The Ark and The Dove

Pro-Life Paganism

Flipping through Ovid's Metamorphoses, two moments struck me that I hadn't noticed so much before.

The story of Bacchus and the story of Adonis each has the potential to become a pro-life narrative.

Bacchus, as you might know, was product of an adulterous affair between Jupiter and Semele. Unlike many of Jupiter's mistresses, Semele was actually a willing participant in the relationship and reveled in the fame she thought it would bring her to be Jove's lover. This annoyed Jupiter's wife, Juno, quite a bit. To get revenge Juno put doubts in Semele's mind as to whether Jupiter really was Jupiter or just some guy claiming to be Jupiter. The myth falls into epistemology, skepticism, and metaphysics pretty quick. Anyway, Juno convinces Semele to test Jove and demand him to appear in his full glory the next time they have intercourse. Apparently, when Jupiter has hanky-panky, he is not in his fullness of glory--and he divinity is therefore subject to interrogation. Jove's glory, however, would yield true and irrefutable knowledge of his being.

The problem with this is a god's glory cannot be endured by the human body.

Against his better judgment, Jupiter yields to Semele's request, and she is promptly incinerated.
But here's the interesting part--her unborn baby is, apparently, unaffected by the process. Jove pulls the fetus from his mother's charred remains and (I'm not making this up) implants him in his own godly thigh. Jove later gives birth to Bacchus. The fetus is an independent entity, spared the mother's fate.

Later in Ovid, we encounter the origin of Adonis--son of the perverse Myrrha who slipped into her father's bed and seduced him without his knowing her identity. When her identity is revealed, she flees his wrath and, in Ovidian fashion, is transformed into a myrrh tree.
Again, however, it turns out that her fetus has not been transformed with her...and the tree gives birth to Adonis.

In both cases, Ovid depicts a story in which the mother's body is disassociated with the fetus's body. Their fates might be intertwined, but they are still ultimately distinct and maintain their own individual integrity.

Certainly, I'm not suggesting that Ovid would have been a pro-lifer if he were alive today...and much of his reproductive biology is suspect. Nevertheless, he was capable of imagining human individuality occurring before birth.

Apples and Oranges

I think I might overemphasize the Tree of Knowledge when I think about the story of the Fall. Because God forbids Adam from eating from the tree, I become fixated on it as if it was the only sin that Adam could have committed. But was it?

Natural law suggests quite the opposite.

If objective morality exists and what is wrong is always wrong, then it stands to reason that Adam could have been ejected from Paradise for a great multitude of reasons. Most likely the only thing preserving Adam is that, in his original state of innocence, the idea to commit any other sin just wouldn't pop in his head on its own...but I don't know this would have prevented sin from ever popping in his head (if only because the serpent seems all too ready to suggest acts he wouldn't consider doing on his own).

It is difficult to imagine God somehow tolerating other sins in Eden so long as the Tree of Knowledge was untouched. If the serpent had set Adam and Eve against one another to the point of violence, he might have achieved his ends just as well--if not better. Could the serpent have convinced one of the first humans to kill the other, it would guarantee the destruction of the human race even more assuredly. Yet, the serpent doesn't--perhaps because he isn't really interested in physical genocide so much as merely corrupting humanity or perhaps because something so obviously wrong as murder, so overtly opposed to natural law would never have seemed convincing to the first parents in their natural state.

The sinfulness of eating from Tree, though, is different.

It's almost as if God has to point out the error of eating the Tree because it's sinfulness is not obvious. The error requires a divine revelation because it is beyond human reasoning--which is precisely why the serpent can confuse Adam and Eve.

The idea that knowledge can be bad or that knowledge can lead to corruption and death does not come naturally to man. If anything, we seemed hardwired towards the opposite--our insatiable desire for knowledge may well be an evolutionary trait designed for survival of the species as well as pre-programmed drive to seek out God, who is complete Knowledge.

The wrongness of seeking the Knowledge of Good and Bad is not self-evident to man--so God goes out of His way to explain that we shouldn't seek it. It's lack of self-evidence gives the serpent the opportunity to manipulate human reason into error. Despite Aristotle's appeals to logos, logic is not always the safest route when it is based on incomplete knowledge or misguided perceptions.

Another way I might consider presenting the point I'm trying to make is this:

Did Cain kill Abel because he was fallen in nature? Did his jealousy arise because his parents conceived him post-Fall? Or would Cain still have experienced jealousy for Abel the same way that Adam and Eve felt jealous of God's omnipotence?

If Adam and Eve had not eaten the fruit of Knowledge of Good and Evil, would Cain have still slain Abel and shed blood on the soil of Paradise? Would natural law have prevented Cain from killing Abel, or could the serpent have found some argument to convince Cain that it wasn't such a bad idea? One can almost hear the serpent asking Cain, "Who forbade you from killing Abel? Is Abel so irreplaceable? What will happen in the future? Will there be enough land in Eden for the descendants of Cain and Abel? Don't your children have just as much right to live here as his?"

One can only assume Cain would still be banished for the act, and one wonders if (in ancient Judaic culture) Paradise would have been seen as far more tainted.

