Hosea

The opening chapter of The Book of Hosea is an intriguing puzzle:

2.And the LORD said to Hosea, Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD.
3: So he went and took Gomer the daughter of Diblaim; which conceived, and bare him a son.
4: And the LORD said unto him, Call his name Jezreel; for yet a little while, and I will avenge the blood of Jezreel upon the house of Jehu, and will cause to cease the kingdom of the house of Israel.
5: And it shall come to pass at that day, that I will break the bow of Israel in the valley of Jezreel.
6: And she conceived again, and bare a daughter. And God said unto him, Call her name Unloved: for I will no more have mercy upon the house of Israel; but I will utterly take them away.
7: But I will have mercy upon the house of Judah, and will save them by the LORD their God, and will not save them by bow, nor by sword, nor by battle, by horses, nor by horsemen.
8: Now when she had weaned Unloved, she conceived, and bare a son.
9: Then said God, Call his name Stranger: for ye are not my people, and I will not be your God.
10: Yet the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which cannot be measured nor numbered; and it shall come to pass, that in the place where it was said unto them, Ye are not my people, there it shall be said unto them, Ye are the sons of the living God.

(The image at the top is of Hosea, Gomer and their three children; from the 1560 Geneva Bible) the names of the last two children ('Lo-ruhamah'' Lo-ammi' in the KJV) are from J B Phillips Four Prophets rendering (1963). The conventional reading of this strange passage is that the 'marry a prostitute' command is a way of symbolising Israel's relationship to Jahweh:

While scholars suggest the marriage metaphor presented in Hosea describes the relationship between Israel and Yahweh, the metaphor itself remains controversial in its meaning and interpretation in modernity. This is particularly true among feminists ... Biblical scholar Ehud Ben Zvi reminds readers of the socio-historical context in which Hosea was composed ... Ben Zvi describes the role of the Gomer in the marriage metaphor as one of the “central attributes of the ideological image of a human marriage that was shared by the male authorship and the primary and intended male readership as building blocks for their imagining of the relationship.” Tristanne J. Connolly makes a similar observation, stating that the husband-wife motif reflects marriage as it was understood at the time. Connolly also suggests that in context the marriage metaphor was necessary in that it truly exemplified the unequal interaction between Yahweh and the people Israel. Biblical scholar Michael D. Coogan makes an interesting point regarding genre that can also lend a hand to the interpretation of this metaphor. Coogan describes the importance of understanding the covenant in relation to interpreting Hosea. Hosea falls under a unique genre called “covenant lawsuit” where God accuses Israel of breaking their previously made agreement. God’s disappointment towards Israel is therefore expressed through the broken marriage covenant made between husband and wife.

This doesn't seem to me to address the issue of the flat contradictions of the passage.  Observing the commandments is a way of following God's instructions; but in this passage God instructs Hosea not to follow his instructions ('Would God really command his prophet,' asks one commentator, 'to marry someone that, according to Deuteronomy 22:20 was supposed to be stoned?); he tells Hosea that Israel will not be saved and that Israel will be saved.  It looks as though the passage is deliberately trying to short-circuit the larger master-follower logic of humankind and God's relation.

A Copernican Revolution in religion

There are several forms a Copernican Revolution in religion might take, but they all share one feature: they challenge the notion that mankind is of unique, central importance to God. This is not, necessarily, to say that God has no care for mankind at all; but it is to suggest that God's love for (let's say) whales, sheep, lions and starlings is just as important to Him as his love for homo sapiens. One consequence of that would be: we should reconfigure our human practices of worship to make them more like the practices of worship of whales, sheep, lions and starlings.

A jogger

A jogger, stretching himself at the roadside prior to his run, looks as though he is trying, by main force, to push that car over.

Postulate of Impoverished Reality

I came across Iredell Jenkins's 'postulate of impoverished reality' (originally an article so titled appeared in the Journal of Philosophy in 1942) at second hand, here. But, alright. The postulate is that 'reality in its essence is somehow simpler, barer, more mechanical and in general terms less exciting than our experience of it -- e.g., that the "primary" qualities of matter, mass, figure, extension, are more "real" than the attributes matter presents to us.' Jenkins thinks this fallacious, and there is some appeal to that notion that 'reducing' King Lear to certain word-shaped marks printed upon paper, or 'reducing' Don Giovanni to certain notes positioned about certain pages of stave-printed sheets is to miss something important. But nobody would ever claim that these printers' marks wholly encompass the texts they encode. Of course not. A better (less fallacious) comparison might be a chess game. It is not to 'reduce' such a game to the board, its pieces and the rules that govern how they are moved about. But those elements, plus the intellects of the two players engaging with those elements, is the game, at a fundamental level.

How many species of Hobbits?

Tolkien, having coined the name, then (as was his wont) invented a mock-etymology for it. But this is widely misunderstood -- as for instance does Wikipedia: 'He set out a fictional etymology for the name in an appendix to Lord of the Rings, to the effect that it was derived from holbytla (plural holbytlan), a speculative reconstruction of Old English, meaning “hole-builder”'. This isn't right, though. Tom Shippey knows better:

Hol of course means hole. A "bottle" even now in some English place-names means a dwelling, and Old English bytlian means to dwell, to live in. Holbytla, then, = 'hole-dweller, hole-liver'.

What this means is that there are at least five peoples in The Hobbit who can be described, without distortion, as Hobbits: Bilbo's people; the Dwarves; the Goblins -- and Gollum (both of whom live in the caves under the Misty Mountains) and Smaug himself. The titular 'The Hobbit' starts to look like ironic understatement.

