The End of Christian America (Newsweek)

Newsweek has a large article (and a series of smaller discussions) on religion in America, particularly discussing whether America is a "post-Christian" society. This comes on the heels of a particular survey of religious identification in which those who self-identify as Christian has gone down 10%, while those who don't identify with any faith has more than doubled:

According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler's attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)

But, as Jon Meacham notes:

Let's be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that "these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more 'evangelical' outlook among Christians." With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.

Meacham then proceeds to complicate this picture even further (as he always does), creating a rather complex portrait of the American religious landscape. See the whole thing here.

Stop All the Clocks...

I thought this poem by Auden, originally entitled "Funeral Blues" but later left untitled, would be appropriate for Good Friday:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack of the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to good.

Now as recited by the actor John Hannah ("Matthew") in the movie Four Weddings and a Funeral, which made the poem famous for a broader audience:

2 Enoch in Coptic!

Jim Davila reports message from Andrei Orlov, whose own site on 2 Enoch is here (and on my sidebar):

No longer ‘Slavonic’ only
2 Enoch attested in Coptic from Nubia

During his work preparing the publication of Coptic manuscripts from Qasr Ibrim in Egyptian Nubia, Joost Hagen, doctoral student at Leiden University, The Netherlands, very recently came across some fragments he could identify as part of the text of the so-called ‘Slavonic Enoch’ (2 Enoch), the first time a non-Slavonic manuscript of this intriguing text has been found.

The fragments were discovered at Qasr Ibrim, one of the capital cities of Christian-period Nubia (southern Egypt, northern Sudan, 5th-15th cent. AD), during excavations by the British Egypt Exploration Society (EES) which started in 1963 and have brought to light an astonishing number of finds, textual and other. Joost Hagen has been entrusted by the EES with the edition of the manuscript material in Coptic, the language of Christian Egypt and one of the literary languages used in the Christian kingdoms of Nubia.

The ‘Slavonic Enoch’ fragments, found in 1972, are four in number, most probably remnants of four consecutive leaves of a parchment codex. The fourth fragment is rather small and not yet placed with certainty, also because there is as yet no photograph of it available, only the transcription of its text by one of the excavators. For the other three fragments, both this transcription and two sets of photographs are available. The present location of the pieces themselves is not known, but most probably they are in one of the museums or magazines of the Antiquities Organization in Egypt.

The fragments contain chapters 36-42 of 2 Enoch, probably one of the most interesting parts of the work one could wish for, with the transition between two of its three main parts: Enoch’s heavenly tour and his brief return to earth before the assuming of his task back in heaven. Moreover, they clearly represent a text of the short recension, with chapter 38 and some other parts of the long recension ‘missing’ and chapters 37 and 39 in the order 39 then 37. On top of that, it contains the ‘extra’ material at the end of chapter 36 that is present only in the oldest Slavonic manuscript of the work, U (15th cent.), and in manuscript A (16th cent.), which is closely related to U. For most Coptic texts, a translation from a Greek original is taken for granted and the existence of this Coptic version might well confirm the idea of an original of the Book of the Secrets of Enoch in Greek from Egypt, probably Alexandria.

Archeologically it seems likely that the Coptic manuscript is part of the remains of a church library from before the year 1172, possibly even from before 969, two important dates in the history of Qasr Ibrim; a tentative first look at palaeographical criterea seems to suggest a date in the eighth to ninth, maybe tenth centuries, during Nubia’s early medieval period. This would mean that the fragments predate the accepted date of the translation of 2 Enoch into Slavonic (11th, 12th cent.) and that they are some several hunderd years older than the earliest Slavonic witness, a text with extracts of the ethical passages (14th cent.).

Although this Coptic manuscript is fragmentary, it proved to be possible to reconstruct part of the missing text using (translations of) the Slavonic versions, and several theories formulated about the book of 2 Enoch by Slavists and theologians have already been confirmed or proven wrong. Recently, the priority of the longer recension has been advocated (again). But the discovery of this first non-Slavonic witness, at the same time the oldest manuscript known so far, calls for renewed discussion about this matter. Unless the two recensions had indeed already split up in Greek, the short recension, and the oldest Slavonic manuscript U, have to be taken more seriously from now on.