What Olympics?

Lacking a television signal or cable, my knowledge of the current Olympics season is pretty scarce. At this point, the only thing I know about them is that some guy got killed while sledding into metal pole and some dude who looks like a chick who looks like a dude has gotten death threats for wearing real fur.

Yep. My Olympic coverage is limited to Drudge headlines.

I remember Olympics being cooler when I was a kid. There was a sense of drama, even if I didn't understand what was going on. Perhaps it was because Olympics were held every four years, so it was a rare occasion. Perhaps there was also an element of heightened competition and patriotism owing to the cold war. Now, the Olympics, like presidential election campaigns, seem to follow a ceaseless continuity. Between X-games, Youtube videos of street performers, failblogs, and Avatar, the nigh-superhuman feats of Olympic seem less impressive and sometimes downright hokey.

I feel too jaded to root for the home team any more, and I'm suspicious of athletes. Even during the mutant Michael Phelps's swimathon, I often felt like I was following the story more to see when he would lose than to see if he would keep winning. And even that fairy tale story came crashing down.

And worldwide conflicts make the Olympic spirit seem like an absurd charade. Most of the suspense lies not in the conflict between athletes but in the morbid curiosity as to whether or not a bad guy with a beard is going to blow something up.

So who out there is watching the Olympics, and how do you get yourselves worked up for it?

District 9 Months

Thanks to the miracle of Netflix, Isabel and I watched the sci-fi, racial satire District 9 last night (I know, what a romantic pregame show for Valentine's Day).

It was a good film, although it certainly had some rough edges. The biggest flaws of the movie are probably glossed over by generic defenses. In my opinion, there were a lot of improbable situations (even for "speculative fiction" as the kids like to call it these days) that one excuses because of the movie's function as racial commentary rather than bona fide science fiction. The film also had some awkward pacing due to its shifting back and forth between faux-documentary and non-documentary presentation. For the first twenty minutes or so, the whole film is presented as interviews, security camera footage, and clips of "COPS" style recordings...then it would abruptly cut to scenes that were clearly not recorded by anyone, but were necessary to advance the story and moments of dramatic irony.

This lent the movie an element that reminded me of Adaptation, moving from realism to convention in a rapid turnabout. District 9 started as a fairly avaunt guard artsy-fartsy take on space aliens, but quickly transformed itself into a summer action flick. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, as the documentary style was a bit plodding.

But enough about aesthetics. I wanted to blog about one scene in particular. Early in the film, the somewhat bumbling and ignorantly racist protagonist is sent to evict the aliens from District 9--an alien refugee camp unfortunately situated in South Africa (the racial questions are writ large). It becomes clear that the eviction process is about more than just relocation. The government agents turn it into an opportunity to confiscate alien technology and...in a very disturbing scene...inflict population control.

The protagonist, named Wikus, and his assistants uncover a shed being used to incubate alien embryos. The embryos are in large pods that require external mechanisms for nourishment. Wikus explains the shed to the camera crew with the relish of the Crocodile Hunter. He then starts removing the nutrient tubes, and gives an order for the shed to be burned. As the pods are destroyed, infantile screeches can be heard, and Wikus laughingly jokes that the pods pop like popcorn in the heat. He explicitly refers to the process as "aborting" the aliens, but he has no qualms with the procedure. A viewer would have to be pretty sadistic, though, not to feel as though Wikus has just done something morally repugnant.

Now, this doesn't make the movie unwaveringly pro-life. The horror of the scene is not just in the screeches of dying babies--it is the ignorant hubris of a government official imposing abortion by force. Someone had been maintaining the incubation shed--someone had chosen that the embryos should thrive, but that freedom of choice is being trampled on by a self-serving government. Whether aliens would be morally justified if they intentionally destroyed their own pods or deprived them of nutrition is another matter and not dealt with in the movie.

Nevertheless, the scene doesn't depict abortion as a particularly merciful act. In this film, alien abortion is only depicted as the destruction of another, unique, self-aware individual. When the embryo is represented as a separate entity--in this case, literally external to a mother's womb--it is unquestionably a form of murder in the film. Whether or not it is morally justified is left up to the audience to determine.

Wry Catcher

J.D. Salinger died about two weeks ago.

Some of my colleagues were talking about it over e-mail.

I can't really say I have any significant thoughts on the matter.

It's entirely possible that I could lose a Jeopardy question in answer to "The author of Catcher in the Rye."

Never read it. I hear its about teenagers, but I couldn't even tell you the plot.

For all I know, it's about a delicatessen with aspirations to make it to the major leagues.

My hopeful fear or perhaps fearful hope is that most experts are as equally ignorant of their field outside of their specializations.

I Agree with Your Minor but not with Your Major

Albertus, the conspicuously silent blogger for A&D, sent me a recent article from the Chronicle of Higher Education. It's another piece explaining why a Ph.D. in the humanities is a dead-end.

Of course, it's not a dead-end if you can get a teaching gig...but those have become extremely scarce.

For the majority of humanities Ph.D.s who will either never defend their dissertation or never land a tenure-track job, you really have to seriously question whether it was time well spent.