Tantalus key

“Sorry I can’t offer you a drink,” said Uncle William, blowing a little in his embarrassment. “The key of the tantalus has been removed again.” [Allingham, Police at the Funeral (1931), 95]

Police at the Funeral is certainly ingenious. It takes Allingham’s sort-of detective, the private gentleman Albert Campion, up to Cambridge. Campion is a strange figure; invented (apparently) as a parody of Lord Peter Whimsey; a boyish, bland, blond-haired nobody who is quite well-connected in polite society and amonbgst the police, hangs around murder-scenes innocuously and ends up solving them. Campion is a self-chosen pseudonym; his actual surname begins with a ‘K’ and his actual Christian name is Rudolf; the suggestion in Police at the Funeral is that he is the illegitimate offspring from an aristocratic Cambridge family; in other novels, apparently, there are suggestions he might be related to the Royal family. But as a deliberate move by Allingham, he lacks any defined role or purpose, and rather drifts through the books. Here’s the blurb:

Great Aunt Caroline rules the roost in an old Cambridge residence which is riddled with mystery, evil ... and terror! Uncle Andrew is dead, Aunt Julia is poisoned, Uncle William attacked ... and once again Albert Campion, that much-loved hero of detective fiction, comes to the rescue. With her customary skill Margery Allingham takes the reader through a delightful maze of intrigue as Albert Campion, bland, blue-eyed and deceptively vague, encounters the formidable Great Aunt Caroline and her bizarre household of horror.

The household is well drawn, actually: a bickering community of mostly elderly individuals, ruled by the implacable Victorian relict Great Aunt Caroline. The claustrophobia of this, and the pettiness of the grounds of dispute, are neatly-enough done. Uncle Andrew, whose death occasions the mystery, was a thoroughly unpleasant individual in life: a wastrel, gambler and domestic monster who delighted in tormenting his family members in petty but infuriating ways. He disappears coming back from Church one Sunday. Ten days later his corpse is discovered, shot through the head, tied hand and foot, in the Cam. Suspicion falls on his elderly, irascible cousin William, who hated Andrew during his life and was cordially hated in return. He was the last person to see Andrew alive. William is a drinker (something expressly forbidden by Great Aunt Caroline), and a man who suffers from improbable fugue-state interludes during which he doesn’t know where he is or what he’s doing; suspicion naturally falls upon him, and accordingly we would not be so callow as to believe that he is actually the murderer. There’s also the corpulent, elderly Aunt Julia; withered Aunt Catherine, and cousin George, who is living life as a tramp, but who comes round to the Cambridge house from time to time to blackmail Great Aunt Caroline for small sums of money. What hold does he have over his Great Aunt? Who killed Uncle Andrew? Campion thinks he knows, but has no proof. Other characters include the beautiful, feisty young Cousin Joyce—who asked Campion along, in effect for moral support—and her fiancé, a young Cambridge lawyer also related to the family called Marcus.

Campion investigates the murder and aids the police whilst claiming, mildly but insistently, to be doing neither (‘“fair dos,” said Mr Campion. “You know exactly how I stand in this matter. I’m not the clever amateur helping the important policeman. I’ve just been asked down for the murder. If it wasn’t for Joyce and Marcus and possibly Uncle William I think I should go home.”’ [138]. I consider it a shame Campion appears innocent of the correct use of the subjunctive). And, yes, bickersome old Uncle William grows on Campion, and to an extent on the reader as well. But the plot doesn’t dawdle. Uncle Andrew’s body has been floating in the Cam with a bullet in its forehead and ropes around its hands and feet for an improbably ten days—but almost as soon as it is discovered, Aunt Julia is killed by poison in her morning cup of tea (something she drank in secret, since tea is another thing interdicted by Great Aunt Julia: ‘tea-drinking in the early morning,’ she says, rather splendidly, ‘has always appeared to me as an indulgence for which there is nothing but spinelessness as an excuse’ [71]). Campion and Joyce investigate the old woman’s bed, and discover a secret stash of slimming powders inside her bedknob. She was drinking the morning tea as a way of ingesting these, something the murderer clearly knew. Then somebody stabs Uncle William in the hand one night, although he tries to cover the incident up with a unconvincing story about being scratched by a cat; he rinses the wound in a lot of iodine and is not further incommoded.

Then the family’s black-sheep, Old Uncle George, arrives drunk, claiming that he knows who the murderer is, that it’s a member of the family, and that he must be paid off or he’ll reveal their shame to the world. He is put to bed in a highly belligerent state of inebriation; and in the morning he is dead, poisoned with arsenic.

Now, Allingham provides us with a family tree, maps of the house, and lots of specific detail. I did not, however, guess the identity of the murderer, and most of the herrings she serves us turn out to be red. This, I suppose, is what we’re looking for in a novel like this. But unlike Edmund Wilson, I didn’t find the revelation of the murderer’s identity a let-down. In part because it is so laughably improbable, when judged by the standards of ‘realism’, as to remove itself from that realm of judgement altogether (nobody would try to nominate La Cantatrice Chauve for ‘Best Documentary’).

The family, in their large house, with their antique routines and habits, are the structuring principle of the novel—I mean, the principle of the novel as whodunit. Allingham gives us a pattern that we can see only when we reach the end; and that pattern is, precisely, family.

Family in Police at the Funeral are ancient; old people ruled by a grandmatriach even older, who bicker like little kids. (In one scene Campion stays for dinner, and wonder why everybody has their own sets of salt, pepper and sauces; he is told in effect that a while ago the old folk quarrelled like toddlers over these items, so Great Aunt Caroline decreed they should all have their own). It is a grotesque, claustrophobic world. Any of them could leave, of course; but Great Aunt Caroline controls the purse strings, which would mean they’d have to work for a living—out of the question, naturally. Though often played for laughs, or at least for smiles, there’s no avoiding the sense that it’s a sort of glimpse into hell.

