Stuff I’ve Written Elsewhere
May 26, 2012
- Just a reminder that my friend Robb Beck and I started the blog on Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity.
- I also just had a review of Andrew Davison and Alison Milbank’s book For the Parish published in The Living Church.
Like this:
Our Lady of Vladimir, Rowan Williams
May 15, 2012
Climbs the child, confident,
up over breast, arm, shoulder;
while she, alarmed by his bold thrust
into her face, and the encircling hand,
looks out imploring fearfully
and, O, she cries, from her immeasurable eyes,
O how he clings, see how
he smothers every pore, like the soft
shining mistletoe to my black bark,
she says, I cannot breathe, my eyes
are aching so.
The child has overlaid us in our beds,
we cannot close our eyes,
his weight sits firmly,
fits over heart and lungs,
and choked we turn away
into the window of immeasurable dark
to shake off the insistent pushing warmth;
O how he cleaves, no peace
tonight my lady in your bower,
you, like us, restless with bruised eyes
and waking to
a shining cry on the black bark of sleep.
Like this:
Why Should The Gregorians Have All The Good Music?
April 19, 2012
Who doesn’t remember those days, anyone who was raised on “christian music” and forced to scorn “secular music,” when the distinction between the two started to break down? And who can forget the epiphany that much of even the “Golden Age” of christian music was still a pale imitation of the “secular” music? And who can’t recall getting in arguments with your parents over whether christian heavy metal was really Christian or whether their singers “sounded like demons?”
Ah yes, the sad and tragic tale of the coming of age of the post-evangelicals. Yet these discoveries of downcast 19 year olds in Bible Colleges spread throughout the land have yet to find their way into the heart and mind of Dr. Dwight Longnecker, one time Evangelical turned Anglican turned Catholic, who still sounds rather like my parents did 15 years ago. Only Mr. Longnecker now has the benefit of the cleansing waters of the Tiber, which have cleared his ears to hear the angelically musical, the gloriously transcendental, the singularly appropriate music of that “sacred polyphony,” Gregorian Chant.
Never mind that there is just as much terrible “secular” music as there is “christian” music (so much for the “sharp and salutary effect of market forces!”), he cannot be bothered with such observations. His eye of judgment is on those insidious architects of secular music, the founders of all things Rock & Non-Gregorian, whose single mind was turned toward the manufacturing of a “certain type of feeling.” Just who these designers are, where they came from, and what terrible pagan deity they worshiped, we are not given to know. His airtight argument is strengthened even more by his probing rhetorical questions and his unassailable adjectives. With perhaps an exception granted for “the library of sacred hymns” – though preferably the oldest songs most especially, and those in Latin (Ok, I added that bit) – and with a Niebuhrian nod to tragic compromise so as to “meet people where they’re at,” it is, nevertheless, hopeless to find any genuine beauty or any authentic worship, outside the liturgical walls.
Fine. The pot shots at Gregorian Chant are easy and unnecessary, I myself deeply appreciate that tradition, as an Anglican and as a lover of Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. I would even be willing to grant that in a corporate setting of united worship with the skilled and unskilled, an eye toward what is simple, catechetical, and easy to follow, is most fitting. But the idea that this cannot be done with guitars, with organs, with pianos, with — heaven forbid it — drums, is sheer bigotry and is more a result of his conversion narrative than it is anything like a result of truth.
Moreover, this kind of attitude to art is simply inexcusable from a Christian leader. It’s precisely the kind of attitude that has bred such terrible art and music in the Church. By putting arbitrary and vague pietistic boundaries on art, the true creative freedom of artists is severely stifled. And it’s not just this fetishizing of a particular kind of music at the expense of others, it’s this strange and damnable portioning of music (and, by implication, other arts) into “secular” and “christian.”
Please, artists, novelists, musicians, dancers, poets, and the rest of you, please make the very best art you can possibly make, tell the truth with as much insight and imagination as you can muster, and do not be afraid to transgress boundaries, even as you live into a wonderful tradition, not so much as to “stick it to authority,” but to expand what has come before you, and to create new possibilities.
First Post From the Richard Hooker Blog: Book I. Ch. i
April 10, 2012
It’s not my plan to continue to cross post, but I wanted you to know that we’ve begun.
-Tony
I started and read through several books of the Laws a year or so back, so I am already somewhat familiar with some basics that Hooker is about to get to in this book. Yet how much difference a couple years makes! My ability to understand and to weigh a work seems to grow by the year such that I almost always get more out of a piece that I’ve read before than I did when I first read it. This applies no less to the opening chapter of the Laws.
Lest I be accused of some tiresome trope, I do not come to this work impartially. On the one hand, I am committed to becoming a confessional Anglican theologian; While by no means do I think with that school that used to imagine Anglicanism some divinely ordained group meant to unite all Christians through her blessed Via Media and her leading role in ecumenism, I am thoroughly committed to dwelling in the Anglican church, to serving her and breathing her air, learning her language. Hooker is a fundamental person to work with in order to accomplish this goal.
