other temples as the Genesis 1 account of the
role of the heavenly bodies’ role in creation differs from the same matter in
the surrounding pagan mythologies: what to the pagans were mighty movers and
shakers with their own powerful wills (often clashing: quite a few pagan
cosmogonies, beginnings of the world, are theomachies, wars among gods) are, in
Genesis, merely elements created by God, the same as the trees and shrubs—their
role was a higher one, being for signs and seasons and days and years, but
still only given to them by God, the same as a tree’s role is. And most often,
in ancient Near Eastern cultures, this was a curtain or tapestry.
But, as I said, alas, the Greek kosmos is not used here in the
Septuagint, but the Hebrew material not only does have it, but has a higher
payoff with it. The Hebrew word translated as “curtain” there is used in two
other places. There is a single use 2 Samuel 7, which is a key passage for the
religious thinking on the promises to David. Here it is when David feels
convicted that the Ark resides in a “tent” while he lives in a palace. The word
there for “tent” is the same word for “curtains” in Ps 104:2. The Ark, center
of the tabernacle and later the Temple, is surrounded in 2 Sam 7 by the same
term, “curtains,” as God robes himself. But this “tent” may not have been some
shabby little tepee, for the same word for “curtains” in these passages is also
all over Exodus 26 and its descriptions of the curtains that are to surround
the Ark, the special presence. the footstool of God on earth.
Another interesting connection
with creation here is that, in 2 Sam 7, David does not say that the Ark is or
resides simply “in” the tent. The term here is more significant than that,
because it is not simply the preposition “in” (which in Hebrew is done by
attaching the letter bet to the front
of a word; there are three letters that are prefixable prepositions—the b
letter is for in with, or by, and the k letter for “like” or “as,” and the l
letter for “to” or “for,” as in L’chaim,
“to life, which I capitalize here as the title for that wonderful song in Fiddler on the Roof). This word means
“in the midst” and it is very loaded. It is the word used for the location of
the trees in the Garden of Eden, they were “in the midst” of the garden:
something almost too holy or powerful (like the light of the two trees in
Valinore) to touch without specific instructions like being allowed to eat of
the tree of life. The word “midst” has a tone of centrality but not a physical
centrality that can be plotted on a map/graph as the exact middle.
And all of this about the
tabernacle is connected at the most basic textual level to a link between
creation and tabernacle/Temple (and by this word “midst” to other “dwellings”
of the Lord, like calling to Moses from the “midst” of the burning bush in
Exodus 3). A scholar named Gordon Wenham did the Word Biblical Commentary on
Genesis 1–15, but he also did a small article on sanctuary (tabernacle/Temple)
imagery in the paradise narrative of Gen 2. Archeological finds of menorrah
from early periods convey that it was a stylized tree of life; there is good
gold in the land, as the furniture in the tabernacle/Temple was to be plated in
gold; there were gems in the land, just as there were to be gems on the breastplate
of the high priest. I don’t remember whether Wenham goes into this one, but I
know it from elsewhere too: when humanity is told to “till and keep” the
garden, a more literal reading would be “serve and protect,” and the only other
place these verbs are used paired together is to describe the duties of the
Levitical priests for the tabernacle and Ark.
The land in Genesis 2 is a
proto-Temple, and the trees are in the midst of the garden as the Ark is said
by David to be in the midst of the same “curtains” Exodus prescribed for the
tabernacle, the same type of curtain-ing as Ps 104:2 describes the Lord using
the heavenly bodies for.
We have to keep in mind that, for
the Jewish mind, the creation of the world and the creation of the Israelite
people are closely linked. The title “Decalogue” for the ten commandments
literally means “ten words,” and the giving of this law constituted the people,
made them a people. And from very early times, Jewish interpretation saw a
connection between this and creation in the element of there being exactly ten
times in Genesis 1 and 2 that the term translated “and he said” is used (waw-consecutive
imperfect, 3rd person, masculine, singular of the verb amar, to say or speak . . . the last comes in chapter 2, when God
says that it is not good for the man to be alone): ten words that created the
world and ten words that created the people. Barfield’s formulation of humanity
being “uttered” in p. 155 is very much along these lines. (This is one of the
reasons I like calling the Silmarillion
the Old Testament of Tolkien: the tapestries of the history of the elves and
humans connects back to the creation of the world, just as the Hebrew term
“generations “ stretches from the final instance in Genesis of the listing of
the “generations” of the twelve sons/tribes [when they transplant to Egypt],
back through all the generations like those of Noah’s three sons in Gen 10,
referred to in scholarship as the “Table of Nations,” but also people like
Ishmael, Esau, and Cain having their own “generations” listed, back to the very
first instance of the term in Gen 2:4: “These are the generations of the heavens
and the earth.”)
