Conversations with Children on the Gospels

In 1836, Amos Bronson Alcott, the father of author Louisa May Alcott, was conducting the Temple School in Boston. His teaching method was Socratic. By conversation and examination, he believed he could lead the children to express moral truths which they already “knew” because they resided within every person.

When the record of these conversations was published, Alcott’s reputation suffered so much that he lost most of his pupils and finally had to close his school. (He retreated to Concord, where Louisa May Alcott grew up and wrote Little Women, based on their lives there — but that is another story.) Several things seem to have aroused opposition. First, by discussing religious texts and beliefs with the children, he opened those texts to interpretation, rather than simply telling the children what was true. Next, some of Alcott’s own interpretations were not conventional. And finally, and probably worst of all, he edged around the dangerous topic of sex.

Reading these conversations now, some of the exchanges with the children are charming, as here where he wants them to understand that small beginnings may have big results.

Despite his Socratic intentions, at times Alcott is quite authoritarian in his explanations:

If you can keep that all straight, you are ready to continue the conversation! The emphasis on spirit is typical of Alcott, who leads discussion of the birth of John the Baptist and of Jesus with an entire emphasis on the birth of spirit. The children don’t always get it. When one child suggests that baby John was brought by angels to his mother while she slept, another protests that that babies are usually born during the day.

Having thus confused physical and spiritual birth, perhaps Alcott could have passed on, but he seems unable to leave the topic alone.

In the midst of all this high thinking, occasionally a refreshing bit of childish realism appears. When they discuss how the boy Jesus stayed at the Temple, causing Mary to be concerned, Alcott wants to explore the concept of “God’s business.” The children, on the other hand, live in a world where parents know their rights.

You can read what shocked Boston now at Google Books or in a new edition entitled How Like an Angel Came I Down.

What I Read in August 2011

Howard Jacobson, Kalooki Nights. I’m not sure why I stayed with this book – all 450 pages of it – since I didn’t like it very much. By the author of The Finkler Question, it is a lengthy exploration of the lives of English Jews as observed and experienced by a disenchanted caricaturist (literally, he draws cartoons) in his middle years.

Charles H. Manekin, On Maimonides. This serves as a companion piece to Sherwin Nuland’s Maimonides and is a much tougher read. I comment on the two books, along with one of Maimonides’ perplexities in Maimonides Maimonides.

Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimajaro. Since I enjoyed A Moveable Feast, I thought I would give Hemingway’s this collection of his short stories a try. Too male and too mannered for me, but I enjoyed The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber because of what happened to Macomber after he shot the buffalo.

Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie. Sarah, of A Rat in the Book Pile, and I have been reading this together and cross-posting in both of our blogs. So read and comment at either place:
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part II
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part III
Sister Carrie, ~ A Dialogue, Part IV

Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Headless Corpse. Despite the grisly title, this is not a grisly book. It is a typical Maigret story. The Inspector considers a crime, he tries to understand the criminals, he eats a bit, he drinks a lot, he solves the mystery.

Martha Saxton, Louisa May Alcott: A Modern Biography. Not too modern any more, this biography. Published in 1977, it is a feminist take on Alcott’s sometimes difficult life. More comments may follow as I proceed with my Alcott project.

Emile Zola, The Masterpiece. Considered the most autobiographical of his novels, in The Masterpiece Zola gives us the lives of writers and artists in 188s Paris. We learn of the price of success, as well as the costs of failure.

Maimonides Maimonides

This fall I will be co-leading in a course – Believe It or Not – in which we examine various sources of belief. I intend to speak about Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon, born 1138). He interests me as a subject because of his efforts to reconcile philosophic truth with revealed truth, as in the Torah.

To learn about the man, I started with Sherwin Nuland’s Maimonides. Nuland is a physician, best known for his book How We Die. After some historical and biographical background, Nuland passes rather rapidly over philosophy and theology to report on Maimonides’ medical opinions – not what I was looking for. I need some apparent conflicts between philosophy and revelation as a basis for discussion.

In Charles H. Manekin’s On Maimonides, I find an example:

With respect to creation, however, Maimonides and his philosophical authorities are on opposite sides of the fence. For his most admired authority, Aristotle, held that the world always existed in the way it does now, that it did not come into existence after not existing. Moreover, Aristotle’s conclusion seemed to follow inexorably from principles of his science….

Aristotle’s science was based on the concept of the celestial spheres and is outdated, but the issue is still relevant. If the findings of science seem to conflict with the revelations of your religious tradition, what can you believe?

Maimonides, faced with Aristotle’s opinion that the world is eternal, had to consider the opening verse of Genesis:

 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

In my edition of the Bible, the note says

 Verse 1 is a majestic summary of the story of Creation: God is the beginning, nay, the Cause of all things.