One aspect of this is the novels’ extraordinarily calcified attitude to class and race. To say ‘it is of its time’ seems to me to let Allingham too easily off the hook. William’s body is discovered by an Indian student at the university, who is brought into the narrative for a chapter only to be made fun of: his funny way of speaking, and his inability to dress correctly. Likewise, George has been blackmailing his Great Aunt with a ghastly secret, which ghastly secret turns out to be that he is himself mixed-race (‘“George,” said Great-aunt Caroline, “was the son of my husband’s brother Joseph ... a despicable character and a disgrace to his family. This person was shipped off to the colonies many years ago. He returned with a certain amount of money and a wife. They lived at Newmarket, quite near us, you see. She was a peculiar-looking woman and of a very definite type, which we in those days chose to ignore. They had a child, a girl ... by some horrible machination of heredity the stain in the woman’s blood had come out.” She lowered her voice. “The child was a blackamoor. They left, of course, and the disgraceful business was hushed up. But to my own and my husband’s horror, although the first child died these criminal people had a second ... George bears our name and is always threatening to reveal his half-caste blood”’ [244]). It is Campion’s frank admiration for this horrible old woman (‘Campion looked at her admiringly. “I think you’re the cleverest woman I’ve ever met”, he said’ [245]) that is most shocking. Then again, there is the de-haut-en-bas attitude to class. George is painted as a thoroughly despicable character, an abusive drunken blackmailer, because he has fallen in with tramps and the low.

And this brings us to the part of the novel that astonished me the most. That he has rendered himself déclassé turns Uncle George into the novel’s homo sacer. In the most astonishing plot development, he is locked, drunk and raging, in one of the house’s upper rooms in which Campion strongly suspects there also to be a deliberately constructed murderous device. Campion is right, as detectives in this sort of novel almost always are; and in the morning Uncle George is dead, poisoned with a massive dose of arsenic. How? Campion explains:

There was a pipe rack on Andrew’s dressing table ... It contained five extremely filthy and blackened pipes and one very good new one, a temptation to any man, I don’t know if you have noticed, the way a man picks up a pipe and sucks it vigorously to make sure the stem is clear? It’s a sort of involuntary movement.’ [242]

Poor old Uncle George. Unpleasant though he was it’s hard to believe that he deserved to be sacrificed upon the altar of Campion’s theorising. Because, you see, our vague detective has got to the bottom of the mystery, the key slips into the Tantalus’s lock. Uncle Andrew wasn’t the first murder victim after all; he was a suicide. We were led to believe that the ropes binding his wrists had rotted in the river, but in fact his hands were free, he shot himself in the head on a footbridge in Grantchester, having rigged an elaborate device to get rid of the pistol, and tumbled into the water. His wickedness was sufficient, however, to want to punish his own family from beyond the grave: he had replaced the eleventh of Aunt Julia’s sachets of powder with poison; he rigs a poisoned blade in a hollow book in which Uncle William keeps a secret supply of booze (the old fellow is lucky not to have been killed) and set up the pipe rack. Death came not only from within the family, the product of decades of accumulated resentment over trivial intrafamilial squabbling—it also came from beyond the grave. Allingham’s novel draws itself into a series of knotted conceptual circles whereby, metaphorically speaking, ‘the family’ and ‘beyond the grave’ become, almost, the same thing.

The fact that this solution is so involuted, that Allingham portrays the family as a stagnant, closed circle from which and contained within which death operates, gives the book the superbly claustrophobic feel, despite its antic and sometimes strained touches of melodramatic gaiety. As Campion and Oates drive away from Cambridge at the end of the book, the Inspector looks forward to ‘a nice little job in Stepney’. ‘Seems like a breath of fresh air,’ he announces. I can only agree. But the sense, in Allingham, as life defined by death, and both existing in an intricate, closed pattern, says more than the surface shenanigans of her novel can convey.

Flash!

Queen’s ‘Flash’ could well be describing Christ:

He’s for every one of us,
Stands for every one of us.
He’ll save every one of us!

He’s also ‘king of the impossible’, which I like as a description of the messiah.

The Fall into Belief

What if the fall of man was precisely the fall into worship? It recalls the old Shavian fable:

Man and woman were content, as to the measure of content, when the whole world was a garden; and they worshipped God as animals do, blithely and brutishly, by their nature not their will. And God was well pleased, for faith sustained them unconsciously: it was something they were, rather than something they did. But Satan, whose name means pride, had fallen from the horizontal paradise of heaven, where all are equal in the love of God. Satan craved hierarchy, and rank, and to define his own superiority in terms of the inferiority of others—all monstrous in the eyes of all-loving God. He could do nothing to persuade the angels, for they knew that to surrender their equality with God and sink into hierarchy would be loss and no gain. But Satan recognised a kink in the soul of humankind, and visited them in the garden. He did not appeal to their self-interest, for they would have rejected such an appeal. Instead he said: why do you walk around, so arrogant in your nakedness? Do you not know that God who made you is vastly superior to you? Do you not comprehend that, when compared to him, you are loathsome, at the bottom of contempt? You should hide your abject bodies under cloaks and veils, fall down to your knees and worship the All High!’ To this, Man was struck, and fell to his knees; for he felt that a true note was being bowed out of the string of his soul. But Woman was not persuaded. ‘How can this be?’ she challenged Satan. ‘For we are made of God, and if our stuff is abject then so is His, and if He is exalted then so are we—there can be no vertical dimension to the logic of paradise.’ And Satan saw that he could not persuade Woman, and so returned his attention to the man. ‘Do you hear her? For as far as God is above, so you are above her, and when she thwarts your will your duty is to rebuke her.’ ‘Is it so?’ replied Man, feeling the intoxication of hierarchy seeping through his veins, and leapt to his feet. ‘Woman,’ said the Man. ‘Be quiet! For God made humankind; humankind did not make God. Therefore God is greater.’ ‘But woman gives birth to man,’ objected Woman. ‘Man does not give birth to woman!’ Satan grew wroth, and said: ‘Yours is a false analogy and thus evidence of inferior intellect. Man! Your duties are: to raise up a temple in which to worship God the All-High—and to chastise your wife, and teach her the ways of the hierarchy! Every creature has a place, some higher, some lower, and God highest of all!

