Antiquitopia

I've been reading a lot of second and third century literature - right now focused predominantly on the second - for my newest project on "The Christian Moses."  I rather enjoyed the following from Athenagoras ( Plea for Christians 9): "...for I think you also...cannot be ignorant of the writings either of Moses or of Isaiah and Jeremiah, and the other prophets, who, lifted in ecstasy above the natural operations of their minds by the impulses of the divine spirit, uttered the things with which they were inspired, the spirit making use of them as a flute-player breathes into a flute..." (ANF trans) Irenaeus, too, at one point refers to the prophets as God's instruments (though I think he meant more in terms of general instrumentality rather than musical instruments).  So, there you go: the prophets are flutes into which the divine spirit blows.  

I am participating in a conference at Union Theological Seminary this Thursday on "See the God." I am speaking on ancient, with an emphasis on late ancient Judaism. Here is a talk-teaser: There is an uncritical assumption that often circulates in scholarship and popular belief that Judaism is a religion of hearing to the exclusion or ignoring of seeing. This assumption operates by pointing to Jewish aniconism and reducing Jewish encounters with the divine to the Deuteronomistic emphasis on audition. Did not God say that humans could not see God—or literally God’s face—and live (Exod. 33:20)? Nonetheless, this reductive maneuver ignores the rich ambivalences of the Bible and later Jewish views concerning whether and how one can see God and live. Some follow Exod. 33:20 and categorically claim its impossibility. In this case, numerous intermediary figures fill the ocular gap, allowing appearances of aspects of God—like God’s Memra, Shekhinah, Glory, or even God’s tefilli...

"So did Creusa cry; her wailing filled my father's house. But even then there comes a sudden omen--wonderful to tell: between the hands, before the faces of his grieving parents, over Iulus' head there leaps a lithe flametip that seems to shed a radiance; the tongue of fire flickers, harmless, a plays about his soft hair, grazes his temples. Shuddering in our alarm, we rush to shake the flames out of his hair and quench the holy fire with water. But Anchises raised his glad eyes to the stars and lifted heavenward his voice and hands: 'O Jupiter, all-able one, if you are moved by any prayers, look on us. I only ask you this: if by our goodness we merit it, then, Father, grant to us your help and let your sign confirm these omens.'" (Virgil, Aeneid 2.920-937; trans. Mandelbaum; cf. Fitzgerald translation in which the line numbering is 2.888-901) When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place. And suddenly a sound came from heaven li...

Euripides, the playwright who was critical of traditional conceptions of the gods and much traditional religious practice--if you read many of his plays in a row, this aspect becomes very clear--says this in his play Helen . In a passage accusing prophets of merely spouting lies in order to make money, he writes in line 757: γνώμη δ᾽ ἀρίστη μάντις ἥ τ᾽ εὐβουλία. The best prophet is common sense, our native wit. (Trans. Lattimore)

Inspired poets' predictions do not fail of fulfillment: a new laurel-wreath for Jove while the first's still green! These are now my words you read (I'm away on the Danube, its waters drink for the ill-pacified Goths): no, this is the voice of a god, a god's inside me, it's a god that makes me predict and prophesy! (Ovid, Black Sea Letters III.4.89-94) Ovid claims inspiration...in a very literal sense. A spirit is in him, a god's inside him. The god possesses him. Poetic inspiration and prophetic inspiration are inseparable: each divinely inspired, each folding into one another. Inspired speech is heightened speech, poetic speech. They flow from the same source: Apollo.

For some diversion and pleasure as I am furiously busy, I am reading Michael Wood's The Road to Delphi: The Life and Afterlife of Oracles . In it he quotes Walter Benjamin: A philosophy which does not include and cannot explain the possibility of prophecy by means of coffee grounds cannot be a true philosophy. (Walter Benjamin, Letters in Michael Wood, Road to Delphi , 20). Maybe he used the "Christ the Magician" coffee mug!

I just watched this clip posted by James McGrath at Exploring Our Matrix , but I thought it raised some really important issues, and, therefore, should be reposted by any readers I may have that he does not (although he attracts far more readers than I do). I might take issue with the unexamined overuse of the term "fundamentalist," although I was happy for the note that you can find Pentecostals throughout the spectrum of social and political issues--they are not just "fundamentalists" and the religious right. What clip failed to note, however, is that the Assemblies of God, which as a whole is quite conservative (although you will find more left-leaning folk at least among the laity here and there) is (or at least it used to be) the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. It is a somewhat decentralized denomination (technically it is called a "cooperative fellowship"), but its decentralization creates a degree of flexibility that, in fact, works t...