In addition, I have been schooled by that group of antifoundationalist theologians that eschew Natural Law in favor of a hermeneutics of faith. Even Reason is done through a context by which it is in large part, indeed in invisible parts, constituted. Reasoning cannot be separated from the form of reasoning and the traditions to which one is committed or to which one reacts. Nevertheless, I have persisting questions about this precisely because it seems that something akin to “natural law” can and even must come precisely from that position of faith in Jesus as the Word of God by and through whom all things were made and from whom we receive our very being. I can’t hold to a voluntarist ethics. Hooker, I am told, is not naïve about the fact that Reason very often is fallen and clouded. I look forward to learning how he coordinates sin and reason and faith and feel it’s important to how we conceive justice and law.
Which brings me to a final note: This antifoundationalism also tends to breed a healthy pseudo-anarchist political bent in me. By pseudo-anarchism I mean that while I have faith in institutions and regulations, these must be able to be disrupted by gestures toward justice even where said justice cannot be properly reasoned at the time. Which is only, I suppose, a politics of semper reformanda. This has also lead to an ecclesial critique of the state. This is, it must be noted, not merely some new thing “Radical Orthodoxy” thought up, but it goes at the least back to the Oxford Movement and its resistance to a church controlled by the state. This led soon to a lively tradition of anglo-catholic socialism that is meet to be revived in my opinion lest anglo-catholicism continue to hemorage as a pathetic movement interested mostly in liturgical fancies rather than a robust doctrine of the Church, which is what I take catholicism to be most about.
Then, without further ado, let us examine the first chapter and a give money quote:
“He that goeth about to persuade a multitude, that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favourable hearers.”
Hooker is not at all oblivious to the charges against the Church of England nor to the government. (btw, whenever I say “government” or “state” I am not trying necessarily to talk about “Government” or “State” as an abstract universal. I shall try to be clear when I want to wax meta). This instantly sets him apart, imo, from those who are un-self-aware in supporting a status quo. He understands that he will be seen as one who either “hold[s] or seek[s] preferment.”[1] He is setting out, then, not to simply have a go at demolishing the arguments of people much dumber than he is, since most people are dumb compared to someone of his learning, but to show how certain policies in fact help to make for justice. “We are accused as men that will not have Christ Jesus to rule over them, but have wilfully cast his statues behind their backs, hating to be reformed and made subject unto the sceptre of his discipline.”[3] This obviously doesn’t mean that everything he says will then simply be right, but it means that he takes the risk of understanding the critiques of his puritan opponents and opening up the laws and himself to be examined, lest they fail the test. “for better examination of [the laws'] quality it behoveth the very foundation and root, the highest well-spring and fountain of them to be discovered.” [2]
The Laws model what +Rowan Williams is rather well known for, then: Any kind of political engagement that would seek genuinely to aim at the well being of all a nation’s neighbors must be one that is open to dialogue and challenge. This is manifestly not simply a liberal toleration and public contestation of competing will and claims; Hooker’s very stark non-liberalism comes out at many key junctures (like, for instance, Bk. V); it is, rather, an engagement that takes ones sparring partners seriously and the good of all seriously. At the same time, easy answers and cheap shots will not yield genuinely fruitful results. “there will come a time when three words uttered with charity shall receive a far more blessed reward than three thousand volumes written with disdainful sharpness of wit.” For Hooker, in order to accomplish this discussion it will take the hard work of patient and exacting thinking.
“Albeit therefore much of that we are to speak in this present cause may seem to a number perhaps tedious, perhaps obscure, dark, and intricate; (for many talk of the truth which never sounded the depth from whence it springeth; and therefore when they are led thereunto they are soon weary, as men drawn from those beaten paths wherewith they have been inured;) yet this may not so far prevail as to cut off that which the matter itself requireth, howsoever the nice humour of some be therewith pleased or no.”[2]
I think Hooker would be sympathetic to Milbank here:
“If, like an enthusiastic undergraduate, I had trotted out phrases such as “we need a new theology on the side of victims,” I would no doubt have been commended for making a “contribution” to the fate of the poor, the environment, etc.. But eschewing such rhetorical regurgitation, I was seeking indirectly to tackle our seeming inability to discover any theoretical or practical grounds for opposing the new global sway of neocapitalism, which is the source of the hunger of the poor, the poisoning of nature, obliteration of sexual difference and equality, the lapse of beauty, the loss of historical memory, and so forth.- “On Theological Transgression,” p171 in The Future of Love
Likewise Hooker doesn’t use Puritan rhetoric about “the Bible” or about “obedience,” nor does he trot out pious language simply to add strength to an otherwise weak argument, because such rhetoric is empty if it doesn’t actually point to concrete ways of enacting laws that make for the good of a citizenship.