Well, I say Shavian; the author (of course) was not in actuality as bearded, Irish or wise as that. But as the story continues the combined glee of Satan and Man is well drawn, for the more they look into the arrangement of natural objects the more opportunity for inserting hierarchical values they see—to discriminate on grounds of age over youth, of white skin over brown, of wealthy over poor and so on. The coda to this little narrative comes when God sends his Son (who is actually his self) to the world to undo all this mischief; but by the time he arrives in human form the human mind has become so saturated with the pride of hierarchy that not even He can escape it. Hence, instead of preaching the universal equality of God’s love, He ends up simply inverting the hierarchies that already exist (‘the last shall be first’ and so on).

States

Emma Jones, ‘Death’s Sadness’ (in The Striped World (2009) imagines how sorrowfully isolated Death must be. I liked this line: ‘Death was a sad Vatican, his own state.’

After all, what does the Vatican say? ‘Look at us, a Church that is as big as a country, its own state!’ Or, ‘look at us, though a billion people subscribe to our faith, our country is the size of Croydon!’

Belief

I've been reading Michael Shermer's very good The Believing Brain: from Ghosts and Gods to Politics and Conspiracies -- How We Construct Beliefs and Reinforce Them As Truths (Times Books 2011). I recommend it. Of course, there's a degree of confirmation bias in my approval, for Shermer brings a large quantity of his research to bear on the question of 'belief' to support a Dennettian point-of-view that is pretty much mine (and many people's), so I'm likely to like it. But one thing that I liked, as a hoary old materialist-atheist, was Shermer's hospitality to various spiritualist and religious points of views.

At the beginning he says: 'in fact all models of the world, not just scientific models, are foundational to our beliefs, and belief-dependent realism means that we cannot escape this epistemological trap.' Very (and very properly) Kantian; and he is quick to add that 'we can, however, employ the tools of science' to determine which beliefs are supported by evidence. But that initial position is one I have found stated by religious writers arguing against Dawkinsian atheism: Dawkins' mocks Christianity as 'faith'; but Dawkins's own belief in science is a faith too. More, Dawkins himself must agree with Shermer that all models of the world, not just scientific models, are foundational to our beliefs, and belief-dependent realism means that we cannot escape this epistemological trap.

It's not a very useful strategy, rhetorically or logically, because it cuts both ways. The Christian doesn't actually want to argue for the absolute relativism of belief; she wants to argue that Christian belief is true and atheism not. Nonetheless, I find myself wondering: what if we follow up the consequence of this? Suppose we say 'well neither Christianity nor Science are any better grounded than one another, so we might as well just pick and choose the belief system that we find most agreeable' (to be clear, Shermer is absolutely not saying this, and I haven't found any theist writers who are either; but bear with me).

One possibility would be to say: since I can choose a belief-system purely on what appeals to me, I might as well go the whole hog. I might as well believe that I am the emperor of the world, the greatest human being who ever lived, that all this cosmos is laid on for my benefit. I might as well believe that I am God! Obviously, few people, and no well-balanced people, do believe that. But might this be because, although such a belief might seem superficially preferable to the belief that (say) we are born into original sin and must abase ourselves before an all-powerful deity to earn the chance to enjoy the afterlife -- maybe it's not. Could it be that one reason why Christianity (to pick one example) does so well in the belief stakes is that it is very finely tuned, as it were, to provide believers with the optimum balance of self-aggrandizement (you are specially, God loves you, you will live forever) with the necessary condiment of self-perspective (you're a sinner, you are unworthy, your abjection meant that God was tortured to death)?

Chains

Rousseau's desperately famous opening line from Du contrat social ou Principes du droit politique (1762) --'L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers' -- is, obviously, behind Schiller lines from 'Die Worte des Glaubens' (1797):

Der Mensch ist frei geschaffen, ist frei,
Und würd' er in Ketten geboren.

'Man is created free, and is free, Though he be born in chains.' It's certainly a more hopeful, probably a more mendacious claim; and part of me thinks that only somebody who enjoyed both affluence and freedom from birth could speak so breezily about what it means to be in chains.

Caché

To pick out a phrase from yesterday's post: le dieu caché. This, of course, is Lucien Goldmann's phrase, and the title of his study of Pascal and Racine.  It's worth thinking a little more about it.  Because 'hidden' is a passive, we perhaps need something else (autocached, perhaps) for a secret that is folded away into the interstices of things by itself.

Goldmann isn't very interested in this, of course; he's more concerned to frame the debate as to whether tragedy is possible in a century dominated by one of two fundamentally 'optimistic' world-views: Communism and Christianity:

Each of these three doctrines—rationalism, hedonism and tragic vision—is basically individualistic, the third even more so than the others since it defines man in terms of his absolute but impossible demand for transcendence … Other doctrines, whether that of Augustinian Christianity or that of dialectical materialism, change the very position of the problem by replacing the question What ought I to do? by the essentially different one of How ought I to live? [263-4)

That distinction looks pretty superfine to me, but perhaps I'm missing something.