This makes me think about conversations I have sat through where colleagues were discussing how to draw more majors into the program, and a rather startling thought occurred to me.

Perhaps the success of a humanities program should not be defined by the number of students in its department or even the work the students are doing (there is a recent push to "professionalize" undergrads).

Rather, it seems a better scale for success of a humanities department is how many minors it can boast. The English minor suggests that someone from outside the field of English perceives value to what your program is doing. That says a lot about what is happening in the class.

Very few English majors, from my perspective, prove to be students who actually want to study English in a professional way. I have, in the past, described the English major as a kind of Chinese pinball major. It's kind of a default major for students who aren't good at anything else. They aren't necessarily good at English, either...they can just hide their lack of talent more successfully.

This isn't me being jaded...this is honest-to-goodness based on what students have told me when I survey the class...and it doesn't inspire me with great hope for the future of the major. It might also help explain why so few English graduates students don't complete their work. What happens in the undergraduate English classroom barely resembles what happens in graduate school, which is one of the reasons why so many English grad students are so self-loathing. Take someone who is doing English because they aren't good at anything else...send them to grad school so they can avoid confronting their self-perceived lack of talent...and they quickly discover that their old tricks don't work anymore, and class isn't even as fun as it used to be. Personal reflections no longer matter; sweeping assumptions of history will not be tolerated; teachers are no longer easily impressed; and literature papers can no longer just deal with literature. The skills they learned in an undergraduate English major have very little bearing on a future as a literary scholar.

Yet, transforming undergraduate classes into pre-grad programs seems like a bad idea as well. First, grad programs are already accepting too many students and graduating a glut of Ph.D.'s into a world with no room for them. Second, if undergrad classes were more like graduate work, I highly suspect that very few people would want to take them...certainly not the large population of "default majors."

Thus, it seems wiser to keep the spirit of the undergraduate course alive while simultaneously discouraging students from pursuing literature in graduate school. In other words, cater to non-majors.

The future of English departments might not be training English majors how not to be grad students, but in training science majors how to become Shakespeare snobs.

The Feast of Saint Eros

Ah, Valentine's Day is nigh upon us...

Stores are strewn with festive red.

Chocolates come in heart-shaped boxes.

And the school where I teach is having a condom festival and free STD testing in its student center.

Oh, to be young and in love...

Shepherd Kings

Random exegesis...

The Nativity story of the shepherds clearly is about God's love for the every-day fella, the poor, the not-royal. The angels first announce the birth to pastoral rustics, not the established political hierarchy or the wealthy.

I'm not debating that.

But it popped in my head this morning that the shepherds might also be read typologically. The Bible loves its shepherd kings. Moses did a stint as a shepherd before leading the Israelites out of Egypt. David, of course, was a shepherd boy before being anointed. And these are probably the two most successful rulers over the ancient Hebrews.

What if the shepherds are not just the poor, but Moses and David?

After all, the receive divine revelations from the angels...meet God face-to-face as it were...and then spread the word of God to everyone they meet.

Sounds to me like a kind of reverse typology, expressing how Moses and David spoke to God directly, then spread his word to the people--(traditionally through writing the Torah and the Psalms respectively).

Dude, Where's My Car?

Well, I'm finding it very unlikely that I'll be able to navigate my way to Church tomorrow...mostly because I can't actually see my car any more on account of the twenty-some inches of snow we've gotten.

I guess if I can't get out, I should try to contact Obama's religious adviser and have him send me some spiritual readings to reflect on. If it's good enough for the President to qualify as his weekly obligation to worship, it should be good enough for me, right?

Cafeteria Catholics or Spiritual Hackers?

Maybe this is just an effect of the techno-savvy books I've been reading lately, but I was thinking this morning about the nature of heresy.

A lot of modern heretics don't necessarily think of themselves as making up something entirely new...or even heretical. It would be somewhat paradoxical to think of oneself as a heretic.

Perhaps part of the reason for this is that on some subconscious-level at least, they approach religion the same way a hacker approaches a computer.

Such people read the Code of Canon Law as if it were some kind of programming code.

In a programming language, the words all translate into some kind of precise machine code. This means you can monkey with it trial and error and see what works. So long as your syntax is correct, you can cobble together all sorts of commands and variables and wait to see the results.

I imagine the results usually aren't pretty in this kind of scattershot approach to hacking, but they might occasionally produce something worth while.

The problem with the spiritual hacker would seem to be two-fold.

First, there is no monitor with which to have almost instantaneous view of output. If spiritual hackers could see the effects of their hacked codes, they would understand why they were a bad idea. But the output of heresy is either invisible to the human eye or it takes centuries to make itself manifest in material way.

Secondly, human language is not a programming code. The meanings of a given programming language are typically fixed. Unless you hack the language itself, the command will usually mean just one set of computations. Human language doesn't work that way, and our religious codes are written in human language, not computer language. A command in English can mean a host of different things--which is why it is important for us to understand the spirit of the law and not just the letter.

I suppose the bigger problem becomes how one comes to understand the spirit of the law without getting tangled up in the slippery nature of language itself. That is, to understand the meaning behind those slippery words, we have to use more slippery words.