Toward a “Loeb” Patristics Library
April 3, 2012
At least for me, the Loeb Classical Library is most helpful not for the facing English translation, the introduction, or the notes; helpful as these are. It is the widely available and mostly affordable access to an original language text. The rest is the cream. And despite their reputation among “real” classicists as texts for hacks and grad students, they are inestimably helpful to, for instance, biblical and theological students, or to priests and hobbyists, or indeed to hacks and grad students.
But alas, there is nothing like this for the study of historical theology, excepting those few early fathers found in the Loeb (Whose use is rather negated by the fact that one must purchase half a shelve’s worth of books just to get The City of God or Philo’s works). There are, however, similar works in both German and French; namely the Fontes Christiani and the Sources Chrétiennes. What’s more — and here I mean the Sources Chrétiennes because I don’t know about the FC — these very often are not just a text but a critical text with apparatus and sometimes commentary. This allows for them to be useful for academic citation.
Now English does have a series that produces texts like this, the Oxford Early Christian Texts, but not only are these texts obscenely expensive, the series makes no aims whatsoever at being a patrology.
I would at least like to assert, though, that it would make a great foundation with which to produce a Patrologia Maior. Forget doing an exhaustive patrology, hell, even a hand-held bi-lingual edition of Minge would work even if it is much less than desirable.
I can’t be the only person who thinks this, right? How handy would a “Loeb” Patristics Library be? Indeed something like the whole combination of Loeb Classical Library, Cambridge Commentaries, and Oxford Classical Texts would be pretty sweet. And how could such a thing not but increase interest in studying patristics in the original languages?
Don’t Forget The Context
March 31, 2012
We’re all fairly familiar with Zech. 9:9
Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion!
Shout aloud, O daughter of Jerusalem!
Lo, your king comes to you;
triumphant and victorious is he,
humble and riding on an ass,
on a colt the foal of an ass.
Just don’t forget the next verses.
I will cut off the chariot from E’phraim
and the war horse from Jerusalem;
and the battle bow shall be cut off,
and he shall command peace to the nations;
his dominion shall be from sea to sea,
and from the River to the ends of the earth.As for you also, because of the blood of my covenant with you,
I will set your captives free from the waterless pit.Return to your stronghold, O prisoners of hope;
today I declare that I will restore to you double.
Like this:
ἐς Πύλον And Other Stories
March 27, 2012
To what shall I compare source criticism? It is like a scholar who stumbles upon a pile of pebbles of similar hue arranged in a definite pattern and proceeds to posit a parent rock for one pebble in particular despite the fact she has never seen the parent stone, there is no evidence primary or secondary to substantiate the conclusion that there is such a stone in existence, and the color of the stone can best be accounted for by direct evidence inherent in the pebbles.
I exaggerate only slightly.
In Greek this semester we are reading the homeric Hymn to Hermes in which Hermes steals some cows of Apollo. It’s a lively story, quite entertaining, and is taken by many to be a a kind of comedy before its time. *SPOLER ALERT*
In the hymn, after Hermes steals the cattle, Apollo is running around looking for them. Being so far unsuccessful he stumbles upon an old farmer digging at his vines. The farmer had in fact seen Hermes with the cattle but the infant god gave a barely veiled threat to the man that he ought keep his lips tied. Nevertheless, the farmer does tell Apollo that he may have seen a little baby driving some cattle, but he’s not really sure. He reveals nothing about the identity of Hermes to be sure.
Conveniently for Apollo, a bird-omen flies by. Miraculously this silent omen tells Apollo what he needs to know. It is revealed to him that it was in fact Hermes who took his cattle. Apollo then flies himself “off to Pylos” to try and find him. Later in the poem, when Apollo is pleading his case against the messenger god to their mutual father Zeus, he explains that the cattle were being driven “off to Pylos.”
The poet never explains how Apollo came to know about Pylos. A certain German scholar takes this as an opportunity to assert that there was probably an earlier and/or another Hymn to Hermes known to the poet and/or that there was some kind of tradition that connected Hermes and/or Apollo to Pylos. Strangely, there’s nothing else in the poem as we have it that suggests that such a source exists, and we certainly have no evidence for it whatsoever, unless the useless, if publishable, ramblings of a German scholar count as “evidence.”
There is another easier and more obvious way to account for Pylos; one which does not invent texts, communities, cults, and other fanciful myths, namely, that the bird-omen, the one which apparently revealed to Apollo who the thief was, also suggested it was in Apollo’s best interests to head off to sandy Pylos. We are never told that the omen said anything, only that it happened — but immediately after seeing it Apollo 1) Exclaimed that Hermes was found out, and 2) Headed off to Pylos. (He was even following the backwards tracks.)
This solution relies on the text as we actually have it, explains quite well how Apollo knew to go to Pylos from internal narrative thrust, and all without taking ἐς Πύλον to some absurd end. While there may be some limited place for the continued practice of source criticism, as a general rule I take it to be hermeneutically suspect, and this is a classic example why.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