For Goldmann, man becomes aware of tragedy when he ‘suddenly becomes aware, by a movement which, strictly speaking, is outside time, of the contradiction between the imperfect values of man and the world and the perfection of those to be found in God.’ Attempts to reconcile this problematic—as, for instance, the rationalist might insist that this world can be made perfect, or the Romantic might hope to retreat from the world into art—are wrongheaded. We must, it seems, live in the world, with all its suffering and horrors.

For if we refuse the world absolutely and unilaterally then we deprive it of any possible meaning, and reduce it to the level of an abstract anonymous obstacle, without form or qualities. Only an attitude which places itself within the world in order to refuse the world can, without abandoning anything of the absolute character of this refusal, still allow tragic man to know the world on which he passes judgment and thus justify his refusal of it by keeping his reasons for doing so constantly in mind. [18]

The tragic man robbed of community is reduced to soliloquy, or to talking to God who doesn’t talk back: indeed, that God can be both absent and present is what Goldmann means by calling him ‘hidden’: ‘at the very moment that God appears to man, then man ceases to be tragic. To see and hear God is to go beyond tragedy.’

Still, I'm minded to challenge the notion that Christianity is 'optimistic'. I can see that as a description of Islam, or Judaism (whose messiah is still to come). But surely Christianity its precisely about the revelation not of God so much, as of the fact that God can suffer pain and die (or at least, that Deity is not immune to suffering and death, and these things are part of the divine as of the mortal realm) -- that God is not in our future, but in our past; that we are belated. If this isn't tragic, I don't know what is. More, it is precisely the collective aspect that makes it tragic. It says: this is how things are for all. The indvidualist at least has the satisfaction of thinking: 'when this suffering is over for me, it is over.'

Vayled and Shadouued in the Olde

Coming across the following passage (from Bishop Griffith Williams' Seaven Golden Candlesticks (1624, or possibly 1627, it's not clear), quoted in Ruthven's excellent little 1969 book on The Conceit, got me thinking:

Christ was veiled and shadowed in the Old, and exhibited in the New testament; promised in that, preached in this; there showed the Father in types, here manifested to us in truths; for the Tree of Life, the Ark of Noah, the Ladder of Jacob, the Mercy Seat, the Brazen Serpent and all such mystical types and typical figures that we read of in the Old Testament, what were they else but Christ, obscurely shadowed before he was fully revealed? And so all the men of note, Noah, Isaac, Joseph, Moses, Aaron, Joshua, Samson, David, Solomon ...

Typology has its roots in Scripture, of course ('For as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the great fish; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth', Matthew 12:40). What particularly interests me, here, is the implication of this larger belief. It relates, of course, to notions of 'le dieu caché'; assuming we reject so-called 'natural theology' as overly simplistic, we have to wonder why God hides Himself in creation.

Thinking about Griffiths's by-no-means unusual perspective, I see a strange symmetry in the arrangement. God-as-Christ is hidden in the OT, but can be discovered if you're canny enough to decipher the clues; God-as-Christ is not hidden in the NT, for He is front-and-centre-stage for the whole of that book. But God in the larger sense is not hidden in the OT, in the sense (which I've discussed before on this blog) He is an actual character, an agent in the world as well as outside it; whilst in the NT, this situation changes -- for the NT is precisely the place where God disappears from plain view, forsakes the world.

A one sentence history of the twentieth century

People at first thought that utopia would be a city; but later they began to wonder if utopia might not instead be a mode of countryside.

Weakness poem

Weakness:
Awakeness:
Weakless.
Weakless.

7s

The ancient Egyptians believed there were seven substances produced by the body, and that all seven were needful for proper magic: wax; tears; spit; phlegm; sweat; semen; urine. Faeces and vomit don't count, for reasons that are beyond me. How about a story based on the seven exhalations? (breath from the nose; breath from the mouth; yawns; odour; burps; farts; spirit -- this last being telepathy).

Drinker

This boozer is in pouradise;
Delirium tremendous, liver-let-die;
Strong, not too neat; he keeps on ice
The eyewash of mud-in-your-eye.
His coaster's there to help him coast:
This drinker knows all life is toast.

Book of Sand

Thoughts on the Book of Sand.

This occurred to me: open the book on a certain page, shut the page again, and you will never again be able to open at your earlier page. More: the pages cannot be numbered--there are an infinite number of them between the front and back boards; which means that, open it roughly in the middle, there are an infinite number of pages on either side.

But (and this is the part that troubles my head): let's say the book is an inch thick, and you took a half-inch paintbrush and painted the ends of the first half of the stack of pages gold. Afterwards, and whilst it would still be perfectly impossible for you to open the book at the same page twice, you could be 100% sure of opening the book in the first half. This puzzles me, because it suggest (counterintuitively) that it is possible to narrow down an infinite range of options. My sense is that this is no paradox: that half of infinity if still infinity, but it feels weird. It prompts me to ask: how far is it possible to narrow things down like this?

