Antiquitopia

The qualities of religious experience mirror those of poetry--and, indeed, some of the best accounts of religious experience are related through poetry (think of St. John of the Cross); as one bends and bursts beyond the typical conventions of language, so does the other.  The most engaging poetry pulls at all five senses.  So too, the expression of religious experience.  I realize that what follows may not be technically be poetry in the sense of ancient meter and verse (though it has some of those things!), but one could easily consider it "prose poetry."  Indeed, St. Augustine of Hippo, trained as a rhetor and as a professor of rhetoric, was a master of style, and his Confessions is a masterwork on many levels including its means of expression.  Late have I loved you, Beauty so old and so new: Late have I loved you. And see, you were within And I was within the external world And sought you there, And in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovel...

Ô souvenir, Tes arbres sont en fleur devant le ciel, On peut croire qu'il neige, Mais la foudre s'éloigne sur le chemin, Le vent du soir répand son trop de graines. (Yves Bonnefoy, "Une Pierre," Les Planches Courbes ) Memory. It is something that fascinates so many ancient and modern thinkers. It is the basis of epistemology for Socrates/Plato: all knowledge is remembrance. It is the basis of the Self and where one finds God in Book 10 of Augustine's Confessions . The Bible constantly enjoins one to remember: zakhor , as the famous book by that name by Yosef Yerushalmi examines. It is the recollection of God's actions with Israel. Augustine depicts memory as a vast cavern with nooks and crannies in which some memories are easily accessed and others are hidden and only elicited with great difficulty. Bonnefoy's image, however, is not of the space of stone that can be filled, but organic. It is not empty space to be filled, but the spring flowering...

Late have I loved you, Beauty so old and so new: Late have I loved you. And see, you were within And I was within the external world And sought you there, And in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made The lovely things kept me far from you Though if they did not have their existence in you They had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud And shattered my deafness You were radiant and resplendent, You put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, And I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, And I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, And I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. (Augustine, Confessions X.xxvii (38))

I am beginning to wonder if there is anything Augustine does not discuss in his massive collection of works. To the perennial question--"why do men have nipples?"--Augustine as always has an answer: There are some details in the body which are there simply for aesthetic reasons, and for no practical purpose--for example, the nipples of a man's chest, and the beard on his face, the latter being clearly for a masculine ornament, not for protection. (Augustine, City of God 22.24; trans. Bettenson) The "Great Artist," as Augustine calls God in his final books of the City of God , made male nipples and beards as ornaments, for purely aesthetic purposes. Indeed, an artist as accomplished as God is not limited to practicalities.

Augustine discusses why seemingly unnatural things--like miracles, omens, and portents--are in fact natural. The argument is based upon the omnipotence of God. God creates all things by willing them. The process of willing is a natural consequence of God's omnipotence. If all things occur by God's will, and all things that occur by God's will naturally occur, then all things are natural: there can be no unnatural occurrences. His argument concerning the naturalness of portents is against his favorite punching-bag throughout the City of God, Varro (he is his favorite opponent, however, because he is one of the most formidable): For how can an event by contrary to nature when it happens by the will of God, since the will of the great Creator assuredly is the nature of every created being? ( City of God 21.8) While this somewhat recapitulates my summary, it takes things a step further. It is not just that all things willed (created) by God are natural because creation...

For the most part, reading Augustine's City of God can be a bore, but at times a passage just jumps out at you, like this one on rare and incredible bodily manipulations: We do in fact find among human beings some individuals with natural abilities very different from the rest of mankind and remarkable by their very rarity. Such people can do some things with their body which are for others utterly impossible and well-nigh incredible when they are reported. Some people can even move their ears, either one at a time or both together. Others without moving the head can bring the whole scalp-all the part covered with hair-down towards the forehead and bring it back again at will. Some can swallow an incredible number of various articles and then with a slight contraction of the diaphragm, can produce, as if out of a bag, any article they please, in perfect condition. There are others who imitate the cries of birds and beasts and the voices of any other men, reproducing them so acc...

