I remember staring up at a statue of John the Baptist in a cathedral once, and he had a scowl on his face, and he was pointing fiercely at the Jesus statue across the way, like, "What are you staring at? Don't look at me! Look at him!" And I thought a long time about the idea of a statue that didn't want you to look at it but to look somewhere else.
Girard's whole schtick is that all desire is mimetic. The only things we want are what we see other people want. We learn how to want through watching others' wanting. This is also how we learn art and how things like jokes work, what's "funny." (Something-something-Wittgenstein too)
I'm just a rando, but it seems like what you're doing with Great Books is a kind of pointing. Don't look at me--look at this! And it's also a kind of indirect teaching of love. "Look at me here. Pay attention. See how I love this? See how to love this? This is how it goes. This is how one does it." And maybe you have to use tricks (like connecting things to current events) to keep the reader's interest, but ultimately (my sense is) you want the reader to read the book you are talking about. And, as a reader, when you write about Henry James or Proust, it increases the likelihood I'm going to read it. (And when I do read it, increases the odds I will enjoy it.) But, at minimum, it increases my desire for the the thing you're desiring. And even when I've read it before, it brings that love back.
I agree that the Old Testament feels more like literature, while the New Testament is more like, well, a witness. It's a pointing. That's Paul's whole MO--trying to point away from himself, even while he's trying to assert authority. "Watch me. This is how you do it."
All that to say, I think you should keep writing about your experiences reading Great Books because it is, in fact, doing something.
I've been on a weird reading kick for the last week--a long, dense history of Byzantium and Peter Heather's new history of Christianity, which is the deepest dive into the early institutional history of Christianity that I've taken in my life. And the thing is that on one hand the debates, if we can call them that considering the violence and intensity of them, within Christianity of the 3rd-5th centuries, is only barely scriptural and almost not at all exegetical. The Gospel is sitting right in front of them, the paint only just drying on it, and they're not really reading it because their debate about the nature of Christ and God is philosophical and shaped in many ways more by non-textual, received bodies of philosophical thought that had been circulating in antiquity for some time. Their debate is also temporal--it's about command over institutions, resources, political authority; it's as much about Alexandria v. Rome v. Constantinople v. Antioch v. Athens as it is "let's read the Sermon on the Mount again".
What's I wonder now is that I'm not sure the New Testament and the Gospels in particular mattered as a great book in the sense of something to read and savor and think about for its literary qualities, for its expressiveness, for the depth of its thought, until Protestantism or at least until humanism--until there was an open-endedness in the thought that reading it as a book could produce not just doctrine but interpretation and inspiration. I'm sure there are exceptions in medieval thought that I don't know about and it might be that the thinness of my knowledge of the early Church is also leading me astray on this point as well.
I saw and liked your post about the Anthony Kaldellis book!
I do think you're on to something, but I'll say that I have two caveats. I think that to the extent that people in antiquity actually read the gospels, they just...stopped being Christians. I'm thinking of the Marcians or the Sethians or the Manicheans. Clearly these are faiths that are very influenced by texts and less by doctrinal disputes.
Secondly, a while back I got really into old english and middle english, and there does seem to be a very genuine, very literary piety at work here. For instance, one of the best Anglo Saxon texts we have is a rather free-form translation of Genesis, which has lovely passages about Luther and his fall. I also really like the Anglo Saxon poem "Dream of the Rood", which is a dream-vision from the point of view of the Cross, imagining how scared the Cross was to be smeared and spattered with the blood of our savior, and how the Cross was our savior's only companion during the long night of his dying. Clearly this 10th-century poem was written by someone who had paid close attention to the text of the bible and been inspired by it.
But yes, I don't think the Gospels were particularly vibrant or alive for most early Christians. In fact, the weirdest thing about the Bible is that Paul apparently didn't seem to know the Gospels at all! He wrote his letters before the Gospels were written, and there are no stories about the life of Jesus in Paul's letters. Which means there's a good likelihood that most early Christians really knew very little about the life of Jesus (or, alternatively, that the Gospels were actually a later group of legends that just adhered to the figure of Jesus). Seems kind of insane that the Gospels could've been so late on the scene, but I think that really does explain, in part, why they seem to have had so little impact on the history of early Christianity.
