29 May 2009

Damn your eyes

Minta, Andrew observed, was rather a good walker. She wore more sensible clothes than most women. She wore very short skirts and black knicker-bockers. She would jump straight into a stream and flounder across. He liked her rashness, but he saw that it would not do - she would kill herself in some idiotic way one of these days. She seemed to be afraid of nothing - except bulls. At the mere sight of a bull in a field she would throw up her arms and fly screaming, which was the very thing to enrage a bull of course. But she did not mind owning up to it in the least; one must admit that. She knew she was an awful coward about bulls, she said. She thought she must have been tossed in her perambulator when she was a baby. She didn't seem to mind what she said or did. Suddenly now she pitched down on the edge of the cliff and began to sing some song about

Damn your eyes, damn your eyes.

They all had to join in and sing the chorus, and shout out together:

Damn your eyes, damn your eyes.

but it would be fatal to let the tide come in and cover up all the good hunting-grounds before they got on to the beach.

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1973:86)

26 May 2009

homeliest varieties

Germany, split by civil strife and a complex, rumbling dispute between kings and popes over the appointment of bishops (dubbed the Investiture Crisis), sent fewer soldiers on the First Crusade than did France or England. Yet their departure still made an impact. The annals of the monastery of Disibodenberg ... record this exodus in violent detail:

Moreover the Gospel witness confirmed it, 'And Jerusalem,' said the Lord Jesus, 'shall be trod down by the nations until the time of the nations is fulfilled' [Luke 21.24]. Whereupon not only country people but even kings, dukes and other powerful ones of the world were stirred, and I shall go on to greater things: bishops, monks and the other orders of the Church were moved to make this journey. At length when all these mentioned were agreed in purpose, kingdoms were left empty by their rulers, cities by their pastors, villages by their inhabitants. Not only men and boys, but many women also partook of this journey. Indeed females went forth on this venture dressed as men and marched in armour ...
 When all who had crossed themselves to make this journey had assembled, they entered into a scheme that wherever they found Jews, they would draw them in to Christianity, either willingly or forcibly ... Many, however, were killed and their wealth seized by the Christians. The distress was so dreadful that the Jews were driven to stab and kill each other with knives. The men did not spare their wives nor their relatives; they put to death their mothers, sons and daughters.
 And so, pressing on with the journey to Jerusalem, [the Christians] reached a city of Pannonia which is called Mersberg, where a great part of them were killed. And deservedly! ...


  In 1099 ... Jerusalem fell to the Christians. The Crusades were to remain a feature of life (if with dwindling force) for the next three centuries. Fighting was the great game of Europe and warriors were celebrated by name as the sporting icons of their day in epic verse such as the Chanson de Roland (written down c.1100). In other crucial respects the Europe of the late eleventh century, much of it still covered in forest, bore little resemblance to the continent we know today. The idea of a nation state hardly existed until the nineteenth century. Germany itself was united neither by a particular language nor a firm geographical identity. The only common tongue was Latin, which was still the official written language for science, diplomacy, the law and, underpinning all, the Church. The continent consisted of a network of feudal loyalties and ecclesiastical sees and a mosaic of ethnic groups. A change of monarch might almost go unnoticed: at one time Germany, Italy and Burgundy were all under one ruler; Aquitaine passed between France and England without undue trouble. Leadership stemmed from a web of jostling warlords and potentates, above whom were the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope. Then came kingdoms, corporations, duchies and archbishoprics, traces of which survive as, for example, in arbitrary boundaries of English shires.
  Cultural and economic horizons were not as narrow as might be assumed. Trade was thriving. Great mercantile routes criss-crossed Europe, bringing grain, wax, honey, wood and furs from the east; silk, damask, porcelain and ivory from the south. The Rhine linked the important commercial areas ... Trade companies and guilds emerged. Methods of travel and navigation were improving: maps grew more sophisticated; the compass, borrowed from the Chinese, came into use; technical refinements to sailing eased hazardous sea voyages. Merchants risked their lives when travelling long distances over sea and land ... exchanging sturdy wool and herring for rare luxuries, spices and incense. Salt was of vital importance, first brought by the Romans from the French coast, Lorraine and the Rhineland along the ancient Hellweg, the salt road through north and central Germany ...
  Despite war, hardship and disease, Europe's population was on the increase. The climate of this period was moderate (temperatures were similar to those of the late twentieth century, though they were to drop sharply in the interim). Towns developed into conurbations, the drift from the land had begun. By the thirteenth century Mainz ... and Cologne ... were two of Europe's largest cities. Yet those people with trades—bakers, millers, goldsmiths—maintained their smallholdings and vineyards and grew much of their own food, fearful of renouncing all links with the land because of uncertainty about their urban future. The agrarian landscape, too, had changed. New crop systems and better tools led to improved harvests. Reclaimed land was used for growing cereals, pulses and root vegetables, a staple diet, supplemented by fifty kinds of fresh-water fish. Meat from livestock, mainly salted, was eaten in moderation, less frequently than game. Houses, usually made of timber, were dark, damp and cramped, with earthen floors and low, narrow doors. Homes of the gentry, to which Hildegard's family belonged, might have exotic textiles and wall hangings brought back from the Crusades, but most people relied on wool and linen of the homeliest varieties.