At the Enoch Seminar in Napels, Joost Hagen hopes to present his recent discovery in the presence of the very people who can hopefully contribute to an answer to these questions.

Mr Joost L. Hagen MA (1978) studied Egyptology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, specializing in Coptic Egypt and with (among others) the following minor subjects: papyrology, biblical and rabbinic Hebrew, modern standard and christian Arabic and Old Nubian. In 2003, his MA thesis, entitled “O LORD, Thou preservest man and beast”: The Encomium for the feast day of the Four Creatures, attributed to John Chrysostom (in Dutch, unpublished), was accepted with the grade 8.5 out of 10.

At the Eighth International Congress of Coptic Studies in Paris, 2004, he presented part of this research, published in 2007 as ‘ “The Great Cherub” and his Brothers: Adam, Enoch and Michael and the names, deeds and faces of the Four Creatures in the Encomium on the Four Creatures, attributed to John Chrysostom’, in N. Bosson and A. Boud’hors (eds.), Actes du huitième congrès international d’études coptes, Paris, 28 juin-3 juillet 2004, Vol. 2, 467-480.

In winter 2004 / 2005 he spent half a year at the Institut für Ägyptologie und Koptologie of the Westfälische Wilhelms-universität Münster, Germany, where he developed an interest in the so- called “Gospel of the Saviour”, about which he also lectured during a 2007 conference on apocryphal gospels in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Germany: ‘Ein anderer Kontext für die Berliner und Straßburger “Evangelienfragmente”: Das “Evangelium des Erlösers” und andere “Apostelevangelien” in der koptischen Literatur’, article in press).

In September 2005, he started a four-year research project at Leiden University to prepare his doctoral dissertation about the role of Coptic in Christian Nubia, entitled Multilingualism and cultural change in late-antique and medieval Nubia: The evidence of the Coptic texts from Qasr Ibrim. In the course of this research, now in its final stages, he regularly visited the Qasr Ibrim archive in Cambridge, England, and the Egyptian and Coptic Museums in Cairo and the Nubia Museum in Aswan, Egypt.

In 2006, he participated in the first Summer School in Coptic Papyrology in Vienna. He assisted his supervisor, Dr. Jacques van der Vliet, in preparing his Dutch book about the Gospel of Judas (published in 2006), and regularly gives popular lectures about the Gospel of Judas himself. He is a member of the International Society of Nubian Studies (since 2006) and the International Association for Coptic Studies (since 2008).

I guess this means that now I can study 2 Enoch, or at least fragments thereof, myself!

Auden on Montaigne

Montaigne

Outside his library window he could see
A gentle landscape terrified of grammar,
Cities where lisping was compulsory,
And provinces where it was death to stammer.

The hefty sprawled, too tired to care: it took
This donnish undersexed conservative
To start a revolution and to give
The Flesh its weapons to defeat the Book.

When devils drive the reasonable wild,
They strip their adult century so bare,
Love must be re-grown from the sensual child,

To doubt becomes a way of definition,
Even belles lettres legitimate as prayer,
And laziness a movement of contrition.

On the Impossibility of Repetition

In her editor's preface to M.M. Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics, Caryl Emerson writes regarding translating Bakhtin:

On the issue of repetition, Bakhtin is his own best counsel. His understanding fo the word, and of the specificity of the utterance, invalidates the very concept of repetition. Nothing "recurs"; the same word over again might accumulate, reinforce, perhaps parody what came before it, but it cannot be the same word if it is in a different place.

Professor Socrates

From PhDComics.

No Time

It seems that I am now in the habit of giving not a quote per day, but a poem per day. I am working through the collected works of W.H. Auden, sometimes proceeding in the order of the book, but sometimes jumping around to titles that catch my eye. My interest in time led me to this one:

No Time

Clocks cannot tell our time of day
For what event to pray,
Because we have no time, because
We have no time until
We know what time we fill,
Why time is other than time was.