Demythologization
All of the
foregoing about the heavenly bodies on the “curtains” or kosmoi of pagan temples being very different from the treatment of
the heavenly bodies in Gen 1, and thus likely of the kosmos in the Jerusalem temple, feeds into what is known in
scholarship as the “demytholigization” that the Hebrew Bible does. I don’t
recall Barfield using that actual term, but it is pretty much exactly what he
is talking about in places.
Basically, this means what it
sounds like: taking the polytheistic myth out. But it has another dimension,
which in scholarship is called the Heilsgeschicte,
the sacred history, in the sense of the history of the people’s relationship
with the Lord in a progression of historical interventions.
[Aside: the German term Geschicte means “history,” and the
adjective heil means holy or sacred (the horror of the Nazi salutation); German makes its
genitive/possessive by simply adding s (no apostrophe as in English, which stands in for the e in the Old English –es
genitive that we still see traces of like Wednesday for Odin’s
day), so hiels would mean “of
the sacred (things etc.),” and Germans get no end of elation from simply
ramming words together to make new words, so Heilsgeschicte means a history of the sacred. (When editing, I sometimes
compare over-use of semicolons in English to the German genitive s: “they will ram fourteen words
together using thirteen genitive letters s,
then slap a heit or keit on the end for good measure, and
call it a new word” . . . with the implied “please don’t daisy-chain five
sentences together with semicolons”)].
The most basic formulation of it
comes on p. 150, in chapter 22 in Barfield, “Space. Time, and Wisdom.” Here he
is talking about “historicization” in early Jewish literature and makes a key
statement for his presentation: Greeks apprehend “form” in space, whereas the
Jewish mind sees form in time—events themselves as images. This is what the Heilsgeschicte (at
least as nineteenth-century German Protestant scholarship called it) is all
about.
Of course, while this is accurate
in and of itself as something that is there, yet just as Brafield’s main point
in his book is not projecting our phenomena-constructing method back past the
scientific revolution, there is here a matter of whether a Christian is trying
to force his own ideas onto a religious phenomenon and make it the defining
characteristic of the original. As a concrete example of this “on the page”:
For my “method” question in my doctoral comps, I did Deut 26:5–10b (in our PhD
comps, you did four questions, to be written in two six-hour sessions, for
which you developed a bibliography for each topic and a rough version of what
is to be questioned, worked out with one prof per question, usually chosen by
their area of expertise, who would write the actual specific question for the
two days of comps, and then you had an oral defense with all four profs a week
later; you did two from your major area [mine were biblical, OT], one from a
minor field [I did systematic theology on Paul Ricoeur’s work on metaphor], and
one method question, in which you took a passage and did a full
historical-critical work up and report on major discussions that have gone on
in the field concerning it). This is a section that was likely a self-contained
unity before being inserted into the book or lined up in combination with the
surrounding material in the composition, Scholars of course disagree (as they
love to do) as to whether it was a very early liturgical recitation that then
spawned compilings of writings of histories of the events, into which it itself
was later inserted, or on the other hand a later “brief recap” kind of thing
that arose after the compilation of the main Torah, then had a
liturgical-celebration life, then was inserted into the larger book that had
once given birth to it as a recap, but one way another, it very likely
preexisted its insertion into the text and was a self-contained piece, probably
with some liturgical use.
My point here, though, is
what the German scholars called it and the Jewish reaction against that as an
element in OT studies that is a good example of Barfield’s thought on
differences in constructing phenomena. The German scholars (like Gerard Von
Rad) dubbed it the “small credo,” on the line of thought that it probably
occupied a similar place in ancient Jewish liturgy to that held by the Nicene
Creed in all Christian worship, a regular communal recitation of a discrete
piece that somehow expresses the identity in a succinct way. And that longer
description may not be a bad one of the Deut passage as far as it goes . . .
but the term “credo” goes further, as Jewish scholars fairly object. “I
believe,” when said in heritage from the Nicene Creed, deals not just with
history (the Word became flesh, was crucified and buried and rose again on the
third day, in accordance with the Scriptures), but also with metaphysical
claims: one God, creator of all things visible and invisible; the Son being
consubstantial, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, born of
the Father before all ages; the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son
(or from the Father through the Son, per Eastern Orthodox objections to the Filioque).