Fiona Maddocks, Hildegard of Bingen (2001: 10-12)

23 May 2009

burning

may your eye see God, your intellect grasp His justice, and your heart burn brightly in the love of God, so that your spirit may not grow weak... Be a bright star shining in the darkness of the night of wicked men, and be a swift hart running to the fountain of the living water [cf. John 4.10]. Be alert, for many shepherds are blind and halt nowadays, and they are seizing the lucre of death [cf. Titus 1.11], choking out God's justice.

Hildegard von Bingen to the Archbishop of Bremen, Letters of Hildegard von Bingen, vol. 1 (1994: 48)

21 May 2009

warm stones

Where second-century pagans differed most profoundly from the views that had already begun to circulate in Christian circles was in their estimate of the horizons of the possible for the body itself. Potentially formless and eternal matter [to pagan civilians], the body was barely held together, for a short lifetime, by the vivid soul of the well-born man. Its solid matter could change as little as the crystalline marble of a sharply cut and exquisitely polished statue might blossom magically in its depths, into a more refined and malleable substance. Like society, the body was there to be administered, not to be changed. Others had begun to disagree with this view. Writing at the end of the second century, Clement of Alexandria, a Christian who knew his pagan authors well, summed up with admirable clarity and fairness the essence of the expectations of the body [to those of the Roman Empire]. Pagan philosophers, he knew, subscribed to an austere image of the person: "The human ideal of continence, I mean that which is set forth by the Greek philosophers, teaches one to resist passion, so as not to be made subservient to it, and to train the instincts to pursue rational goals." But Christians, he added, went further: "our ideal is not to experience desire at all."
 Moses had stood on Sinai for forty days, a man transfigured by the close presence of God. The needs of the body were stilled in him for all that time [cf. Stromateis 3.7.57]. Through the Incarnation of Christ, the Highest God had reached down to make even the body capable of transformation. In admitting this possibility, Clement implied that the stable environment posited by pagan thought, an intractable body and a social order adjusted to its unchanging needs, might burst from its ancient bounds. Sexual renunciation might lead the Christian to transform the body and, in transforming the body, to break with the discreet discipline [ie. the suppression] of the ancient city.
 Clement was a moderate among Christians. He stood closer to Plutarch, Musonius Rufus, and the doctors of his age than he did to many of his fellow-believers. In little groups scattered throughout the eastern Mediterranean, other Christians had seized upon the body. They had set it up as a palpable blazon of the end of the "present age." They believed that the universe itself had shattered with the rising of Christ from the grave. By renouncing all sexual activity the human body could join in Christ's victory: it could turn back the inexorable. The body could wrench itself free from the grip of the animal world. By refusing to act upon the youthful stirrings of desire, Christians could bring marriage and childbirth to an end. With marriage at an end, the huge fabric of organized society would crumble like a sandcastle touched by the "ocean-flood of the Messiah." [cf. Acts of Judas Thomas]
 These were the views of [the] exact contemporaries ... of Marcus Aurelius. Their implications could hardly have been more appalling to the pagan elites of Rome and the Aegean, and more calculated to upset the average married householder in any Mediterranean or Near Eastern community. In the century that followed the death of Jesus of Nazareth, the issue of sexual renunciation came to be elaborated in Christian circles as a drastic alternative to the moral and social order that seemed so secure, so prepared to expatiate upon its fundamental values in treatises, in works of medicine and on the warm stones of so many monuments in so many little cities.