Nor can our question satisfy
The answer in the statue's eye.
Only the living may ask whose brow
May wear the Roman laurel now:
The dead say only how.

What happens to the living when they die?
Death is not understood by death: nor you, nor I.

The Sabbath

Since I study the intersections of sacred space (Sanctuary) and sacred time (Sabbath) in ancient Jewish and Christian literature, I am often attracted to their invocations in modern literature as well. Paul Celan, for example, often talks about the Sabbath in his poetry. Here is a meditation by W.H. Auden:

The Sabbath

Waking on the Seventh Day of Creation,
They cautiously sniffed the air:
The most fastidious nostril among them admitted
That fellow was no longer there.

Herbivore, parasite, predator scouted,
Migrants flew fast and far--
Not a trace of his presence: holes in the earth,
Beaches covered with tar,

Ruins and metallic rubbish in plenty
Were all that was left of him
Whose birth on the Sixth had made of that day
An unnecessary interim.

Well, that fellow had never really smelled
Like a creature who would survive:
No grace, address or faculty like those
Born on the First Five.

Back, then, at last on a natural economy,
Now His Impudence was gone,
Looking exactly like what it was,
The Seventh Day went on,

Beautiful, happy, perfectly pointless....
A rifle's ringing crack
Split their Arcadia wide open, cut
Their Sabbath nonsense short.

For whom did they think they had been created?
That fellow was back,
More bloody-minded than they remembered,
More god-like than they thought.

The Art of Poetic Anamnesis

Memorization is something that is quickly flying out the window. Growing up, we were encouraged to memorize swaths of the Bible, something I should probably do more of (but now in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek). If that's not your ticket, how about modern poetry?

An article in the NYTimes talks about reasons for and gives tips how to memorize some Auden, Yeats, Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc., in tiny increments each day. With just a few lines each day, over time you'll have a vast collection of poems at your memory's disposal. There have been a few times I have pulled a few lines out of Shakespeare when relevant for my class (and not just when I was teaching Shakespeare). And I've actually been wanting to read some W.H. Auden, but haven't had the chance. The best reason beyond any cultural literacy, etc., is just for your own pleasure. Why not give a short poem a shot?

Here is a poem by W.H. Auden:

The Fall of Rome


The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;
Agents of the Fisc pursue
Absconding tax-defaulters through
The sewers of provincial towns.

Private rites of magic send
The temple prostitutes to sleep;
All the literati keep
An imaginary friend.

Cerebrotonic Cato may
Extol the Ancient Disciplines,
But the muscle-bound Marines
Mutiny for food and pay.

Caesar's double-bed is warm
As an unimportant clerk
Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK
On a pink official form.

Unendowed with wealth or pity,
Little birds with scarlet legs,
Sitting on their speckled eggs,
Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast
Herds of reindeer move across
Miles and miles of golden moss,
Silently and very fast.

Everything I do...

You know...someone needs to collect all the musical numbers from family guy--a lot of them are surprisingly good!

Brevity is the Soul of Wit

The NYTimes has a nice piece on the American Short Story. Short Stories don't get as much press, as much attention, as much respectability as the long prose fiction (i.e., novels). But all the great long prose fiction writers (e.g., Melville) were masters of the short form as well. For anyone who reads this blog with regularity, I obviously love the Argentinian short story writer, Jorge Luis Borges. But, for those who wish to stick closer to home, I have three words: Edgar Allen Poe! The short form perhaps reached its highest respectability, at least in European and subsequently American trajectories, in an ironically huge volume: Boccaccio's Decameron, which is a collection of 100 short stories in a larger narrative frame (it is actually 101 stories for those who are paying close attention). We could go back even further to One Thousand and One Nights, etc. The short form has been with us for a long time, in fact, and according to the NYTimes article, is poised for a resurgence.

