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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Sunday Miscellany
Assorted notes on Sunday's reading. Some observations on the academy and on the Hebrew Bible; two articles by Segovia and Collins as the spur.
Sunday, 2004-10-24 | Careerism, Classic Gin, Literature, Philosophy
| Moon Pie...What a time to be alive. |
| Abraham Simpson |
What follows are random bits of text that were generated today. This 'Gin update, you might say, is analogous to the famous PLU episode on 'discontinuity.' It takes discontinuity as its theme and, in doing so, demonstrates the impossibility of practiced counter-intuitivity, if I might invent a word:
WE BEGIN WITH what has become the numbing standard for young scholars; the erudite and effusively academic indictment of the "old academy". Each unreflectively leveled criticism self-righteously accuses the old scholars of being un-self-critical in their assertions and dangerously naive in that they were unfamiliar with the dernier cri in literary theory that seems so obvious to the writer leveling the accusation.
Segovia's first section, while a well written bit of advection, is short-sighted and superficial (you might say it fits perfectly with the genre in this way). It supposes that the highly sophisticated and jargon-laden French conversation on literary theory is the final answer to perennial problem of colonialism and marginalization while simultaneously accusing old methods of scholarship of being overly sophisticated, jargon-laden conversations that were germane to a particular culture (always the Euro-American "white" male).
Segovia tells an eschatological tale of implosion--the old criticism, the fraught and imperialistic rhetoric of chauvinism eventually collapsed under its own weight and was, thank the gods, issued a long-overdue corrective by late 20th century literary theory. His analysis is vapid and presumptive, betrays a clear disdain for the mysterious Euro-American hegemon that has become the scourge of the modern post-modernist and does little in the way of providing instruction or demonstrating the need for the seemingly needless reform it uncritically lauds.
Furthermore, we can learn nothing about man from his fellows or his interactions with them (i.e. philosophers and theologians). He says, 'we are free to excise from the proposed picture of man all those features which are incompatible with the similarity which we presuppose for all the dissimilarity between the man Jesus and us other men.' (pp.226) If this sentence is capable of being understood (i.e. if it was not written with the intention of defying interpretation or comprehension), there are things that man and Christ do not share--they are essential traits that man does not have in common with Christ. Those features (i.e. component parts) of man's essence that are 'incompatible with' our speculative model for the things that man does not have in common with Jesus can be excluded from our anthropology. If I might attempt to make sense of this syntactic nightmare again, we have a model for what man does not have in common with Jesus; certain features of man are incompatible with that model. Those features do not influence our metaphysical anthropology. I'm pretty sure that he's trying to say that whenever we think we have something in common with Jesus that we're mistaken--I'm absolutely certain that he's asking us to earnestly consider how many angels might dance on the head of a pin.
The Deuteronomic reform, then, entailed a purge of Judean religion that brought it much closer to monotheism than it had previously been. On the other hand, the worship of YHWH was also transformed.Collins develops the idea that Deuteronomy got rid of a lot of the stuff in earlier texts and other parts of the Pentateuch that might be construed as polytheistic or too similar to the mos maiorum of polytheists for comfort. In general, we see a de-emphasis on the sacral or cultic elements in Deuteronomy--consider how the profane consumption of meat seems to be A-OK now.
The centralization of the temple lead to a sort of disenfranchisement of the Levites (country priests, if I follow his argument) and this problem is addressed in the Deuteronomy legislation that allows for them to come into the temple and minister there. (pp.167) This all seems to jive with the chapter seven command to kill without question when carrying out the genocidal agenda of the Lord--if the Deuteronomic influence is a centralizing one and a secularizing one, shouldn't it cause its authors to consider how its commands to treat aliens, orphans and widows humanely and its lax attitude concerning clean and unclean (lax, at least, so far as Leviticus is concerned) is at serious odds with its commands to wage open holy war until people of other races are completely purged from the planet?
Just thought I'd open a window to let some light out.
The fact that there is an ever-increasing number of questions and an ever-decreasing number of answers (i.e. more spirited and profitable disagreements) in contemporary discourse seems, to me at least, very elegant evidence that we are living in a golden age. Others, predictably enough, disagree and, in doing so, seem to affirm my point even as I seem to argue against it.