Harmanic

From a online dictionary of Graham Harman concepts:

Harman is a big fan of H.P. Lovecraft’s science fiction novels. Harman argues that “science fiction is not only in ‘science fiction’ but in great literature of any sort” – the key criteria being the weirdness and strangeness of its idiosyncrasies (HOP, p.244). “For nothing resembles science fiction more than philosophy does – unless it be science itself” (HOP, p.333). “Few will object to the term ‘weird realism’ as a description of Lovecraft’s outlook” (HOP, p.348). “In Lovecraft, the relation between a thing and its surface is perturbed by irregularities that resist immediate comprehension, as if the object suffered from a strange disease of the nervous system” (HOP, p.356). Lovecraft’s materialism gives him a “philosophy rooted in the surface, but one in which the relation between objects and their crusts is rendered problematic”. Horror comes “from the declared insufficiency of the description, combined with a literary world in which the monster is a genuine player rather than a mere image” (HOP, p.357). Horror also “comes not from some transcendent force lying outside the bounds of human finitude, but in a twisting or torsion of that finitude itself” (HOP, p.360).

'HOP' is Harman's 'On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl'. The 'genuine player' line is a good one (not a million miles away from Tolkien's reading of the dragon in Beowulf), and important; although I'm tempted to suggest not that 'thing and its surface is perturbed by irregularities that resist immediate comprehension', but rather that irregularities that resist immediate comprehension constitute the main focus of the Lovecraftian text.

To constellate this with a passage from Harman's Guerille Objects:

In addition to being charmed by objects, we ourselves want to emulate them, and wish to charm the world. It is simply not the case that our fundamental wish is to be viewed as dignified free subjects with a chance to speak at the microphone of the universal assembly…. The kind of recognition we would prefer is always far more specific, since we often feel ourselves to be so painfully mutable that any specific role will do…. The one book that all of us would approach with greatest interest, that no human in history would be able to resist opening, would be a book of anecdotes about ourselves as told by other people. The appeal of such a book would not lie in some sort of grotesque human vanity, but in our wish to be something definite, a desire at least as great as our desire to be free. There is a profound need to escape the apparently infinite flexible subjectivity within, which feels far more amorphous to us than to anyone else.

Contrary to the usual view, what we really want is to be objects.

This may indeed be part of SF's core appeal: that it enables us to identify, to empathise and subsume ourselves into, technological object-ness. We become the robot; we sing along with McCaffrey's ship.

Beech Wood poem

A squirrel is watching us,
tail curved like a scorpion's.

Beech woods with their density
of bright green canopy

prevent sunlight from settling
to the forest floor, stifling

other trees' growth, and wildflowers.
Jedem das Seine, they say.

The "Not I" Defence

A follow-upto yesterday's post. If I were to ask my religious friends whether they considered atheists like me to be as bad as rapists, they would probably say: 'no.' And if I pressed them that many believers empirically do believe that, they might say: 'there may be Christians who think that way. Not I!' I wonder about this. It does double service, of distancing the believer from the loonier aspects of religious belief, and of de-fanging religion itself (as it might be: 'some Christians are idiots, sure, but the existence of reasonable Christians like me show that the Church isn't all bad'). I wonder. At the risk of an offensive analogy, isn't this like a Nazi being accused of anti-Semitism, and insisting that whilst there may be some Nazis who think that way, s/he doesn't. If a main point of religious belief is community, then how is one served by explicitly distancing oneself from that community? Of course, humans may disagree on aspects of doctrine, but thinking atheists no better than rapists touches on a core feature -- belief itself -- without which conventional believers have nothing. So ...?

Atheists As Bad As Rapists

Here's the story:

University of British Columbia researchers conducted a total of six experiments on 350 Americans and 420 UBC students, of varying religions (67% of the Americans were Christian). In one experiment, they presented participants with the story of an "archetypal freerider" who cheats and steals a lot, and asked what group they thought that person might belong to. Participants were more likely to categorize the person as an atheist than as a Christian, Jew, Muslim, gay person, or feminist (some of the groups were chosen because they were "often described as threatening to majority religious values and morality"). Only rapists fared as poorly — participants were about as likely to put the "freerider" in this group. According to the study, "People did not significantly differentiate atheists from rapists."

In another experiment, researchers asked what jobs the subjects would hire atheists to perform. Lead study author Will Gervais discusses the results:

People are willing to hire an atheist for a job that is perceived as low trust, for instance as a waitress. But when hiring for a high-trust job like daycare worker, they were like, nope, not going to hire an atheist for that job.

Study coauthor Ara Norenzayan told QMI, "Outward displays of belief in God may be viewed as a proxy for trustworthiness, particularly by religious believers who think that people behave better if they feel that God is watching them. While atheists may see their disbelief as a private matter on a metaphysical issue, believers may consider atheists' absence of belief as a public threat to co-operation and honesty."

As a crystalisation of the public function of religious belief, this sounds not only believable but, actually, speaks to the antiquity of human beliefs about belief (I've posted about this before). But what interests me is the way 'belief' itself has effectively usurped the NT focus on riches. Terms deployed in the NT in order to evoke the knee-jerk disapprobation of its original readers -- 'Samaritan', 'tax collector', 'rich man', 'prostitute' -- are today subsumed into one key word: 'atheist'. We can rewrite the relevant scripture. It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a believer to enter heaven. Unless you become again as an atheist, you shall not enter the kingdom of God.

Frost at Midday

A calculus of frost
whitens the fenceposts.

Fields are milk-coloured
the hill behind the house

is a cassock. The gospel
is glass, and the ministry

is iron in the soil, iron
in the air. Eye-blue sky.

Snarkwhal

Lovely: Henry Holiday, 'The Snark'. This is an unpublished pencil drawing for The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll (1876). The sheet size is 20.3 x 20.95 cm. I found it in an article by Sarah Hamilton Phelps called 'The Hartley Collection of Victorian Illustration', Boston Museum Bulletin (1972), 56-67. I particularly like the sketches of the snark-hunters' heads around the margin.