Peter Brown reviews Paula Fredericksen's Augustine and the Jews in the New York Review of Books in a beautifully written, vivacious style (if a book review can be beautiful and vivacious). In the same review he also discusses Hadith Sivan's Palestine in Late Antiquity . Here are some excerpts from the first half (the Fredricksen half): It is a pleasure to write on a book that derives from a modern scholar's brain wave about the fateful insight of a thinker over a millennium and a half ago. Paula Fredriksen's sudden inspiration occurred in an altogether appropriate place—Jerusalem: I remember staring out the window of the Mishkenot Sha'ananim at daybreak, watching the walls of the Old City glow gold. She realized that, between 394–395 and 399–400, Augustine, bishop of Hippo in Roman North Africa (modern Bône/Annaba in Algeria), had his own brain wave—or rather, a series of brain waves. As a result, Augustine had come to a view of Jews and of Judaism that differed...

No one...must try to get to know from me what I know that I do not know, unless, it may be, in order to learn not to know what must be known to be incapable of being known! (Augustine, City of God 12.7) Go ahead, read it again to know what you can know and cannot know or know that you cannot know (which is better than not knowing what you can know) about knowing and not knowing from Augustine.

In my class, the most autobiographical writings we read are Augustine' Confessions and Montaigne's Essays . Their pioneering work of self-reflection, creating particular concepts of a self, of the invention of the "inner self" as the book by Philip Cary argues for Augustine, is where their similarities end. Augustine's vision of the self is quite contained, fixed; Montaigne's, fluid, in flux, always changing. The key, in my opinion, to the Augustinian sense of the self is memory; the key for Montaigne, imagination. One looks back over a life; one looks forward, or, more accurately, always seeks living, thinking, acting in the moment. Montaigne, it seems, in his act of writing tries to catch himself in the moment of thinking. I think I personally prefer Montaigne's vision of the unfinalizable self. Susan Sontag, in her essay "The death of tragedy," has a brief comparative moment, using the difference between Augustine and Montaigne as an an...

In his magisterial multi-volume commentary on Leviticus (for Anchor Bible), Jacob Milgrom, interacting with the work of Mary Douglas, suggests that the ancient Israelite system of sacrifice was not merely a bunch of scattered practices, but a unified system--a symbolic system. The unifying factor for Milgrom is death-avoidance. In response, Jonathan Klawans has suggested a two-fold organizing principle: imitatio dei and attracting/maintaing the divine presence (itself sort of a throwback to R.E. Clements, God and Temple ). Klawans presents imitatio dei as the organizing principle and maintaining the divine presence as the function of sacrifice. See my fuller discussion here . I actually like Klawans's thesis, and use a lot of his insights in my dissertation. Interestingly enough, however, the idea that the ancient sacrificial cult was a symbolic system did not begin with Mary Douglas, Jacob Milgrom, and Jonathan Klawans, but St. Augustine (and perhaps earlier), who suggests a...

In the New Testament, Jesus's body is the temple (John 2:19-22) and the community is a temple of the Holy Spirit (e.g., 1 Cor. 3:16f), but in Paul's articulation it is not always clear whether it is the individual or the community--some passages tend toward one or the other, but there is enough ambiguity. Augustine responds quite unequivocally which it is: both. Yet he takes the body/temple connection even further: For we are his temple, collectively, and has individuals. For he ocndescends to dwell in the union of all and in each person. He is as great in the individual as he is in the whole body of his worshippers, for he cannot be increased in bulk or diminished by partition. When we lift up our hearts to him, our heart is his altar. We propitiate him by our priest, his only-begotten Son. We sacrifice blood-stained victims to him when we fight for truth "as far as shedding our blood." We burn the sweetest incense for him, when we are in his sight on fire ...

I became interested in this question in my research into the Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice , which consistently refers to heavenly beings as "Gods," rather than merely "Angels." It does refer to "Angels," but they seem to be among the lower rungs of the "Gods"--the "Angels" are "Messengers," the errand-runners. Often this terminology is mistranslated as "Angels" or "Strong Ones" (which is correct in an etymological sense, but then we would have to translate "God" as "Strong One" as well). So, if ancient Jews were comfortable referring to a multitude of divine beings as "Gods," then I guess modern scholars should just face the facts and, when a particular text calls for it, do so as well. I have written far more about this here . Since then, I discovered that it is a title of Jupiter in Virgil's Aeneid (I'll quote this at a later time); it seems to be the title of t...

