God and the Senses (1): Acts of Thomas

In an earlier post, I noted that while vision and audition are the predominant aspects of sacred or divine encounters (hierophany and theophany respectively) that there is a dearth of comment from a modern perspective on the engaging of other senses.  It is not just seeing God or hearing God, but also smelling, tasting, and touching.  Taste, indeed, will play an important role in Christian encounters, largely due to the Eucharist.  But Jewish, Christian, and Islamic works (and I limit myself to these since I am most familiar with them; not because I think it is lacking elsewhere) often engage multiple senses at once when speaking of the self and God.  Of these, perhaps smell is the most interesting:  it permeates and envelops but is not enveloped by you; it is evanescent but ever-present; it may surround you, but you cannot grasp it.  Touching often gives a sense of immediacy and intimacy, and tasting is perhaps most intimate, but also can be used to discuss transformation.  Indeed, seeing and hearing are important, but mystical works engage all the senses as a fuller expression of how all-encompassing the divine or sacred encounter can be for these authors. 

I plan to make note of several passages and authors, but here is a passage from the Acts of Thomas 1.6-7, a hymn (ed. Schneemelcher and Wilson):

The maiden is the daughter of light,
Upon her stands and rests the majestic effulgence of kings,
Delightful is the sight of her,
Radiant with shining beauty.
Her garments are like spring flowers,
And a scent of sweet fragrance is diffused from them.
In the crown of her head the king is established,
Feeding with his own ambrosia those who are set him.
Truth rests upon her head,
By (the movement of) her feet she shows forth joy.
Her mouth is open, and that becomingly,

Thirty and two are they that sing her praises.
Her tongue is like the curtain of the door,
Which is flung back for those who enter in.
,
Which the first craftsman wrought.
Her two hands make signs and secret patterns, proclaiming the dance of the blessed aeons
Her fingers the gates of the city.
Her chamber is full of light,
Breathing a scent of balsam and all sweet herbs,
And giving out a sweet smell of myrrh and (aromatic) leaves.
Within a strewn myrtle branches and
And the are adorned with reeds.

[There is a bit here describing this as a cosmic wedding ceremony with bridesmaids and a bridegroom; and then the wedding feast]

And [they] shall linger over the feasting
of which the eternal ones are accounted worthy,
and they shall put on royal robes
and be arrayed in splendid raiment,
and both shall be in joy and exultation
and they shall glorify the Father of all,
whose proud light they received
and were enlightened by the vision of their Lord,
whose ambrosial food they received,
which has no deficiency at all,
And they drank too of his wine
which gives them neither thirst nor desire;
And they glorified and praised, with the living Spirit,
The Father of Truth and the Mother of Wisdom.

I was reading this passage in class today for my Sexuality class--partly for how wedding imagery (most of which I dropped here) has been reworked and partly for the image of the divine feminine.  For my current purposes, however, I want to note how sensual this scene is.  We do have a lot of visual imagery:  the maiden is the daughter of light; thus, there is a lot of light imagery:  effulgence, radiance, shining beauty.  She looks like spring flowers.  There is also the movement of her feet, suggesting dancing and joy.  Visual imagery also shows up in the second part:  those who have a vision of their Lord receive enlightenment--this language also shows up for the "bridegroom" (those who see him are enlightened), identifying the bridegroom with the Lord.  There is also the engagement of the ears and hearing.  Firstly, this is a hymn so would have been sung and heard.  Secondly, within this hymn is mention of the maiden's praises and songs.  So we get light, beauty, dancing, praise, and songs: a very joyous scene.  But to stop there would be to miss half of the experience:  it is also about smelling and tasting.  There is the sweet fragrance of flowers, balsam, aromatic leaves, and myrrh.  It is an experience that engages the olfactory senses as much as any other.  Moreover, food is mentioned--ambrosia and wine--and, therefore, taste.  The ambrosia (the food of the gods) and the wine are the Lord's, which, one of my students perceptively suggested today, looks like a Eucharist reference (or easily interpreted as such in an early Christian document).  So we have seeing, hearing, smelling, and tasting:  the only thing missing is touching.  The smelling and tasting communicate something that seeing and hearing cannot:  immediacy and intimacy--one can see and hear from afar, but tasting and smelling (and touching if it were there) need greater proximity. 

Elaine Pagels "Revelations" Review

As April DeConick has noted at Forbidden Gospels, Adam Gopnik has rather whimsically reviewed Elain Pagels's new book, Revelations on the book of Revelation and other ancient revelations in the New Yorker.  It is quite an entertaining read.