Along those line of Jewish
resistance to Christian scholarship telling it what it has thought down through
the years and bearing on the question of how radically to make the
historicization the key
characteristic to the exclusion of
anything else, kind of seeing the Hebrew Bible as monolithic on this, the
Jewish scholar Jon Levenson has a book called Sinai and Zion: An Entry into the Jewish Bible. It’s short (only
about 200pp in paperback) and fairly readable (it is often used for MA-level
Intro to OT courses). I’ll give his basic thesis in a moment, but first, he has
a very apt line in one place pretty directly on what I’m saying here: “If this
implication is correct, then the familiar interpretation of the religion of
Israel as radically demythologized , besides being factually inaccurate,
obscures great spiritual treasures” (p. 105; emphasis mine).
Levenson’s main thesis in the
book is that the Hebrew Bible could be accurately describe, in its whole (in
one way of looking at it, but not to the exclusion of all other ways of
examining it), as a tension between two ideologies: Sinai and Zion. Sinai
tradition is this demythologization: the emphasis is on the narrative of the
exodus; the people meet God not in a prominent temple in a powerful city, but
in the wilderness. The Zion tradition shares more in common with the
mythological: God adopts the king’s son as his own, and the throne of the
dynasty is a special symbol of the relationship between God and the people. And
the tension between the two and the process of figuring out how they can be in
the same divine word is, for Levenson, itself a path to finding deeper truth in
the Jewish Bible.
In a sense, maybe for the sake of
a neat and orderly presentation with nice sharp lines, in which the Greek worlds
characterizing that key movement by which alpha thinking transforms original
participation and Judaism as solidly and solely the complete denial of original
participation without needing contact with Greek alpha thinking to do it,
Levenson’s reply would in effect be, “what you are saying is the need for
participation on a natural level (Greek alpha thinking and onward, beta
thinking and modern scientific thought, finding final participation), on the
one hand, and on the other, what you characterize as our radical Sinai
mentality that eschews any semblance of participation other then the radically
given law—this what you say is the development from alpha thinking, we Jews
have had all along in the realization that we have to reconcile the kingly and
myth-tinged Zion with the dusty-historical trek of the prophetic people through
the wilderness with the wilderness meeting at Sinai, or at least that the
tension between them will always define us.”
As one final brief instance from
Levenson, on pp. 45–50 of Sinai and
Zion, he discusses a seminal theory by Albrecht Alt that the laws can be
categorized into two types: casuistic (case-based) and apodictic (universal)
and that there a linguistic markers differentiating them, grammatical
constructions etc. that regularly mark each kind. Levenson says that, while Alt’s
work is invaluable for its linguistic insights in studies of form, it really
doesn’t have a theological value for a Jewish, and therefore closer to the
original, reading of the laws, because, for Judaism, they have the same force
as all being given by God at Sinai, regardless of what type they are. So, here
again is modern scholarship imposing categories on pre-modern literature and
claiming it is a defining characteristic (Alt saw the casuistic laws as being
very similar to the law codes in surrounding cultures, while the apodictic laws
were unique to Israel), much the same anachronistic, hegemonic retrojection
Barfield objects to in forcing modern phenomena-creation activity back onto
pre-modern (medieval and antiquity), but which he might himself be engaging in
a little by trying to pin Jewish thought down so essentially to the
demythologization/historicization aspect (emphaszing Sinaia to the exclusion of
Zion, in Levenson’s terms).
This mention of the Davidic
element brings up a final element in this section: It has to be noted too that
there are extents to which this hypothesis of demythologization is taken in
scholarship that will make it uncomfortable for some, including myself. There
can be a point at which, from our standpoint, demythologization ironically becomes
complete dehistoricization, and this is maybe one of the most complex
interactions between radical alpha thinking and Jewish thinking. The belief
that ancient Israel historicized the elements means that they were not
historical to begin with. There is much room to explore how embellishment of a
historical core is not “lying” but rather an act of interpreting, but as least
after the primeval history (Gen 1–11), Judeo-Christian orthodoxy believes in
some historical kernel, some actual breaking in of the super-natural into a
flesh-and-blood history like our own, not just a recasting into historical garb
of what was good in the mythological, but now without the bad effects of “polytheism.”
