Happy New Year, everyone.
To start the new year out on a cheery note about new beginnings, consider the following scenario. A king finds out there are other pretenders to the throne. To clear the title and quit their claims he has them killed.
An occurrence not unknown in the ancient world (or the modern). The example that comes to mind first for me is Abimelech killing his three-score and ten brothers in Judges 9:1-5 (mirrored by Jehu killing the 70 sons of Ahab in II Kings 10), but you may think of the central section of Ether with its “apostasies and inner revolutions and counter-revolutions.”
Now change the scenario a little. The king learns about his rival through a prophecy, and orders the rival killed, but the rival survives. Clearly we’re in mythic territory now, Oedipus, MacBeth, Snow White, Harry Potter. And yet, one of Abimelech’s brothers did indeed survive, and the author of Judges surely hadn’t read The Trojan Women or Oedipus Rex, or even The Aeneid.
So here’s the question. Does an archetypal element in a historic account render the account archetypal rather than historical? Consider that painting of George Warshington in a toga that the Duckduck can’t find for me, but brings back instead a bunch of busts and Horatio Greenough’s statue of Washington as Cincinnatus
Now, some future critic who objects that Greenough’s statue can’t possibly date from 1840 because that was long before the age of toga parties would be missing the point. Greenough wasn’t claiming that Washington actually wore a toga (or even visited Cincinnati). He was invoking Washington as a successor to an ancient Roman ruler, shaping the statue to the ancient story.
But does every invocation of an ancient parallel mean the invoker is shaping the story to match the ancient parallel? Is it possible that archetypes exist because they depict the way life actually happens?
Matthew clearly means to present Jesus as a new Moses. But Robin Griffith-Jones points out in The Four Witnesses that for Matthew’s original audience the parallels with Moses begin even before Jesus delivers the word to the people on the mountain, or feeds thousands with manna from God.
They would have been aware of the legend Josephus recounts in Book II chapter 9, paragraph 2 of Antiquities of the Jews:
One of those sacred scribes, who are very sagacious in foretelling future events truly, told the king, that about this time there would a child be born to the Israelites, who, if he were reared, would bring the Egyptian dominion low, and would raise the Israelites; that he would excel all men in virtue, and obtain a glory that would be remembered through all ages. Which thing was so feared by the king, that, according to this man’s opinion, he commanded that they should cast every male child, which was born to the Israelites, into the river, and destroy it;
So, was Herod simply repeating the actions of tyrants who seek to secure their thrones by blood, or was Matthew appropriating the story of Moses to shape his story of Jesus’ life? (The translation I quoted is from Project Gutenberg, so it’s been around long enough to be out of copyright. It feels late Victorian to me, hence this footnote from translator William Whiston that we might not see from a contemporary translator:
And, indeed, Josephus seems to have had much completer copies of the Pentateuch, or other authentic records now lost, about the birth and actions of Moses, than either our Hebrew, Samaritan, or Greek Bibles afford us, which enabled him to be so large and particular about him.)
But why does it have to be either/or? Why not both. Matthew was writing to Jews, people who would have been aware of the prophecy in Deuteronomy 18:15-19 about a new Moses, the prophecy Peter quotes
For Moses truly said unto the fathers, A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you.
—Acts 3:22
If Matthew believed Jesus to be the new Moses he could have invented incidents to demonstrate that identity, but if Jesus was the new Moses, Matthew would have found the parallels within Jesus’s life and experiences. Think of Jonathan Langford’s occasional comment about J.R.R. Tolkien telling C.S. Lewis that the story of Jesus was like the story of Baldur Lewis so loved, but it really happened. Well, why not?
Is there any reason why events can’t repeat themselves? and why recognizing and depicting repetition can’t also create a historically reliable account?
It’s a question worth thinking about. If Matthew’s portrait of wise men coming to praise the newborn king is part of a legendary or archetypal context, Luke’s context may be even more archetypal and legendary, and in some ways stranger. Matthew is a Jew writing to Jews, while Luke is a gentile writing to gentiles, who invokes Jewish archetypes–the barren woman who gives birth to a prophet, a new dispensing of God’s word, the structure of the Chronicles–that can’t have the same resonance for gentiles it does for Jews. Why? I’m not sure, but I have some ideas. Next month.
Your turn till then.
Tolkien also (in talking about the survival of folkloric elements within fairy-stories) notes that those elements persist past their original cultural context only if the elements make sense *as story elements* even to people who don’t know the background.