Religion and Food

About a month ago, some fellow religion colleagues and I were having dinner and started bantering.  During the banter, I suggested a course on religion and food.  At the time, I was half-joking, but I have been occasionally thinking about it over the past month and increasingly think it would be an interesting course.  Anthropologists have long discussed food and culture, and so there is already a lot of theoretical material out there.  And different religious traditions have food laws, customs, etc.  There are the discussions of food and sacrifice, often looking at sacrifice as a meal or the ritualization of a meal at least.  There is, in Christianity, of course, the ritualized meal of the Eucharist.

So I have been trying to think of different types of course that could approach religion through food.  There could be a comparative course that discusses different religious traditions through food, meals, cuisine.  There could be a course in my own specialization of ancient Christianity and Judaism in its ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern contexts that focuses on food and religion in those contexts.  Perhaps a course on Food and Christianity through the ages form antiquity, medieval, to modern periods.  It seems, indeed, like a very flexible topic that could be quite fruitful as an upper level undergraduate course or perhaps a more advanced master's level course.

So, right now I am thinking about pitching such a course, but also wanting to compile a bibliography, either for background information for me (as the instructor) or for assignments.  Some initial thoughts that came to mind are as follows:


Theoretical (Mostly Anthropological and Sociological) Treatments:
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked

Claude Levi-Strauus, The Origin of Table Manners

Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (which covers some food laws of the Hebrew Bible)

Carole Counihan, Food and Culture:  A Reader--this has a great deal of interesting essays including theoretical treatments, discussions of particular groups (such as Jean Soler's famous treatment on Jewish food laws; Douglas's famous analysis of the meal; etc.)

Courtney Bender, Heaven's Kitchen

Sacrifice and Food:
Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, eds., Cuisine of Sacrifice

Christianity (in different periods):
Hal Taussig, In the Beginning was the Meal
Caroline Walker-Bynum, Holy Feast, Holy Fast

Food and Identity (including Jewish, Christian, and Muslim material):
David Freidenreich, Foreigners and their Food
David Kraemer, Jewish Eating and Identity Through the Ages

These are things that I thought of, but there has to be so much more out there on Christianity and Food, Judaism and Food, and especially religious traditions with which I am far less familiar.  If anyone has any suggestions on Food and Religion from a particular theoretical vantage point, a particular tradition, or a particular period of time, or a particular region, I would be very interested in hearing them.  Moreover, if anyone has actually taught such a course, I would be interested in hearing what you did, how it went, and what you might do differently. 

The Beauty of Moses

I have been working through the different references to Moses in the New Testament for an upcoming project.  While there are some well-worn topics discussed by scholars (Jesus as a prophet like Moses; which, from the other perspective, makes Moses a Proto-Christ; Moses as faithful servant; etc.), I was struck by a detail--one of the smallest of details--that shows up in the Acts of the Apostles in Stephen's speech and again in the Epistle to the Hebrews.  Acts 7 and Hebrews are often discussed together, particularly for their rather similar views of the temple and the notation of Moses making the tabernacle "according to the pattern" shown to him--used in both texts to suggest a temple not made with hands and that God does not dwell in hand-made temples. 

But there is another detail that I had not previously considered about Moses they share:  his beauty.  When Stephen begins his discussion of Moses (which takes up about half of his speech), he states:

At this time Moses was born and was beautiful (ἀστεῖος) before God. (Acts 7:20)

Similarly, in the "hall of faith" chapter of Hebrews, one reads:

By faith Moses, when he was born, was hid for three months by his parents, because they saw that the child was beautiful (ἀστεῖον).  (Heb. 11:23)

I am not particularly surprised by its occurrence, in and of itself.  It appears to be merely a reference to the LXX version of Exodus 2:2:  "Seeing that he [Moses] was beautiful (ἀστεῖον) they sheltered/covered him for three months."  There it translates the Hebrew טוב.  To see where the NT authors found the tradition of Moses' beauty at birth, one need look no further than Exodus.  Nonetheless, I think it is worth stopping and considering.

First the terminology.  Both Acts and Hebrews have the same term as found in Exodus:   ἀστεῖος.  It literally means "of the city," much like "urbane."  It has a range of meanings relating to urbanity, such as well-bred, courteous, polite, refined, elegant, clever, pretty, and, as translated here, beautiful or lovely.  I also did a quick and dirty search, and, as far as I can tell, in the New Testament this term only shows up in these two places.  So, for at least these NT writers, it is something that is associated with Moses and not found with anyone else. 

While considering use, we should also note that it always refers to his "beauty" at birth.  It is used, in fact, as the reason used for his parents' sparing him:  they spared him, hid him, covered him because he was beautiful.