I am not saying that Barfield is doing this, or even that the scholar I’m about
to talk about is necessarily doing it, but just that it is a dangerous pole
(whether Scylla or Charybdis I don’t know) that is the one they are more in
danger of slipping toward.
I say that the instance of David
brings it up because that is where I personally concretely encountered it. In I
believe spring of 2008, I took a class on eighth-century (BCE) prophecy (Hosea,
Amos, etc.). The course was taught by a very interesting member of the faculty
at Jewish Theological Seminary near Columbia U in SW Harlem (122nd and
Broadway), but was taught in a classroom and on the catalogue of Union
Theological Seminary, across the street (basically, those schools are very
prestigious but to a large degree are able to keep going because Columbia owns
and supports their libraries). I was at Fordham, which was part of a doctoral
consortium in the city, in which doctoral students could have their funding at
their own school cover courses at these other institutions and the course count
on their transcript at their own school; so at least once we had a guy from JTS
taking a class with us at Rose-Hill campus of Fordham.
Alan Cooper was, interestingly,
the original singer for the group Sha Na Na, back in the 60s before the TV
show, when they were mostly a live band and opened for Jimi Hendrix at
Woodstock. (When he related this, I went home and rented the Woodstock movie, and
there a younger version of my prof was, hopping around on stage singing “At the
Hop.” Apparently they were a kind of glee club of Jewish guys in school at
Columbia together doing doo wop and then
took it on the road as a live act. He brought it up in talking about
multi-valence, how things can have multiple connotations and referential
values, as the name of the band was both a line from the chorus of well-known
doo wop song, but also an inside joke by a bunch of Jewish guys about how,
while the name of the Jewish new year is actually Rosh Ha-Shanah [head of the
year], now-Jewish people always say it “Rashashana” . . apparently after
Woodstock, when the opportunity came for the TV show, he decided he would
really rather get further degrees in and teach Hebrew Bible, and so Bowser
stepped in/up for the TV show).
In talking about the
eighth-century history in which these prophetic works arose, Cooper applied the
rubric of demythologization to David: the idea that the name was originally a
divine epithet that was then turned into a human personage. Not only was there no
original Moses, there was not even a historical David. There was never a united
kingdom, just the geographically close and probably genealogically connected two
kingdoms, and when the northern kingdom fell to the Assyrians, the southern
kingdom began gearing its writings about interaction with God to back up an
idea that the southern kingdom should subsume and take over what
former-northern-kingdom territory could be won back from the Assyrians, subsume
it under its own rule rather than restoring any rule of the northern kingdom.
The evidence to which Cooper
appealed is that we find no evidence in the historical records of surrounding
kingdoms that they had interactions with a united kingdom of Israel of the size
described in the Hebrew Bible; had there been a kingdom of that scope and size
operating on the ground there at that time, it would have left some trace in
surrounding nations, but we can’t find them. But that is only a hypothesis and
no positive evidence was submitted to say that this (no historical David or
united, corporate nation) must have been the case with this particular element,
just that it could have been and would be consistent with the
demythologization, just as I would say that, even though Cooper is probably
right that we have no evidence from surrounding kingdoms to indicate the
presence of a kingdom with the prestige attributed to the united Israel under
David and Solomon, it is possible that this attests only to hyperbole and not
complete divorce from any historical presence of David. All I am noting here,
aside from the fair disclosure that some of the content Barfield and others get
into at the very least flirts with readings of history that some (possibly me)
might not be comfortable with (I liked Cooper a lot, and I learned a lot from
him in approaching metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, and I don’t know that his work
makes him entirely incompatible with seeing any historical-referential value to
the Scriptures back beyond the book of 2 Kings; but it’s definitely a concern),
is that it is something to be kept in mind that examination of a
“demythologizing” program in the Hebrew Bible (the HB demythologizing pagan
myth) can, if done in certain ways, end up at a more radical type of
dehistoricization of the Hebrew Bible
(modern scholarship dehistoricizing the HB).