I mean, I think where I'd disagree with this, a little bit, is that I don't draw such a hard line between contemplating something's literary qualities and being convinced of it as truth. But that's probably because I've never really wavered on being a Christian, despite every other way that my worldview and life have changed. Henry James and Marcel Proust and Karl Marx and Fran Ross have a point *because* Jesus is real. He guarantees the significance of the universe that they discourse about.
I find the "last-first-first-last" language thrilling and frightening and confusing all at once. Thrilling because, yeah, I want to see Sam Alito and Brett Kavanaugh (that smug fuck) and even more so Tim Apple/Elon Musk/the Mercers/etc. thrown from their high places. I want the people who sell me my town's homeless-people fundraising newspaper to not have to stand around downtown all day in the hot sun getting treated contemptuously anymore; I want them to have what they need. But I also don't really want *anyone* suffering indefinitely. Eternal suffering is infinitely disproportionate even for a Brett Kavanaugh, you know? Which is why I have to assume Jesus goes on rescuing the people at the bottom even when that bottom is composed of people who really have it coming.
(Also, I grew up fundamentalist so as soon as Hell is introduced into the conversation I start fretting about all the reasons I'm surely going there. When I was 13 I thought I was going to hell because I had dirty thoughts about girls; now I'm afraid I'm going to hell because I bought a record player rather than giving another hundred bucks to the people selling the homeless people newspaper.)
I have to say, this essay puts an exclamation point on the very end of "The Default World," where Jhanvi breaks out of her stasis and clears the building, etc.
Yes! I feel like that's an underappreciated part of TDW. Nobody in real life would actually end a party for that reason, even though everyone knows it's the right thing to do. But the act of choosing to do the right thing changes the entire social scene and really turns them into a community (even if, inevitably, an insufferably self-righteous one).
I mean yes obviously the literary qualities of the Bible pose no difficulties for you if you're a Christian =] Then they're just even more proof that the Bible is true. But then what do you do with the literary qualities of the Bhagavadh Gita, and its description of the inevitability (nay, the desirability) of war and inequality?
Yes what I like about the Christ of the gospels was his anger. Not only were the weak going to be raised up, but the strong were going to pay! Christianity really suffered from being turned into a state religion--it just seems very clear that the Jesus of the Gospels never imagined that there could be such a thing as a Christ-worshipping judge. Like, obviously a Christ-worshipping judge would never be able to say "Go forth and sin no more", and yet...that's what he would have to do! Logically though, Christianity is simply not the religion of the judges, it's the religion of the judged. I think the judges are judged according to their own schema--powerful people basically still adhere to pagan religion, the religion of the strong, no matter what their overt religion is, and they'll be judged ultimately according to its precepts. They'll either be deified, or they'll be turned into lifeless shades. Heaven is really only for the regular folk.
This is incredibly cheesy but I don't think anybody will care about the things they cared about on earth in heaven. Like if you saw Brett Kavanaugh there, or someone else you really dislike, it wouldn't matter because you'd be thinking in terms of God's thoughts, not man's. And if Brett Kavanaugh saw you there, he would think the same way. I don't know anything about religion though so!
If you don't mind me asking, how would you describe the liberating features of the gospel to a non-Christian or someone coming newly to Christianity?
Maybe it's because my background is basically the opposite of fundamentalism (Unitarian Universalist), but when I read the New Testament, or attend a Christian church, or read a lot of Christian theology/commentary - I feel like I have to force my mind into a box created by secular authorities to be a part of it, to feel its grace and beauty. I want my mind to be opened to the hereafter, but very often I feel like my lack of belief (you could put it that way) is closing my mind to the here and now.
“Wow, what’s the point of reading Tale of Genji if you end up sounding like every other liberal?” I do not know anyone who has read Tale of Genji except where there was a grade on the line.
You know we're basically on the same page concerning the Gospels. But, funny enough, we're on a similar page concerning narration, too! Weirdly serendipitous.