On the Soul

From an unusual source for a discussion on the soul (or, at least, for me/this site):

This is the historical reality of this soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology, is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born rather out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint. This real, non-corporal soul is not a substance; it is the element in which are articulated the effects of a certain type of power and the reference of a certain type of knowledge, the machinery by which the power relations give rise to a possible corpus of knowledge, and knowledge extends and reinforces the effects of this power. On this reality-reference, various concepts have been constructed and domains of analysis carved out: psyche, subjectivity, personality, consciousness, etc.; on it have been built scientific techniques and discourses, and the moral claims of humanism. But let there be no misunderstanding: it is not that a real man, the object of knowledge, philosophical reflection or technical invention, has been substituted for teh soul, the illusion of theologians. The man described for us, whom we are invited to free, is already in himself the effect of a subjection more profound than himself. A 'soul' inhabits him and brings him to existence, which is itself a factor in the master that power exercises over the body. The soul is the effect and instrument of political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body. (Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison; trans. Alan Sheridan)

Quote of the Day: Pride and Prejudice

I am obviously very far afield from my own little sandbox of antiquity; yet, alas, I teach Pride and Prejudice next week, and I am finding so many a bon mot to put Oscar Wilde to shame (ok...maybe not that many). Nonetheless, it is a very witty book. Here are some arresting lines of love that caught my passing eye (both spoken by Elizabeth Bennet):

I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love. (1.9)

Is not general incivility the very essence of love? (2.2)

What makes the latter funny to me is that its tone in context seems quite serious, whereas the first quote is in a series of witty banter.

Diogenes in the News

It isn't everyday that the most famous ancient (2,300 year old) Cynic philosopher, Diogenes, makes the news, but there is an Op-Ed piece in the NYTimes about him:

April 1, 2009

Op-Ed Contributor

Cynicism We Can Believe In

By SIMON CRITCHLEY

SOME 2,300 years after his death, Diogenes the Cynic dramatically interrupted a recent New York State Senate committee meeting. Wearing a long, white beard and carrying his trademark lamp in broad daylight, the ancient philosopher — who once described himself as “a Socrates gone mad” — claimed to be looking for an honest man in politics. Considering the never-ending allegations of financial corruption that flow from the sump of Albany, it’s no surprise that he was unsuccessful.

This resurrected Diogenes was, in fact, Randy Credico, a comedian who says he is considering challenging Senator Charles Schumer in the 2010 Democratic primary. Whatever boost Mr. Credico’s prank provides his campaign, it might also cause us to reflect a little on the meaning of cynicism — and how greatly we still need Diogenes.

Cynicism is actually not at all cynical in the modern sense of the word. It bears no real resemblance to that attitude of negativity and jaded scornfulness that sees the worst of intentions behind the apparent good motives of others.

True cynicism is not a debasement of others but a debasement of oneself — and in that purposeful self-debasement, a protest against corruption, luxury and insincerity. Diogenes, the story goes, was called a “downright dog,” and this so pleased him that the figure of a dog was carved in stone to mark his final resting place. From that epithet, kunikos (“dog-like”), cynicism was born.

Diogenes credited his teacher Antisthenes with introducing him to a life of poverty and happiness — of poverty as happiness. The cynic’s every word and action was dedicated to the belief that the path to individual freedom required absolute honesty and complete material austerity.

So Diogenes threw away his cup when he saw people drinking from their hands. He lived in a barrel, rolling in it over hot sand in the summer. He inured himself to cold by embracing statues blanketed with snow. He ate raw squid to avoid the trouble of cooking. He mocked the auctioneer while being sold into slavery.

When asked by Lysias the pharmacist if he believed in the gods, he replied, “How can I help believing in them when I see a god-forsaken wretch like you?” When he was asked what was the right time to marry, he said, “For a young man not yet, for an old man never at all.” When asked what was the most beautiful thing in the world, Diogenes replied, “Freedom of speech.” Sadly, it remains one of the most dangerous.