[Aside: I should contextualize my
comments on hyperbole and embellishment here, as it can sound like saying “the
Bible has errors, because what it claims as fact is, in fact, made up.” The
first thing to note is that the issue itself is in the general neighborhood as
precisely what Barfield is on about. The ancient authors of the books of Kings
would not be trying for scientifically precise “facts.” That idea of and
fixation on material detail doesn’t come until the Scientific revolution, and
the same is true for “scientism,” the belief that scientific fact (as
envisioned in the Scientific Revolution) is the base mode of truth and that
scientific discourse (defined in the same way) is the base mode of all
discourse.]
But those ancient authors are not
completely metaphorical; they have some intention of a historical referent in
the mode of our flesh-and-blood political and cultural reality, and so
something must be said about that. When I say “embellishment” or “hyperbole,” I
do not mean an intention to deceive. In these cultures, rhetoric, and sometimes
polemic, was a usual part of historiography, and this includes formulaic
accolades. It is said of both Hezekiah and Josiah that each was the greatest
king of Judah, and there was none before him or after him who was like him.
Now, obviously, “best” is a rather subjective term, but even so, with the
statements being in the same book, one would expect consistency in the
subjective evaluation. But the key here is that this, which seems like a more
subjective expression, is really a formulaic accolade (in the slot for such
things that is at the end of every king’s account in the book: the king was
good and acted rightly before the Lord, or evil and acted wickedly), and both
Hezekiah and Josiah earned it. The latter was actually viewed by the text as
the greater king, but we know that not from anything about this accolade (like
it has some linguistic marks of some element that proves its veracity in one
case and not another or a difference in intensity between cases), but because,
in addition to this accolade, Josiah merited another, the highest one possible:
that he “turned to the LORD with all his heart and soul and strength, obeying
all the laws of Moses” (2 Kings 23:25). These lines were most likely composed
during the reign of Josiah and were a bit of praise-rhetoric from these authors
(members of a prophetic circle with access to the sources from which they
culled the material woven into the books of Samuel and Kings), who were very in
favor of and allied with the Josiah’s religious reform (after Manasseh had
pushed the kingdom toward a renewal of paganism in the wake of Hezekiah’s
righteous reign, the Book of the Law was found in the abandoned Temple and
Josiah did what a king or military leader should do according to Deuteronomy:
listen to and obey a true prophet of the LORD, which in Josiah’s case was
Huldah the prophetess, but the biblical exemplar was Joshua following the
direction of Moses).
So, it’s not that the Bible
claims no material reality, but that it is not discussed in the same way as our
present understanding of historical “facticity.” When, as Barfield, argues,
there is, in the cultures of the world in general, not the same type of divide
between subject and object, it is more natural that you will have subjective
assessment done with “objective details” (e.g., was the Temple really X cubits,
or was that an idealized number in the culture connoting some kind of
perfection) or the subjective persuasion goals of rhetoric done by messing
about with material details but not in the manner of a material “lie.”]
Some Smaller
Examples
Hebrew Verb Tenses
Barfield makes a
comment on p. 150 that the system of Hebrew verb tenses has “past used for prophecy and future for
history,” so I thought I would explain that one. Hebrew has only four verb
tenses and none of them are the usual past, present, future, perfect system.
Which is understandable because of how far back it is: we would expect this
even just looking at Greek and Latin, in that the older of the two, Greek,
while having mostly that usual time-value as the basic tense system, has an
extra tense for which the defining characteristic is not time distinguished,
and even in two of the tenses it technically shares, its construal is a little
different. In Greek, the perfect, the aorist/punctiliar, and the imperfect are
all past tenses and always past tenses. But, whereas the Latin imperfect and
perfect are the only two past tenses in Latin and are virtually indistinguishable
in sense, the three Greek past tenses have distinct, known shades. The aorist
is called the “punctiliar” because it means at one point in the past, and so
refers to only one time it was done. The imperfect, on the other hand, means an
ongoing and repeated action in the past. So, if it says that Jesus “went” to
the synagogue when they were in, say, Capernaum, if “went” is in the imperfect,
then even if repetition is not indicated by something adverbial like “daily,”
just the imperfect tense alone means that he was in the habit of going there
while they were in Capernaum, whether irregularly occasionally or regularly,
still repeatedly. The, perfect on the other hand, has a sense of something
definitively completed in the past but that has ongoing effects in the present,
so, as a pedestrian example, they would use it for getting clothed (if speaking
while still wearing the same clothes put on in the clothing being talked
about), or for things like maybe the resurrection of Christ being somehow still
present to us in a unique way or making a connection to the Father present in a
unique way beyond what was possible before and is still possible now.