But this is missing a bigger question, I think.  Of all the passages, issues, characteristics, events of Moses' life, why remember this?  Why bring it up?  Is this a fixed part of tradition?  Are there other traditions of Moses' "beauty"?  Are there competing traditions of other figures' "beauty" that are not necessarily in the canon?  This question of why to recall this at all may seem odd when considering Acts 7 as a whole, where half the discussion is Moses--perhaps it is bound to come up.  Stephen talks about all kinds of events in Moses' life: his life in Egypt, his Exile, the Exodus, his meeting with the angel on the mountain, Sinai (somewhat), the golden calf, and the Tabernacle.  The passage generally emphasizes how the people failed to understand Moses' divinely appointed role and how they continually rejected him (using him as a prototype for the later rejection of Jesus).  Oddly, with all of this detail, the Passover is absent.  The actual Sinai experience is also rather vaguely discussed.  So, one might just say Stephen's speech has it because it has so much of the tradition, but, really, some major aspects of the Moses tradition emphasized so greatly elsewhere are downplayed here (the giving of the Torah on Sinai, though the burning bush episode receives extensive treatment, and the downplaying of the Passover).  This suggests that what does show up is important.  What is more, Acts 7:20 has a little editorial shift not found in Exodus or Hebrews:  not only was Moses "beautiful," but he was "beautiful before God."  Other texts usually just indicate his beauty in the eyes of his parents; here it is divinely acknowledged beauty.  It is a heightening of Moses' beauty. 

Stephen speaks of Moses' beauty in a string of attributes of and actions by Moses.  In fact, the text emphasizes Moses' great qualities stating, "he was mighty in his words and his deeds."  How much more interesting, then, is it that Hebrews, which discusses Moses much more succinctly, also mentions this quality.  There are only four events mentioned in Heb. 11:23-28:  (1) Moses beauty as a child and his parents hiding him; (2) his rejection of his Egyptian upbringing in which he becomes sort of a proto-Christian:  "He considered abuse suffered for Christ greater wealth than the treasures of Egypt"; (3) his vision of God "seeing him who is invisible"; (4) and the Passover.  So, when it comes down to the four things to mention "by faith" Moses (or Moses' parents) did: hiding him due to his "beauty" made the cut.  While mentioned elsewhere in Hebrews, Moses' vision of the pattern of the tabernacle is not here (see Heb. 8:5).  Also mentioned elsewhere is Sinai (Heb. 12), but it is not here (not explicitly anyway).  So, we receive an emphasis on Moses' beauty, his suffering (something also suggested in Acts 7), his vision of the invisible (something actually denied in Acts 7, where he meets an angel and, even then, looks away), and the Passover (something again ignored in Acts 7).  Between the two passages (again, without mentioning other parts of Hebrews), the only things that overlap as worth mentioning, as deserving emphasis are Moses' beauty and his suffering--suffering in a way that foreshadows Christ and Christ-followers. 

So, clearly his beauty was important enough to heighten it (before God) and mention it in the sketchiest of biographies.  So why recall this aspect of Moses?  Put another way:  why is this social memory pattern preserved?  Why Moses the beautiful, Moses the urbane, Moses the lovely, Moses "of the astu" for the earliest Christians?

Ancient Israelite Wine

As others have also posted, there is an article in the Jerusalem Post about ancient Israelite wine here.  It is a nice companion to last year's discussion of ancient Israelite beer here.

St. Nick vs. Santa Claus

An old NYTimes Op-Ed article by one of my old professors, John Anthony McGuckin:

December 25, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

St. Nick in the Big City

By JOHN ANTHONY McGUCKIN 

ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place?

Well, it’s a New York story.

In all innocence, the morphing began with the Dutch Christians of New Amsterdam, who remembered St. Nicholas from the old country and called him Sinte Klaas. They had kept alive an old memory — that a kindly old cleric brought little gifts to the poor in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity. While the gifts were important, they were never meant to overshadow the message of Jesus’s humble birth.

But today’s chubby Santa is not about giving to the poor. He has had his saintly garb stripped away. The filling out of the figure, the loss of the vestments, and his transformation into a beery fellow smoking a pipe combined to form a caricature of Dutch peasant culture. Eventually this Magic Santa (a suitable patron saint if there ever was one for the burgeoning capitalist machinery of the city) was of course popularized by the Manhattanite Clement Clarke Moore published in “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” in The Troy (New York) Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823.

The newly created deity Santa soon attracted a school of iconographers: notable among them were Thomas Nast, whose 1863 image of a red-suited giant in Harper’s Weekly set the tone, and Haddon Sundblom, who drew up the archetypal image we know today on behalf of the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. This Santa was regularly accompanied by the flying reindeer: godlike in his majesty and presiding over the winter darkness like Odin the sky god returned.

The new Santa also acquired a host of Nordic elves to replace the small dark-skinned boy called Black Peter, who in Christian tradition so loved St. Nicholas that he traveled with him everywhere. But, some might say, wasn’t it better to lose this racially stereotyped relic? Actually, no, considering the real St. Nicholas first came into contact with Peter when he raided the slave market in his hometown and railed against the trade. The story tells us that when the slavers refused to take him seriously, he used the church’s funds to redeem Peter and gave the boy a job in the church.