This note seems to evade the eternity question. Surely if the Hebrew word actually means beginning, then it indicates a definite point in time and therefore “the heaven and the earth” did not exist previous to that. Seeking the translation of the Hebrew, I consulted knowledgeable in-laws and received this response from Cousin Isaac.

I think I can help a bit, starting with literal translation. The closer we get to Maimonidean philosophy, the further we’ll get from anything I can say anything useful about.

“In the Beginning” is a valid basic translation of “Bereishit,” according to traditional interpretations. That’s essentially how Onkelos (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkelos) translates it in his authoritative, tradition-based Aramaic translation. The root of the word, I think most would agree, is R.A.Sh. (as opposed to B.R.A in the next word), which means “head.”

The next word, “Bara,” is I think universally taken to be the verb “created,” with the subject being God and the objects being the heaven and the earth.

I’m pretty sure that traditional normative Jewish belief and interpretation of this verse is indeed that God existed (as much as one can say that) before anything else, and that the Universe did not exist until He created it, as reported here.

That is what Maimonides thought also, and he stood his ground, Aristotle to the contrary. So God is eternal, but the universe is not eternal, since it had a beginning and to be eternal is to have no beginning or end. Now we drill down to a deeper problem with language. We assign words to concepts we do not really understand and which therefore we cannot define with other words. As Cousin Isaac says, ”God existed (as much as one can say that) before anything else”.  If I understand (!) Maimonides, we can say a stone or a man exists, but to say God exists draws on a different sense of exists. The stone or the man may cease to exist, so existence contrasts being with non being. Ceasing to exist is not possible for God because God is eternal. But then again, eternal is just a word we use. Since it doesn’t apply to anything we have experienced, we cannot conceive of its meaning.

What I Read in July 2011

Leora Tanenbaum, Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality. Reporting and analysis of the struggle by women who, committed to a traditional religion, want recognition and leadership positions within that tradition.

She interviewed members of the three dominant faiths — Christian, Jewish, and Muslim — those who were ordained and those who wanted to be. She attended their meetings, read their publications and carefully analyzed the power structure and the texts and traditions cited to deny them equal standing with men.

Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. This best seller does not disappoint, which its examination of elements of the conventional wisdom which are not supported by examination using the tools developed by economists.

Theodore Dreiser, The Titan. This is the second in the series of three novels about the schemes and adventures of Frank Algernon Cowperwood: financier, collector, lover of women, and “titan.”

Penelope Mortimer, The Pumpkin Eater. This novel, from the 1960′s, may or may not be a fictionalized account of the author’s life with husband John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey and other entertainments). It was chaotic. I found Penelope’s persona – veteran of four husbands and obsessed with her own fertility – very difficult to like. Jake (John?) had my sympathy.

Louisa May Alcott, An Old-Fashioned Girl. Pretty Polly shows us how to be happy though poor. This story for girls was written after the success of Little Women.

Gabrielle Donnelly, The Little Women Letters. A contemporary novel, set in London, centers on  the lives of three sisters, descendants of Josephine March of Little Women.

Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism. Armstrong describes the origins and attitudes of fundamentalist movements in three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Islam and Christianity.

Alexander McCall Smith, The Full Cupboard of Life. This is number 5 in the series about Precious Ramotswe, head of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, who privately and discretely investigates affairs in Botswana.

H. G. Wells, The Island of Dr. Moreau. The mad scientist is not mad exactly. He just pursues his researches without regard to consequences to himself or others.

Louisa May Alcott, Under the Lilacs. Children’s story by the author of Little Women. Well-crafted but conventional tale of two little girls, the young wanderer they adopt, his clever dog, and various benign adults.

Sherwin Nuland, Maimonides. A contemporary American physician and writer tells the story of Moses ben Maimon — Maimonides — the 12th century Jewish physician and philosopher.

The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism

In The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong provides us with a history of fundamentalism as it has been experienced in three different monotheistic religious traditions: Islam, Judaism and Christianity. It’s a large undertaking, especially as she begins in 1492. Her account offers a dizzying array of people, programs and political developments. What ties them together is her analysis of why people who follow conservative religious traditions have felt displaced in the modern age. She begins with myth.

 We tend to assume that the people of the past were (more or less) like us, but in fact their spiritual lives were rather different. In particular, they evolved two ways of thinking, speaking and acquiring knowledge, which scholars have called mythos and logos. Both were essential; they were regarded as complementary ways of arriving at truth, and each had its special area of competence. Myth was regarded as primary; it was concerned with what was thought to be timeless and constant in our existence…. Myth was not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning.