When we get to Hebrew, like other
Semitic languages, the situation is quite different, but those details of the
imperfect and perfect in Greek are a step in that direction, as they have to do
with completion and effect (and possibly, with the perfect, ongoing effect
because of completion, but I’m not sure about that and it would take a while to
suss out).
(Note: I use
“suss” in the older sense of working out details [a carpenter told by the boss
to go suss out that situation with the mantel in the back room, meaning figure
out what all needs to be done, what ripped out and what put back in, in what
dimensions, with what adequate support behind and under, etc.] . . . not the
new teen-fad way of suspicious.)
Hebrew has only two base tenses,
the perfect and the imperfect, and then it has two further derived tenses
formed by prefixing the letter waw
(very often used with a sense of “and”). The perfect with a waw prefixed is simply called the “waw-converted perfect,” and its uses in
Hebrew syntax and its renderings vary. The imperfect with a waw prefixed is called the “waw-consecutive imperfect.” That
“consecutive” part is why it is unofficially dubbed the “narrative” tense. One
might say that what Barfield says about Judaism doing with time and events
(history) what the Greeks did with space is so true that they even had a
special verb tense for narrative sequentiality: They went here, and then they
did X, and then they did Y, and then they did Z. All of those “and then” would
use this “narrative” tense. And what was discussed above about the ten “words
of creation,” the ten times of “and God said”—those are all this waw-consecutive imperfect tense.
The matter here, however, for
explaining what Barfield means by using the past for prophecy and the future
tense for the past, is the fact that their only two main verb tenses, the
imperfect and the perfect, are differentiated not by time value such as past,
present, and future, but by completion versus incompletion.
They can indeed think in terms of past, present, and future, but they handle it
and express it very differently. The imperfect on its own (without a waw) indeed is used for future (e.g, in
“where you go, I will go” in Ruth, both verbs are in the regular imperfect),
and then when it gets the waw, it’s
usually past sequentiality. The commonality is that, in neither case is the
action complete: the future is obviously not complete, but narrative actions in
the past are sort of never really complete when in a sequence of ongoing
action. On the other hand, the perfect, while usually thought of as a past
tense, since past action is completed (unless of course, it is one in a
sequence, and then that individual act is not complete in itself until the
chain is complete), is used for prophecy (as Barfield, and indeed in doctoral
classes in that field, it’s usually referred to as the “prophetic perfect”) . .
. But why? Because the statement by the prophet come from the Lord, and that
makes it already completed, already a done deal. If the Lord has said that it
will come to pass, then unless the Lord himself changes his mind on his own
(unless he “relents,” as the usual language is in the prophets), it’s as sure
of a thing as are events already past.
In addition (to sort of flesh out
this whole thing of Jewish reading of prophecy), there is the tenet made most
famous by the American rabbi Avram Heschel (who marked with Martin Luther King
at Selma) that prophecy is more about forthtelling than about foretelling. What
that means is that it’s not simply a matter of “here, I’m going to give you a
material prediction, and when it comes true, you know I’m a true prophet and
you should do what I say” (although that litmus test is definitely there), but
a logic that this future will unfold logically from the current situation: you
made a covenant, you broke the covenant, you will suffer the covenant curses.
So, there you
have some of the material on Hebrew verb tenses that goes into what Barfield is
talking about when he makes that statement on p. 150.
Circumcision of the
Heart
On p. 155,
Barfield writes: “We shall understand the place of the Jews in the history of
the earth, that is of man as a whole, when we see the Children of Israel
occupying a place in that history that memory occupies in the composition of an
individual man”; the phenomena become inner, the world of wisdom, not out there
behind the phenomena, but inside behind consciousness. This turn to an
interiority is actually put on the page in the Old Testament in the form of the
“circumcision” of the heart, spoken of in, e.g., Deuteronomy 10:16 and 30: 6
and Jeremiah 4. It’s also present in places like Psalm 51, with the “create in
me a clean heart,” but this idea of a circumcision of the heart is a very
deeply Jewish expression of this core change.