Peter Brown, Body and Society (1988: 30-31)

19 May 2009

What is the object of your wish?

A process accompanying our words which one might call "the process of meaning them" is the modulation of the voice in which we speak the words; or one of the processes similar to this, like the play of facial expressions. These accompany the spoken words in the way a German sentence [thought by a native German] might accompany an English sentence [spoken by the German], or writing a sentence accompany speaking a sentence; but in the sense in which the tune of a song accompanies its words. This tune corresponds to the 'feeling' with which we say the sentence. And I wish to point out that this feeling is the expression with which the sentence is said, or something similar to this expression.
  ... Another source of the idea of a shadow being the object of our thought is this: We imagine the shadow to be a picture the intention of which cannot be questioned, that is, a picture which we don't interpret in order to understand it, but which we understand without interpreting it. Now there are pictures of which we should say that we interpret them, that is, translate them into a different kind of picture, in order to understand them; and pictures of which we should say that we understand them immediately, without any further interpretation. If you see a telegram written in cipher, and you know the key to this cipher, you will, in general, not say that you understand the telegram before you have translated it into ordinary language. Of course you have only replaced one kind of symbols by another; and yet if now you read the telegram in your language no further process of interpretation will take place.—Or rather, you may now, in certain cases again translate this telegram, say into a picture; but then too you have only replaced one set of symbols by another.
  ... Our confusion could be described in this way: Quite in accordance with our usual form of expression we think of the fact which we wish for as a thing which is not yet here, and to which, therefore, we cannot point. Now in order to understand the grammar of our expression "object of our wish" let's just consider the answer which we give to the question: "What is the object of your wish?" The answer to this question of course is "I wish that so-and-so should happen." Now what would the answer be if we went on asking: "And what is the object of this wish?" It could only consist in a repetition of our previous expression of the wish, or else in a translation into some other form of expression. We might, e.g., state what we wished in other words or illustrate it by a picture, etc., etc.
  ... The fault which in all our reasoning about these matters we are inclined to make is to think that images and experiences of all sorts, which are in some sense closely connected with each other, must be present in our mind at the same time. If we sing a tune we know by heart, or say the alphabet, the notes or letters seem to hang together, and each seems to draw the next after it, as though they were a string of pearls in a box, and by pulling out one pearl I pulled out the one following it.
  Now there is no doubt that, having the visual image of a string of beads being pulled out of a box through a hole in the lid, we should be inclined to say: "These beads must all have been together in the box before." But it is easy to see that this is making a hypothesis. I should have had the same image if the beads had gradually come into existence in the hole of the lid. We easily overlook the distinction between stating a conscious mental event, and making a hypothesis about what one might call the mechanism of the mind. All the more as such hypotheses or pictures of the working of our mind are embodied in many of the forms of expression of our every day language. The past tense "meant" in the sentence "I meant the man who won the battle of Austerlitz" is part of such a picture, the mind being conceived as a place in which what we remember is kept, stored, before we express it. If I whistle a tune I know well and am interrupted in the middle, if then someone asks me "did you know how to go on?" I should answer "yes, I did." What sort of process is this knowing how to go on? It might appear as though the whole continuation of the tune had to be present while I knew how to go on.
  Ask yourself such as question as: "How long does it take to know how to go on?" Or is it an instantaneous process? Aren't we making a mistake like mixing up the existence of a gramophone record of a tune with the existence of a tune? And aren't we assuming that whenever a tune passes through existence there must be some sort of a gramophone record of it from which it is played?