We no longer believe in or take comfort from myth in the old ways. Myth has been set aside in modern thought by logos. In earlier times,

 Logos was equally important. Logos was the rational, pragmatic, and scientific thought that enables men and women to function well in the world. We may have lost the sense of mythos in the West today, but we are very familiar with logos, which is the basis of our society. Unlike myth, logos must relate exactly to facts and correspond to external realities if it is to be effective.

Because rational analysis and scientific processes have been so successful, people today try, mistakenly, to apply them to myth. If we cannot find evidence of the ten plagues visited on the Egyptians before Moses led his people out, then we conclude that the story of the Exodus is not “true” and has nothing to tell us. As a rabbi once said when commenting on the story of Jonah, “Don’t get hung up on the whale – this is a story that makes a point.”

Armstrong traces the relationship between mythos and logos as Islam, Judaism and Christianity adopted and adapted to modernism. Modernism was also experienced as part of a political process, especially in the Middle East. As to how religious people and their leaders respond, some adapt their religious beliefs and practices, some abandon them, and some reject the modernism which threatens their identity and way of life. That rejection takes place in a very real fear of extinction. Armstrong documents many examples of the cycle of rejection. First, within a dominant religious group those who reject changes in favor of clinging to the “fundamentals” experience conflict within that group. Next, if they are not successful, they either subside (often temporarily) or withdraw to a splinter group. Then, as they build their strength they may engage in outreach to others or, perceiving those others as evil and dangerous, they go on the attack.

 They are engaged in a conflict with enemies whose secularist policies and beliefs seem inimical to religion itself…. They fear annihilation, and try to fortify their beleaguered identify by means of selective retrieval of certain doctrines and practices of the past. To avoid contamination, they often withdraw from mainstream society to create a counterculture; yet fundamentalists are not impractical dreamers. They have absorbed the pragmatic rationalism of modernity, and, under the guidance of their charismatic leaders, they refine these “fundamentals” so as to create an ideology that provides the faithful with a plan of action.

Fundamentalists look to the past, but they act in the present.  Armstrong’s book is devoted to these “not impractical dreamers” and how their fears and action plans have affected all of us.

John Matteson, Eden’s Outcasts

I am reading books by and about Louisa May Alcott in preparation for a course next year. This joint biography, subtitled “The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father,” gave me a new appreciation of Bronson Alcott. His daughter, the author of Little Women, I already admired, but I previously had a different view of Bronson. I saw him as a light-weight, a failed philosopher who ducked out of the responsibilities of life.

Bronson was a true original, a self-taught educator and idealist who pursued the development of his own character above all other demands.

More often than not, Bronson Alcott tended to live more in his ideas than in his skin. At many of the moments when others are likely to feel most alive to the world of sense, Bronson seems to have been only contingently present, like an accidental, gossamer visitor to a ponderously material world.

The aesthetic and sometimes irresponsible Bronson set high ideals for his children, but put no bread on the table. He didn’t think it was important. Louisa admired her father, but did not emulate him. She was very much alive to  the world’s possibilities and determined to make her mark in it, as well as to provide her family with a stable income. As a young girl,

Louisa’s life was already assuming the contours that were to characterize it for the next twenty-five years or more: an almost impossible dissonant combination of superior intellectual opportunities and frightful worldly deprivation.

Her response to childhood poverty and family debt was years of determined hard work, but that is not the entire story of the relationship as Matteson develops it. As they aged and Louisa succeeded as a popular author, Bronson admired her accomplishments and even had some modest success himself with his late books, his conversations tours, and Concord School of Philosophy. He outlived Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne and represented them to a world that was rapidly moving on to other concepts, different goals.

Mary Wollstonecraft, proto-feminist

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin.

Why does a woman have to be conventionally virtuous to have her unconventional ideas accepted? It helps to be pretty also. No one ever says of a man, “Don’t listen to him — he’s really ugly and, anyway, he sleeps around.” For women it’s a special trap. The conventional woman, the one to be take seriously, rarely has anything unconventional to say. Why should she?

And then we have Mary Wollstonecraft. I was inspired to read Claire Tomalin’s biography by the discussion of A Vindication of the Rights of Women — and other feminist books — at Feminist Classics. One of the participants said that, despite reading this biography, she found it impossible to like Wollstonecraft. I’m not sure I like her either, but I don’t think that is important. If we liked her she would probably be a different person. I certainly don’t like Rousseau, who persuaded his mistress to give their infants to the foundling hospital, but everyone pays attention to him.

Wollstonecraft was a woman of her time. Because she was of the time she could write of the position and limitations of women from the inside. She had strong emotions and wrote of the power of reason in a tone of great indignation.

But Mary’s temperament was geared to drama, violent emotion and struggle: when she was angry with Mrs. Cockburn it was (temporarily) a boiling hatred; when she defended George from attack it was without reservation. She had no capacity for nuance or irony….