I remember staring up at a statue of John the Baptist in a cathedral once, and he had a scowl on his face, and he was pointing fiercely at the Jesus statue across the way, like, "What are you staring at? Don't look at me! Look at him!" And I thought a long time about the idea of a statue that didn't want you to look at it but to look somewhere else.
Girard's whole schtick is that all desire is mimetic. The only things we want are what we see other people want. We learn how to want through watching others' wanting. This is also how we learn art and how things like jokes work, what's "funny." (Something-something-Wittgenstein too)
I'm just a rando, but it seems like what you're doing with Great Books is a kind of pointing. Don't look at me--look at this! And it's also a kind of indirect teaching of love. "Look at me here. Pay attention. See how I love this? See how to love this? This is how it goes. This is how one does it." And maybe you have to use tricks (like connecting things to current events) to keep the reader's interest, but ultimately (my sense is) you want the reader to read the book you are talking about. And, as a reader, when you write about Henry James or Proust, it increases the likelihood I'm going to read it. (And when I do read it, increases the odds I will enjoy it.) But, at minimum, it increases my desire for the the thing you're desiring. And even when I've read it before, it brings that love back.
I agree that the Old Testament feels more like literature, while the New Testament is more like, well, a witness. It's a pointing. That's Paul's whole MO--trying to point away from himself, even while he's trying to assert authority. "Watch me. This is how you do it."
All that to say, I think you should keep writing about your experiences reading Great Books because it is, in fact, doing something.
Thanks. I appreciate that =]
I've been on a weird reading kick for the last week--a long, dense history of Byzantium and Peter Heather's new history of Christianity, which is the deepest dive into the early institutional history of Christianity that I've taken in my life. And the thing is that on one hand the debates, if we can call them that considering the violence and intensity of them, within Christianity of the 3rd-5th centuries, is only barely scriptural and almost not at all exegetical. The Gospel is sitting right in front of them, the paint only just drying on it, and they're not really reading it because their debate about the nature of Christ and God is philosophical and shaped in many ways more by non-textual, received bodies of philosophical thought that had been circulating in antiquity for some time. Their debate is also temporal--it's about command over institutions, resources, political authority; it's as much about Alexandria v. Rome v. Constantinople v. Antioch v. Athens as it is "let's read the Sermon on the Mount again".
What's I wonder now is that I'm not sure the New Testament and the Gospels in particular mattered as a great book in the sense of something to read and savor and think about for its literary qualities, for its expressiveness, for the depth of its thought, until Protestantism or at least until humanism--until there was an open-endedness in the thought that reading it as a book could produce not just doctrine but interpretation and inspiration. I'm sure there are exceptions in medieval thought that I don't know about and it might be that the thinness of my knowledge of the early Church is also leading me astray on this point as well.
I saw and liked your post about the Anthony Kaldellis book!
I do think you're on to something, but I'll say that I have two caveats. I think that to the extent that people in antiquity actually read the gospels, they just...stopped being Christians. I'm thinking of the Marcians or the Sethians or the Manicheans. Clearly these are faiths that are very influenced by texts and less by doctrinal disputes.
Secondly, a while back I got really into old english and middle english, and there does seem to be a very genuine, very literary piety at work here. For instance, one of the best Anglo Saxon texts we have is a rather free-form translation of Genesis, which has lovely passages about Luther and his fall. I also really like the Anglo Saxon poem "Dream of the Rood", which is a dream-vision from the point of view of the Cross, imagining how scared the Cross was to be smeared and spattered with the blood of our savior, and how the Cross was our savior's only companion during the long night of his dying. Clearly this 10th-century poem was written by someone who had paid close attention to the text of the bible and been inspired by it.
But yes, I don't think the Gospels were particularly vibrant or alive for most early Christians. In fact, the weirdest thing about the Bible is that Paul apparently didn't seem to know the Gospels at all! He wrote his letters before the Gospels were written, and there are no stories about the life of Jesus in Paul's letters. Which means there's a good likelihood that most early Christians really knew very little about the life of Jesus (or, alternatively, that the Gospels were actually a later group of legends that just adhered to the figure of Jesus). Seems kind of insane that the Gospels could've been so late on the scene, but I think that really does explain, in part, why they seem to have had so little impact on the history of early Christianity.