The Poor Man’s Bible
On p. 151,
Barfield writes: “To immerse oneself in medieval mystery plays and in those
sequences and parallels between Old and New Testament, which are the very
backbone, the essential formal principle, of the Cathedral sculptures, is to
feel that . . . the OT was lost with the
Reformation.” I’m not interested here in relitigating the Reformation or the
Diet of Worms or Council of Trent (I’m Catholic myself, and decidedly so,
having converted to Catholicism, but we have all denominations in our group,
and probably some not practicing any more, and maybe some who never have been
creedally on the books in a church let alone a denomination . . . as long as
they like discussing the Inklings for whatever reason, everybody’s input from
whatever their current place is in unique and valuable in discussion). This is
mainly a place to put in some of the interesting historical things I have
learned over the years.
It may seem an odd jump to go
from parallels in the texts of the two testaments to cathedral sculpture, but
from a course in history of interpretation, I know that choice of figural art
in churches follows ideas about the Bible, and indeed was helpful in
reinforcing familiarity with biblical events even when people could not read a
Bible even if they had one. In many cathedrals, the depictions of biblical
scenes in sculpture or tile mosaics or wood carving in panels gave familiarity.
But they also had spins: depending on which other OT event or you paired, say,
Abraham and Isaac on Mount Moriah, or which NT event you paired it with by
putting them together as one pair among a number of pairs, or where you put it
in a line of event panels or sculptures, in between which two other events, you
created associations with theological underpinnings and effects (this was how
we wound up studying it for a class in history of interpretation, as the
particular connections made in different arrangements were examples of
different interpretations; for the class, only one passage was studied, the
Aqedah in Genesis 22, the binding of Isaac on Mount Moriah, and we did every
treatment of it from allusions made in the OT canon itself outside Genesis, to
the NT use, to patristic, to Genesis Rabbah, to the targums [I did my paper on
the version in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan], and on down to Christian Kierkegard’s
satisfaction with it versus Jewish Levinas’s dissatisfaction, and Jewish use of
the story in addressing pogroms and the Shoah . . . one of those along the way
was the “poor man’s Bible” in medieval times).
When I was at Fordham University,
the University Church had some really beautiful wood-carving panels (as well as
some amazing French stained-glass windows of the four gospelists with the
French name for each, which had originally been for old St. Patrick’s Church
further downtown before the newer midtown cathedral was built, but they were
the wrong size, so they were given to Fordham). The most accessible place I
know of to see it, if you are ever tooling around the Upper West Side of
Manhattan looking for sites to see, especially if you decided you absolutely
must see the frontage of Tom’s Diner on the corner of 112th and Broadway
because it’s famous for being the frontage they show for diner scenes in
Seinfeld (and from the Susanne Vega song), and so you are only a block away, is
the front doors of St John the Divine Cathedral on Amsterdam (one block east)
between 110th and 112th on the east side of the street (but not like you could
be mistake which building it is at that intersection). It’s the cathedral for
the Episcopal Church diocese of New York, and either the largest or second
largest cathedral in the United States, and I think I have hear the largest
Gothic structure in the country. I first saw it not knowing it was there, just
finding my way back to the subway from an apartment of friends who were
originally from PGH and got together to watch a Steelers game; it was after
dark on a somewhat rainy and windy October night, and I didn’t notice it until
I was right under it on the sidewalk, and in that setting, noticing it for the
first time, you can believe it’s the largest Gothic structure in the country .
. . . the only words to describe the sight are “looming ominously.”
But if you go up the front steps
(you can’t get in, I’m not sure how much they have ever had services there
because it’s never been completed), there on the front doors you will find a
series of maybe nine or twelve panels with a biblical scene in each . . . a
“poor man’s Bible.”
Idiocy
These last two
will not be so much on OT, but two more things noticed that were hard to
included in a group discussion. The first is a comment on p. 145: “There is
only an accelerating increase in that pigeon-holed knowledge by individuals of
more and more about less and less, which, if persisted in indefinitely, can
only lead mankind to a sort of ‘idiocy’ (in the original sense of the word)”
(emphasis added). Before “idiocy” and “moron” were used simply for IQ ranges on
a spectrum (or however that works these days), they were Greek roots with
different meanings. I have no time to go into it here, but I was in a really
good doctoral seminar on the Corinthian correspondence (the two letters in the
NT), and the professor got into how the Greek moros was a name for a fool (Paul’s foolishness of the Cross and
being a fool for Christ) of a particular kind: basically, go watch Braveheart and see the little people
mimicking disembowelment to the laughter of the crowd, and it was basically
that but with the preferred humiliating, public state execution for the
Romans—crucifixion (there were mocking the crucified, but it was also a mockery
of them, because only the dregs and filth had nothing better to do than this;
Paul is saying that, in imitating Christ by being mocked and even crucified,
knowing that the world views that martyrdom in the same light as the moros grotesquely pantomiming
crucifixion for a few spare coins, he will undergo that mockery as something to
join to Christ’s suffering on the Cross, as a prayer . . . ok, so I guess I
made time).