And what of the throwing of the bags of gold down the chimney, where they landed in the stockings and little shoes that had been hung up to dry by the fireplace? Charming though it sounds, it reflected the deplorable custom, still prevalent in late Roman society when the Byzantine church was struggling to establish the supremacy of its values, of selling surplus daughters into bondage. This was a euphemism for sexual slavery — a trade that still blights our world.

As the tale goes, Nicholas had heard that a father in the town planned to sell his three daughters because his debts had been called in by pitiless creditors. As he did for Black Peter, Nicholas raided his church funds to secure the redemption of the girls. He dropped the gold down the chimney to save face for the impoverished father.

This tale was the origin of a whole subsequent series of efforts among the Christians who celebrated Nicholas to make some effort to redeem the lot of the poor — especially children, who always were, and still are, the world’s front-line victims. Such was the origin of Christmas almsgiving: gifts for the poor, not just gifts for our friends.
I like St. Nicholas. You can keep chubby Santa.

John Anthony McGuckin is a professor of religious history at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia.

Alan Segal Memorial in JAAR

I just received my copy of the latest JAAR (79:4).  In it is a short appreciation in memoriam of Alan Segal, my late advisor, written by Amir Hussain.  Amir tells of Alan's contributions to research in both ancient Judaism/Christianity and more broadly to the study of religion, his activities in the AAR, his teaching, and some personal remarks.

Codex Sinaiticus Facsimile

For those who missed it, Hendrickson Publishers has released a facsimile edition of Codex Sinaiticus.  Being to scale, it is of course huge, as is the price.

Check it out here for you or your library--it can be yours for only $799.

New Illustrated Conference of the Birds

I just saw that there is a new version of Attar's Conference of the Birds!  I am excited to check it out, since I teach the Conference of the Birds in my Exploring Mysticism course.

Check it out here.

Monk as Shaman?

It is always nice when multiple classes start overlapping.  My Religions of the World and my Sexuality and Christianity classes hit upon martyrdom and monasticism at the same time, although we spent much more time on these topics in my Sexuality and Christianity class.

I had a student in one class make a suggestion through a momentary flash of inspiration that the monks--at least many of the earliest eremetical hagiographies--acted much like a shaman.  I would like to sit, think, and see if we can develop this idea a bit and see where it leads us.

Firstly, while Shamanism proper belongs only to Siberia and the northern Caucuses, it is a phenomenon that shows some interesting cross-cultural comparisons with other phenomena of holy men and women, medicine men and women, etc., so long as historical context is properly taken into account.

Some of the qualities often associated with these figures are:

1.  Death imagery is prevalent--the shaman is surrounded by death imagery, often associated with the shaman's initiation.  The initiate undergoes a symbolic death, becoming a spirit in order to mediate the spirit realm.

2.  This mediation between the human community and the spirit realm occurs for multiple reasons, but the primary function is for healing.  Usually this healing occurs through either finding what malevolent spirit is affecting the human, or by finding the human's spirit (or soul, or some other aspect of self) that has become lost in the spirit realm and bring it back.

3.  This is often done through having visions in ecstatic states.

When looking at something like the Life of Antony by Athanasius, there are some interesting similarities.  Antony, when he is out in the desert, he is constantly interacting with the spirit realm--he is usually battling malevolent spirits (demons) as a spiritual warrior.  There is death imagery all over the place.  This is due to the fact that the monk is taking on many of the characteristics and imagery of the martyr, including athlete, warrior, and, with it, the death imagery.  Athanasius has Antony say, "I die daily."  He undergoes, through discipline, a symbolic death.  It is an enduring, repeating, ongoing death.  It is a disciplined death that gives him spiritual power to defeat demons and live an angelic life.  When people come out to see Antony, they want to hear teaching and discourses, but they also seek to be healed by him.  It is less clear that he is going into ecstatic states, but being out in a cave alone in the desert for a long time, he's probably seeing something!  

Was Antony a shaman?  No.  I largely reserve that term for its own historical setting.  Antony, while fighting and engaging with spiritual forces, does not seem to be going on spirit journeys to search for lost souls, etc., like a shaman does, though there are some hagiographies of monks he seem to have the ability to what we might call "astral project" or "appear" to others.  His death imagery belongs to a particular historical moment of the ending of official persecution of Christians in which martyrdom becomes less of a possibility and the Christian faithful are searching for new heroes--the desert monk.  Nonetheless, we can see that the shaman and monk as types of holy people have similar social functions that make them compelling to compare.  They are interstitial figures, who live on the fringes of society, but also at the intersections between the human and the spirit realms.  They are fringe mediators of the holy, and, typically, not central mediators such as priests (though both the shaman and the monk can be a priest, they do not need to be).

First Fall

My latest painting, finished just two nights ago.