A lot depends on whether we think life is inherently meaningful. If we do, then we will view elements of meaning-bearing structure as something realistic. If not, then we will see them as evidence that someone has tampered with real events in order to make for a better story. And even the most diehard rationalist will concede that coincidences happen, and even the most naive believer will concede that sometimes writers falsify their stories for dramatic effect.
All of this even before we get to the recognition that as humans, we are possibly incapable of comprehending anything without perceiving or creating some kind of order. Once that is conceded, the question becomes not whether there is meaning, but what kinds of meaning we find most persuasive. Hence why “realism” is just as value-laden a criterion of literary judgment as “beauty” or “virtue.”
Thinking about your comment, Jonathan, I keep recalling a conversation with one of my friends in HS (the one who took Moses and Monotheism to church one day to read and some people thought it was a doctrinal work). She told me that she felt the speaker in Ecclesiastes is so devastated by his list of vanities that he really has nothing to say by the end and falls back on the only thing he can to preserve some meaning, “fear God and keep his commandments,” but she didn’t think that was an adequate response to the devastation.
But I think that last verse may be what Koheleth is driving at all along. You can think of Ecclesiastes as nihilistic or pessimistic (I think one speaker at BYU cited it as an example of clinical depression) because it annihilates all our hopefulness about continual renewal in the world–There is nothing new under the sun.
But Ecclesiastes is only nihilistic if we assume that meaning and purpose derive from novelty, from the ability to do something new in the world, if we assume there can’t be meaning in recurring patterns, that everything has to be new.
It’s possible, of course, that Koheleth doesn’t realize what he’s done, that he’s one of the people who thinks meaning comes from novelty, and he is just grasping at consolation. But if you hear the opening of Ecclesiastes just after the closing of Proverbs it’s evident that the speakers in Proverbs were people who had the wit and power to prescribe a rod for the fool’s back and expect their audiences to nod sagaciously or click the thumbs up button, while Koheleth is the fool who has had the rod laid to his back.
I think it would be interesting to get the perspective of a reader of Ecclesiastes from a culture that doesn’t embrace an underlying model of progress.
Whether something is comforting or depressing depends very much on where you’re coming from. I find some things comforting now that I would have been appalled at in my youth, and probably vice versa. And it’s not (answering my own younger self) just because I’ve gotten tired and given up. Though my younger self might disagree.
Thanks for your comment, Jonathan. I’ve been mulling it over all month, which doesn’t make for timely conversation. Sorry. “A lot depends on whether we think life is inherently meaningful,” sounds so similar to the argument C. S. Lewis makes at the start of The Abolition of Man that I thought at first you were quoting him. I read the first chapter or two years ago, then came across a recording in the last few years.
Lewis quotes a passage from some pseudonymous young adult textbook author, saying it shows he is mired in moral relativism, and doesn’t believe life has meaning. Both times I’ve felt Lewis is reading way too much into his quote. It’s his straw man, his way of getting underway, though it seems a weak opening to me.
But then I remember Dennis Rasmussen’s comment about strawmen in his Phil 110 class. I had quoted Sir Phillip Sidney’s comment from the Defense of Poesy, that Plato “feigneth many honest burgesses of Athens to speak of such matters that, if they had been set on the rack, they would never have confessed them.”
“Do you think Plato isn’t aware of that?” Rasmussen replied.
Stunning moment. I said I’d always heard the strawman was one of the chief philosophical sins. He suggested that sometimes you just need a foil for your argument, a jumping off point, and a strawman works fine–which would imply that the real danger of a strawman is not in its use but in pretending it accurately represents the depth and complexity of someone else’s argument.
As I’ve thought about your comment it seems I have an unstated assumption. I connect the spiritualized / abstracted / mythic / figurative reading of scripture not only with secularism, but with the insistence on a closed canon.
Someone told me, as a missionary, that you couldn’t take passages about God’s body literally, indeed you couldn’t take anything in the Bible literally. It was all meant figuratively. More recently Radio West rebroadcast a conversation with Bishop John Shelby Spong on the paperback issue of his Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy http://radiowest.kuer.org/post/biblical-literalism-0. Spong argues that anything we don’t see in everyday life, like feeding 5,000 on a few loaves and fishes, didn’t happen and wasn’t meant literally–Matthew was a Jew writing to Jews using Jewish motifs and type-stories, and his audience would have known to read them figuratively, wouldn’t have even thought to read them as historical accounts.