YES
I mean, I think where I'd disagree with this, a little bit, is that I don't draw such a hard line between contemplating something's literary qualities and being convinced of it as truth. But that's probably because I've never really wavered on being a Christian, despite every other way that my worldview and life have changed. Henry James and Marcel Proust and Karl Marx and Fran Ross have a point *because* Jesus is real. He guarantees the significance of the universe that they discourse about.
I find the "last-first-first-last" language thrilling and frightening and confusing all at once. Thrilling because, yeah, I want to see Sam Alito and Brett Kavanaugh (that smug fuck) and even more so Tim Apple/Elon Musk/the Mercers/etc. thrown from their high places. I want the people who sell me my town's homeless-people fundraising newspaper to not have to stand around downtown all day in the hot sun getting treated contemptuously anymore; I want them to have what they need. But I also don't really want *anyone* suffering indefinitely. Eternal suffering is infinitely disproportionate even for a Brett Kavanaugh, you know? Which is why I have to assume Jesus goes on rescuing the people at the bottom even when that bottom is composed of people who really have it coming.
(Also, I grew up fundamentalist so as soon as Hell is introduced into the conversation I start fretting about all the reasons I'm surely going there. When I was 13 I thought I was going to hell because I had dirty thoughts about girls; now I'm afraid I'm going to hell because I bought a record player rather than giving another hundred bucks to the people selling the homeless people newspaper.)
I have to say, this essay puts an exclamation point on the very end of "The Default World," where Jhanvi breaks out of her stasis and clears the building, etc.
Yes! I feel like that's an underappreciated part of TDW. Nobody in real life would actually end a party for that reason, even though everyone knows it's the right thing to do. But the act of choosing to do the right thing changes the entire social scene and really turns them into a community (even if, inevitably, an insufferably self-righteous one).
I mean yes obviously the literary qualities of the Bible pose no difficulties for you if you're a Christian =] Then they're just even more proof that the Bible is true. But then what do you do with the literary qualities of the Bhagavadh Gita, and its description of the inevitability (nay, the desirability) of war and inequality?
Yes what I like about the Christ of the gospels was his anger. Not only were the weak going to be raised up, but the strong were going to pay! Christianity really suffered from being turned into a state religion--it just seems very clear that the Jesus of the Gospels never imagined that there could be such a thing as a Christ-worshipping judge. Like, obviously a Christ-worshipping judge would never be able to say "Go forth and sin no more", and yet...that's what he would have to do! Logically though, Christianity is simply not the religion of the judges, it's the religion of the judged. I think the judges are judged according to their own schema--powerful people basically still adhere to pagan religion, the religion of the strong, no matter what their overt religion is, and they'll be judged ultimately according to its precepts. They'll either be deified, or they'll be turned into lifeless shades. Heaven is really only for the regular folk.
This is incredibly cheesy but I don't think anybody will care about the things they cared about on earth in heaven. Like if you saw Brett Kavanaugh there, or someone else you really dislike, it wouldn't matter because you'd be thinking in terms of God's thoughts, not man's. And if Brett Kavanaugh saw you there, he would think the same way. I don't know anything about religion though so!
If you don't mind me asking, how would you describe the liberating features of the gospel to a non-Christian or someone coming newly to Christianity?
Maybe it's because my background is basically the opposite of fundamentalism (Unitarian Universalist), but when I read the New Testament, or attend a Christian church, or read a lot of Christian theology/commentary - I feel like I have to force my mind into a box created by secular authorities to be a part of it, to feel its grace and beauty. I want my mind to be opened to the hereafter, but very often I feel like my lack of belief (you could put it that way) is closing my mind to the here and now.
“Wow, what’s the point of reading Tale of Genji if you end up sounding like every other liberal?” I do not know anyone who has read Tale of Genji except where there was a grade on the line.
You know we're basically on the same page concerning the Gospels. But, funny enough, we're on a similar page concerning narration, too! Weirdly serendipitous.