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Prelimary Studies for the "Philosophical Investigations" (1969: 35-40)

18 May 2009

If animals had a religion

Schleiermacher emphasized the function of "feeling" in religion and Hegel emphasized "thought", giving rise to ... tension between them. Hegel said that even dogs have feeling, but man has thought. This was based on an unintentional misunderstanding of what Schleiermacher meant by "feeling", one that we often find repeated even today. Yet it expresses the truth that man cannot be without thought. He must think even if he is a most pious Christian without any theological education. Even in religion we give names to special objects; we distinguish acts of the divine; we relate symbols to each other and explain their meanings. There is language in every religion, and where there is language there are universals or concepts that one must use even at the most primitive level of thought. It is interesting that this conflict between Hegel and Schleiermacher was anticipated already in the third century by Clement of Alexandria who said that if animals had a religion, it would be mute, without words.
  ... if the system is taken as a final answer, it becomes even worse than a prison. If we understand the system, however, as an attempt to bring theological concepts to a consistent form of expression in which there are no contradictions, then we cannot avoid it. Even if you think in fragments, as some philosophers and theologians (and some great ones) have done, then each fragment implicitly contains a system... So a system cannot be avoided unless you choose to make nonsensical or self-contradictory statements. Of course, this is sometimes done.
  The system has the danger not only of becoming a prison, but also of moving within itself. It may separate itself from reality and become something which is, so to speak, above the reality it is supposed to describe.

Paul Tillich, A History of Christian Thought (1968: xxxvi-xxxvii)

13 May 2009

Sartre's Orestes

You are right. No hatred; but no love, either. You, Electra, I might have loved. And yet—I wonder! Love or hatred calls for self-surrender. He cuts a fine figure, the warm-blooded, prosperous man, solidly entrenched in his well-being, who one fine day surrenders all to love—or to hatred; himself, his house, his land, his memories. But who am I, and what have I to surrender? I'm a mere shadow of a man; of all of the ghosts haunting this town to-day none is ghostlier than I. The only loves I've known were phantom loves, rare and vacillating as will-o'-the-wisps.



Jean-Paul Sartre, Les Mouches (1969: 56)

Oh humans

Yet God remained whole like a wheel ... Now this wheel is somewhere, and is full of something. For if the wheel had nothing but an outer rim, it would be empty. And if perchance an outsider came and wanted to work there, this cannot be, for two craftsmen cannot exercise their craft in one and the same wheel. Oh humans, look at the human being! For it contains heaven and earth and other creatures in itself, and is one form, and all things hide in it.
  This is what fatherhood is like. In what way? The round of the wheel is fatherhood, the fullness of the wheel is divinity. All things are in it and all stem from it, and beyond it there is no creator. Lucifer, however, is not whole, but divided in dispersion, since he wanted to be what he should not. For when God made the world, he had in his age-old plan that he wanted to become human.
  And he made the elements of the world, and they are in man, and man operates with them.

Hildegard von Bingen, quoted in Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages (1984: 172)

12 May 2009

you can live and die at peace

True, we men are assailed by grief in our lives, and we lament. But in the end lamentation must cease, giving way to peace and acceptance of our lot. Socrates sets the great example: where consuming sorrow seems in place, there springs the great, loving peace which opens the soul. Death has lost its meaning. It is not veiled over, but the authentic life is not a life toward death; it is a life toward the good.
 While Socrates, in his last moments, already seems far away from life, still, he is lovingly aware of every little human reality, such as the jailer's kind attentiveness. He has a thought for the proprieties: "Perhaps it will be well to bathe before drinking the poison, and so spare the women the trouble of washing my body."
 All pathos vanishes amid jests and such attention to practical matters. These betoken peace of mind. Democritus, who remained more on the surface of things, believed that to achieve peace of mind it sufficed to live with moderation and stick to the tasks that are within your capacities. He did not know the inner upheavals which once illuminated gave Socrates a deeper, wiser peace of mind. What made Socrates free was that in nonknowledge he had certainty of the goal toward which he had undertaken the venture of his whole life and now his death.
 The Phaedo, along with the Apology and the Crito, is among the few irreplaceable documents of mankind...
 The apparently cool equanimity of this attitude is, however, deceptive. Actually, we cannot read these dialogues without becoming engulfed by deep emotion which affects also our thinking. Here we find an imperative without fanaticism, the highest aspiration without ethical dogma. Keep yourself open for the one absolute. Until you achieve it, do not throw yourself away, for in it you can live and die at peace.

Karl Jaspers, Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus (1962: 15)