This representation of the Snark as a sort of giant whale was never used, as Phelps reports: 'because Carroll "had made the Snark strictly unimaginable and wanted him to remain so." Holiday says of his own drawing in a letter to Hartley: "You may rely on my drawing being strictly accurate. I pledge my word that I have never met with anyone however critically disposed who was able to prove a single fault in it."'

Huxley tries to have his cake and eat it too

Two quotations from Aldous Huxley's ‘Spinoza’s Worm’ (1929):

'The means by which men try to turn themselves into supermen are murderous’

‘Simple lifers, like Tolstoy and Gandhi, ignore the most obvious facts. Chief amongst these is the fact that machinery, by increasing production, has permitted an increase in population. There are twice as many human beings today [Huxley is writing in the 1920s] as there were a hundred years ago. If we scrap the machinery, we kill at least half the population. When Gandhi advocates the return to handicrafts, he is advocating the condemnation to death of about nine hundred million human beings. Tamburlaine’s butcheries are insignificant compared to the cosmic massacre so earnestly advocated by our mild and graminivorous Mahatma.’

Steampunk

SF, counterintuitively enough, is often a mode of nostalgia for the future. Steampunk, by articulating a nostalgia for the past, might appear to be a more straightforward, or less paradoxical, business; but in fact Steampunk actualises a nostalgia for the past as the impossible future.

Expansive

Spacetime is expanding, and has been since the big bang.  We think of this as happening on the very largest scales, and so it is.  But it is happening on the very smallest scales too—spacetime is the ground of existence on all scales, after all.  Why, then, aren’t hydrogen atoms (say) getting bigger?  Why isn’t the ‘space’ between nucleus and electrons growing at a rate of tens of metres per second?  There are several possible answers to this question, and here’s one: the subatomic particles, out of which the material cosmos is constructed, are ‘actually’ the rents and fundamental flaws in spacetime magnified to the materiality by expansion itself.
Ooh, scare-quote overload.  Still: a good SFnal, if not a good Physics, idea.

Morton on Tolkien

Amongst many other arguments, Timothy Morton's hectic but stimulating Ecology without nature: rethinking environmental aesthetics (Harvard University Press 2007) situates Tolkien both in terms of the longer tradition of ‘Romantic nationalism’ and environmental art.

As the idea of world (Welt) became popular in German Romantic idealism, so the nation-state was imagined as a surrounding environment. The idea of the nation as “homeland” … demanded a poetic rendering as an ambient realm of swaying corn, shining seas, or stately forests. Nature appeared sublime “there” and yet fundamentally beyond representation, stretching beyond the horizon and back into the distant, even pre-human past. It was a suitable objective correlative for the je ne sais quoi of nationalist fantasy. Walter Scott’s invention of historical novels, realist fictions generating an entire world in a bubble of past-tense narrative, did as much for environmental nationalism as explicitly Romantic criticisms of modern society and technology. [97]

He goes on to read Tolkien in this light.

The Shire, in J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings depicts the world bubble as an organic village. Tolkien narrates the victory of the suburbanite, the “little person,” embedded in a tamed yet natural-seeming environment. Nestled into the horizon as they are in their burrows, the wider world of global politics is blissfully unavailable to them. Tolkien’s work embodies a key nationalist fantasy, a sense of “world” as real, tangible yet indeterminate, evoking a metonymic chain of images—an anamorphic form. The Lord of the Rings establishes not only entire languages, histories, and mythologies, but also a surrounding world. If ever there was evidence of the persistence of Romanticism, this is it. 

In Heidegger’s supremely environmental philosophy, the surrounding ambience created by Tolkien’s narratives is called Unwelt. This is the deep ontological sense in which things are “around”—they may come in handy, but whether they do or not, we have a care for them. It is a thoroughly environmental idea. Things are oriented in relation to other things: “the house has its sunny side and its shady side.” Others (elves, dwarves, men) care for their surroundings differently. The strangeness of Middle-earth, its permeation with others and their worlds, is summed up in the metaphor of the road, which becomes an emblem for narratives. The road comes right up to you front door. To step across it is to cross a threshold between inside and outside. There is a sense that the story, and the world it describes, could go “ever on and on” like the road in Bilbo Baggins’s song. But wherever we go in this world, however strange or threatening our journey, it will always be familiar, insofar as it has all been planned in advance, mapped out , accounted for. This planning is not quite as narrowly rational as a modern factory. Still, the recent film of The Lord of the Rings, with its built-in commentaries on the special edition DVD about the craftsmanship and industrial processes that went into making it, reveals something true about the book. The Umwelt is a function of holistic, total design, total creation: Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk with a how-to booklet thrown in. The holistic world that ‘”goes ever on and on” is exciting and involved, but in the end, it is just a gigantic version of the ready-made commodity. This is ironic, since one of the themes of the work is the resistance to industrialism and specifically to commodity fetishism, in the form of the hypnotic ring itself. [98]