The Master said, "Unless a man has the spirit of the rites, in being respectful he will wear himself out, in being careful he will become timid, in having courage he will become unruly, and in being forthright he will become intolerant." (Confucius, Analects 8.2a; trans. Lau) It sounds a bit like Paul in 2 Cor. 3:6: "For the letter kills, but the spirit gives life." The hallmark verse, at least for Augustine, for his "spiritual" hermeneutics that he learned from Ambrose (Confessions V.xiv (24)): Above all, I heard first one, then another, then many difficult passages in the Old Testament scriptures figuratively interpreted, wehre I, by taking them literally, had found them to kill. This was while listening to Ambrose's sermons. And then reading on his own: I was also pleased that when the old writings of the Law and the Prophets came before me, they were no longer read with an eye to which they had previously looked absured, when I used to attack yo...

Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you. And see, you were within and I was in the external world and sought you there, and in my unlovely state I plunged into those lovely created things which you made. You were with me, and I was not with you. The lovely things kept me far from you, though if they did not have their existence in you, they had no existence at all. You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you. I tasted you, and I feel but hunger and thirst for you. You touched me, and I am set on fire to attain the peace which is yours. (Augustine, Confessions 10.27 (38); trans. Chadwick)

I just received my Routledge catalogue for religion . There were numerous interesting books listed, but two caught my eye: Ritual Texts for the Afterlife: Orpheus and the Bacchic Gold Tablets by Fritz Graf and Sarah Iles Johnston. Here is its product description: Fascinating texts written on small gold tablets that were deposited in graves provide a unique source of information about what some Greeks and Romans believed regarding the fate that awaited them after death, and how they could influence it. These texts, dating from the late fifth century BCE to the second century CE, have been part of the scholarly debate on ancient afterlife beliefs since the end of the nineteenth century. Recent finds and analysis of the texts have reshaped our understanding of their purpose and of the perceived afterlife. The tablets belonged to those who had been initiated into the mysteries of Dionysus Bacchius and relied heavily upon myths narrated in poems ascribed to the mythical singer Orpheus. A...

St. Augustine has an interesting reflection on his "wicked" acts in his youth: I had no motive for my wickedness except for wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the objecto for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake. (Augustine, Confessions 2.4(9); trans. Henry Chadwick). What was Augustine's great depravity in his soul? What great sin had he committed for the sake of wickedness and shame itself? A fall that he enjoyed not for the end, but for the fall itself? He stole a pear. Can you think of a more wicked and evil act? (An extra note: sadly, the translator of these lines, Henry Chadwick, died last year. He will be sorely missed.)

I thought this might be appropriate for inauguration day: Though this equality is only implicit in teh earthly city it permits us to understand interdependence, which essentially defines social life in the worldly community. This interdependence shows in the mutual give and take in which people live together. The attitude of individuals toward each other is characterized here by belief ( credere ), as distinguished from all real or potential knowledge. We comprehend all history, that is, all human and temporal acts, by believing--which means by trusting, but never by understanding ( intelligere ). This belief in the other is the belief that he will prove himself in our common future. Every earthly city depends upon this proof. Yet this belief that arises from our mutual interdependence precedes any possible proof. The continued existence of humankind does not rest on the proof. Rather, it rests on necessary belief, without which social life would become impossible. (Hannah Are...

I was perusing Augustine's City of God , and this passage struck me as perhaps still relevant: "Peace and War had a competition in cruelty; and Peace won the prize. For the men whom War cut down were bearing arms; Peace slaughtered the defenceless. The law of War was that the smitten should have the chance of smiting in return; the aim of Peace was to make sure not that the survivor should live, but that he should be killed without the chance of offering resistance." Augustine, City of God , 3.28.