“Idiocy/idiot,” on the other
hand, comes not from a cultural low-life type, but from the basic meaning of
the word. In Greek, idios/idia/idion
is a 2-1-2 adjective (used with first and second declension nouns, –os as second declension for modifying
masculine nouns, –a as first
declension for female nouns, and –on as second declension for neuter nouns)
meaning “one’s own.” When, in the Gospel of John, Jesus says to Mary, his
mother, and John, “Behold your son,” and “Behold your mother,” it says that
from that day, John took her . . . into his own house? as his own mother? What
it really has is just this adjective in the neuter plural with a matching
definite article, so literally “into the his owns,” which I take to mean his things,
“the world of things that are his,” as in this particular house is his house,
filling the slot of “house” in the grouping of things that are his, and as
Catholic, I believe the most natural reading of the word from the Cross is
that, in the grouping of things that were John’s “things,” he took her in the
slot of “his mother.” But that discussion aside, this is also the word from
which we get “idiom” for terms and constructions etc. that are particular to a
specific language—that language’s own unique elements. How we get to “idiocy”
in Barfield’s “original sense of the word” is through the word “idiosyncratic,”
which is made up of our word under consideration and the base of our words
“synchronize.” The idiot, in this sense, is one who cannot communicate with
others because he or she cannot synchronize with their terms and concept and
ideas to compare and dialogue; he or she is trapped in their own little
language-game and can synchronize with only their own thing, their own logics
not impacted by discourse with others.
Love as a Form of
Gravity or Gravity as a Form of Love?
This comes out of
a comments of Barfield’s on pp. 77 and 93, but is really a short version of my
review of the film Interstellar that
I have someplace on this blog. On p. 77, Barfield makes the comment about the
concept of gravity that the medievals saw it more as something like a stone
dripping with desire. On p. 93 he is quoting Butterfield to the effect that the
medievals saw the gravity in the stone and it’s increase (at least until it
would reach terminal velocity dropping from a plane etc.) as rushing more
fervently as it came nearer home (the center of the universes), comparing this
against a scientific concept like the stone accelerating its descent under the
constant force of gravity, drawing the conclusion that in the difference, we
find an “intellectual transition which involves a change in men’s feeling for
matter.”
My move onto attaching this kind
of thing to deeper personal themes came long before I had much of a clue on how
to study philosophy or anthropology. In Pittsburgh when I was 18 or 19 or 20,
there was a band called the Affordable Floors (they were the big band in town
around the college scene, especially Pitt and Carnegie Mellon, before Rusted
Root took that spot . . . over about ten years, I can’t even begin to count the
number of times I saw the Floors, then Rusted Root, then Hypnotic Clambake, all
at Graffiti at the corner of Baum and Craig near Oakland . . . now the Porsche
[I think] dealership owns all of both buildings, but back in the day, that
second floor showcase room that would hold about 800 people was the place to
be; I think I saw King’s X on the Dogman tour there too).
The Floors had a song called
“Blackout,” and at one point it had the lyrics: “Desire is only chemistry, and
love a form of gravity.” The opposite end of the spectrum is in Interstellar, where I read it as saying
that it’s the other way around: gravity is a vestige in the material world of,
or mirror of, or even in some mystical way a conduit for the deeper reality of
love—of charity but also the romantic love Hatheway has and the familial love McConaughey
for his daughter. If you go to wherever I have the review of Interstellar (I think I either titled or
subtitled it something like “The Gravity of Hearts”), you can read there some
of the material I draw on of St. Bonaventure’s idea of vestiges of the Trinity
in the material world to introduce what I mean by gravity as a vestige of love.
As I said, that’s not really OT material, but it
is one of those things that, when I drive home after a book club thinking,
“wow, there’s just way too much stuff there to uncover in a whole week of
meetings,” is one I wish I could have found a way to bring up, because I love
those elements that cut across various ways of knowing and experiencing, like
philosophy/anthropology/theology in Barfield or a power new-wave band in a club
or a film by a master like Christopher Nolan.