This is interesting stuff, although Morton evidently feels rather condescendingly about the book itself: ‘what gets lost in this elaborate attempt to craft a piece of kitsch that could assuage the ravages of industrialism?’ he asks, answering ‘hesitation, irony, ambiguity’, glossing the middle term via Schlegel. I can see the ‘kitsch’ part, although it doesn’t strike me as a necessarily bad thing (on the contrary). But something is missing from this analysis; precisely the unexpected thing (the unexpected party) that Morton claims the novel erases. Since this is particularly true of the book’s engagement with ‘environmental aesthetics’, it’s a shame Morton doesn’t discuss it. Take: Tom Bombadil. It’s true he was smoothed over and erased by the more commodified film version of the tale; but he’s a crucial figure in the Fellowship (in some senses the crucial figure). He does not represent, but literally embodies, the irreducibility of ‘nature’ as something other than the ‘human’ world. Of course, he embodies this through a metaphysical logic of incarnation that as crucial to (Catholic) Tolkien’s world-view; and it’s possible that Morton has little sympathy with incarnation from an OOO-point of view—I don’t know, but I can imagine that the way the Christian concept prioritises ‘the human form’ over all over objects, to the point where the universe itself, or God, or (in LotR) Nature somehow metaphysically ‘is’ the human form … I can believe that such views are immiscible with OOO. Nonetheless one the things that is so wonderful about Tom Bombadil is precisely the way he doesn’t fit the well-tooled story model, the ‘road’ that the film-makers trod. It is precisely his gnarly peculiarity, his oddity, his naffness (blue coat, yellow boots! Endless fol-de-rol singing!). His non-identity. He represents precision a sort of narrative hesitation -- that's why Jackson and his screenwriters ditched him for their film version.

More Burnet

This is how Burnet thinks planets come about:

We sometimes see the Face of the Sun overgrown with thick Spots, and perceive him for some Days pale, obscure, and, as it were, in the Pangs of Death; but he that is Sick may Die; and what happens to one, may happen to others of the same King (now all the fixed Stars are homogenous ) therefore the fixed stars are perishable. Now a fixed Star perishes, and is extinguished, when being crusted over with a thick Shell or Scurf which it cannot break through, it degenerates into an obscure and opake Body, such as is a Planet. [Thomas Burnet, Archaeologiae Philosophicae sive Doctrina Antiqua de Rerum Originibus (1692)]

It's rather nice, but, coming in the middle of a critique of the imaginative logic of Genesis, it suffers from the same problem as that book: a lack of the actual scale, in terms of space and time, of the cosmos. There's something ineluctably human-scale about it.

Marinerime

I'm sure there's an academic paper on this, somewhere; though I don't know it. The epigraph to Coleridge's 'Rime of the Ancient Mariner':

Facile credo, plures esse Naturas invisibiles quam visibiles in rerum universitate. Sed horum omnium familiam quis nobis enarrabit ? et gradus et cognationes et discrimina et singulorum munera ? Quid agunt ? quae loca habitant ? Harum rerum notitiam semper ambivit ingenium humanum, nunquam attigit. Juvat, interea, non diffiteor, quandoque in animo, tanquam in tabulâ, majoris et melioris mundi imaginem contemplari : ne mens assuefacta hodiernae vitae minutiis se contrahat nimis, et tota subsidat in pusillas cogitationes. Sed veritati interea invigilandum est, modusque servandus, ut certa ab incertis, diem a nocte, distinguamus.

This is from Thomas Burnet's Archaeologiae Philosophicae sive Doctrina Antiqua de Rerum Originibus (1692); and it speaks directly to the imaginative logic of the poem. This is what it means in English:

I can easily believe, that there are more invisible than visible Beings in the universe. But who shall describe for us their families? and their ranks and relationships and distinguishing features and functions? What they do? where they live? The human mind has always circled around a knowledge of these things, never attaining it. I do not doubt, however, that it is sometimes beneficial to contemplate, in thought, as in a Picture, the image of a greater and better world; lest the intellect, habituated to the trivia of daily life, may contract itself too much, and wholly sink into trifles. But at the same time we must be vigilant for truth, and maintain proportion, that we may distinguish certain from uncertain, day from night.

But maybe we should consider the larger design of the Archaeologiae Philosophicae and its relationship to Coleridge's poem: for this was a volume so unacceptable to contemporary theologians that Burnet was compelled to resign his post as chaplain in ordinary and Clerk of the Closet at Court. It is a detailed interrogation of the first chapters of Genesis and the story of Adam and Eve that ponders, inter alia, whether the Fall of Man was a symbolic rather than literal event. And is not the 'Rime' a drama of a man's fall, rendered pagan and strange by its nautical resituation?

John 10

Not trying to nit-pick; but trying to read the tenth chapter:

1 Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.
2 But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep.
3 To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out.
4 And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice.
5 And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him: for they know not the voice of strangers.
6 This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what things they were which he spake unto them.
7 Then said Jesus unto them again, Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep.
8 All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them.
9 I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture.
10 The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.
11 I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep.

Not previously having given this much thought, I'd assumed that the point of the opening verses here is to say: only by entering licitly and in good gaith into the proper ways of the Christian church can you be saved (like the wicked man in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress who leaps over the wall at the beginning rather than going through the straight gate, undergoes all the trials of the progress himself and gets to the city of Zion, only to be carried off to hell at the last minute). But the emphasis, here, is not on the ordinary Christian: it is on Christ himself, or at a pinch, on his pastors: bishops and priests and whatnot. The regular Christian need not worry about this gate; the parable only concerns those who would seek to lead regular Christians (although, according to the logic of the tale, the wicked man would have no luck breaking into the sheep fold; the sheep would never follow 'a stranger' -- which makes the trope of the fence and gate and so on rather redundant). But the confusion is in verse 9, when Christ, having symbolised himself as a shepherd coming through the gate, goes on to symbolise himself as the gate as well. Christ enters the world as the good shepherd, but does so through Christ: a kind of sacramental existential short-circuit.

I think we've been getting this the wrong way about. The door is not 'from' the wider world 'into' the safety of the sheep-fold; for our world, though large, is finite and God infinite. The door is 'from' the smaller place to the larger (larger, indeed, is something of a misnomer): it leads out, not in.