And when asked where he came from, this native of Sinope, in what is now Turkey, replied that he was a “citizen of the world,” or kosmopolites. If only today’s self-styled cosmopolitans drank water from their hands, hugged statues and lived in barrels, one might ponder. Truth be told, Diogenes’ “cosmopolitanism” is much more of an anti-political stance than the sort of banal internationalism that people associate with the word today.

Cynicism is basically a moral protest against hypocrisy and cant in politics and excess and thoughtless self-indulgence in the conduct of life. In a world like ours, which is slowly trying to rouse itself from the dogmatic slumbers of boundless self-interest, corruption, lazy cronyism and greed, it is Diogenes’ lamp that we need to light our path. Perhaps this recession will make cynics of us all.

Simon Critchley, the chairman of the philosophy department at the New School, is the author of “The Book of Dead Philosophers.”

Amish Meet Hasidic Jews

According to the Gothamist, Amish from Pennsylvania visited Hasidic Jews in Crown Heights (on the walking tour I took a couple years ago):

Yesterday dozens of Amish residents from Lancaster County, Pennsylvania caused plenty of confusion as they toured a predominantly Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn's Crown Heights; the Amish beards and black hats had workers in a matzoh factory convinced they were Jews visiting from Uzbekistan. Amish visitors John and Priscilla Lapp explained to the AP that, "In some things we are alike, like our clothing and our traditional beliefs. And in some things we are not. The biggest thing is that Jesus is our savior." (That, and the Lubavitchers have yet to be immortalized by Randy Quaid.)

Rabbi Beryl Epstein, who has been leading tours of Hasidic life since 1982, explained that the visit was intended to give each group a glimpse into the other's devout culture. He tells the Post, "They don't have too many places they can visit where they can be reassured their beliefs will be respected. If they go to Times Square, that's not gonna work." Yisroel Ber Kaplan of the Chassidic Discovery Center also emphasized the visit's spirit of tolerance, "It's reinforcing to the Amish community to see us Jews living the way the Bible says Jews are supposed to live, and have lived since the time of Moses and Abraham. The Amish are also living their lives as the Bible speaks to them."

After touring a synagogue and a library, the group stopped to eat at Esther's Deli on Albany Avenue; Jacob Blank, an Amish father of five, deemed the shawarma on laffa "very good." And before getting back on the bus home, he told the Post what impressed him most: "Watching people cross into the street. People were just walking into traffic."

They actually really do fit in quite well. Click the link above and see the pictures.

Reading Absences, Silences

In the strictest sense, all the contents of consciousness are ineffable. Even the simplest sensation is, in its totality, indescribable. Every work of art, therefore, needs to be understood not only as something rendered, but also as a certain handling of the ineffable. In the greatest art, one is always aware of things that cannot be said (rules of "decorum"), of the contradiction between expression and the presence of the inexpressible. Stylistic devices are also techniques of avoidance. The most potent elements in a work of art are, often, its silences. (Susan Sontag, "On Style")

How often are we careful enough in our art of reading to read silences in the text?

On the Importance of Repetition

Repetition reverberates throughout world literatures. Repetition, repeating, sometimes verbatim, as often can be found in the Epic of Gilgamesh, or with slight variation in the retelling that gives subtle hints of shifting perspectives, which I would argue happens in the Iliad (e.g., when Achilles retells what happened in his argument with Agamemnon to his mother), is often one of the most illuminating aspects of literature. You can find it in biblical literature, near eastern literature, greek and roman literature, all the way to the present (Dadaism, anyone?). Repetition keeps track of time, creates rhythm, denotes emphasis, and provides ever-new perspective and, in fact, allows a text to comment on itself. So, I felt a certain resonance in my own experience of repetition when i read...

...if one does not perceive how a work repeats itself, the work is, almost literally, not perceptible and therefore, at the same time, not intelligible. It is the perception of repetitions that makes a work of art intelligible. (Susan Sontag, "On Style")

Repeat. Reread. Very fittingly, Sontag creates repetition in her statement about repetition as intelligibility.

Quote of the Day: Susan Sontag's "On style"

...the greatest art seems secreted, not constructed. (Susan Sontag, "On style")