I listened in vain for his evidence that first-century Jews read scriptural stories figuratively. Maybe it’s in his book. Reza Aslan made a similar claim a few years ago on Radio West, offering only the assertion that the conflicting details in the gospels prove the early church didn’t mean the stories to be taken literally. (That show doesn’t show up in searching their archive. I don’t think they’ve made the whole archive available to their customized search engine. Shows I found in search results a few years ago don’t show up there now, like the shows on Hugh Nibley.)
Aslan begins Zealot with the claim that Matthew didn’t intend his infancy narrative to be taken literally, but doesn’t offer much evidence. As for the contradictions and discrepancies between the gospels, I suspect the unharmonized gospels represent the desire on the canonizers’ part to accommodate a diverse range of traditions. We know the early church fractured, and including four disparate gospels may have been a way to bring some of the groups together by including their version of events within the canon.
Presumably, the woman I met on my mission, Spong, and Aslan all have a rich sense of life as inherently meaningful, but they all insisted on a figurative reading. So what’s the connection I see between a closed canon and the tendency to spiritualize or idealize the scriptures?
It may be that if we can keep the canon closed we can also avoid the necessity of facing personal revelation ourselves, or avoid the necessity of having the same kind of prophet in the modern world that we saw in all earlier ages.
Or maybe the connection is something else.
OK, another note on Lewis. He’s an intriguing writer, but I’m not sure how much I trust him. A lot of what I’ve read just doesn’t have the emotional depth of his journal after Joy’s death, A Grief Observed–which lacks the glibness of The Problem of Pain just as Spencer W. Kimball’s One Silent Sleepless Night lacks the glibness of “Tragedy or Destiny,” since it’s written from the experience of pain rather than the safety of sermon.
Besides the Narnia books I’ve read 8 or 10 others but haven’t found the theological adventurousness of that scene in Narnia where someone insists that Aslan isn’t a real lion, doesn’t have a body like ours, that passages describing him as such simply mean he has the strength or majesty of a lion.
All this time, of course, Aslan is stalking up behind the speaker, ready to pounce and tickle. It’s a delicious satire of Christian orthodoxy, but I’ve never been quite sure if Lewis meant he believed in an embodied God or if he was just affectionately spoofing his own religious beliefs.
The only clue I’ve found is in Perelandra (or Out of the Silent Planet?) where Ransom entertains the idea that things we see as myths may have been historical occurrences on other planets.
So we have two passages from his fiction that resonate well with LDS beliefs, but I’m not sure how well Lewis would accept a religion that takes seriously an embodied father and mother whose children could grow to be like them, or the concept of worlds without number benefiting from an atoning historical act on one world.
I like Lewis, but consider him more someone who is very good at stating “plain truths” plainly and less as someone whose perception of truth is particularly deep or insightful. Certainly I think there’s a lot more depth and complexity in Tolkien’s view of Christianity as it appears in his work, though (or perhaps in part because) it’s far less explicit.
Which doesn’t sound much like I like Lewis at all. And yet I do. But I also think he was very much a polemicist at times. We don’t, I think, fully appreciate just how bold it was for an academic of Lewis’s time to publicly embrace and defend traditional Christianity, or the animosity he encountered in so doing. Like Paul (or, to take a more modern example, William F. Buckley in a time of liberal intellectual ascendancy), he got his licks in, giving as good as he got. He took cheap shots. It was a worthwhile service, and actually served to help keep Christian ideas in the public discourse in the mid Twentieth Century — but limited and sometimes not entirely trustworthy.
Interestingly, I think he was aware of this aspect of his own personality. It’s widely acknowledged that Ransom, the philologist from the Perelandra trilogy, is modeled to some extent after Tolkien. Later, Ransom becomes the Pendragon, the spiritual leader of Logres, an underground Christian organization. I remember a scene in which some of the evil characters are speculating about who the Pendragon might be, and never consider the quiet and reclusive Ransom. Instead, they are taken with the thought that it is another academic (I forget the name) who is a much more outspoken, public, and (in their opinion) dangerous figure — precisely because he is, in his opposition, more like the pattern they follow. I’ve long thought of this as Lewis’s rueful acknowledgment that his own brand of glib polemical eloquence is not much the same as true spiritual stature — just as Leaf by Niggle is Tolkien’s acknowledgment of (and plea for mercy for) some of his own creative faults.