She struggled, both in her personal life and in her writings. She had an illegitimate child so of course people said: see what happens when you press for equal opportunities. And why was the illegitimacy so bad? When I was a girl I could imagine no greater disgrace than an illegitimate baby. Today we have a different view, and some of my best friends have illegitimate grandchildren. With that out of the way, we can go back to A Vindication with respect for Wollstonecraft’s ideas and her expression of them — and pity for her life.

 

Howard Jacobson, The Finkler Question

The first Jew Julian Treslove ever met — at least, that he knew was a Jew — was a boy at school, Sam Finkler. For Julian, Finkler became the prototype Jew and The Finkler Question is “The Jewish Question.” (Reminds me of the old conundrum about the elephant and the Jewish Question.)

Julian seems to have spent much of his life looking for an identity and his future true love, the “Juno” a fortune teller promised him. On the way to Juno he tries Joanna and Josephine and considers Judith — and also fathers two sons in whom he takes minimal interest. Meanwhile he contemplates Finklers and tries on the identity for himself. After seeing a particularly outrageous play condemning Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,

Hard to go on feeling outrage for people who behaved to you exactly as they were accused of behaving to everyone else precisely because of which accusations you were outraged for them. Hard, but not impossible.

Julian’s wishy-washy nature and disorganized seeking make him an effective foil for the Jewish characters in the novel: Finkler himself with his shame over Gaza, Libor in mourning for his deceased wife and deceased Prague, Hephzibah (aka Juno) who plays the Jewish mother to Julian. At one point Julian struggles through the hundreds of pages of Maimonides’ Guide for the the Perplexed in vain search for understanding. I’ve been there myself and could have told him that Maimonides offers yet more perplexity. What can come is the feeling and sometimes Julian almost gets it. Almost.

Jacobson has a nice light touch when dealing with ethnicity and the contrariness of the religion / tribe / culture that is Jewish life in England. The story  scrapes near the bone when Finkler joins a group ASHamed of the actions of Israel. Jacobson tries for humor but we have to feel the pain:

By what twisted sophistication of argument do you harry people with violence off your land and then think yourself entitled to make high-minded stipulations as to where they may go now you are rid of them and how they may provide for their future welfare?

What I Read in February 2010

It’s snowing in southwestern Connecticut, every place I planned to go is closed, so I’m ending the month February early, with the hope for better weather in March.

John Mortimer, Rumpole and the Reign of Terror. This is the only book I haven’t already posted about, so here is a cover shot to make up for it. This may be the last Rumpole Mortimer wrote since it dates from 2006. It is not his strongest effort, but I am fond of old Horace and wanted to say goodbye properly.

Also read – and posted on -

José Saramago, The Double
Ivo Andric, The Bridge on the Drina
P. D. James, The Private Patient
José Saramago, Blindness
Lorraine Watkins, Prairie Tree Letters
James Webb, Born Fighting
Alan Bennett, Talking Heads
Gerald S. Hawkins, Stonehenge Decoded

Portrait of a Priestess

The subtitle of Joan Breton Connelly’s book is Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece. I started reading for the pictures, but stayed to hear what Connelly had to say.

The conventional view of women in classical Greece has been that they could barely be seen, and never heard. Penelope could weep and weave while Odysseus was away, but had no autonomous power. The scholars are now adjusting that picture, for example, pointing out that the women of Sparta ran the economic show at home when their men went off to war. Connelly turns her attention to the roles women played in the various religious cults and concludes that they were frequently seen and heard and were even sometimes powerful.

Polytheistic religions – like the cults devoted to Athena, Hera, Appollo and Dionysius – offered equal opportunities to the sexes to participate in and direct the worship activities. Some performed temporary functions, like forming part of processions. Think of the Parthenon frieze, with the youths and maidens marching along. Others were dedicated to taking care of the temples and cult objects, a sort of religious housekeeping. Connelly does not depend only on those ancient texts which have been preserved for us.

The archaeological evidence bears witness to realities not recorded in the literary texts that have shaped our understanding of ancient women. The Greek Texts come down to us, not only through the accident of survival, but also through a selection process made by later scribes and librarians…. The lesson here is all existing evidence must be considered….”

Evidence includes statues, inscriptions on statue bases, grave steles, paintings on ceramics. The world they portray is richer and more diverse than the classic texts imply. Further, of course, centuries of western commentators have looked at Greek polytheism through the window of Christianity. A priest is male, therefore, priests in ancient Greece were male and the roles played by women must have been something else or under the direction of the men.

I shall look at Greek vase painting with new respect, now that I have seen the depth of analysis, Connelly brings to her examples.

Here, a woman stands before the altar, facing Athena or her cult statue. She waves the branches of lustration to prepare for the ritual. Behind her, men have brought the animal for sacrifice, but the priestess is the central figure in the drama and controls the ritual.